Writing about nothing
by Paul Wessels
Much writing about art writes more about its own (albeit unintentional) circumscriptions, than about the art - a pacifying, though nonetheless active, discourse. Here are three recent examples/strategies:
Sue Williamson's Saturday, July 19 ArtThrob Diary entry: "Writing is a lot like making art - there are some ideas quietly minding their own business inside your head." Thought (like art) conceived as privately owned capital.
Penny Siopis, Art South Africa (01/03/03), refers to the concept of the "rhizome" as "the by now familiar" (p.53). The "by now familiar" is old news, no news, useless.
Ashraf Jamal, Art South Africa (01/02/02), refers to a "deconstructive sense" of ontology located in "Kentridge's thought process" as one which "may not be original" but is well applied (p.23). The unoriginal is fake, not the real thing, not real.
By reducing creativity to capital, conceptual untimeliness (sic) to the tribunal of fashion, and deconstruction to sense-traces allocated within thought processes, writing is stripped of all relations outside of itself, thought is foreclosed in a circular redundancy, and conceptual acuity is voided.
The point of art - and writing too, is an art - is to invent the capacity for a world. Beyond this critical and creative activity, there is nothing.
Paul Wessels, is the current editor of the on-line literary journal www.donga.co.za, and lives in Cape Town.
