i never knew what time it was

the noise of time

elly and i got persuaded by a couple of young artists teaching there to spend a week in residence with the art department at the university of colorado at boulder boulder is an ungainly little town perched awkwardly on the continental divide with little to recommend it but a good bookstore a pleasant university and a magnificent sky and nothing would have persuaded me to spend a week there except the rare chance to perform back to back with eleanor on the same program aside from a small seminar and some meetings with students we didnt have too much to do before the performances and we spent a lot of time reading but i ran out of books so i had to resort to the bookstore where i stumbled on osip mandelstams memoir the noise of time i suppose most people know that when i come to a place i have a bit of difficulty trying to say precisely what im going to be doing so i dont start with large introductions but as usual ive got a number of things on my mind when i go places and i think about them out loud in public and because what im doing is entertaining ideas not people im quite happy for people to feel free to get up and leave whenever they stop finding this entertaining and thats how i know im a poet not an entertainer though on several occasions people have compared 61 me to entertainers like lenny bruce but thats not what im like im not very much like lenny bruce if im an entertainer at all i admire lenny bruce and have great respect for what he did but lenny bruce worked in clubs where he had to take on drunks and coax and coerce them into thinking about something more than getting laid while he kept them from getting out of the chair and hitting him or running away the difficulty is that hes there in that space where hes got to be entertaining even when he doesnt want to be in my case i always imagine i should put a sign over the door that reads abandon all hope ye who enter here so that we could begin in a reasonable conversational way now recently ive been in a kind of conversation with a number of young artists and what weve been trying to figure out is what is a good way to think and talk about art and it seems that art has recently been accused of having ideas i know theres also a large contingent of people for whom art has no relation to ideas and exists only to express emotions but that idea is so stupid its hardly worth thinking about at all at the same time there are very serious and intelligent people who see an artwork as a container for ideas something like a suitcase or a blackboard on which the artist has inscribed in a more or less idiosyncratic script a message they could read out once theyve deciphered the handwriting so they study the handwriting and when they think theyve got it figured out they declare that this artwork says this and thinks that and they arrive at this notion because they believe that artists as relatively intelligent people having intentions and opinions declare them in their artworks like a traveler passing through customs i realized id never thought about artworks this way and i wondered whether or not it was at all reasonable to think so and the noise of time 62 around this time i happened to read something that made me think of this idea again id picked up a copy of the nation in the bathroom we keep our copies of the nation in the bathroom its a magazine we like to read when were otherwise occupied because it has amusing political conversation though its otherwise totally absurd but it also has one intelligent person who writes about art a very cultivated and eloquent writer most of their other reviewers are worthless their film reviewer is silly their literary reviewers are ridiculous but they have an art writer named arthur danto who is an educated and sympathetic critic of contemporary art and he was writing a commentary on an exhibition by robert morris his retrospective at the guggenheim morris is an old friend of mine and as a...