The WreckIgnitions Read. Stray strugglingly playful thoughts

Fri Apr 8 10:05:08 CDT 2011

Yeahp, thanks...It's Wyatt!

yes, not copies but just like the work of older masters....

So, for an artwork to be Art, must it---in our common understanding---not be 
somehow new; have some originality?
As in the Borges story of someone reconceiving Don Quixote w/o knowing the 
original--------

it isn't a literary work of art in the 20th Century...it was in the 16th......

and, to pick up on your acutely focussed insight into ambiguity--here and in 
tone remarks and more, I'm sure---

Is Gaddis working out the resonance, akin again to Pynchon, that if the modern 
world is false--decadent---then
art that matters must recover/recognize older lost values? 

________________________________
From: Erik T. Burns <eburns at gmail.com>
To: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>; pov at ix.netcom.com
Sent: Fri, April 8, 2011 10:31:12 AM
Subject: Re: The WreckIgnitions Read. Stray strugglingly playful thoughts

first off, it's Wyatt, not Gwyon, who is the artist. 
but that was a Freudian slip, I'm sure, like mine about the Town Carpenter

more importantly, I think the question of WHY Wyatt paints forgeries is the real 
point of The Recognitions -- or at least of Wyatt's story therein. It is not a 
question that is resolved in any satisfying way, to my mind. Which is OK, too. 
It's ambiguous. 

But here's a shot: Wyatt has lost so much throughout his life that he has become 
empty, a vehicle; he honestly believes he is a kind of antenna for the original 
artists to produce "their" work today. "...I am lived." (p262). This confuses 
Recktall Brown because he thinks people only do things for money; it confuses 
Basil Valentine too, because he thinks a person with the talents of Wyatt should 
be producing his own "real" art. But Wyatt has lost that too -- the only 
originals we know of are the Paris paintings, rejected by the critic he failed 
to bribe, and burned in a warehouse fire. The only surviving original is of 
Camilla; thematically his first, and most crucial, loss. Her earrings make it 
into other forgeries, as does Esme's face. 

It's important to stress that what Wyatt does is not copying; he creates new 
paintings that are taken as new discoveries of work by established artists. He 
_is_ Hubert van Eyck, a person who may not have existed, and may not have 
painted anything. 

Arguably, Wyatt's true art is the damage. (see the exchange with Valentine on 
p333 - "But the damage? It isn't as though I'd done that. ... The damage, you 
know, is ... happens."

a counterweight to all this? Wyatt keeps evidence that he is the creator of the 
work, a way to prove provenance and denounce the forgeries. to me, this just 
proves he's not entirely insane; indeed, just a man. 

On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 11:50 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

And furthermore.......in the decade after this novel is published, Andy Warhol
>is going to
>go down in cultural history by copying, enlarged and silk-screen heightened
>Reality
>(of soup cans, etc.)
>(and we can be assured andy never read---or had read to him---the Recognitons)
>
>Everything was so fake in America then that this was the only way art could see
>us out
>(of fakery)?
>
>
>----- Original Message ----
>From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
>To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Cc: pov at ix.netcom.com
>Sent: Thu, April 7, 2011 6:05:35 PM
>Subject: The WreckIgnitions Read. Stray strugglingly playful thoughts
>
>2 parter here:
>OK. Yesterday I wrote some stuff linking that self-confirming ad hominem "joke"
>to
>
>the kind of self-confirming joke that we know as Catch-22 (as well as the
>Ontological
>
>Argument, which no one called me a genius for...)....
>
>Anyway, help me out here as Columbo is always saying. Gwyon, after giving up
>attempting
>any 'original' art, now does loving, exact copies of the Flemish masters for a
>living...
>
>Now, isn't that akin to a Catch--22 joke? To an ad hominem "argument"?......
>Art in America then, anytime, is only seen as art when it was confirmed by
>history
>as Art...and real Art is like the proverbial tree falling in the forest with no
>one to hear it?.......
>
>
>Part 2....writers/artists have to a) have something to say b) find their
>voice/style....and
>they are One in the best..............
>
>So, Gaddis wants to write serious fiction. Knowing, say, melville's American
>career and others,
>he tries writing.......Let's say: HE feels it falls in the forest in
>silence.......So, he has this brilliant
>self-whatever idea..........All that I could write and make a living at would 
be
>
>....................
>dead realism..........................................
>
>So, I'll push realism to Gothic excess, to over-the-top irrealism with
>overwhelming copies (allusions) from the world
>of reality....I'll do a novel about, at one level, the faked reality of
>unoriginal writers. My originality......
>
>
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