–William Carlos Williams
I fall to pieces each time I see you again.
–Patsy Cline
On his fantastic travels, Lemuel Gulliver encounters scholars busily inventing new forms of language. These include a large mechanical device that makes texts at random, an attempt to reduce language exclusively to nouns, and, taking that idea to its logical conclusion, the practice of substituting objects for words.
From the perspective of the twentyfirst century, Jonathan Swift’s descriptions sound like a prescient catalog of avantgarde practices. Indeed, his story of a language made of things seems like an allegory of the twentieth century and the rise of art under the sign of mass production and the commodity form. As Gulliver puts it: “An expedient was therefore offered, that since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express the particular business they are to discourse on.”
For Swift, the eighteenthcentury satirist, the joke is at the expense of these wouldbe experimenters, for surely there is just too much in human experience to be reduced to a set of brute, material objects, and certainly these fools are missing the very point of language itself–a more convenient and efficient form.
And yet, from our vantage point three centuries later, it seems clear that marketers seek to reduce almost every human desire, thought, or experience to the commodity form. Indeed, in the consumer economies of the Global North, we now do a vast amount of communication through just such brute and material things, and much as Swift imagined it, we seem to use our designer clothes, customized kitchens, and electronic accessories to explain who we are: human experience has never been so overwrought with things.
Indeed, rather like the Laputian experimenters, we find that the most seemingly successful among us exist more in a world of things than of words, much as how Swift describes the mad Laputians: [M]any of the most learned and wise adhere to the new scheme of expressing themselves by things, which hath only this inconvenience attending it, that if a man’s business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged in proportion to carry a greater bundle of things upon his back, unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him.
I have often beheld two of those sages almost sinking under the weight of their packs, like pedlars among us; who, when they met in the streets, would lay down their loads, open their sacks, and hold conversation for an hour together; then put up their implements, help each other to resume their burthens, and take their leave. (178)
In this language game, one’s range of expression is tied directly to one’s wealth, for what one might say is in direct proportion to the objects one carries. Swift’s historical position at the beginnings of consumer society renders our contemporary interpretation of this activity far more forceful, for while Swift notes that these interlocutors resemble “pedlars,” they are different in that they do not sell their vast bags of objects but make rhetorical use of them.
Swift cannot quite put his finger on just what this practice might be, for he lacks its true name: consumption. Perhaps a timetraveling Gulliver would not be at all surprised to come facetoface with the work of Heidi Cody, a contemporary artist responding to a world of commodities through the use of readymades, collage, and the multimedia techniques of contemporary marketing and advertising.
“As Americans, we are surrounded by the white noise of our consumer culture,” explains Cody in her artist statement. She readily admits her complicit role as a consumer, “but with the critical perspective of a cultural anthropologist. I hope my overall body of work will eventually be seen as a sort of art documentary about advanced consumer culture.”
One of Cody’s most striking works is a series entitled American Haiku, which includes the piece entitled American Haiku–The Mountain. Like her Laputian forebearers, she too takes objects out of her bag, creating a haiku. While Swift’s experimenters make a concerted effort to abandon words and communicate only through things, Cody’s work testifies to a much more radical transformation.
Even words themselves have become things, under the signs of brands and labels, packaging and marketing: just so many objects that make up the commodity horizon of our everyday lives. Unlike Marx, with his endless examples of unnamed, unbranded commodities (one ton of iron, ten shirts, a bushel of corn), commodities are now veritable words: soap has become sunlight and dawn, while toothbrushes reach and toothpastes gleem.
Yet, like Swift, Cody too is a satirist, and her playful haiku cuts with two edges. On the one hand, she points to the absurdity of these wordthings. Obviously dish soap, with its connotations of domestic chores, is hardly comparable to dawn, and the unearthly green of the soda has very little to do with mountains or dews of any variety.
