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TOWARDS A THREE-DIMENSIONAL LITERATURE

Text by David Colosi, 2006

PART 1: THEORETICAL CONTEXT

Intro
1.0  For a New New Novel
1.0.1 New Technology:  Literary Simultaneity
1.1  What is Literature?
1.1.1  Words and Language
1.1.2  Allographic and Autographic
1.1.3  Reflection and Reflexion
1.2  What is Art?
1.2.1  When is Art?:  Art and Aesthetics
1.2.2  How is Art?:  Art and Entertainment
1.3  What is Three-Dimensional Literature?
1.3.1  Sentences on Three-Dimensional Literature
Bibliography

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intro

As my title suggests, this essay will propose both a direction and a definition.  By the end, I can insure that the direction will be defined, but the definition of Three-Dimensional Literature will remain en route.  Just as no dictionary can define Art for all times, places, cultures, and objects, neither can a dictionary-like definition suffice for Three-Dimensional Literature.  Without question, my definition will rely on definitions of Literature, as well as those of Art.  And since both of these concepts are self-defining, how could a definition of Three-Dimensional Literature be anything more than a proposal for a direction?

This project follows two inspirational models of artists and/as theorists of their own practice: Ilya Kabakov's series of lectures, On the Total Installation, and Joseph Kosuth's seminal essay Art After Philosophy, Parts I, II, III.  Structurally, this book will follow the model of the latter and be comprised of three parts.  Part 1, Towards a Three-Dimensional Literature, will construct a theoretical context from which Three-Dimensional Literature can be understood; Part 2, 'Three-Dimensional Literature' and Recent Art, will pursue an historical context by exploring examples of art works and practices which fit or fail to fit the context proposed in Part 1; and Part 3, I am a Literary Artist, will situate my stake in this enterprise and my practice within the contexts proposed in Parts 1 and 2.

Part 1, which the present essay takes as its scope, will follow this plan:  1.0 For a New New Novel, will introduce Three-Dimensional Literature as a challenge posed to Literature by way of a precursorial consideration of Alain Robbe-Grillet's For a New Novel taking into consideration the concept announced by Edmund Husserl's call to get "back to the things themselves."  After comparing the conception of the Nouveau Roman with that of Three-Dimensional Literature, in 1.0.1 New Technology: Literary Simultaneity I will explore how the addition of the third dimension to Literature rudimentarily introduces alongside literary linearity the option of literary simultaneity.  By comparing examples of Installation Art to Three-Dimensional Literature through the primary examples of Ilya Kabakov and Ed and Nancy Kienholz I will provide a tangible, although cursory, frame of reference for the reader to carry into the theoretical sections that follow. 1.1 What is Literature? will reckon with the fact that in order to come to an operational definition of Three-Dimensional Literature, it is necessary to come to a definition, first, of Literature.  Considering the difficulty of this task, if not its foolishness — as Gerard Genette describes it — I will limit myself to certain of Literature's aspects since an exhaustive list of them all is impossible.  In the spirit of the "towardness" that this essay proposes, I will limit my discussion to the following three:  The differences between, 1.1.1. Language and Words:  A Necessary Condition?; 1.1.2. The Allographic and the Autographic; and 1.1.3. Reflection and Reflexion.  The aspect of Literature that I will take for granted is that works of Literature are works of Art, even though, along the way, I may suggest the reverse Phylum-Genus relationship:  works of Art are works of Literature.  The section following this one will take up the equally difficult — and foolish — question 1.2 What is Art? by changing the question two times, both inspired by Nelson Goodman, as a means to consider two aspects:  1.2.1 When is Art?: Art and Aesthetics and 1.2.2 How is Art?:  Art and Entertainment.  The aspect that I won't address directly, although it is infused in the spirit of the entire essay, is the difference between works of art and mere things.  The primary theorists and texts which guide this essay deal head on with this distinction, so I refer the reader to my bibliographic entries on Arthur C. Danto, Nelson Goodman, Gerard Genette, and Umberto Eco to explore this aspect.  I have chosen these particular theorists because the conversation I wish to participate in is already underway in their texts.  Finally, the conclusion to Part 1 will be both a brief summary and an introduction to Part 2 directed by the question, 1.3 What is Three Dimensional Literature?

With the goal of only pointing the definition in a direction and not in establishing a definition "once and for all", it should be clear that once having set the terminology in motion — with a few parameters — just as Kosuth's essay did with 'Conceptual Art' — I hope to open the field of production for Three-Dimensional Literature to multiple interpretations according to the contributions of other theoreticians and practitioners.1

1.0 FOR A NEW NEW NOVEL

"It seems hardly reasonable at first glance to suppose that an entirely new literature might one day — now for instance — be possible…There's nothing new under the sun, it's all been said before, we've come on the scene too late, etc., etc.  The risk of such rebuffs is merely increased if one dares claim that this new literature is not only possible in the future, but is already being written…" [Robbe-Grillet, 15-16]2

