\u2013William Carlos Williams<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I fall to pieces each time I see you again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2013Patsy Cline<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From the perspective of the twenty\u00adfirst century, Jonathan Swift\u2019s descriptions sound like a prescient catalog of avant\u00adgarde 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: \u201cAn 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For Swift, the eighteenth\u00adcentury satirist, the joke is at the expense of these would\u00adbe 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\u2013a more convenient and efficient form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this language game, one\u2019s range of expression is tied directly to one\u2019s wealth, for what one might say is in direct proportion to the objects one carries. Swift\u2019s 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 \u201cpedlars,\u201d they are different in that they do not sell their vast bags of objects but make rhetorical use of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Swift cannot quite put his finger on just what this practice might be, for he lacks its true name: consumption. Perhaps a time\u00adtraveling Gulliver would not be at all surprised to come face\u00adto\u00adface 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAs Americans, we are surrounded by the white noise of our consumer culture,\u201d explains Cody in her artist statement. She readily admits her complicit role as a consumer, \u201cbut 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of Cody\u2019s most striking works is a series entitled American Haiku, which includes the piece entitled American Haiku\u2013The Mountain. Like her Laputian forebearers, she too takes objects out of her bag, creating a haiku. While Swift\u2019s experimenters make a concerted effort to abandon words and communicate only through things, Cody\u2019s work testifies to a much more radical transformation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 word\u00adthings. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She is not fundamentally transforming these objects, nor is she highlighting the traditional mimetic skills of the artist to create trompe l\u2019oeil 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\u2013as all who live in consumer cultures inevitably do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
American Haiku perfectly formulates the paradox of contemporary cultures of consumption. Consumers encounter a readymade world that requires almost no meaning\u00admaking labor, only the magical transformation of the point\u00adof\u00adpurchase where everything comes completely refined, assembled, ready\u00adto\u00adeat\u2013fully cooked, as Claude L\u00e9vi\u00adStrauss would say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. Jean\u00adPaul Sartre offers one of the clearest articulations of the oldest ideas about human meaning and the role of art: \u201cIf I fix on canvas or in writing a certain aspect of the fields or the sea or a look on someone\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Sartre\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Surely Cody\u2019s 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\u2019s essential relationship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Moreover, there is little or no labor with raw materials in Cody\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is true for artists just as it is for almost every aspect of anyone\u2019s everyday life where we no longer work directly with raw\u2013or at least not wholly finished\u2013materials. Yet the liquidation of labor in the purchase of readymades is only half the paradox.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s Haiku seems perhaps needless, or not really hers. One might think that the role of art here is simply unnecessary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cody encounters fully\u00adformed 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 brand\u00adnames 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cody\u2019s work suggests that consumers do create meaning out of what they use, but do so in ways that would be almost unrecognizable from Sartre\u2019s traditionally humanist perspective. The question of Cody\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Created from the trademarked fonts, she makes a complete alphabet from the first letters of well\u00adknown American corporate brands. American Alphabet demonstrates just how much of the meaning of contemporary life comes ready\u00admade, and how consumer culture provides a kind of overwhelming meaning that the consumer finds as something \u201cgiven,\u201d more accurately promised, something waiting to be bought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Something that would seem much closer to a kind of raw material of representation\u2013the alphabet that might express almost anything\u2013is 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cody\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Unlike Sartre\u2019s 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 ready\u00admade meaning and must find a way to say something when the very materials of any possible statement are already over\u00adcoded with the messages of corporations and brands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The more mass\u00adproduction techniques have succeeded, the more finished, ready\u00admade things there are displayed in ever more well\u00adconsidered orders in ever more stores. Yet the more we encounter these completed things in their ordered ranks on the shelves\u2013the more ready\u00admade we find the world\u2013the more both laborers and consumers have to find new, unprecedented strategies of making meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s American Alphabet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 ready\u00admade status of each element.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For instance, a sixteenth\u00adcentury oil painting might well represent a still\u00adlife 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Though modernism is certainly characterized by disjunctions, discontinuity, and confusion\u2013so well emblematized by fragmented art forms and philosophies\u2013perceptions of rupture, dismemberment, and fragmentation structure some of the oldest myths that inform Western thought: Osiris, Orpheus, and the Kabbalah\u2019s Shevirah. Despite their<\/p>\n\n\n\n
