Introduction to the Gallery
The classic writer is not like a television cook showing you how to mix mustard and balsamic vinegar. She is like a chef whose work is presented to you at table but whose labor you are never allowed to see, a labor the chef certainly does not expect you to share. There are no salt and pepper shakers on the table.
——Thomas and Turner, Clear and Simple as the Truth
The job of the classic writer, Thomas and Turner tell us in their book Clear and Simple as the Truth, is to keep the writing process hidden: all the signs of revision, of backtracking, of doubt (existential and non), are erased from the final product. The purpose of the Introduction, on the other hand, is to bring some of that back out into the open, to knock down the walls between the kitchen and the floor of the restaurant, so to speak. It’s to put the main cooking station right there in the middle of the restaurant for all to see. However, because I manage to do quite a bit of this in my analyses, I’m going to keep this Introduction relatively short. Just to make things even shorter and easier, I’ll even use headings.
The Found Object
The objet trouvé is that which is found, ready-made, for the artist’s taking. They are mundane objects such as urinals, bicycle wheels, combs, bits of rubber or plastic, and just about anything and everything that has no right to be called art. Ready-mades, such as those “produced” by Marcel Duchamp, are indeed considered art objects, or at the very least objects of anti-art, which for postmodern art critics seems to amount to basically the same thing. The ready-made is only a piece of art insofar as it is re-contextualized by the artist—by receiving the artist’s imprimatur, for instance—and thus transformed or elevated to the status of the piece of art.
While the objects that you will find featured in this collection may seem to lend themselves well to artistic treatment, they weren’t always that way for the author. The painting of a nautilus, a nautilus shell, a cello—all of these were parts of my childhood. Objects that were ready at hand, objects that, in no time at all, became commonplace. They are objects that I have found, that I have stumbled upon as an adult, and which have only now struck me as being capable of being re-contextualized as pieces of art. What I found as I began writing about them was the irresistible pull of the memories I had associated with them: the nautilus, an animal my father loved, made me think about my relationship with my father, who recently passed away. This in turn made me think about a painting he gave me, along with a nautilus shell, for my sixth birthday, and how these objects came to define my childhood room. The thing is, objects are never just objects. They always do something for us. As Sherry Turkle claims in Evocative Objects, objects are necessary parts of our thought lives:
We find it familiar to consider objects as useful or aesthetic, as necessities or vain indulgences. We are on less familiar ground when we consider objects as companions to our emotional lives or as provocations to thought. The notion of evocative objects brings together these two less familiar ideas, underscoring the inseparability of thought and feeling in our relationship to things. We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with.
“We think with the objects we love; we love with the objects we think with.” And often, the most fundamental emotions available to us—love and grief—are mediated through objects. So both the evocative object and the found object got me thinking about style.
The Found Style
Prose styles—or practicing with different prose styles—are a lot like these objects. We stumble across them, ready-made, ready to be transformed into the work of art. Without substance, style is meaningless—it’s a glass of milk, except it’s missing all the milk. Styles are things we try on, that we can discard, that we can put away in the closet and pick back up again, when the sun has died down. But styles are also evocative objects: once you write for long enough, you realize that style and substance, as well as style and thought, are entirely interdependent. Styles are as much things we think as things we think through and with. Rather than just a neutral container for thought, style shapes thought and limits what can be thought. This becomes immediately evident when we compare the different epistemological stands of styles. In classical style, truth is as knowable as it is universal, but in most contemporary academic prose—particularly work by theorists and philosophers—the truth is fragmented, messy, complicated. In fact, it’s hard to imagine any contemporary theorist who doesn’t think they are a reincarnation of Descartes seriously using the classic style in a philosophical work. Style is never simply a matter of containing thought; in a very tangible sense, it is thought itself
The Found Project
This Studio Gallery, then, will be a collection of four hand-crafted styles, each followed by an analysis of its stylistic and rhetorical moves. There are pieces on low, middle, and high style, and one piece in the inimitable classic style. My hope for this project is that I can do justice to both the objects I’ve found and to the styles I’ve used to describe them, and that both style and substance are joined together in the same thought.