Ric Royer

Paper Title:
Pop Experimentalist; The Avant-Garde Celebrity in (un)popular Art and Poetry.

Abstract:
The paper analyzes the phenomenon of celebrity personalities in experimental, marginal fields of artistic practice using poetry (a marginal form of literature) and especially experimental poetry (a marginal form of a marginal form) as the focused area of study. The paper proceeds from the general notion that experimentalists fashionably position the nature of their work as ontologically in opposition to mainstream allurements of “fame” and popularity (anti-celebrity). But does the true appeal of a life in the underground lie in the increased possibility of being celebrated in a less competitive, less inhabited arena? Does the ever ego-driven artist craftily continue his/her quest for popularity in a less-populated field under the protection of an illusory ideology?

I. Defining Popular

With pop culture, as with culture in general, its much easier to be involved in it than talk about it, and it’s much easier to talk about it than to define it- or to know what you’re talking about. So f or the sake of contextualizing the following arguments, it’s only fair that I briefly clarify my own current understanding of popular culture.

Broadly speaking, I notice two ‘populars’ that exist in our culture: one that is fixed, measurable and quite easy to observe (for example, through google hits). This is, as it’s normally considered, the culture of most of the people as opposed to the culture organized, thought and transmitted by various elites.

But there is another popular culture that is permeable, individual and relative. A popular culture in which one can legitimately say: My popular culture is not your popular culture.

I don’t deny that there may be a thing called popular culture in our society; this paper looks into certain phenomenon that exists at a popular level inside all cultures (sub, pop, counter, etc.) within American society. Popularity is a potential in all forms on this scale.

In this context of multiple popular cultures, the idea of popularity occurs on a scale. This is sometimes difficult to perceive, because of the dominant voice of the mainstream, because of the material remnants that it leaves for historians, but also due to the majority of the minority that idiosyncratically unites each marginalized sector as equally suppressed.

The modes of creative practice that for the artist/poet become political platforms of ideology: avant-garde, underground, mainstream and so on, these are all (potentially) popular forms. Not always popular in and of themselves, but within themselves. Too frequently, the dichotomy is set up between the popular and the marginal. Often the battle lines are chalked by the dominated fringe, and it seems that although the popular culture is usually the impetus and material for the avant-garde, it frequently publicizes itself as impinged upon by it and independent of it. Even though marginalization is the cry of the avant-garde, one might say that they conspiratorially cry loud enough to drown out the even less noticeable, institutionally detached varieties of underground.

I’m unable to believe the modes are completely closed off from one another. They interact, appropriate, feed and consume each other, although they promote an antithetical ideology. But together the avant-garde and the mainstream form the two party duopoly that vies for resources necessary to advance their own capital.

In your local grocery store you might find a copy of People magazine nestled right next to the recent Utne Reader Special Indie Culture Issue 1, or maybe even near the glossy music magazine called “Under the Radar”. Just how under the radar is it if a consumer can find it in countless venues both on the web and on the shelves?

I preface the paper with my understanding of the popular culture scale because it stresses that popular can occur at any local level, and therefore an ostensibly oxymoronical term such as Pop Experimentalist can exist. Artists such Elvis Costello, Radiohead, Bjork have been referred to by reviewers, critics, and journalists as pop experimentalists. It’s a term that has only been utilize, although only occasionally, in music vernacular. Its common usage, when used at all, is to describe an artist in the mainstream whose work seems built upon an independent spirit or created for a smaller audience and only incidentally accepted by mass culture. But these are not the only terms in which I will be using the concept of Pop Experimentalist. My definition is more oriented to a player in an experimental wing of the arts who operates within the confusing politics of the mainstream/marginal dichotomy and consciously or unconsciously gears his/her work to an elitist taste in order to increase his/her likelihood of being popular in a less populated field.