Her lyric assemblage reminds us just how these commodities have colonized the language of nature, and perhaps just how much more at home we are in the brightly lit aisles of supermarkets rather than any real pastoral meadow or mountain. On the other hand, Cody is operating first and foremost here as an artist of the readymade, seemingly more a consumer than a producer.
She is not fundamentally transforming these objects, nor is she highlighting the traditional mimetic skills of the artist to create trompe l’oeil effects. Instead, she presents these objects virtually unchanged, or with as little transformation as an advertising campaign might bring to them. She speaks with them as though she were simply pulling them from her shopping cart–as all who live in consumer cultures inevitably do.
American Haiku perfectly formulates the paradox of contemporary cultures of consumption. Consumers encounter a readymade world that requires almost no meaningmaking labor, only the magical transformation of the pointofpurchase where everything comes completely refined, assembled, readytoeat–fully cooked, as Claude LéviStrauss would say.
The supermarket replaces the subject of nature and the raw materials that would represent it, the traditional ground of art, and this surely transforms meaning itself. JeanPaul Sartre offers one of the clearest articulations of the oldest ideas about human meaning and the role of art: “If I fix on canvas or in writing a certain aspect of the fields or the sea or a look on someone’s face which I have disclosed, I am conscious of having produced them by condensing relationships, by introducing order where there was none, by imposing the unity of mind on the diversity of things. That is, I feel myself essential in relation to my creation.”
In Sartre’s example, the artist looks on the inexplicable chaos of the natural landscape and labors to make a human meaning through representation. The force of Sartre’s formulation, however, is in the contrast between an utterly inhuman earth and the profoundly human construction of meaning out of raw materials that will be used to represent it.
The artist labors to make the world meaningful, but that very labor is itself a kind of unity of action linking the inhuman and the human. This link is indexed in the canvas or the poem where we see the struggle of the artist to produce a coherent and meaningful vision; for Sartre, art creates a meaningful relationship to the meaningless, inhuman natural world.
Surely Cody’s Haiku is utterly different from this, for like everyone in consumer culture, she confronts a world that is already ordered, unnatural, and utterly human; it marks not an essential relationship to an inhuman natural world but the very disappearance of that nature. She finds no inhuman world through which to make Sartre’s essential relationship.
Moreover, there is little or no labor with raw materials in Cody’s work, for she neither fixes on canvas or in rhyme the contours of her encounter. She has not exactly made her haiku; she has found it, and she simply shows it to us as if to show what she has purchased. Taking away the raw materials of art, the traditional subjects of the natural world, and the need for the more traditional labors of making, refining, and ordering, consumer culture strips away the need for those labors that have traditionally made life meaningful.
This is true for artists just as it is for almost every aspect of anyone’s everyday life where we no longer work directly with raw–or at least not wholly finished–materials. Yet the liquidation of labor in the purchase of readymades is only half the paradox.
There is nothing more humanly and fully organized than a store, no place where the artist seems less needed to order experience. At first glance, Cody’s Haiku seems perhaps needless, or not really hers. One might think that the role of art here is simply unnecessary.
Cody encounters fullyformed and finished commodities with little connection to who made them or how they were made, these commodities appear with meanings already fully formed by brands, advertising, and prescribed uses that have already been determined by others. Cody ironizes this, picking up the fullyformed commodities, taking their brandnames and creating a nature haiku that gestures at the very disappearance of the experience of working with raw materials for the representation of the human in relation to an inhuman landscape.
Cody’s work suggests that consumers do create meaning out of what they use, but do so in ways that would be almost unrecognizable from Sartre’s traditionally humanist perspective. The question of Cody’s work is how to make a world meaningful that has already been made. This is put most pivotally in her best known work, American Alphabet.
Created from the trademarked fonts, she makes a complete alphabet from the first letters of wellknown American corporate brands. American Alphabet demonstrates just how much of the meaning of contemporary life comes readymade, and how consumer culture provides a kind of overwhelming meaning that the consumer finds as something “given,” more accurately promised, something waiting to be bought.
