Berfrois

What if the Oulipian constraint is the body?

Print


The Magician, AB Svensk Filmindustri, 1958

From Jacket2:

Is this mental/intellectual/psychological focus within Conceptualism ableist? At the very least it seems to be one-dimensional: the body marks a caesura, and it is a product of Conceptualism’s relationship with the body and its positioning of itself in relation to it. There’s so much of a focus on the idea, on how the work strikes the mind — it’s rife with duality. Indeed, Conceptualist scion Sol LeWitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” can be surprisingly Cartesian at times. He writes: “Conceptual art is made to engage the mind of the viewer rather than his eye or emotions.” This sentence bothers me because it implies that the mind is not somehow talking to the eye or emotions. If Conceptualism is about the idea, why couldn’t the idea be communicated through the body? What if the “machine” that drives the poem’s construction is the body? What if the Oulipian constraint is the body (via disability, media, etc.)?

The manner in which I came to ask these questions is undeniably personal. On March 1, 2014, I suffered two small strokes in my thalamus and paramedial pons, respectively. I was lying in bed watching Bergman’s The Magician and noticed my lips were numb. I was having difficulty standing up. It was like I was drunk, but I’d been sober for a month.

“‘Corpaphysics, Conceptualism, and dualism”, Matthew Landis, Jacket2