Alain Robbe-Grillet, in his introduction to the collection of essays known in English as For a New Novel, claimed that "the novel's form must evolve in order to remain alive."[Ibid, 8]  Although I agree with this statement, my motives for proposing Three-Dimensional Literature are quite different from his.  While the Nouveau Roman was inspired by a "revolutionary" stance aimed at "dragging literature out of its ruts" after the tradition of Balzac — just as Kosuth's motivation for writing Art After Philosophy was a reaction to the methodology of Greenbergian criticism — my motivations are not so guided.  My position has no particular qualms with or praise for the current literary condition, instead it proceeds with indifference.  The "new" literature that I propose — which is also not new at all — can be seen more as an attempt to crack open the doors — or cover of the book — and to make the suggestion to literature that it too could cross the barriers of other disciplines, following the fifty-plus year lead of the other Arts.  Painting is no longer restricted to a two-dimensional surface, it can be three-dimensional like the collages of Jean Arp or Anselm Kiefer or "2.7 dimensional" as Frank Stella once described his black paintings, or it need not be restricted to the use of paint at all as in Atsuko Tanaka's Work (Bell) from 1955; video or film can be a seatless experience, as is Pipilotti Rist's or Catherine Sullivan's work or it can appear on the stuffed objects of Tony Oursler or the facades of buildings like the images of Krzysztof Wodiczko or Jenny Holzer; sculpture bridged its way into architecture through the spaces of Michael Asher, Dan Graham, and Michael Heizer; and John Cage showed us how music could be made in silence.

Admittedly, the innovations of Raymond Roussel and Robbe-Grillet; Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover; Italo Calvino and the Oulipo; Ishmael Reed and anyone republished by the Dalkey Archive Press; and, of course, Joyce, Shklovsky, and Derrida, too, have stretched and obliterated the definitions and limits of literature.  But all of these innovations occurred within the discipline of literature as it is linguistically conceived.  Just as Joseph Kosuth, Hans Haacke, and Adrian Piper stepped out of the bounds of visual art and into the more broadly defined, Art, so too am I asking Literature to think outside the book, step off the page, and read its way into space. 

My call is an echo of Edmund Husserl's early cry to get "back to the things themselves", followed by Robbe-Grillet's similar cry for literary objectivity, yet I mean by this something different.  Husserl's 'things' were quite specifically 'things as we perceived them': they originated in our perception leaving everything exterior to perception, like physical objects themselves, bracketed out.  In this way, the ontology of physical things was less important than our perception of them.  Likewise, Robbe-Grillet's hyper-objective descriptions, although he hoped for them to be devoid of significations, couldn't avoid the Freudian interpretations his voyeuristic characters elicited.  These "things", for either of them, did not exist "for or in themselves", since they existed for the perceiving subject, even if the quest, successful or not, was for 'objective truths'.  While Husserl later reversed his position from objectivity to subjectivity, Robbe-Grillet, from the outset, understood that "Objectivity in the ordinary sense of the word — total impersonality of observation — is all too obviously an illusion."[Ibid, 18]  But he also believed in the "freedom of observation" or, as theorists like Charles S. Peirce, Umberto Eco and Jacques Derrida would call it, the openness of unlimited semiosis. 

What Robbe-Grillet reacted against was the "literary", understood in the pejorative sense. 

He describes this sense of the literary as a screen set with bits of different colored glass which fractures our vision yet finds a place for everything according to a systematic appropriation of signification.  Even those things from "the world" that break the glass are conveniently categorized as "the absurd."

Although he is talking about objects in the world, Robbe-Grillet's main focus is on the ability of literature, in the traditional linguistic sense, to represent more accurately the open or free condition of objecthood.  Despite his linguistic focus, he suspends the general signifying nature of language and, particularly, words.  We can see how "all our literature has not yet succeeded in eroding their smallest corner," since words, adjectives specifically, can only consider objects and gestures one aspect at a time.  Since objects are not able to present themselves, words — linguistic signifiers — are saddled with the burden of representing objects and gestures in their fullest sense of freedom and openness.  Taken literally, Robbe-Grillet's description pertains more relevantly to what I call Three-Dimensional Literature since objects, in lieu of words or in conjunction with words, would be able to present themselves.

The way I have used /aspects/ above is to be taken in the same way that Gerard Genette uses /aspectual/, which is also comparable to the way Umberto Eco conceives the Model Q theory.  For Genette, /aspectual/ refers to the "properties mobilized" in the relationship between, say, a rock and a potato and the "attention that mobilizes them" when considered as a tool for pounding a nail, on the one hand, and as mantle decorations on the other.[Genette, AR, 8]  Eco uses a metaphor of a box of magnetized marbles to describe this same process as a theory of crossing axes where the common components meet at nodes.  He calls a system a rule which magnetizes the marbles according to a combination of mutual attractions and repulsions on the same plane.  Depending on the system, the marbles which were attracted in one system can be repelled in another.  The sum of all of these crossings makes up a Model Q.[Eco, TS, 124-126]  Eco cites Wittgenstein’s example of family resemblances to demonstrate:  Chess, a ball game, and ring-around-the-roses all have the common aspect that they are games, but taken according to different aspects, they can have radical dissimilarities:  Chess is played generally by two adults; ring-around-the-roses is a played by more than two children (unless you have a pair of creative children and only one or two roses); and a ball game can be either played by one person throwing a ball against a wall or by two teams of fifteen or more players. 

