paul chan against the tyranny of use value

Paul Chan: against the tyranny of use value

In a wonderful conversation between Paul Chan and the psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips in the exhibition catalogue, Phillips says that quotation:

"…is an opportunity to have a commonwealth of things, rather than an inside. They're in circulation, these quotes, and we can use them and they may be our best way of speaking. If we drop the pressure to be original and new, we're then free to use the cultural repertoire in a completely different way. I like the thing Cocteau said, that originality is trying to be like everyone else and failing."

Chan too is a treasure trove of quotes. So here goes, raw and random, not a conversation here, just some amazing thinking:

Adam Phillips: John Ashbery once said, the worse your art is, the easier it is to talk about…

Paul Chan: …I think they [people who talk to him] don't know that they're uncomfortable talking about art. And I think they're uncomfortable because there's no quick and easy and right solution to it. Perhaps, once upon a time, we thought art was the divine, high culture. We don't know what it is now.



AP: …it's terrible to live in a world where art becomes a kind of fetishised, thin religion.

PC: …there's a strange tyranny of use value … I think of that beautiful line by Adorno, who wrote that art is like weeping without tears. You could adapt that and say: the art market is a parody without laughter.

AP: …You talk in one interview … about "the cheap thrill of understanding". It's striking that when people write about your work, they end up merely describing it … We've been educated into the myth of understanding, as though understanding is the object of desire. But what do you do if you don't understand?

PC: …There's that beautiful quote from Randell Jarrell, who said, "If I can think of it, it's not what I want."

AP: There's a letter that Keats writes, where he talks about not liking poetry that has a palpable design on the reader. I often feel that some so-called artists are too knowing; they have a real intention and they want to do something to you and they think they know what that is.



PC: …Waiting for Godot had been playing in Paris for a year and a half and really going nowhere, but finally, for some reason it picked up and people loved it. A reporter asked Beckett, "What's it like to be a successful playwright?" Beckett replied: "I'm afraid the success comes form a complete misunderstanding of my work."

AP: John Ashbery said, "If you talk to other people, eventually they lose interest. But if you start talking to yourself, they want to listen in."