Which Is To Say

Which Is To Say

by Tyrone Williams
(reproduced by permission of the author)

A photograph of Tyree Guyton's "Toaster," a toaster not unlike the one on my kitchen counter. And yet, like mine, unique; it is a photograph of a particular toaster, just as a particular toaster sits on my kitchen counter at the moment I am writing this. And though my toaster is a mass-produced commodity, my ownership of it is not its only form of uniqueness. But Guyton's "Toaster" is unique in a way that suggests that not all ways of being unique are equal, whatever one means by "equal." Not simply because it appears, in the photo, to be burnt, as do the forks, spoons, and knives that Guyton has thrust into its slots. Not simply because "Toaster" can be "read" metaphorically as all art works can ("Toaster":a crown with plumage, human figures struggling to escape some machine, a trolley (for the butter knife intersects a page border much like the cable on a tram), a radical re-articulation and multiplication of Munch's "The Scream," etc.). No, Guyton's "Toaster" is unique because it is a toaster whose body has been reworked and framed: in quotation marks, in a magazine (Art News, May 1992), which is to say, as/in "art," which is to say, simultaneous decontextualization (it is not merely a toaster) and recontextualization (an old toaster, thrown away as junk, has been recreated into "art."). Which is to say, an old story, older than DuChamp's toilet, Schwitters' "Merz," the Garden of Eden, etc., all parasites or guests in a body parasite or host/guest structure that has always defined a given--"life," for example--in relationship to a not-given--"art," for example--however and whatever a "given" and a "not-given" have been determined (as).

A photograph of Tyree Guyton's"Toaster" has been placed just above a photograph of Guyton's "Fun House" on page 15 of the May 1992 issue of Art News. The photo of "Toaster" occupies a position relative to the photo of "Fun House" which replicates the position of the silverware in the toaster: above. Ditto for "Fun House": the assemblage of "junk" around and on the house also replicates the assemblage of silverware in the toaster. Inside out and outside in: silverware is normally outside a toaster; junk is normally inside a house or garage. A toaster is normally inside a house. Would life be the name of this given normality? Would parasite be the name of this not-given abnormality?

There is, of course, an art that maintains a benign relationship with life: art as a guest. But however one views an art--benign or malignant, guest or parasite--this host/guest structure maintains its hierarchal function which refers, in the last instance, to property, who or what owns. Whatever or whoever owns land or humans owns the criteria for what will be called "life" and what will be called "art." And as we know there are cultures in which the ownership of land is more heinous than the ownership of people, cultures in which "art" as such does not exist. Which is to say: our generalities are circumscribed by the Euro-American adventure sometimes called "Western civilization."

At any rate, under the host/guest structure, the guest is merely a welcomed transient; the parasite, however, is an illegitimate squatter. It was precisely under this formula and reading that Tyree Guyton's "Doll House" and "Fun House" were demolished by Detroit city authorities. For them, Guyton's "houses" were not only parasites living on abandoned debilitated houses but also parasites living on surrounding houses--the neighborhood. Eyesores. But it was also under this formula and reading that Guyton sued the city of Detroit. No less an authority than African art historian Robert Farris Thompson proclaimed Guyton's houses "art." Sights for sore eyes. Guyton's houses were thus sanctioned, framed, huddled under the umbrella of artistic aesthetics, and so, protected from further legal harassment. That Guyton's work had to be legally sanctioned as art underscores the problem of its relationship to its source-materials: abandoned houses, junk. It was not only or primarily a question of who owned these abandoned houses (the city, realtors, etc.). Rather, it was a matter of these houses' relationship to other houses, specifically, their spectacularity. Which is to say, their aesthetics. The line drawn between Guyton's "artistic standards" and the neighborhood's "community standards" did not, despite proclamations to the contrary, demarcate "art" from "life." Instead, it separated different conceptions of "art."

