Cooperider's Expansion

León Ferrari. Cuadro escrito (Written painting). December 17, 1964
Ink on paper
26 x 187／8" (66 x 48 cm)
Collection Eduardo F. Costantini, Buenos Aires
http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/audios/153/1630

A few weeks ago the Society was invited to create a form of ekphrastic response: a piece of writing that responds to a visual work, or vice versa. The request came from our friends Joseph Starr and Alicita Rodriguez in their call for work for the next issue of Marginalia. Carrie Cooperider FWS came up with an expansion that somewhat resembles the oulipian procedure of "larding" (le tireur à la ligne),which amplifies a preexistent text by adding language internally, words between words or sentences between sentences. Larding is a fine collaborative procedure. In one session we each wrote two consecutive sentences, one at the top of a page and one at the bottom. Then we passed the page to our neighbor, who inserted a sentence between these two before passing to the next person, who had a choice of which pair of sentences to insert a sentence between; and so the page went round till it was full, the original sentences serving as beginning and ending of a now quite variegated and sometimes doubtfully continuous paragraph.

Cooperider's Expansion works a little differently. It is ekphrastic in that it responds to a painting recently shown in New York, Leon Ferrari's Cuadro escrito from the Tangled Alphabets show at MoMA.

The actual raw material for Carrie's piece was two sentences from the catalog of that show (Andrea Giunta, "León Ferrari: A Language Rhapsody", in Luis Pérez-Oramas, León Ferrari and Mira Schendel: Tangled Alphabets [NY and São Paulo: The Museum of Modern Art and Cosac Naify, 2009], p. 51). Carrie broke the two sentences into groups of from one to five words, following the natural rhetorical pauses. She then turned each word-group into a full sentence that incorporated that word or those words.

Here are the original two sentences: "The Manuscritos series includes Cuadro escrito, a piece of writing, a conceptual operation that describes the painting Ferrari would make 'if I knew how to paint.' This is not, however, a cold list of portrait, landscape, or still life subjects to be described with the materials of painting ('marten hairs on the tip of a flexible stick of ash drenched and submerged in crimson oil'); it is instead a motley gathering featuring birds."

And here is the way they were broken down and expanded, the original words in boldface:

Once jutting forth with proud angular insistence, the letterforms in the Manuscritos

have been eroded, sanded into scattered particles that blow in susurrating clouds across the desert floor. In that series of doublecrosses with which history likes to mark its events in time and space, the exiled letters betray each other. Their sad display of exclusive self-interest includes several members of the alphabet – A springs to mind, or, shockingly, S– of whom one had thought better. Look: you can see them crowding together, jockeying for position as they vie for a place of prominence in the Cuadro escrito; there is P’s elbow jabbing into O’s soft pillow of surprised dismay, and there, F’s arms reach to menace Y’s slender twigged throat – and above that, M’s double plough shoves W dangerously close to the rim of the page’s white cliff. Despite everything, the letters somehow manage to arrange themselves into the portrait of a piece of writing. But their posturing is merely a conceptual operation, an idea whose time may be just beginning, or is already lost. Breaking away from the picture, a flock of words that describes the rise and fall of a hundred notions shimmers above a sentence’s long horizon before settling in uneasy syllables among the dusky branches of its letters. The painting, watching, waits for light. What Ferrari would make, if words were less treacherous and pictures less deceitful, are colorful nests of entwined letterstrokes where inscriptions could safely roost. If we were ever to meet, León Ferrari and I, – in a footnote, say, or at the end of an epilogue – he might ask me if I knew into which sacred grove the nests could be securely placed. And if we had come to a time when all sacred groves had been obliterated, I would try to remember how to paint one into vivid existence for him. At least, this is what I tell myself when, in dreams, fat correspondences drop ripely at my feet, their messages pleading for divination. Our meeting is not, however, likely to happen. If one were to draw a line in the sand, and on one side make a cold list of things likely to happen, and on the other, an equally chilly list of unlikely things, one side would stutter quickly into silence while the other would loudly riff on “what ifs” with baroque logorrheic flourishes. Let me ask you: do you think it is better to allow a portrait, landscape, or still life to dictate history than to give words permission to engrave the boundaries of our understanding? These, and other subjects worthy of discourse, are questions which I realize may be more usefully answered through gesticulated rather than articulated thought. Whether our experience is to be described with phrases that coil themselves into paragraphs upon a page or with paint-strokes that float images onto the surface of a canvas is a matter for fruitful debate. Perhaps the materials of painting, with their gorgeous color and sticky allure, are more suited to seduction than the drab, dry artifacts left behind in the wake of a pencil or pen can ever hope to be. Nonetheless, Ferrari understands that penstrokes, as fine as marten hairs, may assemble themselves into either word or image. Expression may be on the tip of one’s tongue or the tip of one’s fingers, or both. It may even be conveyed through the agency of a flexible stick, like a conductor’s baton ushering an orchestra through the corridors of a score toward music’s more spacious rooms of meaning. Within those chambers we find sadness, but also liberation, in the confirmation that we are only made of ash, which had begun to fly apart beneath the weight of our first breath. Though drenched and submerged in life’s generous juices, we burn white-hot. We may, in our interval between water and fire, anoint the pages of our lives with crimson oil whose stained presence then attempts to retell the past and augur the future. However, the story thus created can never speak a whole truth; it is instead a phantom record of mixed desire and delusion; falsehood and forgetfulness. But, listen – let’s not lose our way in a melancholy thicket of words, some motley gathering of marks sequestered within the walled garden of a page. Any decent picture or poem, while proudly featuring its author’s best intentions, must also include a legible expanse of emptiness between thoughts where we latecomers may infer our own lives. Then, stepping into the gaps between words, the mark we will leave will be like the inscription of birds on the shore of a vast ocean.

Carrie Cooperider, "Cuadro escrito" (published here with her permission)

Carrie originally presented this in the form of a table that placed the word-groups across from the sentences that expanded them, a presentation that emphasized the visual-schematic nature of a writing about a written painting. We still find that quality even in the presentation we have given it here, since it allows a connect-the-bolded-words reading that serves as armature to the expansion.

We liked this piece very much. The Society used it as the basis for a similar exercise, and the first round consisted of creating a reduction of Carrie's piece: take words from any of her sentences and build a text from them. Andrea Giunta's words, the bolded ones, could not be reused. Participants were at liberty to use the selected words in the order in which they were found in Carrie's writing or in some other combination. Of course we always prefer to go for the limit and so kept them in order.

If you find this constraint interesting and wish to try it, let me suggest as a base text Walter Pater's famous passage on La Gioconda in The Renaissance (London, 1893). Begin by choosing two consecutive sentences; break those down into word-groups; then proceed by expanding each word-group into a sentence. Send in the results as a comment. Here is the passage:

The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.

Happy holidays and happy writhing!