A few years ago I made a series of Pop Experimentalist coffee cups in response to a classroom discussion in which a student claimed that she lost interest in Marcel Duchamp the moment she saw his work on a coffee cup in a Barnes and Nobles bookstore. At that moment I found her rationale ridiculous, but I eventually grew sympathetic towards her argument, because it reveals one of the many ambivalences facing the experimental artist: the unexplainable anxiety of betrayal when one of our esteemed icons of the anti-establishment crosses over to the commercial side to which we thought they were opposed.

For me, the Pop Experimentalist is not just a border crosser from a sub-culture to a main culture, but a figure at work in an experimental art field who has hit the glass ceiling, and in some uncertain terms is comfortable. This leads to a tricky theory of illusory ideology. In many cases the experimentalist subconsciously indulges in the “big fish, little pond” syndrome realizing or not that careerism may also exist in “unpopular” fields.

A Pop Experimentalist and a Pop Marginalist are similar, but yet very different. The experimentalist is more clearly positioned in an artistic partisanship and understands that mainstream popularity is not likely in his/her chosen path. The marginalist may or may not be affiliated with any tradition; he/she is just not popular regardless of intentions. The Corky St. Clair character of Christopher Guest’s remarkable film on underappreciated small-town super-stars, is a prime example of the Pop Marginalist.

One thing that clearly sets the Pop Experimentalist apart from a mere locally celebrated unknown artist is the affiliation with established academic institutions and a compulsion for novelty.

II. New is the New New.

There seems to be a difference of worth between newness in the mainstream and newness in the avant-garde. The idea of the new (unfamiliar) to a general audience of a popular/commercial/main-stream/and such production is more favorable towards tradition, familiarity, and an easily digestible system of content and structure. The avant-garde audience, on the other hand, waits armed with the insult of all insults to the experimental artist: DERIVITIVE.

The avant-artist is in the business of newness. Some of the same artists that will tell you with trendy pessimism that new is dead are the same ones secretly caught up in the newness race, wrapped up in a game of new for the sake of new (or even new for the sake of career). Or as Jed Rasula puts it referring to Pound in The American Poetry Wax Museum, “how much did ‘making it new’ have to do with ‘making it’?”

Cultural investigators such as Baudrillard, Eco and McLuhan have provided us with vast data on the American replica fetish by which we can begin to understand contemporary mainstream tastes. For our general public, novelty can only be appreciated when it is a legitimate double of something else; but in the vanguard novelty can only be applauded where there is very little visible thread to previous product(ion)s.

As the term avant-garde connotes, newness is a crucial ingredient for a successful avant-garde artist, and therefore an obsession with being the first on the block is one of unspoken guidelines for the aspiring Pop Experimentalist.

III. Poetry + The Classroom= Ghetto Super Star.

This hypothesizing of popular scale and a flexible definition of popular is necessary for presenting such a topic as poetry at such a conference on Popular Culture. Only if all things, as soon as they’re transmitted to a part of society beyond the self, exist on scales of popularity, can we discuss such a form as poetry on a devoted panel. If we were strictly reporting on popular culture in regards to the mainstream we would have little else to talk about other than movies, television, and sports. 2

In 1980 Don Byrd stated “poetry is well on its way to ranking with tatting, restoring antiques, and pitching horseshoes as a harmless pastime.” That was 25 years ago; today we might hyperbolically move to say that we might find more people listening to Ham radio than reading poetry. Outside of the English Departments, it’s hardly more than a private doodling considered with the insignificance of hobby, rendered nearly obsolete. Poetry, in its antiquated state, may have at one point been considered part of popular culture, but it no longer has the outlets that it once had.

Imagine The New York Times publishing 450 poems during the course of a year or poems appearing in every issue of Sunset, Good Housekeeping, Saturday Evening Post, and Ladies Home Journal. Imagine a poetry reading on a network radio show every weekday afternoon. Imagine a daily newspaper publishing regular poetry columns or a book of poetry on the bestseller list.