By sticking to linguistic signifiers and using adjectives to describe a chair, for instance, a writer can only create a string of these aspects, and, due to the inherent linearity of time, position, and hierarchical order of written or spoken language, all of the aspects can never be presented simultaneously:  a small, brown, oak, child's chair in the Shaker style.  Robbe-Grillet's "erosion of the smallest corner" can hardly be achieved by language because this string fails to consider the broken front right leg, the gum under the seat, the weathering from rain damage, etc.  If this same object were to be presented, or to present itself as an object — as in a work of Three-Dimensional Literature — it could present all of its aspects simultaneously, and the interpreters could choose their own aspects.  Even so, I still recognize that these aspects could never be interpreted simultaneously since the act of looking and that of reading — which are one and the same act (as Goodman says, "There is more to vision than meets the eye"[Goodman, LA, 14] — must order and prioritize.  Robbe-Grillet's call, as I have called it, to get back to "things themselves", is a call for the object to present itself.  But in the linguistic conception of literature, the physical object is always absent.

In order to see what Robbe-Grillet proposed as the New Novel, we first have to understand the novel he was reacting against.

But those who practiced the Nouveau Roman no longer believed in this "depth" of the word:  "the surface of things…ceased to be…the mask of their heart, a sentiment that led to every kind of metaphysical transcendence."[Ibid]  For Three-Dimensional Literature, a return of depth will take on new significance, literally by the addition of the third dimension.

For the New Novel, Robbe-Grillet proposed, instead of the "universe of signification"

As this passage should make clear, if I end up citing excessively from Robbe-Grillet, it is only because he says so clearly what I mean to say about Three-Dimensional Literature.  Reading, For a New Novel and writing this essay have the uncanny effect that I have started out like Pierre Menard in Borges' famous story as he rewrites Don Quixote word-for-word yet nevertheless succeeds in writing a "new" novel for a new place, time, and culture.  Soon I will depart from Robbe-Grillet but only after I benefit from the work he has already accomplished.  Read the above citation again taking as its subject Three-Dimensional Literature.

The difference between Robbe-Grillet's New Novel and Three-Dimensional Literature is that Robbe-Grillet is still considering literature, and objects and gestures, only in their linguistic capacity.  Three-Dimensional Literature considers literature outside of the linguistic realm and objects as physical entities and not as linguistic signifiers.  For Three-Dimensional Literature, I propose that "objects will be there before being something"; that "they will still be there afterwards, hard, unalterable, eternally present, mocking their own "meaning""; and that the "freedom of observation" or openness to a wider variety of aspects or analyzable axes will be more accessible in the absence of words all together, or at least in the presence of "things themselves."

In this citation, Robbe-Grillet introduces the terminology of the reduction of signification.  Note that this reduction, although the method is somewhat similar, is characteristically different from Husserl's phenomenological reduction.  For the early Husserl the reduction was a trajectory towards the core, "back to the things themselves", a method of bracketing out all of the transcendent — metaphysical, psychoanalytical, social, emotional — excess applied to the object in order to get to a singular objective truth.  For Robbe-Grillet, this reduction, for example, the emotional interpretation that reduces a landscape, in all of its richness, to /austere/, marks a trajectory away from the core toward a singular characteristic trait.  For Robbe-Grillet the reduction is to an aspectual essence, while for Husserl it is toward an ontological essence.  Although Husserl and Robbe-Grillet want to bracket out the same clutter, and get back to "things themselves," Husserl's return leads him toward a singular point of oneness, while Robbe-Grillet's takes him to the site of the sum of all aspectual crossings, to what Eco described as the Model Q.  Husserl's return is to a point of closure, a point of a singular objective truth, while Robbe-Grillet's is to the point of the most open, unlimited, vast, and free center of observation.

Having introduced Menard and Borges should draw a link to the epigraph that begins this section.  By this reference, I hope to mark an awareness of a parallel between the pessimistic reception of the "new" novel that Robbe-Grillet sensed and the attitude toward newness and the avant-garde expressed in mantras along the lines of "all that can be said has been said" that motivated much of the Postmodern art of the 1970s and '80s.  In this respect, my position is that there is no question that Menard's novel, just as Borges' writing, and the art of Sherrie Levine and Cindy Sherman, too, was just as "novel" at the time as Monet's paintings were in 1872, Duchamp's Fountain was in 1917 or Pollock's paintings were in 1947.  Although I will leave this thought for the moment, let it mark that part of the definition of Art, I believe, includes invention, and "newness" is something that cannot be avoided, even when its modus operandi is appropriation.

After applying Robbe-Grillet's theory word-for-word to my theory, I will admit that there are some noticeable points where our words do not align.  Recognizing this, though, I will not stray too far from the source by choosing to mimic a method applied by Raymond Roussel in which I will replace only one word in order to come to a different path which connects the beginning with the end.  In doing so, I will point out how close Robbe-Grillet came to a definition of Three-Dimensional Literature (had it been his project and not mine) but missed the mark by choosing the wrong discipline for comparison.  In the passage below, replacing the word /cinema/ for /Three-Dimensional Literature/ will demonstrate this point.

