Monkeydoodle: annotating the anti-essay "after history." - Aesthetics and the Body Politic

What does it look like, that fog-wrapped spot where art history/theory and visual art practice collide? How to describe the fallout? It seemed unlikely that it could be mapped by words and concepts only. We would have to use them against themselves by passing over into the visual, into the business of making, even constructing an object. What started off as a regular art history essay soon enough passed into its queer opposite - an anti-essay.

In Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass/Green Box there is a mysterious fog-ridden zone where word and image, verbal and visual elements coalesce. He spoke of a "retail fog," that is to say, not a wholesale one, not quite the thick, pea-soup killer that blanketed London in prepollution times.

At Goldsmiths' College, London, art history/visual art students set about probing this foggy spot. The probe is called Monkeydoodle. It consists essentially of two stages. The first involves making a contemporary version of Daniel Spoerri's Anecdoted Topography of Chance. The idea is to get under the skin of an artist who embodied in visual/textual terms some of the issues of historical writing we grapple with today - long before the armored tanks of theory overran the subject with abstract concepts. The illustrations here are of contemporary Topos - some constructed as objects, some handmade, others computer based.

In a second step, the anti-essay is conceived around body fluids - orgasm, excrement, blood, lymph. This is realized in print, published in Art & Design (1995 and 1996), and on the Internet as Monkeydoodle Archive.

Monkeydoodle plans to set up as a public group in 1997. The idea is to use notions of randomness, noise, chance, and accident in an account of the political present through anecdoted histories of refugees, asylum seekers, and exiles in London today. The Monkeydoodle project ranges over the following issues:

i "After History," what remains? As the History machine judders to a halt, hapless, bogged down, dialectical wheels in a spin - what form might historical thinking and writing assume? Away from linear coherence and grand narrative, how do we take on board chance, accident, sticky singularities, the aleatory, differance? Such a gear shift, in Perry Anderson's words, amounts to a "randomization of history."(1) Monkeydoodle does not shy away from trying it on for size.

ii After the historical job is done, what "remains" of the art object? How is the difference of the visual to be acknowledged and articulated? Duchamp speculated on a visible grammar - Adorno on a wordless syntax - prompted by misgivings about the limits of the conceptual and what is forsaken in its wake.(2) For Adorno, the conceptual steam-roller reduces and flattens out difference and otherness - identifying and labeling experience in its own image. Like some juggernaut cruncher, it chews up and spews out everything in its path as concept, idea, sign. The concern is not only with what slips through the conceptual net but with the "difference" that has to be teased through and beyond it - the "remainder of the visual." He rues the fact that we cannot escape the "frozen wastes of conceptual abstraction" by actually pasting and sticking in the brute particulars of objects and things into the philosophical text - however seductive still lifes or landscapes might make the notion. Monkeydoodle tries its luck with the idea: starting off as abstractive explanation and exposition, writing turns into making - into constructing itself with objects and things. From the straight, sober essay we pass over into the bent, queer business of the anti-essay.

iii Monkeydoodle is a way of looking and thinking that apes the straight essay only to muck up its system by letting loose the baboonery of a counterforce.

iv Does the conceptual originate in mimicry - a simian, arboreal state it shook off find grew ashamed of as it evolved into a hard-nosed mode at the top of the cognitive pack?

v It goes against the grain of the anti-essay to theorize it. We are dealing less with principles than with rough-and-ready thumb rules. The anti-essay has to dredge these from the depths of its own practice. They are rules for the nonce - applicable perhaps only in the single instance, having to be thrashed out and coined afresh each time. These annotations do not so much add up to a systematic account of the anti-essay as they graph its drifts and meanders, sounding out its blanks and gaps.

vi In Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day (1989), the butler, Stevens - in service to Mr. Faraday, the American master of Dartington Hall - takes meticulous stock of household order. The inventory is doggedly shadowed by what has yet to be accomplished. All the time, he is taking the measure of what is left over.(3)

vii Daniel Spoerri glued down the scraps and remains of a meal onto the dinner table that he hung up on the wall. He called these snare-pictures (1960-64) - fixing down a jumble of plates and bowls, cutlery, crockery, and chinaware, trapping them where they stood, ensnaring the world.