Second Thoughts

by Ulises Carrión

70 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Ulises Carrión (Veracruz México; 1941 - Amsterdám; 1989) fue un escritor, editor y artista mexicano nacido en San Andrés Tuxtla. Celebrado inicialmente como un talentoso y joven escritor, a principios de los años 70 Carrión abandonó al mismo tiempo México y la literatura ortodoxa para iniciar en Europa una obra en el arte contemporáneo. Heriberto Yépez lo llama "el escritor post-literario más innovador que haya nacido en México".

Reviews

[Kamil Dudar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ll begin by saying that I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT THIS BOOK WAS ABOUT before starting it. The structure attracted me (which is also, funnily, a concept that is reflected upon by Carrión), so I chose to read it in one sitting as a break from other books I started. So here is my stream of thoughts transcribed into a semi-essay or something adjacent to an analysis.

The new art of making books

[What a book is] A book is its own space-time that can be utilised in various ways. Carrión states that a book can be boring notwithstanding its contents being interesting or not. [Prose and poetry, The space] Poetry is, on the contrary, a way to make use of this property – how words are organised on each page influences their ultimate meaning and influences the reader in novel ways. To write is to be boring. To make books is to be an poet. To be an artist is to make books. Discovering spatiality is the key to creating art. Spoken word is, therefore, just a mere method of transcribing written poetry that omits its structure that provides us with emotions, ideas, concepts etc. Prose can imitate this effect, ‘A novel with no capital letters […] is still a novel, that is to say, a boring book pretending not to be such’. (Here I must say I do not agree with Carrión’s statement – an excellent example of the contrary is ‘Na ratunek gołębicy’ by Czesław Dobek, where using capital letters or not, that is the structure of the text, is an important part of discerning this amazing book)
‘The space is the music of the unsung poetry’ – ‘A book is a volume in the space’ – ‘Space exists outside subjectivity’ – Text is the prisoner in space. One that cannot be disjunct from physical form. Poetry, therefore, cannot escape its intrinsic layout without the reader being able to look at it on paper.
[The language] ‘They are there to form, together with other signs, a space-time sequence, that we identify with the name book’ Words become unintentional, non-utilitarian, semantics is abolished only to create the n e w art. The word is to be abstract – ‘[…] the word rose is the word rose. It means all the roses and it means none of them.’ A word is connected to ideas and mundane things ONLY when placed into the structure of the book – a sequence, a space-time.
[Structures] ‘Every word is part of a text.’ Structure abhors void, it is everything, its parts cannot be isolated. To understand is to analyse the STRUCTURE, not the isolated parts. Text is not the true unit of structure – it is what is included in it.
‘Plagiarism is the starting point of the creative activity in the new art.’ An epigone can create something new. That is, transformation of already created works of art is art itself.
Meaning of sentences in isolation is undecipherable. They can be uprooted from the space of a book and interpreted according to our every-day understanding of language. However, them being embedded in the text is what makes them have a meaning. Function over literality.
An artist probes words to create new art: ‘the author has no other intention thant to test the language’s ability to mean something.’
[The reading] The pace of text in new art is NOT EQUILIBRIOUS. You need not read everything, you don’t have to overanalyse everything. Sometimes, the contents are senseless.
Let’s take The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech by Avital Ronell as an example. It begins with a sequence of letters that simulate noise and stutter:

‘t h eeeee eeeee eeeee eeeee eeeee eeeee eeeee eeeee
eeeee eeeee t e llllll llllll llllll llllll eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeee p h o
nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn e b
o o
 k’

Or Tytus Czyżewski’s poetry, such as ‘Mechaniczny ogród’, where there is a diagram that itself doesn’t have to be read in its entirety.
‘The new art makes it possible to read faster than the fast-reading methods.’ Frequently it leaves the reader confused or unable to grasp the meaning instantaneously. It evokes emotions, feelings that are ENCAVED deeply in our SUBconscious. ‘The new art appeals to the ability every man possesses for understanding and creating signs and systems of signs.’

From bookworks to mailworks

Carrión describes several examples of the so called Mail Art.
[1] The book is only the superficial characteristic of it. Its contents can be read and interpreted on different levels – from its contents to its value as an art piece. Different methods of immersing the reader into the told story can be utilised to create art. Sometimes, page-turning is the time itself and a page is space itself (Peter Meyboom); collection of bills on its own doesn’t mean anything, but when looked at as a collection, it creates new understandings (Franco Vaccari).
[2] True Mail Art is embodied, for example, by H. Gajewski’s Eliza Gajewski – the ‘mailness’ is created by including only two photographs of certain moments in the life of the author’s daughter. Next photos are then sent to the reader to create the feeling of time-passing. It makes a book a form of communication between the reader and the author. It is created by both. The culmination of this process creates art itself.
‘The ubiquity of the work stops being a secondary characteristic and becomes and essential, defining, element that gives birth to new forms.’