What I am calling Robbe-Grillet's mistake — for my purposes only — is his failure to recognize that film is also a two-dimensional medium and the 'picture', in this instance the 'moving picture', functions semiotically in exactly the same way as the reductive 'word' he took issue with.  In a picture or a film the view of an object, of a gesture, is always already trained from a particular perspective.  The viewer sees only one view or aspect of a chair and only one view at a time.  What Goodman says of the "unreality" of pictures drawn "obeying the laws of perspective" applies to the camera:  "The picture must be viewed through a peephole, face on, from a distance, with one eye closed and the other motionless."[Goodman, LA, 12]  The technique of façade-building for set design also applies.  The viewer is only shown the face of the building while the unimportant back may be only two-by-four supports.  In the cinema, the objects (the "things themselves") are denied their objectivity and are, before they reach the viewer, reduced to certain of their aspects and to certain of their significations.  I agree that the symbolic reduction attributed to the linguistic adjective can be expanded somewhat by the interpretive eye of the lens, but there is no question that the openness of the object, the freedom of observation, is also significantly reduced by the medium of film.  The object, taken as itself, as a found object in an installation by Ilya Kabakov, for instance, would have offered Robbe-Grillet more of the effects he was after.

This semiotic proposition can be witnessed clearly in Joseph Kosuth's One and Three Chairs.  The dictionary definition of /chair/3 reduces a physical entity of a //chair// to its abstract entity <<chair>> through the linguistic medium.  The picture of a //chair// reduces the //chair// to its abstract entity <<chair>> through a pictorial medium.  The back of the chair cannot be seen by flipping the picture over.  In the third instance, the //chair// is present as a physical entity.  Because this is a work of art, I understand that the //chair// is not "in reality" a chair, but is instead, like the others, a representation of <<chair>> (since Kosuth and the Museum of Modern Art don't want us to sit in it).  But we can't deny the fact that, by looking at this third <<chair>>, around it, behind it, under it, it is more open to free observation and the viewer is more inclined to recognize its other aspectual details and consider it along different axial lines:  one could tell if it is from the period it represents or is a fake; one could see whether it had been stained or painted; one could try to determine its age and wear according to scuffs, breaks, scratches, dust accumulation, or bubble-gum residue.  None of this could be considered from the word /chair/ and, more of this, yes, but no where near all of this could be considered from the photograph.  If a picture is worth a thousand words, an object is worth a million.  If we found this chair in a used furniture store, rather than in the Museum of Modern Art, we would be able to consider even more of its aspects since we would be able to feel it, pick it up, turn it over, and sit in it, if not extract samples of its materiality to examine under a microscope.  Since I am considering the realm of the New Novel and Three-Dimensional Literature and that of Art and Literature specifically, this fourth case is outside the realm of my discussion.

To conclude the contributions and the debt I owe to Robbe-Grillet in leading toward my definition of Three-Dimensional Literature, I will recognize that he, like Husserl who reversed his position from objectivity and to subjectivity, also recognized how his use of objectivity did not, in fact, "get back to things themselves" but only to a perception of things from a particular subjectivity.  To answer the criticism that the products of the Nouveau Roman lacked the human presence, he argued:

Unlike both Husserl and Robbe-Grillet, my proposal for Three-Dimensional Literature is to "get back to the things themselves" by allowing objects to present themselves as themselves, "there before being something" and "hard, unalterable, eternally present, mocking their own "meaning"."  Perception, for me, is always already a reduction, the beginning of an interpretation.  We are a consumptive people, so perception can't be helped.  But objects in and as themselves, prior to perception serve as criticism to those interpretations which inevitably, and by definition, reduce and over or under-represent them.  This "world-view" puts objects in the center of the universe and not the perceiving subject. 

My point in analyzing Robbe-Grillet in this way was not to draw the conclusion that his goals were mine.  I understand fully that he had no delusions that his words could replace the objects which they represented.  His account of an incident while he was writing The Voyeur makes this clear.

George Perec had a similar revelation when he tried to describe everything "live" while sitting at a street corner in Paris.  For two or three days he wrote down everything he saw, yet he discovered that it was impossible to tell everything that happens at a certain spot in the world.  His account turned out to be sixty pages and could be read in a half of an hour.[Eco, SW, 59-60]  Here the irreconcilable semiotic gap between words and objects makes its presence known.  This gap is one of the many relevant defining aspects I will attribute to Literature in three dimensions.

1.0.1  New Technology:  Literary Simultaneity

In order to put a preliminary face to Three-Dimensional Literature, I will here suggest that its closest relative is installation art.  Installation is both the discipline which provides many of Three-Dimensional Literature's best examples and the "new technology" which has made this "new new novel" possible.  At the same time, it cannot be said that all works of installation art are works of Three-Dimensional Literature.  They are similar in many ways, but they differ in many others.  In this section I will not set out to examine too many examples in detail (Part 2 will be dedicated to that project) instead I will offer only a few comparisons with the intention of providing my reader with a tangible, yet cursory, frame of reference to carry into the theoretical sections that follow.

