The Mine King I/O

Lisa Radon. The Mine King.

In June 2010, The Mine King took up residence at galleryHOMELAND during the exhibition Doing It To It for “The Mine King I/O.” During gallery hours, I rhizomatically read, researched, and wrote five catalogues documenting the work of The Mine King. A sixth catalogue comprising lists of crucial books solicited from a handful of friends and interesting thinkers, is forthcoming.

From the first CATALOGUE:

The Mining is the practice, the digging down through rich vein of idea (and, not incidentally, language) captured in text, page to dog-eared page (repeat) through to bibliography to jump into another text in the vein.

The Min(e)ing, making mine of mined, refers to repeated readings of beloved writings (gathering books like family), assimilating ideas into my own constellation of ideas, and my practice of “reading” texts, which is to say making-poem-of-found-text via an intuitive paring for sound.

The Mind King [deprecated] was the intermediate step (suggested by sound) from min(e)ing to The Mine King.

The Mine King is both the project and the Mine King. The Mine King is an archive of books, essays, PDFs, handwritten notes, recordings. The Mine King is a set of publications that address the mining and the mined. The Mine King is text constructed from text.

Published on 27 June 2010 3:55 PM.
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in my own (little) way I am always aware

As to the poet/artist dichotomy question, I think of myself as being both, and I imagine that my “artist’s books” are really more like books than most publications which fall within that genre. In my own (little) way I am always aware of literature, and it seems to me that artists like Jenny Holzer (for example) would be much better if they were more aware of the literary tradition of the short sentence, text, or whatever; they are clearly ignorant of the aphorism and its related forms. I have to say that I am very modest about my own capacities, but with that reservation, I do think that I have a certain awareness of both art and literature as traditions, whereas people do tend to be aware of one or the other.

Murray, Caitlin and Tim Johnson, eds. The Present Order: Writings on the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay. Marfa, Texas: Marfa Book Company, 2010. 65.

Published on 3 May 2012 3:26 PM.
Filed under: art, writing

books are for use

Books are for use.
Every reader his [or her] book.
Every book its reader.
Save the time of the reader.
The library is a growing organism.

Ranganathan, S.R. The Five Laws of Library Science. Madras: The Madras Library Association, 1931.
[paraphrased]

Published on 2 May 2012 2:47 PM.
Filed under: books, library, reading

language arrives

The internal sense speaks at last and for the fist time. The tent is printed with burning tongues and crowned with writing. Language arrives.

…

Solitary belonging, devoted to itself, no longer devotes itself to what is given, except to what languge gives us—to what is said or dictated.

…

I am nostalgic for a lost world, a lost paradise, an island between two seas, where the senses sparkle like a lake of gemstones. I speak now and shelter in the tent of language or writing. The tabernacle closes, its flaps are lowered. I live now in the prison of my language and the jewel-box closes. …the beauty of the five senses lies in the black box while we sleep under the blue hangings engraved with fire.

TO MY ONE DESIRE

This is the first sentence, the originary, primary proposition, as original as the fault committed in the past by a girl on a paradise-island, as original and permanent. These are the first words uttered by the body when it becomes an interiority endowed with a voice, and is enveloped in flames and imprinted with signs, when the skin-tapestry or the skin-pavilion no longer bears on itself lilacs or cheetahs but geometry and letters. This is the sentence that causes the world to flee and the necklets to be abandoned, that excludes rabbits and goats and that chased us from paradise, these are the words which cause the senses to withdraw into a black box. Our only desire is that it be reopened.

The woman-summation bids farewell to the world, takes the veil beneath the tent of language.

This is the first cogito, more deeply buried althought more visible than the thinking cogito. I feel, I have felt; I have seen, heard, tasted, smelt; I have touched; I touch, I enclose myself in my pavilion of skin; it burns with languages, I speak; I speak about myself, about my loneliness and the nostalgia of lost senses, I mourn the lost paradise, I regret the loss of that to which I was giving myself or of what was given to me. Since that phrase was written, I desire, and the world absents itself.

This is the first, self-contained proposition, literally circular, the first stable unitary philosophy of identity. My desire identifies with writing. I exist only in language.

Serres, Michel. The Five Senses: A philosophy of mingled bodies. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008. 57-8.

Published on 1 May 2012 6:52 AM.
Filed under: body, language

the fragment is like the nucleus of an ephemeral destiny of language

46. For Barthes, fragments are “texts without structure” that return language to a continuous fluidity (1980, 4). To Blanchot, “[t]he fragmentary promises not instability (the opposite of fixity) so much as disarray, confusion” (1986, 7). In turn, Baudrillard believes that a fragmentary style of writing “is non-dialectic, disruptive, indifferent to its origin and to its end, a literal transcription of objective irony that I believe I can read directly in the state of things itself. The fragment is like the nucleus of an ephemeral destiny of language, a fatal particle that shines an instant and then disappears. At the same time, it allows an instantaneous conversion of points of view, of humours and passions” (1993, 159). Johnson’s myriad examples possess such disruptive powers, an omnipresent potential to insubordination, such that the coexistence between the Dictionary‘s power and its encyclopedic force are precarious to say the least.