Rubber stamp theory and praxis

Let’s start with the definition of the word ‘praxis’ (from Wikipedia):

Praxis is the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, embodied, realized, applied, or put into practice. "Praxis" may also refer to the act of engaging, applying, exercising, realizing, or practising ideas.
It is important to understand this word in order to understand this essay to understand this theory to understand the author’s intentions to finally understand the art of Carrión.
‘The most striking thing about rubber-stamps as they function in our social reality is, that they are a symbol of power – their role is to validate or invalidate something.’ Contracts, bills, invoices, permits, certificates – all require to be clinched by stamping. Were they not stamped, they would be just mere pieces of scrap paper that do not change the reality. ‘The contract has the power to define the reality of the relationship’, says Boon Gan Ng (ref. 1) Therefore, a rubber stamp is the tool of MATERIALISATION OF CERTAIN PROCESSES.
‘Artists’ rubber-stamps present exactly the opposite characteristics’ – ‘We can define artists’ rubber-stamps as ‘rubber stamps that lack validity in an absolute sense’’
‘A document, for instance – looses its validity because the rubber stamp is valid’ The praxis of using rubber-stamps by artists, however, convey the image of them through reproduction and anonymity – a paradox nonetheless. ‘Every print of a rubber-stamp implies a choice by the artist. He creates not only when he designs his rubber-stamp, but also every time he makes a print.’ They give the artis a means of MENDING REALITY or creating something NEW by using something NON-NEW (I use the prefix non- intentionally – orthography can be bent, at least according to descriptionists).

1 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/contra...

Rubber stamp art

There, I will only quote Carrión directly: ‘Among the many genres that artists have created, identified and developed, Stamp Art is a democratic one if there is any. The materials are simple, the format small, the appearance discrete.’

Mail Art and the Big Monster

Mail Art is an art, but it is not concentrated around mailing. ‘What he controls is the ‘work’, the ‘mail piece’ that he shall post. That is his creation.’ A letter can evoke emotions by itself, ignoring its contents. Or, conversely, its contents are the important thing, not the emotions. Mail Art is the former and can include the postal system itself as a part of the final result of the project embarked upon by the artist. ‘It is actually so – the best Mail Art pieces use the post as an integral, functional element of the work.’
Mail Art revolves around the act of creation and posting. We control the former, we do not have any authority over the latter. Money is a key obstacle in Mail Art – it makes it undemocratic.
‘Mail Art knocks at the door of the castle where the Big Monster lives. You can tell the monster anything you like […] But the fact is, that the Big Monster exists and oppresses us.’ The Big Monster is everything that puts a spanner in the works. Mail Art is to oppose it. To do so, you ought to be determined, be strong, knock at the doors of its dwelling as hard as you can.

Table of Mail Art works

This section consists of a concept describing the structure of a Mail Art work. They speak by themselves, therefore I suggest to read them fully.

Personal worlds or cultural strategies?

‘Mail Art shifts the focus from what is traditionally called ‘art’ to the wider concept of ‘culture.’ And this shift is what makes Mail Art truly contemporary. In opposition to ‘personal worlds,’ Mail Art emphasises cultural strategies.’ As said before, Mail Art shifts focus from itself towards multiplicity, culture, plurality. Nowadays, artists cease their traditional aspirations to create a self-consistent work and start exploring the influence brought about by its ‘life’ in the wider concept they choose. This never leads to closure, the life of the art piece is infinite, sometimes uncontrollable – ‘a Mail Art project is never closed. Every human being, even those who will never hear the question, can provide an infinite number of possible answers.’ The abovementioned ‘cultural strategy’ is designed by the artist through choosing to show the audience the responses they get in a specific way. Therefore, it creates culture, since social interactions are the basis of Mail Art.
Postal services are frequently unreliable and inefficient (as many of us experienced the burden they pose). This quality (or, rather, drawback) can be incorporated into an art project to convey a message. Thus, the interlocking of postal processes and cultural influences constitute true Mail Art.

Bookworks revisited

Books are organised – marked by page numbers. They have an internal structure that is only evident if it is arranged. Similarly, that’s the function of paragraphs etc. But is it always the case? (Let’s forget about Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar, where page numbers are needless, or even troublesome) Newspapers (they are not books, obviously) do not possess this internal structure, however, their pages are also numbered. Similarly, it is the case with dictionaries and phonebooks. So, this concept of order, sequentiality doesn’t always reflect the true way of reading.
Mail Art is therefore the visual counterpart of newspapers. It creates a space-time, similarly to books.
Another idea that Carrión describes is the distinction between books and artworks in context of possessing one. One book is not the book – it is a part of the WHOLE that is created by an artist and then disseminated through copying. An artwork is always singular, its copy is not identical, therefore one can say that they possess a painting, for example. This is not the case with books.
Finally, what differentiates books from bookworks is whether the book, as an object, is a means of documentation, or works as an ‘autonomous form’, as Clive Phillpot says: bookworks are ‘books in which the book form is intrinsic to the work.’ Also, bookworks elicit different experiences through how they are read. Thus, a bookwork consists of (1) contents, (2) form and (3) experience or manner of reading. Non-linearity of language is common in such works.
‘But in the manner an artis exploits, contradicts, comments on the existing genres, one can recognise his awareness of the peculiarity of the book form.’

[amanda teixeira · Rating 5 out of 5]

ulises <3