While Ilya and Emilia Kabakov and Ed and Nancy Kienholz can be considered two sets of foreparents to Three-Dimensional Literature, even their works can differ from Three-Dimensional Literature in many ways.  Part 2 will also explore their work in greater detail, but for the moment, I will use them to demonstrate two different methods of three-dimensional literarity.  One I will call literary linearity which I will exemplify through examples of Kabakov's work; and the other I will call literary simultaneity which I will exemplify through examples of the Kienholzes' work.  Literary linearity essentially translates the structural and physical aspects of linguistic literature into three dimensions, and literary simultaneity takes advantage of the third dimension (the "new technology" provided to literature) by culling traits from architecture and visual art.

Ilya Kabakov theoretically defines his work and the installation work that is becoming current around him with the term "Total Installation".  The root of the "totality" in his definition is the same root, self-consciously so, as that in "Totalitarianism"[Wallach, 10]  He equates the viewer with the "victim" who is "overcome by the intense atmosphere of the total installation."[Kabakov, TI, 245]  To varying degrees, all works of art make demands such that the receiver is "victimized" by their form.  In most cases, the receiver is willing to accept a certain amount of "suffering" and control at the demand of the medium in order to reap the benefits.  In this way, the willful suspension of disbelief extends not only to the content of a work of art, but also to its form.  Particular disciplines of Art do not, by necessary condition, have to be "totalitarian", even though some of its branches and practitioners may explore that subject matter.

To see how this applies to literature, I will begin in the direction that Robbe-Grillet pointed, toward a comparison between literature and film.  In the first place, both media require the receiver to dedicate a substantial amount of time to entirely experience a work, and both "victimize" or direct the attention of their receivers in strict linear ways, physically and mentally.  Time and linearity go hand in hand.  To experience a book or a film the receiver must, in words the King so famously spoke to the White Rabbit, "Begin at the beginning and go on until you get to the end: then stop."  Any linguistic text, regardless of its content, requires, first and foremost, that it be read left to right and top to bottom in the roman languages; top to bottom and right to left in many Asian languages; and right to left and top to bottom in Arabic and Hebrew.  Most narrative works (by which I include historical and fictional works) demand that they be read in a conceptual or narrative order as well:  chapter seven must be read before chapter eight; the beginning before the end; and page 72 before page 73.  Reference works, by contrast, like the dictionary, make no such demands.  While certain novels, like Vladimir Nabakov's Pale Fire, offer different approaches to this order, each approach or path maintains its own order that cannot be deviated from without counter-productive results.  (Anyone is free to read a horizontally structured text vertically, or read the chapters, paragraphs, sentences, or letters out of order, but the results of such a strategy, when not sanctioned by the text, contribute nothing to an experience of the work).  Film is just as restrictive in that it must be viewed in the order in which the receiver receives it.

In another purely physical way, books and films force their receivers into specific bodily positions:  a reader must track words with his/her eyes and must use the arms and hands to hold and open the book and turn the pages.  Particular books force the reader into licking a thumb and forefinger to turn the page, and newer books or very old books with hard pages might draw blood from the reader who mishandles its pages.  The time and concentration it takes to read requires that the reader be seated in a comfortable chair with the arms upright or the book flat on a table and the head bent over it.  Italo Calvino exploits the physical demands of reading in the opening of If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.  Viewers of films are forced into seated positions whether at home or in a theater by taking an optimal position several feet back from the screen proportional to its scale with the body and eyes centered vertically on the image and centered horizontally or slightly below the center line of the image.  One cannot view the film seated along the same plane as the image or from behind the screen, just as one cannot read a book without opening it.

Kabakov's installations mimic this linear and literary reality.  He discusses five different strategies for designing the layout of a Total Installation:  the first design directs the receiver through a single entrance into five rooms connected railroad-style with the middle one being both the largest and the most significant and out a single exit; the second design forms a snake-like sequence of rooms each of equal significance through which a "drama of significances" accompanies the receiver; the third design is a single, winding corridor where new experiences occur around each bend; the fourth design is a labyrinthine structure where the receiver is free to move among the various rooms in non-stipulated directions; and the fifth design creates a space of multiple stories (or floors) where the receiver must enter the floor below before entering the floor above.[Kabakov, TI, 259-60]  Like the literary text and the film, these designs, especially the first, second, and third, strictly control the physical actions and direction of the receiver.  The Corridor/My Mother's Album is an example of the third design where the long "dark, dusty corridor lit by a weak lightbulb, at the end of which is not an exit, but a new turn in the same corridor…" is lined with chronological texts written by his mother and photographs taken by his uncle.  The installation serves both as a metaphor for his mother and for "mother" Stalinist Russia[Wallach, 193].  The receiver must physically walk down the halls, looking at and reading the texts on the walls in the order they are presented to fully experience the work.  This is one of the best examples of literary linearity translated into three-dimensions.

