EPIPHANTOM

The Manifesto (Continuation) (This Is Going To Take A While)

We are all familiar with the concept of performance. A performer, or a group of performers, behaves in a certain way for an audience, so as to evoke or bring about an experience which in some way deviates from that of quotidian reality, or non-performance.

The most obvious medium of performance is that of theater: in theatrical events (plays, movies, TV shows, etc.), humans (or anthropomorphized beings) are the performers, and the performance takes place within a space concretely localized in physical space and time. If it isn’t solidly contextualized - e.g., if the setting is metaphysical - that quality is usually brought to the forefront of the audience’s attention as something strange or unusual.

Less-obvious media of performance include visual art and music: here the performer is not so easily identifiable. If we are to consider concerts within the realm of “theatrical events,” then the musicians themselves would be the performers. Whom, or what, are the performers inside of a piece of recorded music? An abstract painting - especially, one with no reference to an artist? I would say that the performer is the sound or the visual image itself. Abstract art and instrumental music provide the best cases for demonstration of my greater point, here, because they remove all but a faint trace of the human element within their scope. It is not the artist or musician who performs: it is the tangible sound or image, unbound to an origin. The performance space is  constituted by the audience - a person, the consumer of the work - and the performer. The presence of an originary point is not only unnecessary, but (I would say) is dangerous insofar as it runs the risk of undermining the work’s performative qualities - stealing the spotlight, so to speak. For example, I’d argue that it’s more meaningful to  view a famous film - Citizen Kane, for example - without knowledge of the meaning of “Orson Welles.” Orson Welles is not the performer in Citizen Kane; Beethoven is not the performer in his ninth symphony, and Picasso is not the performer in Guernica. In each instance, the content operates freely from its progenitor.

This principle is complicated by the concept of language and writing. The complication arises from the fact that language seems inextricably bound to an originary point: meaning. Each word has its definition - this is not true of each sonic frequency, brushstroke, or subtle gesture of the actor’s brow. Meaning will always be the father, so to speak, of language, except in cases of nonsensical or made-up words. Right?

Well, somewhat. Of all the written arts, poetry disrupts meaning to the greatest extent. Still, one gets the sense - or at the very least, one is taught to have the sense - that poems try to convey something beyond itself in some way. A love poem in which no direct reference to a beloved, in which no word explicitly related to love, is ever displayed, for example. 

Writing As Performance Art: The Beginning Of A Manifesto

Renee Magritte’s La Trahison Des Images (The Treachery of Images) features a tobacco pipe, beneath which are displayed the words Ceci n’est pas une pipe (“This is not a pipe”). This famous painting has intrigued and confounded no small number of people in the eighty-three years since its creation. What is the brown object which attends the text, if not a pipe? 

Until I did a bit of research, before which I assumed the work’s title was the same as its infamous phrase, it did not occur to me that Magritte was actually commenting on the nature of imagery and representation. The sentence “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” indicates the difference between an image and the thing it represents. The object in question is not, in fact, a pipe: it is the representation of a pipe.

I would like to hereby open this manifesto by revealing a secret: this is not a manifesto. 

It is, rather, the representation of a manifesto, the performance of one as such. Like an actor assuming the guises of a character, this piece of writing is going through the motions, adopting the qualities and mannerisms of a manifesto. But, just like that actor is not actually the character he or she plays, this text is not actually a manifesto.

Please keep in mind as you read this manifesto that it is only a performance . However…

the value of the performance is at least equal to the value of that which it represents, so perhaps the word only should be omitted from this explanation. It is a performance, a performance whose truth value or “reality” is completely irrelevant to its function in the world. In other words, it should be treated exactly as if it were a living, breathing, “real” manifesto. 

When one watches a play, one must suspend their disbelief in the reality of the play in order to fully enjoy it: for the hour or so in which the performance occurs, one must forget that the stage is a place of unreality, the characters are not acting out real dramas, their clothing items are merely parts of a costume. So this “manifesto” must be treated as a manifesto - sans the quotation marks which indicate that it is not real. My goal in writing this manifesto is to explore the liminal space between performance and reality, and in doing so, explain how writing can be regarded as a form of performance art, and also how the concept of performance is of critical value in considering the current state of art across all media. 

