I’m terrible at chess, even worse at interpreting in advance the most strategic moves that will produce a conquest. if I play against an endgame tablebase, I sacrifice my pawns first and then the king and queen (if possible) to give myself a quick death since the game doesn’t permit lawlessness (unless I refuse to play). in my case, I have a flimsy grasp of the rules—that is, no comprehension at all. if the pawns go down fighting, so must the king and queen. eat the rich. tax churches. kill the gig economy. defund the military. checkmate.
Mark Young’s ‘My Gryphon Garden’ is certainly suggestive of a chess board—look at its 8×8 matching black and white squares—but it also proposes its own anarchy. how am I to read this work? and in what order? the squares themselves are a mix of cultural artefacts—a low res image of Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy, a guitar chord diagram (D), E=mc2, the Twitter logo, and a ‘no war in Ukraine’ badge, to name a few. I couldn’t identify the grey man on the lower right hand side, but Google immediately attached the keyword ‘religion’ to it when I uploaded the image to the search engine. ask my former professors and mentors, I am not solid close reader. but vispo also demands a different kind of interpretative practice—like chess—that resists close reading’s rhetoric of borrowing under the layer of the text to reveal a secret meaning.
is textual meaning supposed to produce an eureka moment? couldn’t reading be more ambulatory? recently, I have been exploring surface reading as a way to play with interpretative strategies. chess, after all, is a kind of surface reading since the information presented in any one instance of the game is exactly what’s in front of the players. while each player certainly hides their own strategy, the text itself (the pieces, the board) obscures nothing. it is what can be looked at. (and by surface reading, I’m not referring to any particular theory, although when I say ‘looking at’, I give a nod to Stephen Best’s and Sharon Marcus’ special issue of Representations that focused on the surfaces to be ‘looked at‘ as opposed to be seen ‘through‘.[1]) rather, surface reading allows me to focus on the presentation before me and to free associate without locating the ‘so what’—the big reveal or any reveal—about a text. I want to keep close to the surface, keep my eyes on what I can see as opposed to what is illegible. such a practice might reveal more about me than ‘My Gryphon Garden’ but textual analysis isn’t an objective activity. we shouldn’t pretend that it is.
with a surface reading of ‘My Gryphon Garden’, my instinct, then, is to hone on the constellations of similarities and differences. I’ve already mentioned The Blue Boy, a work that itself complicates the high and low art divide, given its references in countless films. and this particular square gives me an inroad to thinking about how ‘My Gryphon Garden’ flexes upon associative modes of reading, since a number of squares invoke media and/or media manipulation. Case in point is ‘Cane train’ and ‘Rosebud’. These two squares infer Citizen Kane, a fictive biographical film on the life of Charles Foster Kane that influenced The Maltese Falcon. Orson Wells and Herman J. Mankiewicz based Kane on a number of real-life figureheads, including media tycoon-cum-politician William Randolph Hearst. arguably Hearst’s brand of sensationalist media reverberates in American politics today. while he ran on a progressive ticket in 1902 (he was elected to Congress twice as a Democrat), he grew increasingly conservative in his later years. Kane used his unprecedented access to news media to attack political adversaries, a move that feels very familiar in the age of Trumpian fascist politics. and American politics is full of performers and actors, who use their own brand of sensationalist media to manipulate grassroots public support. take Jesse Ventura, the WWE/WWF wrestler-cum-politician, for example. in 1999, Ventura won a landslide victory on the Reform Party ticket in the Minnesota governor race against Republican Norm Coleman and Democrat Skip Humphrey. Ventura owed his success to his grassroots organising and a catchy low information slogan: ‘Don’t vote for politics as usual’. (the Reform Party were libertarian in ideology but threw their support behind Trump in the 2016 presidential election.) ‘Politics is like chess’, says Tim Urban.[2] but how when chess offers everything on the surface? American politics isn’t a chess game. it’s highly scripted, anti-intellectual, and emotionally manipulative. cue, here, Walter Benjamin’s fascist aestheticization of politics in full force. in other words, it’s a reality show.
I will resist a takeaway with ‘My Gryphon Garden’ except to say that it exemplifies what Clara B. Jones has described in Young’s work as ‘Spontaneity, if not pure “automatism”’.[3] although I would suggest that Young’s vispo is ‘organised lawlessness’ given its presentation and invitation to pursue secondary connections in whatever order between the various squares. this invitation doesn’t imply that we need to go underneath the surface of the text. rather its provocation is to explore the associative ambulatory relationships between signs. in this light, it’s a very reader-centred text—unlike politics—without a defined endgame since Young’s tablebase offers all possible combinations in full view. in other words, it’s a game of chess.
orchid tierney
notes
[1] Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): 9; emphases in original.
[2] Tim Urban @waitbutwhy, June 12, 2021, accessed July 19, 2022, https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy/status/1403772880354111490.
[3] Clara B. Jones, ‘Review: Art Informel by Mark Young’, Entropy, May 18, 2020, accessed July 19, 2022, https://entropymag.org/review-art-informel-by-mark-young/.