KARL KEMPTON AND
“THE ENIGMA
OF THE OTHER”:
THE ORIGINARY
STRUCTURES OF TRUTH
AND DISCOVERY OF VISUAL WRITING
“…a language is always a legacy…”
-Ferdinand de Saussure
In his great text, Writing
and Difference, in a chapter titled “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” Structuralist
philosopher Jacques Derrida writes:
The trace is the erasure of
selfhood, of one’s own presence, and is constituted by the threat or anguish of
its irremediable disappearance, of the disappearance of its disappearance. An unerasable trace is not a trace, it is a
full presence, an immobile and incorruptible substance, a son of God, a sign of
Parousia and not a seed, that is, a mortal germ.
However, some of these same qualities, made use of in
this type of visual writing, are also found, perhaps in an altered form, in
another type of visual writing that might more likely be described as
“semiology.” It’s semiology that is more
appropriately described as an “unerasable trace,” a “full presence” which is
“immobile” and “incorruptible.” This
type of visual writing is separate from the self.
Just in the same way that he uses such phrases as “the objectivity
of structure,” Derrida writes:
It is the deepening of a work…of
excavation…which…brings to light…the “structural a prioris”…of genesis itself.
In a somewhat incidental manner, talking about
linguistics as opposed to speech, in the Course
in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure states that “linguistic signs
are, so to speak, tangible.” He goes on
to say that linguistic signs are not simply abstractions. In saying this, in my view, he is
demonstrating an awareness in the future of the first type of visual writing
that I described—visual poetry or vizpo—with its awkward fledgling splashes, inexplicable
stains of actuality, recurring forms, indefinite tangibility, a tangibility
that is ambiguous but not fake, metaphysical but at times seemingly palpable—the
“matinal trace,” at the same time both fleeting and eternal.
Saussure postulates, along with, much later, Roland
Barthes, that “language, as we have just seen, is a social institution.” Barthes, in his tract Elements of Semiology, terms language “a social contract” and “a
system of signs.” Saussure describes
language as “a collective phenomenon” and “a special type of system,” “something
that is within each individual but is none the less common to all.”
It is therefore possible to
conceive a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life. It would form part of social psychology and
hence of general psychology. We shall
call it “semiology” (from the Greek semeion,
“sign”).
Karl Kempton’s visual work relates not to the
“tangibility” of the inexplicable momentary appearance of “writing” and language-as-Being
but rather to the intangibility of constant archetypal linguistic systems and structures interacting with one another and of
structure as such. I should insert that
Saussure wrote these words in Europe during the early 1900s, at a time that the
field of linguistics had yet to be officially invented but, also, at a time of
great upheaval in art and literature—with the appearance of Cubism, collage,
Dadaism, Suprematism and others often approaching visual writing.
**
Of Kempton’s works, his friend Karl Young writes:
But for Kempton (and for most of
us) this clarity is most important when used to present themes such as
environmental action, sense of self or loss of same, natural communion,
openness to spiritual revelation, the need for personal and communal
responsibility. These are all things
that have become confused and degraded in recent years. Few poets or artists have done as good a job
of re-presenting these ideas, freed from cliché and cleaned of the junk that
has accumulated around them, presenting them in the clearest most honest and
most appropriate manner.
The pursuit of visual writing, often considered a new art
form, the discovery of it, the difficult articulation of consciousness, places
and faces, bill paying, death, emotion, nature, families, presence, worlds, the
planet, barrooms, politics, protests, the rise and fall of the Xerox machine
has led down a lonely and not particularly rewarding path, with the future
extremely clouded and everything yet hanging in the balance. It’s remarkable the way that the artists and
writers in the early-gathering group have remained loosely together. Jim Leftwich, editor of Juxta, John Bennett, editor of Lost
and Found Times, Lloyd Dunn, editor of PhotoStatic,
Kempton, editor of Kaldron. Bob Grumman (his artworks published in Scientific American), Karl Young, Carlos
Luis, “Blaster” Al Ackerman gone. Would
this movement be portrayed by these artists themselves as a matter of interacting
signs and structures or of the intrusion into a small oxygen-breathing world of
the unknown presences of all-but-invisible footprints and semantic, “tangible” handprints
of eager, mouthy U.S. Beings-always-in-Question? Karl Young, in his 1992 Rune introduction, warns not to put limitations on responses to
Kempton’s works, in which
…people have seen aerial views of
cities, Kachina dolls, space ships and stations (children and teenagers have
launched into expansive explications of space images), bead work, clothing,
frameworks of skyscrapers, mandalas, video games charts of railroad tracks,
sketches for gardens and so on.