Epiphantom: The New New

Hello, all!

I’d like to make a formal, public gesture declaring my commitment to this website as a space for theoretical writings. This blog post is that gesture.

I have created a custom domain for what was formerly tinyspirits.tumblr.com. You are currently looking at writings.epiphantom.com (the parent website, epiphantom.com,  is intended as a display of the things I do and make, and the things the people I love do and make, spanning all forms of media, although at present it’s nothing more than a nascent ambition).

Welcome to EPIPHANTOM  In the weeks that follow, I plan on restructuring all prior content according to the express mission: this website is to serve as a place for writing. There’s no need for another image-based site in my web experience or yours. My desire is to promote diversity on the internet, instead of adding another layer of the same sort of paint to be absorbed into the homogenized grayness into which most image-based websites are eventually subsumed.

I hope people will be interested in transmissions from the center of the universe, Missives about writing, art, and… well, a lot of other things, like robots, the internet, social media and organization, and the woods. I adore the woods. I live in the woods.

I also live here at this website. Welcome to my home.

Love,

Emma

Umberto Eco and The Useful Fiction of A “Structured Life,” pt. 2

Barbara Ellmerer, Amanita 

Barbara Ellmer is a Swiss-based painter who “paints objects of her subconscious manifestation with the unconstrained flip of her wrist and a surreal color pallet” (quotation culled from this interview, in which she brilliantly elucidates her methodology and philosophy of art). Her work intrigues me, as it offers an aesthetic perspective on transcendental experience that seems to evoke the ambience of such situations, rather than attempting mimesis (Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, why is my spell-check device indicating an error at the word? A harbinger of newspeak’s advent, my friends; gird your loins and keep your dictionaries close) or fidelity to an original vision which by its very nature is transcendent - fleeting.

Therein lies my theoretical contention with the art of Alex Grey, actually. By my estimation, he seems to aim for a direct reproduction of psychedelic visions, but there’s this weird disjuncture between the slickness and clinical feel of his art and the qualities of transcendence from which they, at least nominally, issue.

That’s the long and short of what I have to say about that. If what I am about to write feels a bit distant, or playful, , it is because I am resisting the sudden urge to fingerpaint.

Toward the end of this post, I mentioned that I had “a ton more to say on the subject”. What follows is a fraction of that ton.

I have long been fascinated by metafiction (I wrote my senior thesis about it, natch, and the interest extends back to age 14, when I first read this book ). When something of both a highly conceptual and specific nature holds my attention over the course of multiple years, I think it is worthy of attempting to discern a function, or group of functions, that define the thing. In revealing its character this way, it also reflects on my thought provess and allows for a more profound and intimate connection to the seemingly abstract and remote.

This explains why I am excited about the concept that metafictional literature might surpass non-metafictional literature in its function to aid the reader in self-fictionalizing (e.g., creating meaning from what objectively might appear to be a dispersed and heterogeneous human existence). According to Umberto Eco, that is exactly why people read. 

I like to think that metafiction creates a benefical catch-22 which finds the reader forced to envision themselves as part of the story.  I choose the word “forced” carefully: this phenomenon occurs regardless of her or his complicity with a narrative or its assumed “message.” The consequence of this is that they are empowered to view their lives from an aesthetically distant perspective, making life appear more cohesive, elegant, and structured.

These thoughts! They simmer like primordial soup under the lid-pot that my skull undoubtedly is. Definite forms will emerge from this, I am sure of it. I feel them slinking inexorably to solid ground; maybe - just maybe - a Real! Live! Paper! will be produced from their exodus, to add to some sort of not-yet-existent writing portfolio. The missing link will thus be restored and harmony will prevail between my ears until something else comes along to frustrate (I mean, tantalize) me. My problems: terrible and adorable all at once.

Love,

Emma