By contrast, Three-Dimensional Literature need not mimic or translate the restrictions of the linguistic medium in order to remain "literary".  (In section 1.1 I will explore other aspects of "the literary").  New technologies always introduce new ways of experiencing the medium, and Three-Dimensional Literature's relationship to literature is no exception.  Throughout the twentieth century writers and filmmakers tried to break free from the physical and narrative linear constraints of text and film.  William Burroughs and Brion Gysin (with David Bowie following behind) created their stories with scissors, physically cutting-up their sentences; and their film collaborations with Anthony Balch (following Dadaist, Surrealist, and structuralist filmmakers) did the same with the physical line of film strips.  Virginia Woolf, Faulkner, Joyce, and Robert Coover, and "stream of consciousness" writing in general, not only explored the telling of tales from different characters, sensibilities, and psychological states, but also opposed linearity by jumping and cutting time as a way to more "naturally" represent thoughts as they occur in the mind.  Films like Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Christopher Nolan’s Memento manipulate linearity by attempting to more "naturally" represent memory by submitting their characters and receivers to narrative and discursive time travel.

While these "games with time" — as Paul Ricoeur characterized them — fractured the line, they did so only from the production end:  editing is always a cut-up technique.  On the reception end, the receiver receives books and films as they are intended to be viewed or read, with the words and frames "in order", even if their stories aren't.  Just because Burroughs, Gysin, and Balch cut up and collaged Towers Open Fire and The Cut Ups, their receivers are not authorized to physically do the same even if, mentally, that was the challenge.  The receiver is still expected, as the King expects, to start at the beginning and go until you reach the end:  then stop; and, in some cases, to begin again.
The introduction of digital technology has changed these possibilities by opening new avenues for both production and reception.  While analog technology didn't easily allow for a cut-up technique for reception, digital technology does.  Hypertexts allow the reader to follow a variety of paths (like Kabakov's fifth design does), and DVDs allow the viewer to select and play chapters at random or to "shuffle" them.  Digital video has literally eliminated the physical "line" of the film strip, the tape of 8-tracks, cassettes, and VHS, and even the groove in the rpm record.  The basic structural principle of film has changed as well:  pixels are arranged instead of frames ordered. 

Despite these developments, the receiver is not completely free.  While chapters or songs can be shuffled to vary reception, each chapter must be viewed in its linear arrangement. ("Shuffling" is a tool for receivers.  If the receiver uses editing software to manipulate the innards of chapters, then s/he takes on the tools and tasks of a producer).  In hypertexts too, the reader must read one screen in the order that it is presented before having the freedom to choose the next direction to move in.  With writing, digital technology has actually done more, and not less, to reinforce the Line by choosing typing as its primary mode of input. 

Three-Dimensional Literature, as a new technology, poses far more challenges to and options from the steady line of linguistic texts by way of its merger with visual art and architecture.  The introduction of literary simultaneity provides Literature the break to linearity that many of the writers of the twentieth century sought.  Like its linguistic counterpart (in a relatively determined way), and like film, performance, and music, Three-Dimensional Literature demands that the receiver dedicate a set amount of time to experience the work as a whole:  in its entirety it cannot be viewed simultaneously.  Likewise, Three-Dimensional Literature, like its linguistic counterpart (in the sense of pages to be traversed), and like architecture and installation art, also demands that the receiver move through a determined amount of space making it impossible to grasp the entire work as a whole, simultaneously.  By contrast, small paintings, drawings, collage, or any traditionally considered "static" work can be viewed completely and simultaneously.  But in architecture, installation, and, likewise, Three-Dimensional Literature, the introduction of the third dimension provides for simultaneous experience in the form of excerpts.

When we approach a cathedral from a distance, while it is true that we experience its façade without experiencing its back, sides, or insides, we can experience the details of the façade simultaneously.  The same is true when we look at the night sky without focusing our attention on a particular star, or Pollock's Autumn Rhythm without focusing on a particular splattered line of paint.  This experience of simultaneity is not possible in literature or film since the linear and physical restrictions prevent it.  Even when we look at Apollinaire's L'Œillet, which is contained on one page, and can see the letters and words simultaneously and can also see the form of a carnation, we still cannot see what the words tell us without running the course they have planned for us.  Architecture and painting do not impose this kind of external order in which we must view the internal details — it doesn't matter whether we examine the ceiling before the floor, the west wall before the east, or which line we follow in Autumn Rhythm (it doesn't even insist that we follow its lines).  Even if we must be in front of a painting to experience it and must enter through a door or pass through the lower floor before entering an upper floor, once we are inside the experience we are free to circumnavigate according to our own order. 

Recognizing this, I also recognize that the presence of this (excerpted) simultaneous experience cannot be confused with the condition of being able to dwell in simultaneity.  Simultaneity is knife-edged or transiently "thick" in the same way that the concept of the Now or the Present has been represented from Augustine, through James, Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger.  One cannot look at the simultaneity of the façade of a cathedral, the stars, a painting, or poem for long without beginning to look at particular windows or bricks, or finding constellations in the stars, representations or brushstrokes in the paint, or meaning in the words.  To stare at simultaneity is just as much a focused look at a detail (that of Simultaneity itself) by way of not focusing on other particulars.  As such this destroys simultaneity by imposing an order.  While experiences of reception can be linear or simultaneous, all acts of interpretation can only be linear.

