Tag: postmodernism

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The most interesting task is to discover the shape of the now-moment. So it
becomes a matter of forms, more than a matter of structure.
What is the form of the present, and each succeeding present? Then, see
what-can-be-done with the form that is the real form of the here-now. Those here-nows
as the building blocks of some other structure. But the quality of the blocks
determines the possible ‘style’ of the overall structure.
Now, the form of ‘now’ can be determined only as I try to twist my body
(mental) until it FILLS somehow the moment, till it touches the borders of the
moment. The meaning then, cannot be in a superimposed fable, but is in the
modes found of being able to inhabit (fill the spaces of the present, and the
sequence of those modes. Meaning is-“how do you live in a space?” Spaces arise,
the way mutations are delivered’ upon the planet-and then life tries to inhabit
that new, mutant species. In the attempt to make an arisen space ‘habitable’ (a
species is also a ‘space’ for living)-meanings arise, such as “that plant is
poisonous.” I am concerned with such meanings. 

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Meaning? Make an item (the play) that other items can allude to when they are
making an effort to crystallize their own meaning-to-themselves. The play doesn’t
allude to a real world, through having a ‘meaning’. Rather it is there to ‘give
meaning to’ anything else that wants to take meaning from it.
What we need are models for a ‘way-of-being-in-the-world’ that we’d like to
remember as a possibility. I’d like, myself, to be ‘tuned’ to the world in the way the
play I create is tuned. I establish the world of the play so that hopefully, I can turn
to it, and begin resonating to its rhythms. 

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I generate a text, I make a composition out of what I ‘know’, that is to say-a
collection of ‘meanings’ carried around inside me. One meaning … in conflict
with another meaning. That means, of course, a continually shifting frame of
reference. That means of course … that there is no conclusion … no beginning,
middle and end … but, intermissions. Until I die, But then I won’t be able to
write about it. 

—Richard Foreman. “The Carrot and the Stick” (full text linked)

“On Found Poetry” by John Robert Colombo.  From Open Poetry, (ed. Gross & Quasha, 1973)

• Found art is the most conservation-minded of the arts, for it recycles the waste of the past and reuses it in a surprisingly different way, thereby giving the original a new lease on life. “Collage seems to me the one medium most suited to the age of conspicuous waste,” painter Harold Town wrote, “and it’s marvellous to think of the garbage of our age becoming the art of our time.”

• An especially valuable function of found art and found poetry in particular is its ability to make us respond aesthetically to the universe around us, not just to those separate parts of the world called works of art. It is possible to act as if the universe itself were an immense piece of art, a collage perhaps. But does this spell the doom of art? As the Czech poet Miroslav Holub wryly observed, “There is poetry in everything. That is the biggest argument against poetry.”