No doubt one could reduce this stand-off to a political platitude, the relationship of individual rights to community rights. This move obscures the more ticklish problem of aesthetics in the public domain, how one house "looks" next to another, the question of how far is too far in matters of taste. Two paragraphs above we posed the question of life's given normality and art's not-given abnormality, host and guest, body and parasite, etc. We acknowledged the hierarchy this formulation presupposes and depends upon. But what happens when the body is itself a parasite (we know that every parasite is a body)? When the host has no more "rights" to ownership than the guest? Because both the city and Guyton subscribed to the life/art paradigm, they could not have posed these questions, questions which underscore the problematic relationship all public "art" has with its "public." Who has articulated the question of a public "art" which must be refused in a public "work," who has confounded the question of a body and its double, which is still a part of the body, more often, more passionately and, yes, more despairingly than Antonin Artaud?

A strange and appropriate name to invoke. Antonin Artaud, Tyree Guyton's double and exact opposite. Guyton's entire project valorizes "which is to say," the transformation of brute dumb existence into a speaking thing, the expropriation and articulation of the nonhuman (which is, often enough, under other headings, quite human). Artaud, as we know, railed against, even as he demanded, expropriation and mutability. Not a paradox, for Artaud demanded the recreation of a body that had been dispersed into functions, organs, sectors, a recreation which would finally halt the differences of dispersal, a recreation which would integrate the body into a nonorganic indifferent whole. Example: Artaud imagines a brain breathing (he does not, to my knowledge, imagine a heart thinking). This recreation could never be a re-integration since the body, sent forth from God, mother, all those "false" and/or "hated" origins, had never been whole, had, from the start, been riddled with difference. For Artaud, then, the puzzle of the other was linked to and, indeed, dependent upon the puzzle of origins. Artaud's furious denunciation of origins and others could only lead to its logical conclusion, the refusal of all gestures--including a language--which had never been his own. Thus the cry, the scream, in the context of that which privileges the body--the theatre--a scream which, in its articulation of a "pure" self, could never be reduced to song or noise, protest or rage, a cry which would become the audible equivalent of Artaud's scrawlings: taken together, they constitute the exteriorization of an incoherent collapsing interior, a scar over the wound of a stillbirth, an "art" that is not a work, or a work that is not an "art." To name the birthplace "wound" is not to participate in Artaud's cruel misogyny; rather, it is to acknowledge the rupture of contradiction in Artaud whose "scream" is not yet song or poetry and yet, in falling out of the body, is only not yet song or poetry.

One looks at "Toaster," or a photo of "Toaster," a scar or a bandaged scar, and is struck by the uncanny, which is to say, the mysteriousness, of the relationship between Guyton's and Artaud's projects. This mystery depends upon our belief in the unique. But if the unique is also a path to metaphysics--and the political traditions of the individual in democracies can serve as one example among many--it may well be the case that the relationship between Guyton and Artaud is, in fact, also, canny. But to see this relationship as canny also involves betrayal, expropriation; indeed, to see a relationship at all is to have already betrayed uniqueness. One could mount a number of discourses to accomplish this feat: psychoanalysis, which is to say, both Guyton's and Artaud's anal fixations betray an obsession for order, an anxiety of loss, of difference, of others, of origins, etc.; political theory, which is to say, both Guyton's and Artaud's not-given work or not-given art--but not both--depend upon, for the one, homelessness and poverty, for the other, medical clinics and standards of evaluation (like "madness"); aesthetic theory, which is to say, the expressed fidelity to Guyton's stated intentions, sanctioning his work or art in opposition to the expressed desires of some of his neighbors, the expressed betrayal of Artaud's stated intentions, sanctioning his work or art in conjunction with the expressed desires of an intelligentsia. And so on.