The alphabet, the very form we use to spell out the meaning of the world is presented as a privatized, corporate world of meaning that is not made but waiting for us. Also telling is that the American Alphabet is not the fonts of the State but of the corporate world of consumer culture. While there is a playfulness in her work that draws on the cheerfulness and playfulness of the advertising fonts themselves, there is also a much darker allegory about how we make meaning.
Something that would seem much closer to a kind of raw material of representation–the alphabet that might express almost anything–is here depicted as a readymade. Each letter carries a wealth of associations from branding and its complex play of fantasy about what life should or might be were we only lucky enough to possess a given detergent or bubblegum.
Cody’s alphabet suggests that the meaning of American life is spelled out through these commodities, that we write a meaning through what we consume, but the alphabet also clearly shows that those meanings are found waiting for us.
Unlike Sartre’s artist gazing into the landscape and making a relationship to the inhuman, the American Alphabet shows that the artist, and everyone else, steps into a mediascape of readymade meaning and must find a way to say something when the very materials of any possible statement are already overcoded with the messages of corporations and brands.
This is not just the problem of the consumer but also of producers, for mass production deskills labor, cutting off even the laborer from the very kinds of relationships between raw materials and finished products that make, as traditionally held by Marxists in particular, the final product meaningful.
The more massproduction techniques have succeeded, the more finished, readymade things there are displayed in ever more wellconsidered orders in ever more stores. Yet the more we encounter these completed things in their ordered ranks on the shelves–the more readymade we find the world–the more both laborers and consumers have to find new, unprecedented strategies of making meaning.
This problem gives rise to two profoundly important and influential forms of modern art that seek a solution to the problems of meaning in consumer culture: the readymade and the collage. Both forms depend on the artist working with materials that are ripped from their context, and, in the case of collage, usually radically fragmented. For instance, there is a fantastic violence of fragmentation in Cody’s American Alphabet.
While each letter seems simply a readymade in its own right, each letter has been ripped out of the brand name it once spelled, and it is now used as a fragment of a new whole. What makes collage a particularly modern form is just this overt emphasis on the cut, ripped, and fragmented, the way in which collage marks a violence that is so often not made back into a seemingly organic whole but instead emphasizes the fragmented and readymade status of each element.
For instance, a sixteenthcentury oil painting might well represent a stilllife of many incongruous commodities laying together in an improbable or even violent arrangement, but the perspective of the painting, as well as its unity of materials and techniques, covers over this and makes the work far less disturbing and certainly less fragmented than the modern technique of collage in which radically different elements, materials, and styles are put together, all while leaving the seams to show, emphasizing the very violence of the new arrangement.
Material cultures have always produced a flotsam and jetsam of fragments, as both Archaeology and Art History eloquently testify, but not until the twentieth century do collage techniques become widely used to create or reuse these fragments while simultaneously emphasizing their status as ripped, torn, and broken readymades fitted together in new and shocking wholes that, more often than not, emphasize the seams equally with the glue.
There are myriad forces and circumstances at work in the invention and development of what we today call collage, and to critically understand its development, it is necessary to wrestle with how the basic element of collage, the fragment, came to be grasped and employed so differently by modern artists.
Though modernism is certainly characterized by disjunctions, discontinuity, and confusion–so well emblematized by fragmented art forms and philosophies–perceptions of rupture, dismemberment, and fragmentation structure some of the oldest myths that inform Western thought: Osiris, Orpheus, and the Kabbalah’s Shevirah. Despite their
ancient status, these myths aptly show us that the anxieties of a
divided self and a fractured world are essentially primordial. Indeed,
many modernists and postmodernists turn to these three myths to
develop their own contemporary experiences of dislocation and
alienation.5 The pervasiveness of these myths cautions against any
yearning to imagine that previous eras experienced a comfortingly
meaningful and unified world.
