Literature
Is 10:04 Art Writing? What is Art Writing? 10:04 begins with moneytalk. Ben Lerner – the autofictional Ben Lerner – discusses with his agent the “six figure deal” she has negotiated for him on the strength of his debut novel and a story he’s had published in The New Yorker. She asks him what he’ll write, and he tells her he’ll write the book you’re now reading. 10:04 is full of metatexts and puzzles; the second chapter is, reprinted in full, the story that helped secure financing for the book. Here though, I’d like to look at the ways in which Lerner harnesses metatextuality to explore contemporary art. The narrative of Lerner’s debut novel Leaving the Atocha Station, is interspersed with explorations of writing and art practice that interrupt and recontextualise the story. While, in 10:04, Lerner certainly dives into esoteric questions of reality-building, he retains a focus on the concrete means by which his writing, like any artform, is facilitated. Where the story of Atocha was punctuated by discussions of poetry and classical art, 10:04 circles back to various contemporary artworks Lerner encounters in New York and Texas. He watches Christian Marclay’s The Clock at a local cinema, attends the “Institute of Totalled Art”, modelled off Elka Krajewska’s Salvage Art Institute, and visits the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Lerner was in Marfa on a Lannan Foundation residency, and this was one of several means by which he managed to afford to write the book you’re reading about him writing; those other “means” include a teaching job and the six-figure advance. The “Institute of Totalled Art” is a particular exercise in art-financing-as-art, as it consists of damaged artworks that have been removed, by insurance companies, from the art market, but are being redisplayed in gallery format by Lerner’s (fictional?) girlfriend. In the acknowledgements section, Lerner credits Krajewska, and even Daniel Zalewski’s essay on The Clock, from which Lerner borrowed details of things he didn’t get the chance to see; he notes that he’s taken his epigraph from a book by Giorgio Agamben, and that the self-published pamphlet he cowrote with “Roberto” and reprinted in 10:04 is based on a book he wrote with Elias Garcia; he tells us that, as well as The New Yorker story being a reprint, two other sections of the book had previously appeared in The Paris Review; the poem he wrote in Marfa, and which he includes and discusses in the novel, was published in a poetry journal. With so much of the book being something other than “original” content, we start to wonder what our expectations for a book are. Is it okay if everything in this novel is available elsewhere? And if not, how much “new” material is necessary? And given that pre-releasing sections of the book was the means by which Lerner funded writing it, do our expectations for originality exclude from the publishing market authors who are not reliant on their writing for an income? If you’ll allow me to speak generally about a topic I don’t know very well, I’d like to make this observation: one of the dominant preoccupations of contemporary art is with interrogating the means by which art is made and monetised; this focus seems to have started with the process-oriented conceptual artists of the twentieth century’s latter half. A renewed focus on the means of production has led to some very self-reflexive art that foregrounds the (im)materiality of artworks, and reconsiders the means by which art and literature is disseminated, commodified, and consumed. Called into question, too, is the notion of the “sole author” (to whom copyright reverts), which is an inheritance from Victorian London’s publishing and legal practices. While Lerner’s name is the one on the cover, therefore, and while he is paid the book’s royalties, his far-reaching acknowledgements section calls into question the extent to which the book is “his”.
Image Credit: MusikAnimal
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