These are not the delusions of some manic poet, but the reality of the state of poetry in the United States during the first half of this century. In those years, poetry was not cloistered in universities, nor was its publication limited to literary magazines with small circulations. Poetry was part of the mainstream popular culture, just as fiction is today, rather than being limited to the small, elite world of poets themselves. (Spaulding 2)

For more than the first half of the 20 th century, newspapers were publishing poetry with great frequency. Today, the only thing close to word craft we have in the paper is the daily crosswords puzzles, word jumbles, and crypto-quotes (ironically, these word games may be a delight to procedural poets and Oulipians!).

Today, the popular of poetry is almost entirely authorized by academic institutions. The young poet, finding the coffee shop and bookstore no longer a viable market to further literary growth, turns into the undergraduate English major, who then becomes the MFA creative writing student, then to PhD, and finally becomes Professor at one of the many conveniently located creative writing programs; From cradle to cradle.

There is a charge that artificially nurtured in this way poetry can only become more devoid of humanity and less informed by our interdisciplinary, multicultural realities. Therefore, without being able to keep up with the arts that have one foot in the institutions, and one foot out, poetry will not be able to keep up, if in fact it has thus far. In no other art form, except possibly theatre, has there been so much prophecy of extinction. But b efore I start sounding like just another poet-prophet foreseeing the death of the poetry, let me confirm that I don’t think poetry or for that matter theatre, ham radios, horseshoes, or pottery are going to vanish off the face of the earth any time soon. The worst that can happen is that it will just continue to be of little importance.

Rasula: “(A)ny crisis of poetry is at present a public relations fiasco. Few people actually care about it. Whether it is written well or poorly is a moot point, and what is written about is of even less consequence.”

For poetry is- let us admit it- a minor art in America , like pottery. Our poetry becomes more and more ceramic as the decades roll by…Perhaps we should teach our children that once upon a time there was a thing called poetry, that it was very beautiful, and that people tried to bring it to our shores in boats but it died. And a few people couldn’t live without it, so they went back to the Old World to see it. And others built greenhouses called English Departments, were they kept it breathing. (Byrd 237)

With time, every art form becomes a time-based art. Every day another fringe poet/performer/artist becomes lost to the memory of existence without the extant published documents to necessary preserve, and material culture is the primary source of study. This is the challenge of popular culture historians, and it’s also another cause of anxiety for the neurotic poet. I’ve considered the cries of crisis to be merely a projection of the poet/artists own existential dilemmas onto the larger field in which he/she participates.

Because poetry started its decline (at least in the amount of criticism arguing this) at the same time as the advent of television, many have been quick to use television as an excuse. But I doubt television can be entirely responsible for the marginalization of poetry. Rasula: “What is misleading about poetry competing with television programming is the corollary that poetry is an entertainment medium.”

I would actually assume that it is a combination of several of the proposed ailments, which would also include:

-the inability for a poetry public to accept experimentation of form, combined with the inability of the general public to maintain an interest in standardized flush-left-margin poetry structures.

-The real technological anxiety- which is not television, but the immediate large-scale mainstream employment of text-based creations, i.e. the Bjork video that shows us a book that writes itself with digital magic surrounded by constructivist text scenography, or the fact that the current phase of digital poetry can do little to look better than Hollywood film credits.

-The usual suspect- the academization of poetry.

The ambivalence of a comfortable place to be: the classroom. The frequent anxiety of publish or perish can also turn out to be situate yourself in an MFA program or perish. In a conversation with a colleague who, like most young poets, is discouraged with his own decisions of staying helplessly on the academic fast track, he unconvincingly attempted to justify his position by referring to something Charles Bernstein said in a workshop that we both attended. Bernstein, when asked about why he was a chair in the English department in spite of his own opinions about creative writing programs, said that it was one of those “change the system from the inside” jobs. Bernstein’s rationale more than satisfied my youthful idealism. But today I’m skeptical: it seems like everybody is trying to change the creative writing system from the inside. And if this is true, what system are they changing other than the one they are perpetuating through their own supposed insurgent operations?