Yet the cultures that produced these myths of fragmentation and alienation did not produce the kinds of art we most associate with modern expressions of decidedly similar perceptions. The very concept of the fragment implies a dialectic of universal and particular, whole and part. For many theorists, the apprehension of a divided self is one of the most characteristic signs of a modern sensibility cut off from belief in comforting or stable universals.
Freud’s study of the unconscious, Marx’s critique of ideology, and Nietzsche’s genealogies all point to a new emphasis on a divided self. Still, older myths of fragmentation reveal a decided difference less in their obviously shared recognitions of that division than in their attempts to frame the meaning of this rupture.
Where modernists place the emphasis on the experience of division by foregrounding seemingly irresolvable particulars, these earlier myths acknowledged this fragmentation while striving to resolve it into new universals.
The story of Osiris is recorded in the Pyramid Texts, one of the most ancient narratives to survive from Egypt. Though the story undergoes many changes over millennia, most sources agree that Osiris and his sister/wife Isis are the children of the earth god Geb and the sky goddess Nut; together, they rule over Egypt until Osiris’s death.
While in some texts Osiris drowns in the Nile, in the more popular and enduring version, he is killed by his scheming brother Seth. Seth goes on to dismember Osiris’s body, scattering it throughout Egypt. Isis gathers together all the fragments of his body except the phallus, nonetheless conceives a son through them, and Osiris himself becomes a god of the dead–often depicted with green, rotting flesh.
Tom Hare argues that we should see in Osiris’s dismemberment an allegory for the particularly Egyptian sense of fragmented identity reflected in the elaborate funerary rites of mummification: “The mythical dismemberment of Osiris mimics psychological and semiotic dismemberments constituting (even as they threaten) Egyptian constructions of subjective consciousness.”
Noting that the different organs of the body represent radically different aspects of the personality, the process of mummification must grasp each organ as something quite separate both metaphorically and literally, and thus “the identification and specification of the individual aspects of the subject suggest their separability, even as pointing to separate parts of the body with logographs in itself suggests the possibility of dismemberment” (23–24).
Hare’s point is compelling, especially since the story of dismemberment is clearly more resonant for both ancients and moderns. Yet while modern sensibilities tend to favor the drama of the particular, in ancient contexts this perception of a fragmented self is complemented by a dialectic between Osiris’s dismemberment and the redemption of its wholeness by Isis.
According to R. E. Witt, it is Isis that is the real key to this myth, for “having pieced them together with the magical skill that is particularly hers, she raises Osiris from the dead and bestows upon him eternal life.”
Thus the Greeks and Romans adopted the mythology of Osiris with the emphasis on Isis’s role as healer: “She was esteemed as the model spouse. She was hymned as upholder of the marriage covenant … the tale of Isis and Osiris, whatever the discrepancies of detail, contained just those elements which for later antiquity could serve as the pattern of family bonds of affection” (41).
Instead of dwelling on a shattered Osiris, the psychological trauma of his castration and dismemberment is an opportunity for Isis to demonstrate her power to make whole. Nonetheless, such a demonstration is a forceful reminder of its very necessity.
There are enough similarities between the mythology of Osiris and the later Greek poetshaman Orpheus that some scholars believe there is a strong link between them, but whether created independently or sharing an evolutionary link, the story of Orpheus again underscores the ancient sense of a fragmented consciousness that manifests itself in the metaphor of literal dismemberment.
Orpheus is thought of first and foremost as a poet and musician, and he is best known for sailing with the Argonauts, using his lyre to triumph over the Sirens, and charming his way into Hades to free his dead lover.
He fails to free Eurydice from Hades when, at the last moment, he looks back. Later, he is dismembered at the hands of Thracian Maenads, ecstatic female worshippers of Dionysus. In both his journey to the underworld and his death, there is a marked resonance with Osiris. Yet despite the number of sources that recount these incidents, the particulars of Orpheus and the meaning of his myth remain confused.
