From: "Ann Klefstad" <klefkal-AT-cp.duluth.mn.us>
Subject: Re: Is there an avant-garde.
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1998 15:01:26 -0700




In reply to ideas of the avant-garde residing in uses of new media,
including things like changing the relation of readers and writers by
eliminating the middle-people:

First, I don't think hypertext is either terribly new or a nonprestige
form. Jewish tradition has produced hypertext of a kind for many
centuries--the annotations of annotations, commentaries on commentaries,
and texts that are active forces in the world, Kabbala, etc.  This concept,
then, is not new by any means, although the means now make such things a
little quicker, and easier for the nonobsessed to use. Sort of like, Conlon
Nancarrow's work predated the electronic machines that would have made the
production of his work much easier . . . 

Also, so many people are drooling over and pouring money into hypertext, I
can't imagine that it can be considered vanguard by virtue of its
outsiderhood--

Now, about changing the relation of reader and writer--

I think that there will in some way always be middlepeople in works of art
involving language, because language is before anything a collective
contract, an agreeing among the whole to make sense. Do visual artists have
editors? There is no other art form that surrenders itself to a collective
notion of sensemaking like writing traditionally does. I don't think that's
oppressive, I think that that tells us things about how we use texts, about
how texts satisfy desires.
	If people want to *produce* texts they do so. What they seem to want from
a text that they *encounter* is not co-production but the dazzlement or
pain or laughs or whatever that has been made for them by the maker of the
text. Reading, in fact, by its stablishment of the text in consciousness,
is already a sort of necessary co-production, one that seems to exhaust the
activity of the reader . . .

There's these books written for kids that are an elementary kind of
hypertext--that is, different strands lead out from the story, and the
reader is enabled to choose different ones. Never met a kid who liked these
stupid things. They're always what's left over after the library booksales.

I do think most hypertext is only trivially innovative, and doesn't really
address what is important about people's uses of texts.

I also think the issue of the avantgarde is a dead one. Malgosia's notion
of "resistance" is a valuable one. If the goal is to be resistant to what
one sees as dead or malign, then I think art is better employed in specific
resistance to specific forces that fit that description. That is, if you
hate something, make art that makes it difficult for that thing to exist.
If something you value is threatened, then make art that gives that
something strength. Specificity seems very important now, when
disinformation and really moneyed monopolistic media can so easily confuse
issues.

Ann K


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