**
It’s apparently easier to reach the “golden ratio” in geometric
artworks and medallions than in the geometries
of modern societies. What about the buried
and demolished realities of our everyday lives? What
about politicians on a pretext taking money for themselves intended for society
as a whole? Karl Young is right in
scolding artists and the world in general with moralistic warnings. The signs, systems, infrastructure, totalities
that we attempt to portray and build cannot succeed in their “transcendental intentionalities,”
conceptualities, telos without specific
characteristics and qualities infused into them. Our guiding signs cannot remain vacuous Oedipal
blazes and intact polar vortices pulling us along without thought. Derrida himself criticizes structure in this
manner—in phrases such as “geometry of experience” and “mathematics of
phenomena” or “irreducible incompleteness” and “infinite opening.” “What I can never understand, in a structure,
is that by means of which it is not closed.”
Surprisingly placing possibility below it, Derrida states, “Every
totality, every finite structure is inadequate to [truth].” Genesis structure has no “opening” but is,
rather, both always open and always closed.
Derrida also emphasizes
“understanding” as a necessary quality of signs and structure.
In his book Proust
and Signs, Gilles Deleuze goes further, attributing the success of signs
and structures to “love.”
Love’s signs are not like the signs
of worldliness, they are not empty signs, standing for thought and action. They are deceptive signs that can be
addressed to us only by concealing what they express, the origin of unknown
worlds, of unknown actions and thoughts that give them meaning.
Such types of signs are “deceptive” in that they are
fathomed only in an effort of our perception.
The very existence of structure
relies upon love, truth, understanding, morality. The signs we follow cannot be homogeneous or
locked out from meaning. The signs that
Deleuze is talking about in Proust are the emotional “openings” that are
prompted from momentary experiences from entities such as a coffee cake (“madeleine”) or dislocated cobblestones,
associations that resonate with the recurring threads of a singular life. The quality that structure gains from Proust
is a nostalgic orientation toward memory and knowing that memory is also
structural. In his “search for lost
time,” Proust discovers that there is no time regained without memory, truth
and love. Writes Deleuze, “The search
for lost time is in fact a search for truth.”
But this is an essential not a melodramatic truth, a truth of reality
and of legibility (visual writing). Deleuze, already making reference to Sodom
and Gomorrah, concludes that memory is learning. In this same way, the “rights of Man” are
structural and the rights of women also.
It is also a structural orientation that allows Foucault to make the
title of one of his books, from Semiotext(e), The Politics of Truth. His
meaning is that no matter the intensity of its partisanship, politics must remain always
collated as truth. But, as Karl Young
implies, structure has to do with many things:
cooking,
architecture, sex, health, space ships. This is the reason that Kempton’s artworks
from the 1990s and sometimes earlier do not seem to become outdated. They are already “time regained” in the truth
of their structure, not by virtue of a cogency but by virtue of their
substantiveness and, in a certain way, emptiness (emptiness of blight and troubles). In this way, we see that the autonomous
erasable trace itself and the unerasable
genesis trace are alike. It might be
emphasized that this discussion is as much about creating various structures and qualities as detecting and articulating them. And let us not forget the idea of de-construction: of such superfluous structures as Death, falseness,
Oedipus, covetousness, Time, disease, repression. Proustian deconstruction and structure is
reflected in its sense of abandonment.
**
In his 2015 collection of conceptual artworks, haiku-style
and, loosely, tanka-style poems, Poems About Something and Nothing, Kempton examines the borders of
life and death, evil and good, being and non-being. Here is one of the poems from the collection:
for this Love
risk everything
to receive Nothing
This type of poetry is derived from Buddhism and Bhakti
Yoga. It is also similar to the
trace. It carries a structural sense of
knowledge and teaching but, at the same time, is fragile and erasable. It represents the self in the most self-effacing
brevity of terms. The mathematical
designs and mandalas mixed in with the textual haiku-like poems reinforce a
sense of an indestructible, unknowable star-like Other. And yet, in the context of daily human
struggles and experience, on what grounds are we able to recognize these works
of perfection and unity as “realism”?
