Some years back I went to an event given by Richard Kostelanetz at the Frankfurt Book Fair. This was a reading of work that seems to belong in that fertile delta where found text meets poetry meets word-based visual art, all in the mountain shadows of those great imponderable classifications, conceptualism and minimalism.
One of the pieces read, or performed, sticks in the mind. It was a catalogue of the times in a day when a particular watch was consulted, reduced verbally to the bare bones of hours and minutes: “Seven ten; seven twenty-three; seven twenty-six…” The purpose of the work, Kostelanetz explained, was to act as a kind of correlation of the anxieties that induce us to check our watches; when the owner of the watch was relaxed and absorbed, the watch was not consulted for quarter-hours, half-hours or even whole hours on end, but when anticipation or apprehension was in the air, when it was time to leave home or catch a bus, or past time to receive an expected phone call, the watch was checked at closer and closer intervals. It was actually a gripping episode to hear the poem read, like the experience of riding the stimuluses and calms of an electrocardiograph.
There was a Q&A session at the end of the reading, when somebody asked how it had been possible to record all of those times: if he had written down the times at which he had consulted his own watch, then the awareness of self-monitoring might have affected his relationship to his watch, and therefore the frequency he consulted it. Equally, had he been observing someone else through the day, however discreetly, his presence might have made watch-checking more foregrounded in their consciousness. So how had he managed to avoid tainting the innocence and semi-consciousness of what he was observing?
Richard Kostelanetz appeared nonplussed by the question. He replied that he’d simply written down the times at which a notional person might look at his or her watch over the course of a day. There had been no observation.
A kind of shiver ran through the entire audience, a mass body-language tremor of people pressing back in their chairs, or turning to look at each other, or laying their hands open, and something audible too that stopped as soon as it had begun, like a spliced audiotape sliver of hubbub, only just registering. I would say that everybody gasped.
What had just happened? What had caused this schism, this cognitive twitch, in the minds of the publishers, writers, academics, artists and agents who made up most of the audience? What had Richard Kostelanetz said that was so wrong?
Here’s what I think. A boundary had been crossed. On one side of the boundary is the results-led, or synthetic, tradition of theatre and fiction, in which whatever means are available are crafted into a preconceived outcome, a production. The keyword here is verisimilitude: the appearance of being true or real. This is where Richard Kostelanetz started out, in his approach to writing his wristwatch piece. The other side of the boundary finds work that is source-based, or analytic. Here, a different ethic is at play. The original is sacrosanct, to be handled as circumspectly as scene-of-crime forensics. An explicit or implicit code guides the artist or author in their dealings and interventions, so that a piece of found text, for example, may have words removed but none added. The final work, if it is to be anything at all, must be evidential, and scrupulous.
I don’t think Richard Kostelanetz did anything wrong, but he misjudged his audience, and it seems he mistook his genre. Whatever else, if this kind of work is to retain any meaning, any integrity, it cannot be fiction.