JACOB WREN
The Rusty Toque | Poetry | Issue 3 | October 12, 2012
ONE IS FREQUENTLY MISUNDERSTOODFundamental to the ontology of making art is the fact one is frequently
misunderstood. /// But how misunderstood should one allow oneself to be? /// Comedy should not be mistaken for bitterness, yet mostly that is the well from which it springs. /// If one is understood too much it might also feel like a misunderstanding. /// Like an x-ray that sees us as we really are (by seeing straight through us.) /// Critical analysis can be like that x-ray, what it sees is not precisely what is there, both more and less. /// X-ray as a kind of misunderstanding, looking too specifically as a way of mis-seeing. /// But these are not the misunderstandings I meant. /// Anything can be said to concern anything. /// It is not assumed that the artist accurately knows what he or she means. /// There is always the desire to find the meaning behind the intention. /// The advertiser knows the exact intention of his or her work, but the artist does not. /// Yet the artist has an excess of intention. /// Within the very nature of this excess there is a gap, and it is this gap that interpretation seeks to fill. /// It is like a person where you wonder if you really get them, if there is in fact more to get, what they are holding back. /// They are a person but you are an x-ray. /// As if wandering through an airport, the person must submit. /// The artist is holding something back, cannot give you everything, but you will uncover the secret. /// The secret is that the artist cannot possibly know everything his or her work is doing in the world. /// (Or failing to do.) /// People are constantly telling me how great I am. /// Meanwhile, I am dying of loneliness. 
Some people like art and others like sport / some people like making art while
others prefer looking at art and some people like playing sports while others prefer watching sports / some people like both making and looking at art while others like both playing and watching sports / some people like making art and watching sports while others prefer playing sports and looking at art / some people like looking at art and watching sports while others prefer making art and playing sports / some people treat art as if it were a sport, with clear winners and losers, while others play sports purely for the pleasure, and consider who wins or loses irrelevant / some people like art about art while others prefer art that works treacherously to speak clearly of things outside itself, and though arguably any given sport is always predominantly about itself, there is also a tendency to take what happens on the playing field and use it analogously towards a greater understanding of daily life and/or the world / some people don’t like art and use their love of sports as a clear signifier to differentiate themselves from the kind of person who likes art while other people who like art might do something similar, only the other way around / some people who like both art and sports might use this fact as evidence that they are well-rounded / but I suspect there are very few people alive who have never considered taking even a slight interest in either one or the other / nonetheless, there are always a few. 
Evil is just bad choices vehemently pursued like a course in doing the right thing where they teach you: think of the wrong thing than do the opposite but forget to teach you to do the opposite there are pains you can escape and pains that will pursue you crimes that change your life and crimes that go unnoticed when will the wrongs be set right? right after the next wrong goes terribly wrong I can be generous, but I can also be small-minded and petty does this make me like everyone else? 
Performing, tradition and politics
To feel like a trained performing monkey is normal enough in my profession if one can say that it’s normal to feel when bad ideas become traditions we call it modernity in this time when traditions barely last if art is a mirror to society, of politics than it is no wonder all this art sucks there is the painful sucking and the pleasurable kind why not both? the constant search for a third way, as every third is folded back into the second or first, into one trivial substance too tired to fight, the exhaustion keeps fighting without us a discussion needs neither a beginning nor end an aphorism requires little more than brevity 
It feels like being a loser
everything, especially writing this poem everything the same as nothing (if you want something you can’t have, and want it all the time, it’s equally dissatisfying as wanting it never) this feeling of being a loser buys into a set of social values I am completely against but I feel it, the feelings we feel reject and feel again and accept, reject and feel again with everything I am asked to do, I ask myself: do I have a choice? in what way do I have a choice? I see the winners, the bullies the assholes, and reject them wondering if they are happier and see myself, reject myself too the world, what is the world apart from this world we have created it is many, many things it is everything and we so rarely see it it is everything, at least for a few more hours this feeling of being a loser of everything, much like the many the things already lost 
Explanations are metaphors we understand through approximation experience short-circuits understanding and we re-establish perspective through analogy if one thing, or experience, is not like another, what then is it like? it is like itself but this explains nothing we might say it is a question of language, of wanting to explain of wanting to understand it is a question of desire when you want you want to know what and why why and what happens next requiring explanations with no explanations there is nothing therefore metaphors are the engines of our heart or the opposite an empty heart can only be filled therefore metaphors are the rusty armor that paralyze experience I’ve never used the word heart in a poem before and I’m realizing now it is no coincidence it appears among concerns of explanation and metaphor the technical heart pumps blood but our own blood is not what we crave |
JACOB WREN is a writer and maker of eccentric performances. His books include: Unrehearsed Beauty, Families Are Formed Through Copulation, and Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed. As co-artistic director of Montreal-based interdisciplinary group PME-ART, he has co-created: En francais comme en anglais, it's easy to criticize, Unrehearsed Beauty / Le genie des autres, La famille se cree en copulant, and the ongoing HOSPITALITE / HOSPITALITY series which includes Individualism Was A Mistake and The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information. In 2007 he was invited by Sophiensaele (Berlin) to adapt and direct Wolfgang Koeppen's 1954 novel Der Tod in Rom and in 2008 he was commissioned by Campo (Ghent) to collaborate with Pieter De Buysser on An Anthology of Optimism. He travels internationally with alarming frequency and frequently writes about contemporary art.
