Fork by Charles Simic // 1971
This strange thing must have crept
Right out of hell.
It resembles a bird’s foot
Worn around the cannibal’s neck
-
As you hold it in your hand,
As you stab with it into a piece of meat,
It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
Its head which like your fist
Is large, bald, beakless and blind
Missing by Rita Dove // 1995
I am the daughter who went out with the girls,
never checked in and nothing marked my “last
known whereabouts,” not a single glistening petal.
Horror is partial; it keeps you going. A lost
child is a fact hardening around its absence,
a knot in the breast purring Touch, and I will
come true. I was “returned,” I watched her
watch as I babbled It could have been worse …
Who can tell
what penetrates? Pity is the brutal
discipline. Now I understand she can never
die, just as nothing can bring me back -
I am the one who comes and goes
I am the footfall that hovers
Extracts of Allen Ruppersberg’s Fifty Helpful Hints on the Art of the Everyday // 1985
General
The individual search for the secret of life and death. That is the inspiration and the key.
The reality of impressions and the impression of reality.
The ordinary event leads to the beauty and understanding of the world.
Start out and go in.
Each work is singular, unique and resists any stylistic or linear analysis. Each work is one of a kind.
Personal, eccentric, peculiar, quirky, idiosyncratic, queer.
The presentation of a real thing.
The ordinary and the rare. their interconnectedness and interchangeability.
There is a quotidian sense of loss and tragedy.
Collect, accumulate, gather, preserve, examine, catalogue, read, look, study, research, change, organize, file, cross-reference, number, assemble, categorize, classify, and conserve the ephemeral.
Art should make use of common methods and materials so there is little difference between the talk and the talked about […]
A sort of journalist reporting on the common, observable world.
Suicide is often the subject because it is a representative example of the ultimate moment of mystery. The last private thought.
Look for narrative of any kind. Anti-narrative, non-narrative, para-narrative, semi-narrative, quasi-narrative, bad-narrative.
Use everything.
The artist is a mysterious entertainer.
