p o s t_m o o t
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Mark Wallace
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Mark Wallace is the author of a number of books and chapbooks of poetry, including Nothing Happened and Besides I Wasn’t There and Sonnets of a Penny-A-Liner. Temporary Worker Rides A Subway won the 2002 Gertrude Stein Poetry Award and was published by Green Integer Books. His multi-genre work Haze (Edge Books) was published in 2004, as was his novel Dead Carnival (Avec Books). His critical articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and along with Steven Marks, he edited Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s (University of Alabama Press) a collection of 26 essays by different writers on the subject of contemporary avant garde poetry and poetics. With Juliana Spahr, Kristin Prevallet, and Pam Rehm he edited A Poetics of Criticism, a collection of poetry essays in non-standard formats published (Leave Books). He is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at California State University San Marcos.

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         The world of what used to be called the avant garde arts, or the world at least of what has become of them, has all the flaws of any area of human endeavor, professional or artistic or otherwise: raw ambition, narrow-mindedness, self-interest, cruelty, oblivious behavior of most varieties one can imagine. Occasionally it has some of the virtues that one can also find—now and then—in the rest of the world: playfulness, humor, intellectual and emotional companionship, sincerity and genuine insight. Certainly, all first-rate anti-conventional art continues to serve as a goad and a challenge to things as they are, in all the ways that they are, but the fact of that ongoing role should never lead to complacency or an easy belief in the artistic or cultural superiority of anti-conventional tactics. We have to live in the whole world, with it, not in some separate sphere, removed from the fray, where we murmur ironic or even sincere phrases to knowing others before heading on our way to the next orchestrated instance of public art. I can see no value to loving art, and the world of artists, unless one is also challenging its limitations, and our own in approaching it.

            In his book Dada: Art and Anti-Art, Hans Richter points out that one of the reasons for Dada’s impact was that the people it insulted were informed enough (he uses the word “intelligent” ) to know they were being insulted. Dada was a great way to attack people who believe they understood European artistic traditions and the civilization which those traditions defended. But when Richter speaks of the 60s, it’s with the fury of an old man who realizes that the world he meant to bring down is gone, but has been replaced by something he wouldn’t have wished for and can’t really imagine, and which he understands he doesn’t even know how to talk about. Dada, he says, had no way to deal with people who had no clear artistic traditions or awareness of what those traditions might be. Dada used anti-conventional art to attack a world in which art was understood to have an active role. But what role does anti-conventional art play in a world in which most people think art doesn’t have much significant to do with life in the first place, or are hoping it does and wish someone would show them how it works? That’s a question without easy answers, although one hears easy answers often enough. But never forget, for instance, that it was hardly Duchamp’s goal in his work “Elle a chaud au culto” to paint a moustache on Mona Lisa so the picture could hang in Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art. His goal wasn’t to open up the idea of what might go in any of the world’s National Gallerys of Art, but to take everything out of them, then tear the national buildings down. A lot of things, it seems, don’t work out the way we hoped.

            For reasons both emotional and intellectual which I’m still trying to understand, as a writer I’m unwilling, or unable, ever to do the same thing twice. The goal isn’t always conscious, so don’t think I’m trying to sell you on my artistic genius. I’ve often tried to recycle my ideas, but they won’t recycle, I find them doing things I didn’t expect and usually am grateful for. I’ve created short poems, long poems, sound poems, visual poems, narrative poems, lyric poems, poems that disrupt narrative and lyric assumptions, poems made mainly of prepositions. I once drew a hangman on one of my poems, then took it out, since the hangman was more effective implied. I’ve written a horror novel that has no plot, thirty plots, and a ridiculous plot simultaneously. I’ve written a science fiction novel that suggests our minds might as well be taken over by aliens, given what we’ve made of them, and I’ve written a long realistic novel about the American suburbs that should have, if all the oversimplified things avant-gardists say about realism were true, made me famous long ago. I’ve written short fictions–some of them might actually be called stories–about drugs, my mother, allergies, political lies, and what might happen if you woke up one day and found that you really had destroyed the world like you’d always wanted. Genre is a concept that seems to me made to play with, and I’ve been playing around.

            I’ll have to leave to others the statements about what avant garde art can do to change the world right now. I’ve been through that discussion many times and I think I still don’t know, which is not a way of saying either I don’t think it can or I think it does. Obviously, sometimes art has helped change the world, although it’s by no means been mainly the avant garde kind that’s done that. Other times we just have to wait and see, and sometimes the things it changes probably can’t ever be seen. I think you have to deal with specific cases.

            One thing, though, I think I can say for sure is this: that of all the times I’ve been exhausted (and believe me, there are more and more of them), I certainly haven’t managed to exhaust the possibilities, in language and otherwise, that a restless anti-conventional art can create. I’ve tried, quite sincerely and probably more than most, to kill art, since my sense of art has often been that if I really could kill it, it would be better off dead. Seriously: if you don’t want art to be dead, then you just don’t respect it enough. But there art is again, after the attempted assassination, suggesting possibilities. After centuries, millennia of it, after people have declared it dead repeatedly, after all the great things it has suggested and the terrible things it has aided, after all the people who have died with no relationship to it at all, it’s still here, saying you just don’t know what life is, do you, you don’t begin to know, and you haven’t yet begun to learn to live. So I figure the time to start learning might as well be now.

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