Dana Gioia: “The campus is not a bad place for a poet to work. It’s just a bad place for all poets to work.”

Jed Rasula: “(T)he writing programs are a safe haven, a refuge from the sociocultural perplexities signified by theory and postmodernism…promoting a return to the now paradoxically reassuring anxieties of self-doubt…The institution insulat(es) its inhabitants against cognitive and cultural challenges from the outside… The cost is an inbred trepidation and intellectual xenophobia.”

Walter Kaladjian: “For better or worse, most of our enduring verse writers are academics whose poetry typically seeks to repress and transcend their institutional lives.”

Eve Shelnutt: “(The poet) is isolated from the broader intellectual life.” (and therefore burdened with an intellectual insecurity.)

Much has been said of the effects of the academization of arts and poetry. But in my opinion, not enough has been covered in terms of the classroom effects on the actual “professionals” that the institutions create. The classroom is a breeding ground for character creation. Part of affiliation with institution has to do with identity, mission statement, and clearly formulated definitions. Existence is a paper thing.

Institutions also consistently canonize privately therefore marginalize publicly. One of the essentials for programs in higher education is a certain quota for consecrated (incarcerated?) personalities. This perpetuates a process favoring quantity over content. So marginalists turn into pop-marginalists through the needs of institutional provisions that fall short of meritocracy. The academy reminds us again that it’s involved in the marketing business. Therefore it too cannot resist the influence of marketable mimesis. Their type of reproductions can be seen in the students that they create.
It’s impossible to know to what degree contemporary poetry necessitates an academic existence. But it would be a difficult argument to say that it has no effect at all on the current state of poetry and poets. How does this affect the concept of career for the individual in the world of poetry, and more specifically, in experimental poetry? What customized visions of celebrity exist? What become standards for success? What rewards for excellence can they boast? The answers to these question are perverted enough to construct a reality that may breed a collective operating in shame, bitterness, and embarrassment. It could also be an environment that produces a classic compensational psychology that creates a rock-star mentality that suits the pop experimentalist clownishly well.

The question begs to be asked, what kind of repressed humiliation, or to a lesser extent a generalized neurosis, might be stored inside the artist who must be nurtured and coddled his/her entire “professional” life because of his/her societal label as capitalistically impotent? And if we muse on the ramifications, can we help but wonder how much these tribulations are actually sustained by the marginalized artist?

The Pop Experimentalist is fashioned here between the pressures: being dedicated to a craft that does not provide a return in the standard societal sense; going through school to render themselves practically unemployable outside of an institutional niche; the secret envy towards other sectors and higher skill based fields; the insecurities of life on the outside armed only with elitist, specialized knowledge.

Certainly, this kind of investigation may be an exercise for myself in coming to terms with my own suspicious initial entry and continued involvement in experimental art and poetry. 3

Safely secured in the anti-everything position of the avant-garde, a position that tries to convince that celebrity status is undesirable and unattainable, the pop experimentalist begins to understand that celebrity only takes on a new function. When they are confronted with accusations of careerism, they often reply with the seemingly incontestable “If I wanted to be famous, why would I be involved in (experimental art)?” This is a career path smokescreen that implies the artistic motivations are more genuine and not as carefully cultivated as they actually are. The experimentalist knows that marginality is where it’s at and at the same time pretends to suffer from underappreciation. These creative decisions couldn’t help but be influenced by the first time the artist/poet was wondrously applauded by an audience of under a dozen.

With such an intimate, solo, and internal form as poetry, the presence of celebrity in the author is the only push that can thrust one into popularity within the unpopular. So we’re likely to find instances of the ego-driven, career strategists, decrying a crisis state of poetry which can be seen as part public relations effort and part projection of artists personal existential crisis, caught up in the romanticism of the life of the martyr poet on the road less traveled. Entering the field at any age and discovering a place not so crowded.

IV.

WHO MADE YOU SO POPULAR? …And why?