There are some cases of architecture, painting, or installation art where once we begin to "read", the details impose an internal order on us — as we have seen in the texts and photos in The Corridor/My Mother's Album, and as we can see from narrative paintings, or from Roman Opalka's painting series: Opalka 1965/1-(infinity) or MC Escher's drawings, and as we can see in certain cathedrals where the stained-glass windows narrate stories.  This last example introduces a parallel to Three-Dimensional Literature even though I would not classify it as such.  In the event called the Stations of the Cross which takes place in Catholic churches, worshipers walk around the interior of the church along a path directed by the windows or sculptural tableaux which narrate (through image and text) different stages, or "stations", along the path of the death of Christ.  At each station they pray a portion of the rosary.  Although this event may utilize the strategies of installation, performance, and linear Three-Dimensional Literature, I would argue that it can not be accurately characterized as such because it is not Art (of which Three-Dimensional Literature always is).  I will not analyze these differences here, but I would begin by suggesting that the motives of Art and religion are profoundly different.  In the Stations of the Cross, the experience, as ritual, is the same every time, and the worshipers know it will be, and they want it that way.  The narrative is also the same every time as is what they come to know from it.  They wouldn't have it any other way.  The entire experience then exists primarily to reinforce the same point each and every time and not to challenge the participants with what they don't know and don't want.  In section 1.2.2 I will posit the theory that one of the roles of Art is to give people what they don't know and don't want.

By contrast, a piece by Ed and Nancy Kienholz can, at the same time, serve as both an example of Three-Dimensional Literature and as an example of how simultaneity can function literarily.  To make The Jesus Corner the Kienholzes' acquired a collection of Jesus paraphernalia from a man they knew nothing about named Roland Thurman who displayed it in his private storefront window in Spokane, Washington.  The Kienholz installation (technically speaking a "tableau") recreates the collection exactly as Thurman displayed it himself.  Although the receiver cannot physically enter their installation, it is still one as such since the objects have been installed as has the work of Art.  The entire work can be viewed at once (there are no hidden or other rooms which the receiver must travel into).  But these facts are not what constitute its simultaneity.  The order that the objects are arranged in is not narrative or linear.

What makes the installation literary or even narrative is the simultaneity of its presence as an accumulation.  The adjectives Robbe-Grillet talks about could not accomplish this.  Conceptually, there is a hidden room that must be explored:  that of the idiosyncratic and passionate sensibility that accumulated this collection.  The "literature" of The Jesus Corner is in the reconstruction of the story that the objects do not tell.  The presence of simultaneity, and the absence of linearity — what we see at once and what we don't see at all— constitutes the literary quality of the work, not a particular path that narrates a story from one object to another.  What we want to know from the work is the motivation behind the accumulation. The piece challenges us with those things that we don't know, and it gives us what we don't want:  uncertainty and ambiguity.  Although it may have been the case, we should be cautious in assuming that Thurman's collection was motivated by Christianity by the well-known fact that Kienholz was an atheist.  The motivation to accumulate and display is not always content-specific.  Sometimes it is motivated by motivation, and in this way I would agree with Rosetta Brooks who recognized that The Jesus Corner is not (or at least is no longer) a shrine to Jesus but "a shrine to the man who created it,"[Hopps, 190] the one behind the storefront that we are denied access to, the one whom we must construct in his absence, literarily.

Another example of a Kienholz installation (before he partnered with Nancy Reddin) demonstrates in different ways the new possibilities that a literature in three dimensions has to offer.  Although the receiver is physically forced to enter Barney's Beanery through only one door, once inside — as if one had entered any bar through the front door — the order one follows inside is relative to the receiver and not subject to linear controls.  The literary aspects of the environment come instead by way of observing the details simultaneously, collectively, and juxtaposing them against one another in different combinations across multiple axes.  The "aboutness" (which all works of art possess (see 1.1.3)) of this bar displays itself in many ways.  The metaphoric shift in the use of clocks for faces on the representations of people doing everyday things in an everyday place is enough to trigger literary interpretations and readings of the objects, the environment, the music, and the presence or lack of verisimilitude.  This freedom to construct one's own order, to "read" along one's own path is radically dissimilar to the strategy, described earlier, intentionally employed in Kabakov's The Corridor/My Mother's Album.  At the same time, what allows us to call them both works of Three-Dimensional Literature is not the presence of a rigorous linearity, since clearly one has this and the other does not.  It is instead the literary qualities evident in the construction and through the reception of the works.  If these works are literary, it is because objects and space are combined and arranged in much the same way as words are semantically (and not physically on a page).

