Türkçe okumak için: https://www.buzdokuz.com/2025/11/craig-dworkin-ile-soylesi/

Interviewer: Hakan Şarkdemir

1. What kind of relationship is there between the concept of “no medium” and “post-medium”? That is to say, how can we associate the art that evokes nothingness with the theatricalization of art?

I think one connection comes from recognizing how “medium” has been used in two different ways: to mean something like “discipline” (painting, sculpture, drawing, etc.) and to mean “material,” or substrate. Stone, say, is a medium in the medium of sculpture. So part of my focus in No Medium was on the inescapable and signifying materiality of the substrate, even as the extreme works I discuss challenge the genre or discipline in which they’re placed: Drawing with no (graphite) drawing, Film with no image, Music with no sound, and so on. You can escape genre, perhaps, but not materiality.

At the same time, the plurality inherent in “post-medium” – or in the “differential” artworks discussed by Marjorie Perloff – parallel the multiplicity I argue for in No Medium (and the meaning of that title): there is never just one single medium, but always media in concatenation. We might think of sound, for instance, as the medium of music, or the phonograph record as the medium of sound, but you can’t hear whether there is even any sound recorded on that phonograph unless it’s hooked up to a turntable, with a needle, and an amplifier, and speakers, and wires, and electricity….. It’s not just vinyl; there’s no one material medium involved.

• Nurullah Ataç, a significant critic in 1940s-50s, says that Mallarmé’s poetry is “an object made of words”. So, we don’t need to translate Un Coup de Dés into Turkish to understand it properly. According to Marcel Broodthaers he was the one who invented unwittingly modern space. He teleported the poetry to the age it was born (i.e. tragedy), so to speak, since he combined language (lexis), visuality (opsis) and musical expression (melos) in poetry. What does Mallarmé’s work mean in contemporary art today?

Coup de dés is a good example of the plurality of media and the importance of materiality. The typography and the print on the page have long been recognized as key to the work, but that page has been abstracted and dematerialized at the expense of the materiality of the sheet of paper. Mallarmé, significantly, wanted the sheets of that book to be unbound, so they could be slipped from the portfolio and made mobile. The gutter (the fold in the middle of the sheet) is also a thematically significant aspect of the work – and one that only comes about because of the three-dimensional material properties of the substrate of paper. So when Broodthaers produces his Coup de dés (image) on metal plates, he eliminated that gutter fold and fixed the openings (the two-page spread) in a way that Mallarmé’s vision of mobile, unbound sheets destabilized.

That said, the Broodthaers is an amazing work, and although technically it’s not the first visualization of Mallarmé’s typography, it’s spawned an entire sub-genre of ‘transcreations’. Indeed, the artist Michalis Pichler has been working on Coup de Dés (Collection): an exhibition and catalogue of all the various versions (along the lines of the Ed Ruscha exhibition and catalogue Various Small Books). It’s both a work of scholarship, and an artwork in its own right. So while I’m not sure that Mallarmé as such is very important for contemporary art, his book – or at least Broodthaer’s image of his book – as a site for further production, has taken on a life of its own.

• Would it be possible to say that the “gesture of reduction” (like emptiness, silence or blank page) is attacking the paradigm of the autonomy of art with a similar violence as multi-layeredness (like appropriation and/or allegorical strategies)?

Certainly in the sense of No [Single] Medium as I suggested earlier – if you can’t even have one medium, you can’t have much autonomy. Even the most conventional, 19^th-century novel, for instance, required light to read by, which for the reading public in America and parts of Europe was most likely whale oil lamps. So simply reading a book implicated the novel reader in a global industry of species extinction. And that book was printed on recycled rag paper, which most likely had it origins in slave-harvested cotton. And so on . . . . There’s never been any autonomy to art, as long as it’s recognized as materially grounded in the material specifics of its substrates.

• In this context what is the underlying phenomenon of the split between modernist criticism (e.g. Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried) and the post-modern criticism (e.g. Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Hal Foster)? Is this a political division or an aesthetic one?

I might complicate the dichotomy by adding Yve-Alain Bois and T. J. Clark to the list. Compare Clark to Foster, or Bois to Buchloh and you can start to see what I mean. Which makes me suspect that it’s less a matter of politics or aesthetics – a critical position that then turns to consider some art or other – than it is a matter of the criticism being determined by the art one starts with. That is, does one take Picasso as a given? Or Duchamp as a given? Or to put it schematically: from the Modernism you chose, you get the art criticism you deserve.

• Where does Ezra Pound’s experiment in The Cantos fit within the context of breaking the understanding of “poetry as a language art?”