The entire Structualist project is, thus, perhaps summed up as an
attempt to view the world not as inanimate substance, the repetitious motion of
inviolable laws, codes and principles but as an ambiguous mediated dimensional subjectivity and diversity of
qualities of living Being. Visual
writing is the pursuit of presence rather than of an absolute (that is,
meaningless) philosophy or spirituality.
In anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and
Guattari write
If in fact there are structures,
they do not exist in the mind….Structures exist in the immediate impossible
real. As Witold Grombrowicz says, the
structuralists “search for their structures in culture. As for myself, I look for them in the
immediate reality. My way of seeing
things was in direct relationship to the events of the times: Hitlerism, Stalinism, fascism.”
On a global scale, new “complexes of the unconscious” containing
the menacing apocalyptic monsters of infinite failure and dubious arbitrary rights-and-wrongs
are the “immediate realities” of politics and criticism very aptly represented
in abundant alphabetical and environmental texts reconstructing and reterritorializing
the lasting place of humanity.
In Kempton’s work Chewed
from avantacular press (2012), the characteristics of language structure are
difficult to interpret. These works are
created from photographs of “Bubble Gum Alley,”
….a narrow brick walled walkway
between two stores, connect[ing] a small street surface parking lot to Higuera,
a San Luis Obispo one-way downtown street.
Gum on brick first appeared anonymously in the 1960s….Eventually, from
far and near, others came to press gum wads onto brick….
The works are presented in vivid colors like an out-of-body
moment remembered or crowds at a sports stadium. The rosettes look like photographs depicting
mass destruction as much as artworks portraying an ordered universe or mystical
“Flowers of Life.” White space is
integrated into the artworks. Isometrics
still portray three dimensions on a two-dimensional surface (a reference to
writing). In both the quality of these designs
and attractiveness of materials, the artworks seem to strive harder than
previously for color and diversity. But,
at times, these works (of Kempton’s) are naively enclosed within the muted awkward
mazes of their protective non-linear geometries, in the same manner as in the
earlier Runes. They seem to pay homage to other artists,
including early visual artist Agnes Martin with her cryptic horizontal lines, a
virtual space reserved for only the most originary of realities. Kempton’s works silently fold and unfold, perhaps
without our noticing, as they observe society from a decidedly low vantage. Yet, within their symmetry, the beauty of sacred
harmonies is at times strongly demonstrated.
Whether bad or good, their struggles, their failures, their signs, their
systems and their structures are endlessly recycled. Do these semiologies of nothingness, of
Derrida’s “nothing,” of the Greek word “hyle”
or “harsh garbage” constitute a caring feeling world of love, understanding,
memory, truth and selfhood or a crumbling world of concession and repression moving
backwards? A newly revised and revived world
or a world not revived but reviled, that refuses to consider its fellow beings
or itself? In Bubble Gum Alley is expressed
not a presence but a temporary absence, here, perhaps, in search of a new
structure and a new writing: Out of
nothing is born everything. In a sense,
visual writing is a phenomenology of existence or an expression of it. And metalanguage is, simply, empty space. In his excellent and perceptive visual works
reflecting a world where some things exist and some things do not exist,
Kempton provides sensitive unerasable Proustian memories—not of the past but of
the future.
Artworks: 1. Karl
Kempton, “r, Rune 2, 26 Voices, January Interlude” 2. Karl
Kempton, “m, Rune 10, Rose Window” 3. Karl
Kempton, from Chewed 4. Karl
Kempton, “eternal om 1” in Poems About
Something and Nothing, from the eternal om series 4. Tim
Gaze, “untitled” (example of the erasable trace).
*****
ABOUT TOM HIBBARD:
Recent Activities and
Online Publications
P.S., Forever:
Introduction and translations from French Surrealism, Big Bridge online magazine, Michael Rothenberg,
editor, 2016.
March-April 2017, poetry
readings: Myopic Books, Chicago, and
Woodland Pattern Book Center, Milwaukee WI (reading with Buck Downs).
September 2017, poetry
readings: Lorine Niedecker Poetry
Festival Open Mic, Fort Atkinson WI, and 100,000 Poets For Change, Racine WI.
Existence and Terror, review of Michael Rothenberg’s Murder,
published in Journal of Poetic Research,
John Tranter, editor, 2016.
Ecologies of Diversity, published in Journal
of Poetic Research, John Tranter, editor, 2018
Genesis and Resingularization, review of California
Poems, Carolyn Welch, Moon Willow Press, and The Three Ecologies, Felix Guattari, published in Eco-Fiction.Com, 2016-2017.