With this rudimentary introduction to two methods, two artists, and a few works which demonstrate how certain installations can be works of Three-Dimensional Literature, I will oppose the examples of Kabakov and Kienholz with two examples of installations that do not proceed with literary concerns.  Jessica Stockholder's installations and the complexity of her structures aim more directly at three-dimensional abstract painting than literature.  For example, Your Skin in this Weather Bourne Eye-Threads and Swollen Perfume, does not beg the viewer to follow paths, either physical ones or narrative ones, even though paths exist in the work (in the same way that the splatter lines in Pollock's Autumn Rhythm do not ask the viewer to follow them even though this can be done).  Like a painting, Stockholder's installation begs the viewer to view it from a distance and examine the elements of space, color and form simultaneously.  One can then approach the work as one would to examine the brushstrokes of Autumn Rhythm and then step back again to take a different view of its simultaneity.  This back and forth process of viewing and reading is not a literary type of reading but one more akin to visual analysis.  The semantic realities of the materials and objects — the white shirts, the yellow extension cords, etc. — are less significant than their forms, shapes, and colors.  Ultimately, the spatial or three-dimensional relationships exist as metaphors for the three-dimensional illusion created in the figure-ground relationship of two-dimensional abstract painting (which, interestingly, is the reverse in representational paintings where the two-dimensional representations act as metaphors for the figure-ground relationships of a still life or a landscape).  Without question, Stockholder has pushed the boundaries of collage far beyond Stella's 2.7 dimensions by forming a three-dimensional painting, but Literature is not her concern.

Another installation artist whose concerns are other than literary is Jason Rhoades.  In Uno Momento/The Theater in my Dick objects like those in a stereotypical male's garage are accumulated and scattered around the room in a quasi-order.  The accumulation is general and random and the objects are types, impersonal, and store-bought, more akin to a messy Wal-Mart than to a particular man's garage.  One object does not need to be next to another and there is no personal or literary intentionality or sensibility behind the organization.  Nothing guides the viewer to ask questions such as "Who does this tool belong to?"  While the "my" in the title may suggest a character who has constructed the space, this "character" resembles more closely the stereotype of "maleness".  (This is clearly not a stereotypical female's garage).  The "character" then is Everyman, or, more accurately, Nobody, since the stereotype is intentionally overplayed and over-stylized.  If we are to consider this a "character" at all, like those in morality plays, (which the work doesn't require that we do) then we have to recognize that the character is a construction of male identity rather than a construction of the identity of a particular male.  It is therefore more sociological than literary.

Kabakov's work The Communal Kitchen, like Rhoades' work, is an accumulation — as is Stockholder's and the Kienholzes' — and can be viewed simultaneously as such, but they are radically different.  In The Communal Kitchen when a cup is nailed to a board painted blue, it is very specifically that cup, and it is nailed for a specific reason, and the blue is specific and meaningful in itself.  Narratively speaking, someone has nailed the cup there and has written above it, "Whose cup is this?"  Unlike Rhoades' Nobody, the men (and they are all men) in Kabakov's installations are always specific individuals with idiosyncratic methods.  The "who" is always important.  Similarly, in The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away the viewer is immediately directed and inclined to piece together the story of this man and these objects.  An extreme sensibility of ordering, classifying, and personalizing is evident in the rooms of Kabakov's men, just as it is in the Kienholzes' The Jesus Corner.  Their objects are personal, found, worn, and hand-remade.  The objects in The Jesus Corner or in The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away are wholly dissimilar from those in Stockholder’s and Rhoades’ installations which appear as if they came straight from the store to the museum.  Theirs do not represent themselves but instead stand as types, examples, or simply forms.  They are reduced in the sense that Robbe-Grillet used the term.  They display their use values rather than their prior use.  In Kabakov's and the Kienholzes' installations objects are specifically, uniquely, irreplaceably, themselves.

Considering the environment, in Rhoades' "partial" installation, the garage is missing, but all of the objects from the garage are present.  In Kabakov's Total installation, the viewer is in the very room of The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away.  Stockholder's three-dimensional painting is clearly in a museum, but the moment the viewer steps into Barney's Beanery, s/he has left the museum and entered a "bar".  Being inside an installation by Kabakov or Kienholz is intentionally like being inside a book.  One leaves one's own living room or museum space and willfully enters the environment of the work of Literature temporarily suspending one's disbelief in order to understand the benefits of the experience. 

While I am more willing to call Stockholder's installations Three-Dimensional Abstract Paintings than Three-Dimensional Literature, and although I am not quite ready to go so far as to say that Rhoades' installation is not an example of Three-Dimensional Literature, I will say, emphatically, that many of Kabakov's and the Kienholzes' installations are works of Three-Dimensional Literature.  This said, Three-Dimensional Literature can exist to varying degrees and it seems less productive to draw lines in the sand between what is and what is not Three-Dimensional Literature, but instead more useful to suggest which works better exemplify the category.  I will return to this project in Part 2.  For now, I will emphasize that the presence of a linear narrative and character construction are not requirements for calling a work Literature.  There are many factors which constitute a work as literary.  In the sections that follow, I will explore many of these factors by looking at various philosophical attempts at defining Literature.  The examples presented here can serve to ground the reader as we proceed through the next sections which will distinguish Three-Dimensional Literature from its linguistic, or two-dimensional, counterpart.

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Three-Dimensional Literature; The Center for Three-Dimensional Literature; and 3Dlit.org ©David Colosi, 1996-2010.  All artists and writers retain copyrights to their own works.

Last Updated: Monday, February 8, 2010