Launch Speech - Kit Kelen - My First Forest of Words
Given the
times, I need to declare at the outset that this speech was not generated by AI
and that, despite appearances, I am not a bot. It goes without saying that
Kit’s exhibition has not been constructed by AI either. I have been wondering,
however, what would happen if I waved my camera around the exhibition and asked
AI to write my speech. AI would be bamboozled. It would produce, I’m sure, the
most anodyne, reductive, inhuman description imaginable.
This brings
me to the first thing I want to say about the exhibition. It is intensely human
and represents one ‘thinking reed’s attempt to say something which is not
simple, commodified, unambiguous, and banal; to say something which is
meaningful yet resists being reduced to summary. Which means, I’m in trouble. This
is hand work, handiwork, it is pencil and paper, paint and charcoal, it is
creative mess and chaos. What’s the Einstein line, ‘creativity is the
intelligence having fun’. It stands in sharp contrast to the mechanical, the
sanitised, the spellchecked and whitewashed.
The second
thing I want to say is that Kit’s undertaking is massive. There is something to
be said for size because it is indicative of ambition. Not in the negative,
self-aggrandising sense but in the artistic sense of wanting to push boundaries,
go beyond, explore, not be satisfied with the neat and comprehensible, the
expected, accepted, digested and forgotten. This is the work of a career and I
am all but overwhelmed by the scale of it
Kit calls
his exhibition a ‘forest of words’ which conjures up all the possible associations
of ‘forest’ - dense, dark, beautiful, mysterious, haunted, lost … Goethe … for
example - and contrasts the natural, unthinking materiality or, if you like,
spirituality of a forest with the abstract signification of words and their multiple
meanings. One of the struggles of poetry is how to use words to go beyond words,
how to make words worthy of the world, worthy of human perceptions, feelings, and
intuitions. Kit invites you to wander, and wonder, through this forest of words
- the first words you might see beside the entrance are ‘come into the forest/go
whichever way’ you wish. A little later you might notice the suggestion, ‘there
is no grammar you can trust/ take this one spark and follow/ be lost’.
Kit frames
the exhibition with the statement, ‘no signs without meaning - no meaning
without signs’. I don’t want to get lost in the forest of semantics and
semiotics. Like Kit, I am one of Pascal’s ‘thinking reeds’ but there are limits
to what this reed can think. Suffice to say, I agree with Kit’s formulation but
note that in the realms of art, and of poetry especially, ‘meaning’ is not
unproblematic or uncontested.
To suggest
how problematic it is may I offer these two quotations. The first is from the
American Beat writer Brion Gysin in his ‘ Statement on the Cut Up Method and Permutated
Poems’. He declares, ‘… poets are supposed to liberate the words - not chain
them into phrases. Who told poets they were supposed to think.’ The second is
from the Dada manifesto: ‘Any work that can be understood is the product of a
journalist.’ So, in these views, meaning is not the point, meaning is the enemy.
But humans are meaning-making animals and will look for meaning in any text, no
matter how gnomic, obscure or randomised. The poet’s task, according to T S Eliot
is to ‘dislocate words into meaning’.
I’d also
like to consider this extract from a review by the SMH art critic John McDonald:
‘… the work has to connect with the viewer primarily on on a sensory level. The
only test is whether it captures and holds our attention. Interpretations can
follow in good time’. I would like to stress the sensory level of this
exhibition, the way poem links to poem, fragment links to fragment. Kit does
not chain words. He liberates them. He dis-locates and relocates them.
Importantly, he respects them.
Kit asks the
questions, how does one make meaning, specifically in art and poetry, and in music,
art and poetry combined? Is meaning, even of the simplest statement, ever
transparent? Are we talking about ‘meaning’ singular or ‘meanings’ plural? How,
by what means, does one know, understand or misunderstand? By thinking, Blaise
Pascal might answer, though I’m not credentialed to answer for him. We could
also consider T S Eliot’s contention that meaning is conveyed indirectly
through the music of a poem at least as much as it is conveyed directly to the
intelligence. To make an appropriate link to the visual, we can consider
Simonides statement, ‘Painting is silent poetry and poetry painting that speaks.’
These paintings and drawings do speak, they are in conversation with each other
and with the poems that are interleaved with them.