McCaffery, Steve. Prior to Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2001. 259.

Published on 30 April 2012 6:59 PM.
Filed under: language, writing

the primary problem of language is its magic

Mediation, which is the immediacy of all mental communication, is the fundamental problem of linguistic theory, and if one chooses to call this immediacy magic, the the primary problem of language is its magic.

Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings: Walter Benjamin. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, eds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. 64.

Published on 27 March 2012 7:03 AM.
Filed under: language

can only lead to the silence of writing

Other writers have thought that they could exorcize this sacred writing only by dislocating it. They have therefore undermined literary language, they have ceaselessly exploded the ever-renewed husk of cliches, of habits, of the formal past of the writer; in a chaos of forms and a wilderness of words they hoped they would achieve an object wholly delivered of History, and find again the freshness of a pristine state of language. But such upheavals end up by leaving their own tracks and creating their own laws. The threat of becoming a Fine Art is a fate which hangs over any language not based exclusively on the speech of society. In a perpetual flight forward from a disorderly syntax, the disintegration of language can only lead to the silence of writing. …for some writers, language, the first and last way out of literary myth, finally restores what it had hoped to avoid, that there is no writing which can be lastingly revolutionary, and than any silence of form can escape imposture only by complete abandonment of communication.

Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero. Trans., Annette Laers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967. 74-5.

Published on 9 February 2012 9:25 PM.
Filed under: language, writing

a thousand years

Brothers, nobody should say or think: “What is the sense of bothering with copying by haand when the art of printing has brought to light so many important books; a huge library can be acquired inexpensively.” …

All of you know the difference between a manuscript and a printed book. The word written on parchment will last a thousand years. The printed word is on paper. How long will it last? The most you can expect a book of paper to survive is two hundred years. Yet, there are many who think they can entrust their works to paper. Only time will tell.

Yes, many books are now available in print, but no matter how many books will be printed, there will always be some left unprinted and worth copying. No one will ever be able to locate and buy all printed books. Even if all works ever written would appear in print, the devoted scribe should not relax in his zeal. On the contrary, he will guarantee the permanence to useful printed books by copying them. His labor will render mediocre books better, worthless ones more valuable, and perishable ones more lasting. …

…he must not cease copying just because the art of printing has been invented.

Johannes Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes (De Laude Scriptorum). Ed., Klaus Arnold. Trans., Roland Behrendt. Lawrence, KS: Coronado Press, 1974. 63.

Published on 15 January 2012 12:52 PM.
Filed under: books, knowledge, manuscripts, time, writing

calls the reader the operator

Mallarmé calls the reader the ‘operator.’ Reading, like poetry, is an ‘operation.’ The term retains for him, throughout, its dual connotation of work and of something almost surgical, derived ironically from its functional nature: operation as amputation, rather like the Hegelian ‘Aufhebung.’ Reading is an operation, a labour of self-suppression which is substantiated in a self-confrontation and simultaneously abolished and asserted. …Mallarmé emphasises the danger and daring of reading—daring apparently to claim authorial rights over the book….

Blanchot, Maurice. “The Book to Come.” A Book of the Book: Some Works & Projections About the Book & Writing. Jerome Rothenberg and Steven Clay, eds. New York: Granary Books, 2000. 156.

Published on 14 December 2011 9:15 PM.
Filed under: books, poetry, reading

however useful

However useful the findings of the scholar may be, they would never reach posterity without the skill of the scribe. However good our actions, however profitable our teaching, they would all soon be forgotten if the zeal of the scribe did not transform our efforts into letters. It is the scribes who lend power to words and give lasting value to passing things and vitality to the flow of time. … Without scribes the written word would not long survive unscathed but would be exposed to the destruction by chance and weakened by age.

Johannes Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes (De Laude Scriptorum). Ed., Klaus Arnold. Trans., Roland Behrendt. Lawrence, KS: Coronado Press, 1974. 35.

Published on 10 December 2011 12:38 PM.
Filed under: writing

writing is covering

Reading is uttering aloud printed or written matter…writing is forming or inscribing words, letters, symbols, etc. on a surface, as by cutting, carving, or especially marking with a pen or pencil…writing is covering something with writing.

Vito Acconci in 0 to 9, Issue 4. in Allen, Gwen. Artists’ Magazines, An Alternative Space for Art. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2011. 77.

Published on 6 November 2011 7:29 PM.
Filed under: writing