What happened to the bold, kicky promise of writing instruction in the 1960s? The current conservative trend in composition is analyzed allegorically by Geoffrey Sirc in this book-length homage to Charles Deemer's 1967 article, in which the theories and practices of Happenings artists (multi-disciplinary performance pioneers) were used to invigorate college writing. Sirc takes up Deemer's inquiry, moving through the material and theoretical concerns of such pre- and post-Happenings influences as Duchamp and Pollock, situationists and punks, as well as many of the Happenings artists proper.
With this book, already a cult classic, began a neo-avant-garde for composition studies.
Winner of the Ross W. Winterowd Award for most outstanding book in composition theory.
ENGLISH COMPOSITION AS A HAPPENING
By GEOFFREY SIRCUTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2002 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-87421-435-2Contents
0 The Still-Unbuilt Hacienda.............................................11 "What is Composition ...?" after Duchamp...............................332 The American Action Writers............................................693 Scenes from Late Sixties Composition...................................1214 Writing Classroom as A&P Parking Lot...................................1855 Never Mind the Tagmemics, Where's the Sex Pistols?.....................2356 English Composition as a Happening II..................................263References...............................................................295Bonus Track: Funeral Ceremony for the Anti-Procs II.....................311Index....................................................................314About the Author.........................................................319
Chapter One
"WHAT IS COMPOSITION ...?" AFTER DUCHAMP (Notes Toward a General Teleintertext)
1. English Composition as a Happening (as all composition that followed him does, consciously or not) begins with Duchamp. When Richard Kostelanetz interviews Allan Kaprow, who coined the term Happening, "the conversation opens with Kaprow speaking of Marcel Duchamp" (The Theatre of Mixed Means 102). Calvin Tomkins calls the influence of Duchamp on Robert Rauschenberg, creator of some of the most poetically charged Happenings-like theater events of the era, "crucial ..., confirming and reinforcing what must often have seemed a highly questionable use of [his] talent" (Off the Wall 131). There is that amazing moment of desire, in 1954, when Rauschenberg and his friend Jasper Johns wander amazed through the recently installed Arensberg Collection of Duchamp's art in the Philadelphia Museum; stopping in front of one of the works, a birdcage filled with sugar cubes called Why Not Sneeze? (1921), Rauschenberg can't restrain the urge to poke his fingers through the thin bars of the birdcage to try and steal one of the marble lumps of sugar inside. A museum guard suddenly appeared: "Don't you know," the guard said in a bored tone of voice, "that you're not supposed to touch that crap?" (Tomkins 130).
The scene of Duchamp, then, is typical of "Composition as a Happening": what's conventionally thought of as a questionable use of talent turns out to be crucially influential, poetic; what's prized enough to steal is tediously dismissed by the guardians of culture as so much crap. An account of Duchamp's influence on Happenings Composition, then, is in large part a story of seemingly failed production, work which is judged too crappy to win prizes. Failure is a fitting lens by which to view Duchamp. There was the time, coming home in a taxi, March 1912, with a painting that was supposed to ... well, not win prizes, of course. It couldn't have. It was his Nude Descending a Staircase, and the show where it was to be exhibited was in Paris at the Socit des Artistes Indpendants. The slogan of this salon, open to anyone, was ni rcompense ni jury, so there were no prizes to win, no panels to award them. But even if there were, Duchamp was out of the running before the show began. A 1953 catalogue from the Muse d'Art Moderne refers to the story: "1912. March-April. Paris. 28th Salon des Indpendants. Gleizes, Le Fauconnier, Lger, Metzinger and Archipenko, members of the hanging committee, turn it into a great demonstration of Cubism" (Lebel Marcel Duchamp 10). Duchamp's Nude was a sort of culmination; he'd taken Cubism as far as it interested him. He was at the time moving out of, away from, that particular school of painting; it implied a technology, an aesthetic, a certain problem set and certain materials, with which he'd grown bored. The show's hanging committee must have thought ... a Cubist nude? This is a joke, right? And one they certainly didn't want played on their great demonstration. So Gleizes convinces Duchamp's brothers to get him to withdraw it. He does, and riding home in the cab, with this amazing work next to him, he feels some bitterness, surely, but vindication, as well, knowing he succeeded in turning his canvas into a machine. "Just the same," he smiles, "it moves" (Lebel Marcel Duchamp 9). Then there was the Big Show of 1917, the American counterpart to the Indpendants. Another show which was supposedly open to anyone, but another show which refused one of Duchamp's works-this one, the urinal called Fountain. That piece, taken to Stieglitz's studio, photographed (inscribed on glass), and then mysteriously disappearing-why, its photographic representation alone is enough to ensure its central place in art history. And finally, the later Duchamp, the one who has since left the stylistic nostalgia of painting's cult of technique (its mystic craftsmanship) behind to pursue the mechanical processes of "precision oculism," at a French trade fair in the 1930s, trying to sell even one of his Rotoreliefs, those fascinating revolving spirals, made for a kind of optical massage, to transport perception to another place. But his project fails. Roch recalls the scene with a certain smug glee:
None of the visitors, hot on the trail of the useful, could be diverted long enough to stop [at Duchamp's booth]. A glance was sufficient to see that between the garbage compressing machine and the incinerators on the left, and the instant vegetable chopper on the right, this gadget of his simply wasn't useful.
When I went up to him, Duchamp smiled and said, `Error, one hundred per cent. At least, it's clear.'
These Rotoreliefs have since become collectors' items. (84-85)
Ah, that Marcel. Even in chronicling his failures, we simply chart his success. But yet each failing must have been felt acutely at the time. "Given that ...; if I suppose I'm suffering a lot" (Duchamp 23). Failure intense enough, for instance, to warrant inscribing a theme of lament in his most famous work, the Large Glass (1915-1923). Lebel reminds us of a note to that effect scrawled in The Green Box (1934), concerning
the disillusioned litanies of the glider: "Slow life. Vicious circle. Onanism. Horizontal. Return trips on the buffer. The trash of life. Cheap construction. Tin, ropes, wire. Eccentric wooden pulleys. Monotonous fly-wheel. Beer professor." All these terms express a single one: CHECS, which Duchamp, with his instinct for inner meanings, seems in some way to have made his motto. (Marcel Duchamp 67)
checs, we are reminded, is the French term for "checks" and "failures," as well as "chess." For Duchamp, chess was "like constructing a mechanism ... by which you win or lose" (136). So chess, as failure/success, both in accordance, delayed, in check. Motto, indeed.
Like many, I'm interested in Duchamp. I'm interested, for example, in failures that really aren't, in works barred from gaining the prize which end up changing the world. Brief, personal jottings that become a litany for posterity; apparently impoverished writing that proves a rich text. I'm interested in Duchamp, then, the way I'm interested in writing, writing done by anyone-whoever: useless, failed, nothing-writing by some nobody that turns out to be really something. I'm interested in what Duchamp reveals about our era, the Modernist era, specifically in the way Modernism...