The Cantos is exemplary in staging dramatically, for the reader, the degree to which language is material and inseparable from its substrate. Recall the line in “Canto I”: “In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer”, where Pound glosses the title page of the translation of Homer he is basing his own translations on. The point being that you can never just refer to “Homer” in the abstract – you read Homer in a particular edition, published by a particular printer. Indeed, at the end of Canto XXX, Pound will name check one Renaissance printer, Hieronymous Soncinus, discussing not only another (Aldo Manuzio), but the typecutter (Francesco da Bologna) who made the type that let them print: “this Messire Francesco who hath cut all Aldous his letters with such grace and charm as is known.” And then in “Canto VIII” on reads: “tergo/ …hanni de/ …dicis/ …entia”, where Pound notes the verso inscription of the address of a letter, its paper substrate torn so that some of the text is missing. That absent text can be easily filled it, and the following lines gloss them “Equivalent to:/ Giohanni of the Medici, Florence.” That is: Giohanni de Medicis Fiorentia. Again, it’s not just an allusion, but an citation from a particular source, and not just an abstract source, but a particular written inscription on fragile paper, with all its physical attributes and exigencies and materialities.

• Johanna Drucker and Liz Kotz have thought about the materiality of language in conceptual poetry/art. You also wrote about the works of Vito Acconci in your article titled “Fugitive Signs” within a similar context. You say that just like Broodthaers he does not only emphasize the spatial dimensions of language but also denies the transparency of signification. The tendency of repetition by eliminating its references exists also in artists/poets such as John Cage (Empty Words) or Jackson Mac Low (“5 biblical poems”). Today we can consider that similar approaches are followed in vispo, asemic poetry and glitch art. Is it possible to say that contemporary poetry/art focuses on failing existing meaning expectations? Where does error, chance or accident come into play?

That’s definitely one lineage, and one direction things are going. But it’s a direction that stands out in contrast to ease and transparency from two very different directions. On the one hand, the vast majority of contemporary poetry in the United States is not only transparent, but imagines a direct and authentic link between the author’s experience and their expressive exposition. Both the language and ideology of mainstream poetry today are even more transparent than post-war “confessional” poetry ever was. This kind of poetry may not be very interesting, but it’s ubiquitous.

On the other hand, one of the things that was striking about Conceptual poetry is that it followed directly from an avant-garde tradition which valued difficulty, opacity, and the facture of language at the level of the word or phoneme. But unlike the radical modernisms or the Language Poetry that inspired it, Conceptual writing offered smooth surfaces instead of opacity, entire uninterrupted texts instead of fragments, seemingly transparent and deoderized projects instead of difficult mysteries.

Your question about error is very interesting. The procedural nature of Cage and Mac Low’s writings-through make the criteria for a mistake clear, but it’s not so easy to see an error. To actually identify an error in those works would mean re-creating their procedures – you would have to rewrite their poems, letter by letter. On the other hand, how would you know if one of Mirtha Dirmisache’s asemic poem had an error in it? What would it mean for her to have made a mistake? It’s not that the concept disappears, but it gets shifted to other arenas than the ones in which we’re accustomed to consider it. Which reminds me of a definition of improvisation (variously attributed to different jazz musicians): “if you’re not making a mistake, you’re making a mistake.”

• What would you say about the poets, artists, writers from different schools and movements appearing together in publications in the past such as 0 to 9, M/E/A/N/I/N/G, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E?

I’d say it’s one of the signs of a healthy avant-garde. Where conventional literature operates by imitation (and so looks back to similar kinds of works – someone writing a sonnet today, for instance, looks back at earlier sonnets), the avant-garde operates by provocation and permission, so an experimental poet might be looking to dance, or film, or music, or other arts – much less the sciences – for challenges and inspirations. So this goes back to the question of the post-medium: of moving beyond the disciplines and departments of art schools and institutions (in my own university English Department, for instance, “creative writing” is divided between “fiction” and “poetry” – no room, obviously, for something like Finnegans Wake, or Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, or Yevgeny Onegin, or any number of other works!)

• According to Robert Smithson it is possible to treat words like objects and to treat objects like words. In a way conceptual artists/poets more or less follow this path. On the other hand, in Joseph Kosuth, who is at a different pole in conceptual art, objects and words turn into a concept or a definition about the art. They are “almost a neutral vehicle for the idea” for him in Trevor Stark’s words. What do you think is the main motivation that separates the understanding of art as a thought and the art that manipulates the materiality of language?

I suppose it’s a fundamental philosophical difference between idealism and materialism. Literary theory has taught us that not only is language not a neutral vehicle for ideas, but that the form language takes (we’re back to the typography of Mallarmé) is not a neutral vehicle for language.