A negative stance on celebrity is a popular ideology of the avant-garde party. But I argue that it’s only an illusory ideology that sets up a labyrinthine course towards success. This course may be malleable and contingent on the facticities and projections of each artist. But much of the guidelines may also be set up by the historically established anti-establishment or that anti-establishments current connections within established academic institutions.

The dysfunctional relationship between the institution and the avant-garde is akin to the equally confused relationship between tradition and the avant-garde. They support each other even though they position themselves as philosophically antithetical. They use each other for material, they share space, and fluctuate players freely between the two worlds. This can be heard in Paul Mann: “The avant-garde is first of all the instrument of attack on tradition, but an attack mandated by tradition itself.”

The rebellious progeny of this classic American dysfunctional relationship is the schizophrenic Pop Experimentalist; conflicted with the ideology of opposition. Avant-Garde needs an enemy, and where it has none, it will invent one.

Ron Silliman: “The challenge facing any oppositional poetics is how to remain marked, literally stigmatized.”

Billy Collins idea of the “antireputation” may shed some light on the existence of the Pop Experimentalist:“A poet may become well known for not being well known. This kind of antireputation is bred and maintained within the hyperactive world of Small-Press-Little-Magazine publication.”

Who is responsible for the construction the avant-garde identity? Is it the toiling hands of the small press media, is it the institutions, is it the artists themselves? In her book Career Moves, which can be read as a highbrow tabloid on contemporary poetics (although this was, unfortunately, not her intention), Libbie Rifkin argues that four of the major forces of postwar poetry were strategically careerist due primarily to their ego-driven machismo.

Rifkin expands on Wordsworth’s idea that the original artist bears the task of “creating the taste by which he is to by enjoyed.” But before the artist him/herself can set out on such an aesthetic gambit, is it not the mandates of the academic institution that creates the circuitous routes?

There was a particular entry in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book that was incidentally not anonymous that stated, “work yr ass off to change language and never get famous.” The author of this statement needs to attach her name to it, make sure she’s the first to be the last non-anonymous poet.

Inconspicuous as they may be, these are still career moves. The idea of career has just relaxed into accepting its role as a non-financial model.

There is the question of how much the poet/artist is responsible for the creation of his own readership/audience, then there is the question of who sets the rules by which he/she must play by in this game of survivable community creation. Creating can arguably to simplified as marketing strategies for artists. The idea of market is one that needs to be customized in what could be considered an intimate form of economy. To use Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, poetry exists in a “restricted” production (as opposed to “large-scale” which relies on the quantitative success of commercial market) and values peer approval, internal network celebrity, and less tangible social rewards than monetary success. Audience creation is often a part of the avant-garde practice itself and creating an audience is not a populist notion in this regard; it’s merely a sculpting of an adequate survivable audience, in other words, creating a community as readership. But this ideal is only a strategy that can only go so far in poetry, the rest is left up to the large-scale institutions. Unless the movement/celebrity can be assimilated into the institution, or the celebrity/movement becomes part of the institution itself, the buoying community does little but allow one fleeting moment of indulgence.

This poetry, entirely marooned on an intuitional island, or adrift in a symbolic mythic state, is conversely not an entirely inconvenient place to be for the Pop Experimentalist.

Rasula: “To inhabit the margins…is not to be bereft in companionship: quite the contrary, the margins can more readily facilitate congregation and mutual recognition.”

1 Editors note from the recent “Indie Culture” issue of Utne Reader: “Indie itself has increasingly become just another category within the mainstream American cultural industry… So instead of administering a litmus test, we looked for a spirit.”

2 San Antonio 2004 Popular Culture Association motto: “If it’s not popular, it’s not culture.” Excluding experimental practice? Can experimental be popular?

3 Since I was a child, the concept of over-population, more than anything else, has been my greatest fear. So when I discovered the avant-garde, maybe I thought to myself, “Hey, it’s not so crowded in here.” This is just one of the many potential reasons for my involvement, which prior to the last year or so, have consisted only of hopeful, goodwill, youthfully idealistic justifications.