Making and Breaking Meaning: A Critical Mash-up of Trecartin and Mallarme

Below is an essay comparing Ryan Trecartin to Stéphane Mallarmé using only a computer mouse to complete copy, cut, and paste functions.  All text was borrowed from the Wikipedia entries on Stéphane Mallarmé, Fin de siècle, and Ryan Trecartin; and Brian Droitcour's article Making Word: Ryan Trecartin as Poet as found on Rhizome.org's website. 

None of the individual words was composed by me, only the rearrangement of the language found in said sources.

If you own the rights to the sources above, and do not approve of this usage, please contact me and I will remove it at once.

Stéphane Mallarmé  (18 March 1842 – 9 September 1898), whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism,Surrealism, and Futurism.

Ryan Trecartin (b.1981, Webster, Texas) is an artist and filmmaker currently based in Los Angeles.^[1] He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating with a BFA in 2004.^[2] Trecartin has since lived and worked in New Orleans, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Miami.^[1]

Mallarmé's earlier work owes a great deal to the style of Charles Baudelaire. His later fin de siècle style, on the other hand, anticipates many of the fusions between poetry and the other arts that were to blossom in the next century.  Roberta Smith grasped for precedent, naming Paul McCarthy, Matthew Barney and Pipilotti Rist. But, she admitted, the comparisons fell short. To find another artist who engages a plurality of art forms with simultaneous, equal intensity—all while rethinking what art is and how it touches its audience—you’d have to go back to Wagner. The critic and translator Barbara Johnson has emphasized Mallarmé's influence on twentieth-century French criticism and theory: "It was largely by learning the lesson of Mallarmé that critics like Roland Barthes came to speak of 'the death of the author' in the making of literature.

Trecartin says he starts each work by writing a script. Language—the primal, biological system of symbols—is the model and vehicle for art and commerce and every other manifestation of social activity. And the forms of all the aspects of Trecartin’s work—the camerawork, the editing, the music, the makeup, and the costumes, as well as Lizzie Fitch’s sets for the videos and “sets” for their viewing in “Any Ever”—are prefigured in the way he works with words.  Rather than seeing the text as the emanation of an individual author's intentions, structuralists and deconstructors followed the paths and patterns of the linguistic signifier, paying new attention to syntax, spacing, intertextuality, sound, semantics, etymology, and even individual letters. The theoretical styles of Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and especially Jacques Lacan also owe a great deal to Mallarmé's 'critical poem.'"^[3]  The space-time properties of attending suit the names. These are not distinct individuals, but inflections

Punctuation was invented to represent the pauses and pitches of speech; long after it moved beyond this purpose to become a set of standards for clarifying the meaning of written language, punctuation marks were remixed as emoticons when writing began to take on the phatic functions of speech. Trecartin’s unruly use of punctuation draws on all stages of its history.  It has been suggested by some that much of Mallarmé's work influenced the conception of hypertext, with his purposeful use of blank space and careful placement of words on the page, allowing multiple non-linear readings of the text. Trecartin’s writing responds to the internet, but it defies an assertion made by Kenneth Goldsmith, poet and founder of ubuweb, who wrote that flarf and conceptual poetry are the quintessential poetic responses to the digital age because they employ cut-and-paste techniques.  This becomes very apparent in his work Un coup de dés. When, in the script’s first lines, Mexico Korea says “Yaw,,,,,,”, the comma does more than make a pause. It’s a winking eye torn from a smiling face, repeated until it’s a nervous tic.

 Some consider Mallarmé one of the French poets most difficult to translate into English.^[1] The difficulty is due in part to the complex, multilayered nature of much of his work, but also to the important role that the sound of the words, rather than their meaning, plays in his poetry.  One plus one is two ones and the ozone emitted by their collision. Combos like these are a favorite device of Trecartin’s. So is the willful disregard for parts of speech. A character’s “first name” can be a noun or an adjective or one of each. Grammatical difference meets geographical difference as both are jettisoned.  When recited in French, his poems allow alternative meanings which are not evident on reading the work on the page. For example, Mallarmé's Sonnet en '-yx'opens with the phrase ses purs ongles ('her pure nails'), whose first syllables when spoken aloud sound very similar to the words c'est pur son ('it's pure sound'). Indeed, the 'pure sound' aspect of his poetry has been the subject of musical analysis and has inspired musical compositions. These phonetic ambiguities are very difficult to reproduce in a translation which must be faithful to the meaning of the words.^[2]

Trecartin exploits the coincidence of homophony to elide the difference between an ontological position and a physical one. Just as the corporation’s abstraction of the body is returned partially to the concrete, identity sits somewhere between a state of mind and the location of the body.

Both reject traditional ideas of authorships by imitating the impersonality of machines. Fin de siècle is French for "end of the century".^[2] The term sometimes encompasses both the closing and onset of an era, as it was felt to be a period of degeneration, but at the same time a period of hope for a new beginning.^[3] The "spirit" of fin de siecle often refers to the boredom, cynicism, pessimism and the widespread belief that civilization leads to decadence, Trecartin keeps everything. His flamboyant use of the patterns of chat and ads and other types of cliché isn’t a direct form of copying, but a concentration of a normal condition of language use: A speaker is obliged to use words that come from outside her—and can be understood by others—while making them her own at the moment of the utterance, in order to make it seem like the utterance comes from inside her.

Mass-market things become fluid and ephemeral, subject to exaggeration, misunderstanding, repetition and play. Their origins are indistinct or irrelevant, and the same things are used in other contexts by millions of people. They are like words.