Human beings
love to categorise things. Once you have categorised something, or had it
pigeon-holed for you, you no longer have to do the hard work of thinking. It
has been named, described, tamed. You have a readymade, reductive,
generalisation to fall back on. Kit’s exhibition defies categorisation. It is
experimenting with Simonides’s statement, it is exploring indirect and direct
ways of making meaning. Somewhere in the formative background of this
exhibition I intuit the flash of haiku, the art and poetry books of ancient
China and Japan, the combinations of collage, the wit of concrete poetry, the
glint of the philosophical fragment, the impact of Imagism, ekphrasis, I
suppose, even the randomness and surprise of the Cut-Up method; my mind turns
to the paintings of Dubuffet, Klee and Miro, even the cartoons of Bruce Petty.
All of these influences, and more, seem to be swirling around beneath the
surface of this exhibition but none of them adequately describes it. I am
making no attempt to categorise the exhibition but I will proffer one term
which you might like to consider.
For some
time now it has been fashionable to speak of ‘embodiment’ or ‘embodied’ poetry.
This has annoyed me a bit because I sometimes see it applied as praise to poems
which, to me at least, are lifeless and have no connection to the physicality
of the body, its senses and apprehensions.But, though I hate buzz words, I will
say that this exhibition is truly embodied poetry. It asks of you, provokes in
you - the reader, the viewer - a physical, perceptual reaction before an
intellectual one.
This
thinking reed is not going to give you an interpretation of Kit’s work. Instead
I’m going to suggest a way in which you can ‘read’ this work and make meanings
for yourselves. Or, more accurately, ‘experience’ the work. I’m inviting you
not to approach the work with fixed ideas about poetry and art; you can’t read these
poems as you would read a traditional volume of poetry. I’m inviting you to
‘immerse’ yourself in the exhibition, let it wash over you. Forget sequence.
Allow your eyes to roam, freely associate one poem with another, one fragment
with another, discover fruitful juxtapositions, or even fruitful
inconsistencies, consonances and dissonances, allow the work to throw up all
sorts of questions without straining for answers. Make of it a sensory
experience and leave interpretation to later or, if your name is Susan Sontag,
don’t interpret at all.
As you
wander the exhibition you are going to discover poems about blokes and poems
about bears, poems which won the bicentennial poetry prize and the Newcastle
poetry prize; you might notice that the quotation ‘always look on the bright
side’ is followed by ‘a forest of gallows/where Eden was’; you might notice the
despairing question ‘is there a world more fucked up than this?’ And the answer:
‘We’re getting there now’; only to find it followed by ‘there is the joy of
just where I am/I hope you’ll feel that too’; like me, you might notice the
punning absurdism of ‘an orchestra/high up in a tree/ sawing itself/off a limb’;
or the lyricism of ‘it fell/ to birds/to make/a sky/ their moment to moment
invention’; or the haunting ‘the most/dangerous animal/that is or ever was/ the
one who/made the mirror/now peering/in at you’. Or your eye will light on so
many different things that I didn’t notice. You are likely to meet anger,
cynicism, whimsy, idealism, grief, hope in poems which are by turns political,
lyrical, enigmatic, spare, exuberant, resonant and suggestive. A line that
recurs to me is ‘the earth becomes a little weary of us maybe’ because it
reminds me how much this exhibition is about how, as humans, we could do so
much better.
He wasn’t
the first to say something similar, but sometime in the 50s or 60s the American
poet Kenneth Rexroth declared, ‘Against the ruin of the world the creative act
is the only defence.’ I used to think this a bit apocalyptic and self-inflating.
Now, when Humpty Dumpty Trumpy bloviates, blunders and blusters in Washington,
implicitly decreeing, without irony or self-awareness, ‘When I use a word, it
means just what I choose it to mean’, I think Rexroth might have been right. In
a world where vocabularies are shrinking, jargon is multiplying, and words are
increasingly used to obscure, to lie, to cheat, to manipulate, and confound the
evidence of our eyes and ears, I think an exhibition like this which examines
the nature of language and meaning is a needed defence of culture and
civilisation against technological and governmental barbarism.
Which takes
me back, finally, to the first thing I said about the exhibition: it is
intensely human. I invite you to enjoy it.
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