One looks at a photograph of "Toaster" and this fusion of cooking and eating, this refusal of differentiated functions, which is to say, an aestheticized politicized medicalized "look," and one sees the Tyree Guyton one wishes to see. Is there, nonetheless, evidence that suggests one discourse more than another? If we follow Tyree Guyton's stated intentions--e.g., he wants an art that actively transforms the landscape, the life around him, dramatizing the problems of homelessness, prostitution, poverty, etc.--we can only speak in his language once we know--or decide--what both "art" and "life" "are." For Artaud, it was the body that had to be recreated, made anew; for Guyton, it is life, understood as poverty, homelessness, prostitution, etc. But Guyton transforms "life" by taking life and transforming it into "art": "art" does not exist prior to life. But also: vice versa: "life" does not exist prior to "art." In supposing that art draws attention to life, one supposes that life is left in abeyance, unattended, prior to art--which comes into being on condition that life is abandoned, in abeyance, unattended--like a house. If we can still speak of life and art or art and life as two articulations, echoes or doubles of one another, the difference that falls between them is what must be maintained at all costs by those with vested interests in life and/or art. Is it not in this difference that Tyree Guyton acquires the quotation marks of artist, that his unsympathetic neighbors acquire the quotation marks of philistines? This difference will always resemble a wound, a rupture, at every empirical level. To heal it, to close it, would be to commit suicide, and since, as Artaud teaches us, no one commits suicide alone, it would mean that one had been suicided--e.g., "Tyree Guyton" by the philistines, or the philistines by "Tyree Guyton."

Let us not forget that we have been speaking in the language of Tyree Guyton, the language of "life" and "art." We have already indicated that the debate for everyone else, including many of Guyton's supporters, is about different concepts of "art," including "art" itself. This absence of a conventional dualism in the arguments of the neighbors/philistines suggests a radical otherness, an irreducible difference, that Guyton's language ceaselessly attempts to appropriate, possess, own. An example: "problems." Are we certain that Guyton's concept of urban life "problems" is the same as his neighbors? When an artist appropriates the problems of others--including his own--for the sake of "art," can he still call these "problems"? If they remain "problems" for the name in quotation marks, are they not primarily "aesthetic," as opposed to "social," problems, that name's social activism notwithstanding? How are we to understand Guyton's desire to save his bulldozed houses, his anger at their destruction, though their destruction meant that fewer "abandoned" houses? Does his desire to salvage his work as art undermine his stated concern over the eyesores of abandoned houses? After all, another solution would have been to burn them down. Ironically--or is it?--Guyton's work or art drew attention to those houses and they were bulldozed. No more eyesores. But of course--no more sights for sore eyes. No more "art."

A photograph of "Toaster": A private ritual--cooking and eating--exposed to public scrutiny. Imagine photographs of "Fun House" or "Doll House": exposes of private despair and private joy. Is this not the crux of Bigger Thomas' cruelty in Native Son? Bigger is soft, and soft because he is ashamed of his black skin. Bigger knows that what is soft and black cannot survive in America, so he pretends to be hard and unblack for most of the novel. When his black skin--and the softness and shame and fear it implies for him--is exposed to public scrutiny, he lashes out and kills. For Bigger, black is the color of despair, anger, poverty, joblesness, humiliation, etc. In drawing attention to etc., humiliation, joblessness, poverty. anger, despair, Guyton's work or art says everything but black. Which is to say, black. Even if we believe that there is no reason for those of his neighbors who do feel shame to feel so, who do not want their lives turned inside out by extension, implication, "which is to say," still, the imposition of integrity, pride, esteem, etc., the "outing" of despair, anger, poverty, joblessness, humiliation, etc., hardly gets at the problem of the supposed absence of more so-called "positive" qualities, values, states, etc.

A photograph of "Toaster": a toaster recreated into a spectacle of cooking and eating in the same crowded "room." Any middle-class kitchen, any one-room shack. A spectacle of what all too canny, all too un-unique. All too spectacle, all too "out." And what does it mean to "out" one's neighbors? The mobilization of political clout always subordinates the one to the many, a platitude which, of course, greases the wheels of history. The unique is always reactionary when it is not merely blinded by self-mystification. Outing is always positive even when, especially when, it wrecks the unique. And no matter what war is being fought on what battlefield for whatever land or people, all sides, if the truth will out, out. But what does it mean to "out" one's neighbors under the force of an essentially aesthetic program? Outing also says "which is to say"; it too replicates the structure of commentary--literary, political, medical, social, etc.--which is to say, the host/guest, body/parasite, given/not-given structure of all hierarchies. Out/in--this too is a structure of domination. Only where there are no longer houses disowned or owned is this relation levelled--if not bulldozed.