Was he a priest of Apollo or Dionysus, a musician or a shaman, and was he dismembered in spite of or because of his association with Dionysus? Different sources provide radically different answers to these questions, though the bestknown work in English on Orpheus, W. K. C. Guthrie’s Orpheus and Greek Religion, suggests these very confusions that characterize Orpheus reflect his status as a divided figure.
Informed by both the Apollonian and Dionysian traits, Guthrie observes: “There are times when he seems on the point of becoming merged with the lyreplaying god Apollo, and others when, thinking of his death perhaps, we wonder whether he is only an incarnation of the Thracian Dionysos.”
The meaning of the Orphic myth is this very division that so powerfully represents a divided subject. However, like Osiris, the figure of Orpheus both engages a vision of a fractured subject while framing it with an emphasis on ultimately greater unity.
So while “Orpheus reflects Dionysos, yet at every point seems to contradict him,” in most retellings, he ultimately becomes a figure of unity and reconciliation through the power of art, for as his head floats down the river in death, it still speaks poetry, and thus the ancient function of the shaman to bridge the division between this world and the next mediates the fractious drives of a subject divided by the Apollonian and the Dionysian.
Indeed, Nietzsche also invokes the ultimate unity of both Apollonian and Dionysian elements. In The Birth of Tragedy, he maintains: “With what astonishment must the Apollonian Greek have beheld him [Dionysus]! With an astonishment that was all the greater the more it was mingled with the shuddering suspicion that all this was actually not so very alien to him after all, in fact, that it was only his Apollonian consciousness which, like a veil, hid this Dionysian world from his vision.”
Like the myth of Osiris, the emphasis of Orpheus’s dismemberment is finally a desire for unity: “His lyre carries the music of universal harmony and eternal response. Seized by the god, he speaks in no one voice of his own; possessed, he loses his selfpossession. Even Apollo must reveal himself to men in poem, oracle, or trance, forms that no mortal finally controls.
The mystery unites all opposites, and bursts there where being and nothingness seem to touch. This is why the pure Orphic voice always speaks as one.” While both Osiris and Orpheus provide powerful examples of the divided subject, the Kabbalah’s shevirah, or breaking of the vessels, offers a powerful allegory of a fallen and fragmented world.
Indeed, while many modern and postmodern artists have turned to the myths of Osiris and Orpheus to explain or even structure their work, critics beginning with Walter Benjamin in particular have been drawn to the shevirah.
According to Isaac Luria, creation begins with God’s essence imagined as light radiating into the pleroma, the space of the universe. Ironically, to set the creation in motion, God performed the act of tsimtsum, or selflimitation, and creation thus begins with God’s act of exile.
Still, some of the divine light escapes as sparks, called sefiroth, representing divine qualities or potentialities: will, wisdom, intuition, grace, judgment, compassion, eternity, and splendor. Each being has a portion of these lights, called the shekhinah.
However, the vessels that are the material world proved too fragile to contain the force of the shekhinah and they shattered, scattering the divine sparks. This rupture, called shevirah, or “the breaking of the vessels,” represents a fallen and fragmented universe of particulars sundered from divine unity.
The drama of creation becomes the tikkun, the desire to reintegrate the fragments of creation with the unity of God. Gershom Scholem explains that “since that primordial act, all being has been a being in exile, in need of being led back and redeemed. The breaking of the vessels continues into all the further stages of emanation and Creation; everything is in some way broken, everything has a flaw, everything is unfinished.”
Even more emphatically than the myths of Osiris and Orpheus, the Kabbalah powerfully imagines not only a self but an entire world in fragments. Yet Scholem points out: “The Kabbalists held that every religious act should be accompanied by the formula: this is done ‘for the sake of the reunion of God and His Shekhinah’” (108). Like other myths, the shevirah myth acknowledges a divided and ruptured world but frames its meaning in the desire for a unity.