1-Year Plan
Prospect: Year 1
Horizon Work
What are the possibilities and limits of one's acts? I am setting out to ask this as poet and critic caught in the middle of things, in a duration between long-since beginning and what is not yet comprehensible as an end. In more prosaic terms, I have been planning over the past year to develop a writing project that would take place in time, on a regular basis, and that would publish its findings on the internet. The writing produced would be a record of the time in which it was written, and would act on and change that time—if only as a matter of understanding. This writing would hope to change itself, as writing, within the time it was written. I wanted to specify a duration for the writing of one year, and a frequency of roughly one text per week. If all goes well, at the end of the year there will be an index of about fifty texts, with commentary and links.
In the early 1990s, I wrote frequently for West Coast arts publications with a similar frequency (though using a different technology, and in a different mode of production). In the middle of everything else that was going on, I would be asked to look at a show and turn in a piece of writing—1000 words and up—by a given deadline. The work was edited, published in Artweek, and now can be seen as an index to the time in which it was written. The first Iraq War was taking place: in the middle of writing on art, I was able to record the changing contexts of the war and the overwhelming refusal of it in the literary and arts communities. Now, in the middle of the second Iraq War, it seems to me that writing about poetry and art offers an chance to delineate the changing contexts of the war—and our rejection of it—in and among our cultural projects.
It is now near the end of September 2004, and my project is still under construction. That sense of belatedness must be nearly original with my work; I remember having felt it strongly at the outset. This project thus begins as a construction of belatedness toward a future in which—what can be inferred? As an activity, it will begin to make sense of itself, in itself and as a vehicle for action. Its mode of presentation has not yet been decided—the one in which I am now writing can only be seen as provisional. Deciding on the mode of presentation, then, will be a crucial moment of the work in its first stages of construction. All decisions about mode and format will be a part of specifying the kind of writing it can be, its possibilities and limits for agency and response. I imagine a flexible site in which texts and comments can be continually uploaded, responded to, and linked to other projects. But as I have not yet found the best format for doing so, the current version—as handmade as it may seem—must stand as a point of departure.
I am not merely asking, What are the possibilities and limits of one's art? I want to continually access the structure in which one's art and criticism find their way with others, or meet their limits in resistance. Such limits must be encountered as the ground for the work itself—it is of crucial importance to access their structure, to try to envisage a kind of work that would change them.
This is horizon work, then—work on the horizon of our acts. "Go, little act—" and then, where do we find ourselves, in terms of its proper aim, response, limit, even crisis? It is toward the crisis of the act that this work of writing and engagement is directed.