• What kind of meaning does Kosuth’s view of “All art (after Marcel Duchamp) is conceptual” have in the digital age. For example, can we say that Christian Bök or Eric Zboya are today’s conceptual artists/poets?

I take Kosuth to be arguing that one of the things that changed with Duchamp’s readymades was a shift from an emphasis on how an artwork looked to how it functioned, and that part of the role of art became to question (or challenge, or expand) the category of art itself. Duchamp’s Nu descendant un escalier, for instance, challenged what a painting might look like, but it didn’t challenge whether a painting counted as art. I’m not sure I see Bök or Zboya so much challenging what counts as poetry as much as challenging what counts as poetics: how you arrive at a couplet or a visual poem. Does the algorithmic count as a legitimate poetics? So maybe we have now a conceptual poetics as well as a Conceptual Poetry.

1. What does the tension between lexical and nonlexical mean when it comes to electronic medium today? What do you think about the current language-based art?

When it comes to digital media, I see two significant changes (for all kinds of writing). First, the multi-media capabilities of computers today – where sound and image and text and moving images are all readily available within the same frame – come at a cost of homogeneous code. The language underneath all of those languages is the same. A version of this can be seen in book production; it used to be expensive to have images in books, and they had to printed on separate stock with a different process (think of those older books which have all the figures together on glossy paper in a section in the middle or at the end of the book). Now, it can all be done with the same digital printing process at the same cost, because the computers that set up and control the printing don’t distinguish between image and text – it’s all image as far as the printer is concerned.

And that leads to the other significant change I see with writing in a digital environment. The vast majority of writing and reading today – by orders of magnitude – is by machines and for machines, without any expectation of humans ever viewing it (or being able to understand it even if they took a look). Martin Howse wrote a book in 2013, titled Diff in June, which contains all the data his computer wrote to itself in one day.  Even excluding binary data, it runs to well over 700 pages. That’s just one computer in one day.  And it’s not even talking to other machines. The difference between lexical and nonlexical literature starts to look smaller when it’s dwarfed by all the writing that is not meant to read by people at all.

Buzdokuz, Issue 14, November-December 2022.

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From Archaeophonics

Some 30,000 years ago, spelucean artists of the Upper-Paleolithic left marks memorializing acoustic experience; in the resonant subterranean cavities at Altamira, Ekain, Chauvet, and Lascaux, the points of greatest reverberation correlate to the greatest density of prehistoric paintings. Among the hyenas and ungulates, aurochean bulls and steppe-bison depicted in full rear, levande, congregate in disquieting, awesome domination.

Here, sound amplifies, escalating quickly to thundering levels. Imitating the deafening stampede and roar of the depicted beasts, while standing before their image, brings the body into alignment with a geologic affordance of the limestone auditorium: the space itself reverberating at frequencies not merely acoustic but fully corporeal, with its repercussions of palpable echo felt by the body caught in the troughs — kinetic, buffeted and quivering — between waves of high and low pressure — a sound more quaking than heard.

Revolving with a queasy vertigo deeper toward the chambers through the switchback turns of the dedalian maze, matching corridor to convolute, clew thread from his pack unspooling, keeping always to the path of Ariadne’s disclosed course, headlong toward Minos’ infamous bull, Theseus — at the labyrinth’s core, finding it empty, facing only a curving wall without any unsmoothed, asperous surface, all craggy coarseness having long ago been mirror-polish sanded — bellowing with piqued rage or triumph or panicked fear, discovers that the whole time, all along, he alone had been the minotaur.

Process Note

“Archæophonics” adapts a form developed by John Cage in his “mesostic” poems, which write through a source text using a key word or phrase, reducing the source to selected fragmentary passages according to a pre-determined exclusionary rule.

For the present work, I started from the amino acid sequence of the ion channel protein trpa1 [Transient Receptor Potential, Cation Channel Subfamily A, Member 1]. Restricted to the cochlea and certain peripheral sensory ganglia, it is responsible for the mechanosensitive transduction channel of hair cells in the inner ear, and so it is the key to translating sound waves into nerve impulses as part of what humans experience as hearing. My text includes the coded letters of the protein’s amino acid sequence (reproduced on the following page) in order, with the rule that between any two letters from the code, those letters may not appear. So, for example, taking the beginning of the sequence, mkr: after the initial “m,” no m can appear until a k has appeared, and after the appearance of that “k” no subsequent k can appear until an r has appeared, and so on — with only a single instance of those letters permitted (that is, only a single k can occur between the “m” and the “r”). In practice, the run of KEYLLMKWLAYGF, for one example, might yield: “the KEY haLLMarK of the WayLAYinG Fit.”