| Description |
Surrounding Fields is an investigation of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty and an ars poetica. Having made three visits to the Jetty, documenting the trips photographically, this project explores the experience of interacting with an art site constructed as a 'non-site'. In addition to the photographs, I have included text, dialogue, code, and scientific facts that acted as the lyrical subtext for each trip. Considering the ways in which the experience of art in a museum is unhinged by Smithson's Jetty, my project investigates the role of the art viewer and trip taker in that unhinging. Smithson's Jetty blurs the boundaries between figure and ground, text and context. Accordingly, I hope that the texts in my project begin to zoom in and out so that the foreground and background for each trip become unstable in the ways all of our trips become as they get layered with memory, screened by desire, thought through, and mediated by our tender machines. In my approach to poetry as a field, "art becomes inseparable from the search for reality," as Lyn Hejinian puts it in My Life. The concept of mediation, so foregrounded in visual art, becomes a useful concept when it comes to thinking about what I'm doing in a poem. I'm trying to say something but all I have is words. This feels dreadfully insufficient so many times, but it's the constant failure of words to get at what I'm saying that I find so beautiful. Sometimes the words stop pointing to anything else and just gum up like paint on the end of a brush. Moving between the visual world and the written world becomes an act of translation that is generative in its failure. I like to emphasize and find beauty in the failure of words. In searching through what it means to see things and to experience the media of the world, I keep going in circles. The circles, like Duchamp's notion of delay and Smithson's Spiral, feel very satisfying because it allows a concept to come out of the lyric. |