ancient status, these myths aptly show us that the anxieties of a<\/p>\n\n\n\n
divided self and a fractured world are essentially primordial. Indeed,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
many modernists and postmodernists turn to these three myths to<\/p>\n\n\n\n
develop their own contemporary experiences of dislocation and<\/p>\n\n\n\n
alienation.5 The pervasiveness of these myths cautions against any<\/p>\n\n\n\n
yearning to imagine that previous eras experienced a comfortingly<\/p>\n\n\n\n
meaningful and unified world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Freud\u2019s study of the unconscious, Marx\u2019s critique of ideology, and Nietzsche\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s 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\u2013often depicted with green, rotting flesh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tom Hare argues that we should see in Osiris\u2019s dismemberment an allegory for the particularly Egyptian sense of fragmented identity reflected in the elaborate funerary rites of mummification: \u201cThe mythical dismemberment of Osiris mimics psychological and semiotic dismemberments constituting (even as they threaten) Egyptian constructions of subjective consciousness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201cthe 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\u201d (23\u201324).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hare\u2019s 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\u2019s dismemberment and the redemption of its wholeness by Isis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to R. E. Witt, it is Isis that is the real key to this myth, for \u201chaving pieced them together with the magical skill that is particularly hers, she raises Osiris from the dead and bestows upon him eternal life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thus the Greeks and Romans adopted the mythology of Osiris with the emphasis on Isis\u2019s role as healer: \u201cShe was esteemed as the model spouse. She was hymned as upholder of the marriage covenant \u2026 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\u201d (41).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are enough similarities between the mythology of Osiris and the later Greek poet\u00adshaman 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 best\u00adknown work in English on Orpheus, W. K. C. Guthrie\u2019s Orpheus and Greek Religion, suggests these very confusions that characterize Orpheus reflect his status as a divided figure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Informed by both the Apollonian and Dionysian traits, Guthrie observes: \u201cThere are times when he seems on the point of becoming merged with the lyre\u00adplaying god Apollo, and others when, thinking of his death perhaps, we wonder whether he is only an incarnation of the Thracian Dionysos.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So while \u201cOrpheus reflects Dionysos, yet at every point seems to contradict him,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Indeed, Nietzsche also invokes the ultimate unity of both Apollonian and Dionysian elements. In The Birth of Tragedy, he maintains: \u201cWith 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Like the myth of Osiris, the emphasis of Orpheus\u2019s dismemberment is finally a desire for unity: \u201cHis 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.\u201d While both Osiris and Orpheus provide powerful examples of the divided subject, the Kabbalah\u2019s shevirah, or breaking of the vessels, offers a powerful allegory of a fallen and fragmented world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to Isaac Luria, creation begins with God\u2019s 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 self\u00adlimitation, and creation thus begins with God\u2019s act of exile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201cthe breaking of the vessels,\u201d represents a fallen and fragmented universe of particulars sundered from divine unity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The drama of creation becomes the tikkun, the desire to reintegrate the fragments of creation with the unity of God. Gershom Scholem explains that \u201csince 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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: \u201cThe Kabbalists held that every religious act should be accompanied by the formula: this is done \u2018for the sake of the reunion of God and His Shekhinah\u2019\u201d (108). Like other myths, the shevirah myth acknowledges a divided and ruptured world but frames its meaning in the desire for a unity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u2013William Carlos Williams I fall to pieces each time I see you again. \u2013Patsy 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 … <\/p>\n