Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play

by Jennifer De Vere Brody
Duke University Press, Durham & London, 2008
221 pp., illus. Trade, $45.00; paper, £11.99
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4218-2; ISBN: 978-0-8223-4235-9.


Reviewed by Margarete Jahrmann
University of Arts and Design Zurich, Switzerland

margarete.jahrmann@zhdk.ch



DeVere Brody, herself a scholar in English Literature studies, African American Studies and Professor in Performance Theory succeeds in bridging the gap between a range of disciplines. Her sophisticated and diverting links in Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play opens up writing not only as both performance and notation (as an instructional element concerning the dramaturgical aspects of a text) but also the political effects of the use of hyphenation as an element of arts. The surprising and promising aspect of the study makes readers aware of the very fact that politics are found exactly inside the l’art pour l’art conception of punctuation marks. Once acquired as possible direction of a theory, this radical “insight view” invokes an increasingly beautiful new sight on activism in the art of play.

The trajectory of Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play appears to be very readable and convincing. A smart disposition of a Pre/Script, chapters on points, hyphenations, queer quotation marks, dots, ellipses, hyphens, semicolons, colons, and exclamation points slowly draws the reader into an endless image of the way, in which punctuation performs. It argues that if gesture can be decoded in relation to punctuation, then it must be seen as a mark of body politics. Consequently, it follows that the dominant history of technology reciprocally informs typographic ethnocentricity.

“Hyphen-Nations” in DeVere’s sense always perform, link or divide, and can express a specific case as a paradigm of globalisation theory. Saskia Sassen’s (Sassen, 2001) reading of sovereignty and territory as space of friction is marked by the hyphen (p. 87) between assimilation and difference. The author reminds us, that Roosevelt prepared the way for imperial one-world democracy already in 1915 with the claim that: “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism”. It is polemics like this lead to George W. Bush’s fear that America may become “Balkanized” (p. 93). DeVere then cites a problematic New York Times discussion of Barack Obama as metaphor, in which all ingredients can melt until blended into an uncomplicated pure non-hyphenated form.

The book opens with plays of words on punctuations. Reading the book, one can imagine she would call her intervention “Punctuations” of punctuations, to punt a point on punctuation signs, their inherent meanings, use and politics. “Joy in repetition”, as she quotes the artist formerly and again known as Prince (p. 67) opens the eye towards an experimental interrogation of the body politics of notation marks, full of explicit scholarship. Tautological repetitions are a formal trope to be found throughout the complete book, from the very first page, on which she neglects to follow the line of literature studies, in which prescriptive „rules rule“ and admits to taking the imputed risk to “err with the errant”. In examples, such as this the study, encourages the artistic representation of punctuation marks in writing and play on stage. Her interest in Post Colonial studies opens another interpretation of the excessive meaning of punctuations, which is astonishing, even in the slightest black point, it seems, the blueness of being black (p. 69) becomes evident.

According to DeVere’s interpretation, punctuation signs such as the ellipsis mark both, presence and absence, and as such appear more “…ludic than lucid” (p. 80). Ellipses and their different use and name - “suspension point” in colonial education and in British empire - provides one very clear example of the study, which is more than the pure interpretation of punctuation as another kind of dance notation. In such moments, both the politics and poetics of the representation in signs unfold. The book’s argumentation follow typographic experiments, from the artist Richard Artschwager, a close friend of the author, to the Adbusters graphic tradition to bring “pic + text” into one big narrative (p. 24). Following this idea the chapters, are called points, performative “think pieces” on a peripatetic intellectual journey (page 5, For(e)thought). The first “point” DeVere presents with the late 60’s Polka-dot body paint performances of the rarely discussed Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who became recognized for her political performance art. Body art that reproduces writing on living surfaces is discussed as “spotty evidence” of an explicit anti-war and pro-sex strain in the arts. The appreciation of toys, kitsch and vernacular objects appearing in the time and genre of Pop-Art is satirized in Kusawa’s obsession on polka dots, as such an ornament of feminized, oversexualized frivolity. Still significant for political art proper, this reader was grateful to be introduced to such elements of efficacy, almost forgotten in the 21st century’s understanding of typefaces as element of capitalist public relations, in which The Medium is the Massage. A comic sense of play is communicated in typewritten press releases for a series of naked events; for example demonstrations of a naked troupe of dancers and actors gluing dots on businessmen in front of the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street (p. 56) and other urban spaces. The mobile-gadgetry literate reader might be reminded of the innocent appearance of contemporary Flashmobs, which unlike the historic activist naked performances lack political intention (Jenkins, 2006).

Being-as-Playing-a-Role in “queer quotation marks” titillates the literal interpretation of how to dance written language. Spoken and danced acts mirror the relation of “signifier and signified” (p. 123). Although one should stress the fact, that relevant questions of authorship and body-property are addressed, as for example in a passing remark on the artist Orlan (p. 127) as “auteur” of her surgery performances, in which, nevertheless, a surgeon executed the operation, but on her flesh as material there is the beginning of an almost forgotten discourse on property rights on the body. This problem reaches into such contemporary domains, as the production of videogames as Grand Theft Auto, which feature motion capture technologies. In this case an evident disjuncture between body and movement arises, when the dancer who serves as model for the capturing, no more owns the “right” on the movements “performed”, which are set on stage (of the videogame) by virtual figures in the final software. The question remains, if the movement pattern belongs to the body of the dancer does it remain his bodily property, or not. It is not a trivial conundrum since it opens new questions about labour and slavery that can be thought of in this context of the slavery that made entertainment.

Finally DeVere ends up in Cyberpunctuations, the smiley (or emoticons) as another form of ASCII art (p. 157). This forms the resume of the study; the emotional dimension related to punctuation. The movie “Me and You and Everyone We Know” (2005) by Miranda July communicates precisely how much the importance of punctuation in everyday life has increased, when, with the ubiquity of the cell phone and computer, mediated communication inserts itself into chat based everyday life. A typographical rendition of “two butts actively passing poop back and forth” makes its way out of a private chat into the museum. Punctuations anthropomorphized as sexual and political sign announce the final point of the study: ))<>((

Middle-European readers might be slightly surprised by certain omissions. For example DeVere Brody does not make any reference to the tradition of Konkrete Poesie (Artmann, 2003) and related genres of visual poetry of the 20th century in Europe. A tradition founded in writing in punctuated circles in ambiguous Wunderkammer illustrations (Nekes, 2004) to writings of the French poet Alfred Jarry and later the OULIPO Group (Mathews, 2005). Even Arno Schmidt discussed punctuation marks and their body and sex-politics, in his notations that might be one nod towards DeVere’s specialised range of perspective. Nevertheless, despite this shortcoming Punctuations is a valuable contribution to the repoliticisation of art through performance.

Cited works:

All stand-alone page numbers refer to Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play.

H. C. Artmann, 2003. Sämtliche Gedichte, Ed. Klaus Reichert; Wien: Jung und Jung.

Henry Jenkins, 2006. Fans, Bloggers, And Gamers. Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press.

Harry Mathews, 2005. Oulipo Compendium. London: Turnaround.

Werner Nekes, 2004. Media Magica. The Ambiguous Image and Space. Mühlheim an der Ruhr: arte

“Saskia Sassen, Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for Theorization.” In Globalization, edited by Arjun Appadurai. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001.