BRIAN EVENSON: Years ago I was somewhere with Gordon Lish, and he said to me, “It seems like what you’re doing in your work is trying to figure out what it would be like to tie your shoes if you were completely outside of civilization and didn’t know that shoes existed but were suddenly wearing them.” And I think that’s such a weird paradox in some ways—how does that change things? How do objects—things that we just see, take for granted as tools or things that are natural—how do they change if they’re taken out of their context or if the world changes in some way? There’s a great moment in Kant’s Critique of Judgment in which he talks about objects that once had use-value that have become useless, and struggles to try to decide how to think about them aesthetically. He talks about it in terms of purposiveness without purpose. I think a lot of my work involves people having something that they have to figure out to use in some way, and use for different purposes than intended, which is probably a reaction to my father’s insistence that a screwdriver was exclusively for screwing in screws. Week Three of 5x5 with Brian Evenson: Brian Conn conducts an interview with tarot cards. the.blvr.org/1nPlU5K
Posted on: Thu, 17 Jul 2014 17:08:52 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015