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Partridge Boswell, singer/lyricist of the musical group The Cows, produces live music, theater, dance and spoken word performances as director of Lebanon Opera House in Lebanon, New Hampshire. His poems have recently appeared in Rattle, The MacGuffin, Main Street Rag and New Delta Review. |
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Published Spring 2006
 
Found
The sculptor explains what we're looking at
is actually a piece of art. (side view of a video
monitor) You'll see what I mean when I show you
the front. (click) There, burnt into the screen's pixels,
ghosts the faint afterimage of a hallway or lobby
like any you might find in a hotel or condominium—
blank walls, glass doors, two-toned diamond carpet.
Is it turned off? one woman wants to know. Yes,
he repeats, clicking back to the previous slide,
pointing out the exempt cathode tube, the flaccid
plug. What medium is it? one artist wisecracks.
We stare some more at the monitor's screen
the way its camera stared at the same dull scene
for fifteen years, and listen to the sculptor describe
in technical terms how the rendering mimics
a palimpsest or early daguerreotype in its expression,
trying to convince us what he found in a sidewalk
dumpster is a seminal creation, and not a fluke
of technology headed for a landfill on Staten Island.
Would his case be stronger if we detected
the spectral movements of residents who lived
there, the quotidian contrails of their transitory
to's and fro's? Or if he'd painted figures on the glass,
say, a doorman, an old woman and her Pekinese?
Would we then see art, not as something worth salvaging
but as our salvation? (And why are we spending more
time on this one slide than all his others combined?)
Or would it be better—for the same reason
the Giro d'Italia isn't staged on bike paths and
real farmers slaughter and eat their own animals—
if he'd kept his dirty little discovery to himself?
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MR BOOKS
Critics at Work
ed. Jeffrey J. Williams.
Critics at Work offers a guided tour through the central, sometimes confusing and frequently controversial developments in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. The tour guides, however, are not distant observers but have been primary participants in those developments, and they report on theory, cultural studies, the literary canon, the recent focus on race, sexuality, and other identities, the state of the univerisity, and the role of the intellectual. Throughout, they consider the not always easy negotiation of politics and culture.
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