LibraryNovember17RS

A Museum of Language

In the illusory babel of language, an artist might advance specifically to get lost, and to intoxicate himself in dizzying syntaxes, seeking odd intersections of meaning, strange corridors of history, unexpected echoes, unknown humors, or voids of knowledge... but this quest is risky, full of bottomless fictions and endless architectures and counter-architectures... at the end, if there is an end, are perhaps only meaningless reverberations. The following is a mirror structure built of macro and micro orders, reflection, critical laputas, and dangerous stairways of words, a shaky edifice of fictions that hangs over inverse syntactical arrangements... coherences that vanish into quasiexactitudes and sublunary and translunary principles. Here language "covers" rather than "discovers" its sites and situations. Here language "closes" rather than "discloses" doors to utilitarian interpretations and explanations. The language of the artists and critics, referred to in the library, becomes paradigmactic reflections in a looking-glass babel that is fabricated according to Pascal's remark, "Nature is an infinite spere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere." The entire bookshelf may be viewed as a variation on that much misused remark; or as a monstrous "museum" constructed out of multifaceted surfaces that refer, not to one subject but to many subjects withing a single building of words—a brick = a word, a sentence = a room, a paragraph = a floor of rooms, etc. Or language becomes an infinite museum, whose center is everywhere and whose limits are nowhere.
An artist deploy writing as a pure spectacle of atenuation. An autobiographical method mutated into a synthetic reconstitution of memories that brings to mind a vestigal history. An arsenal of expired metaphors.