I think that even when I am not actively
writing, I am working on my novel. Having read Cory Arcangel’s book titled Working On My Novel, I was informed or
perhaps reminded rather of the mass of people who are constantly writing, who
need to write and who at any given moment may be working on their novel. Just
as in this book, Arcangel’s larger artistic practice is Internet-based. This
project can be read as appropriating a Duchampian tradition by way of
repurposing found objects to be qualified as art. And yet, Arcangel’s found
materials are not objects at all but are instead tweets, personal sentiments, and
utterances describing brief moments, feelings or occurrences with regard to
writing.
By collecting these phrases, all of which
include the words “working on my novel”, Arcangel collects people and forms a
community whereby the testaments of people working on their novel interact with
one another in such a way that the assemblage forms a narrative. There is
almost a sense that there exists a single protagonist working on his or her
novel over the course of some time, at once inspired and encouraged and at
other times lethargic, disappointed or merely in a state of procrastination.
Despite this, Arcangel does not wish to merge these writers stuffing them into one
manufactured character. He includes with every quite the name of the tweeting
author, the exact time of the posted tweet and the precise date during the year
2012. Is Cory Arcangel writing a novel?
Placed sporadically throughout the book are
pages with line drawings of a stove kettle, each picture drawn from a unique
angle. The altering angles have a temporal quality whereby not only is the
viewer moving around the kettle as object but we become aware of the kettle as
a mercurial thing in and of itself. It becomes hot, comes to a boil, and then
begins to shriek on the top of its lungs until it is removed from the fire and
let to cool anew. I began to consider that this is not dissimilar to the ways
in which one experiences the process of writing a novel. At times you are hot,
you are smoking, you are so fucking on fire that your hand cannot keep up with
your head. You are unstoppable. You are a genius. And there are also those
other times. There are those times you cannot bear to even think about working
on your novel, times you spend hours and hours staring into blankness (be it paper
or screen) only to change one word and then change is back again. There are
those times you feel your mind is so empty, so banal, how dare you call yourself
a writer.
It is all part of the unavoidable highs and
lows of accessing one’s creativity in a way that is brave enough to actualize something
real. In the end, we are all really just kettles getting hot and cold about
life and words over and over again.
A tweet collected by Cory Arcangel:
“I’m
working on my novel again, and it feels good, you guys. I love my mind.
Stephen
Mangol – 11:44 PM, 23 Sep 2012.”
