Literary Arts: Book Review
On Being and Maintaining the Ephemeral
Lance Olsen’s Theories of Forgetting
by Michael McLane

For fans of experimental or metamodern fiction, Lance Olsen is a well-known name. He has published over twenty volumes of fiction, essays, and “anti-textbook” work, with another forthcoming. There are few writers working today who are more prolific, inventive and as simultaneously micro- and macrocosmic in scope as Olsen. In his twelfth novel, Theories of Forgetting, he guides his long-running, cross-genre experimentation with fragmentary and disintegrating narrative into new territories preoccupied with both the nature of memory and the materiality of language and books.

At the most basic level, Theories traces three separate narratives — the attempts of a middle-aged filmmaker named Alana to finish a final film about Robert Smithson’s earthwork, Spiral Jetty, before she succumbs to a mysterious epidemic known as “the Frost;” the story of her husband Hugh’s disorientation and bewildered travels following Alana’s death, which culminates in his seeming kidnapping by a cult that worships barbituates; and that of their daughter, Aila, who is annotating her parents’ journals and documents, partly as a means of exploring the disappearance of her brother, who seems to have disowned the family at some earlier time.

We meet Alana in the early stages of her disease, when she writes

Something is happening to me.
            I wasn’t sure at first. Now I am. A glary gray migraine
Aura. A sheet of plastic lowering between me & me.
        The same sort of feeling when you suspect the flu has begun
Scattering through your bloodstream:…

Alana’s narrative commences via journals that take the form of mixed media entries of text, photos, and clippings made as the Frost slowly robs her of writing, syntax and conventional temporal sense. The documents pasted into her journals shift perpetually amongst a myriad of themes, from x-rays and constellation maps to photos of the Jetty or of Smithson with his wife, Nancy Holt. There are even photos we can infer to be of Alana and Hugh during their travels, though they are actually of Olsen and his wife, Andi, only one of many instances of blurred history and fiction within the story.

Hugh is initially a mystery, a man repeatedly breaking and entering a house (and complicating seemingly simple domestic tasks) that he once owned and which we find out he later abandoned after Alana’s death. Early on, he finds himself again in the house where

        This thought happens to him and the man
hears someone take a quick breath across the room
and he raises his head: a stranger  suspended in the
doorway between the hall to the bedrooms and this
place, the one the man finds himself occupying

The phrase “stranger suspended” is an apt description of Hugh in general. Shortly, after this incident, he disappears into the limbo of travel, which only further confounds his loneliness, and finds himself in Jordan on a Quixotic search that leads to a final disorientation.

Meanwhile, Aila appears entirely through blue, handwritten marginalia on each of her parents’ narratives which alternate between deeply personal remarks to her brother such as “Their trip of a lifetime, which makes me think: did you ever feel, if even just a little, that they held us responsible for never being able to take another” and literary or theoretical commentary ranging from Baudelaire to Baudrillard.

For all the unsettling, lyrical beauty of these three overlapping stories, it is impossible to deny that the form of Theories of Forgetting acts as one of its main, if not the main, characters. The question of how to approach the book itself will likely be the first to confront most readers. The covers of the book — which are designed like the rear covers of most texts, with the telltale author photo, blurb, and synopsis — are identical, though one is upside-down. The formatting of the text itself is similar in that each page is split in two (though not always in half, suggesting a method of emphasis/forgetting at times) with part of the text upside-down on each page. Depending on which way the book is turned, the reader is confronted with either the text of Hugh’s story, or the mixed media of Alana’s, resulting in two 367-page “books,” a contested term here for sure.  And in either case, many pages are further framed by the sometimes parallel, sometimes perpendicular annotations made by Aila. As a result, the reader is forced to constantly turn the book in their hands to access all of the text.

For me, the form of Theories generated two experiences that were key in thinking about not only how we read, but also how memory shapes our ability to read and contextualize. The first was trying determine how to actually read the book. Do I read one “side” of the book straight through, and then the other? Do I alternate between them? And to what degree? Or do I just continually turn the book around from page to page and thus move forward and backward through the signatures simultaneously?

Of course, this is all further confounded by Aila’s notes, which can seem to refer to either story, depending on the page. I finally settled on a rather arbitrary system of reading 16 pages of each narrative at a time (a geeky sort of homage to the materiality/binding of the book), though this system quickly disintegrated into completely arbitrary forays between the two layers.

Likewise, it is all but impossible to ignore the opposite story coming and going on the pages read and to be read, particularly in the case of images, which are frequent in Alana’s narrative. The result is a kind of mnemonic or oneiric residue or precipitate that is inescapable. We cannot forget that as separate as the two stories are — formally, temporally, stylistically — they are ultimately inseparable due to the relationship(s) that constitute each.

All the turning and manipulation the book asks of the reader, and the moments of reflection and perplexity it allows, is emblematic of, and parallel to, tensions entangled in the text that are best reflected in the presence of the Spiral Jetty itself.  Alana notes during one visit to the site

We approach the [Spiral Jetty] with our visual expectations
already askew, already thrown into tao

 

doubt,

and so we experience it without convention—or, closer to
the point, with the idea of convention always bracketed,
always foregrounded precisely in its contingency and insta-
bility.

Here the Jetty and the Frost vie for control of language, throwing Alana in and out of “convention,” of coherence. The Frost not only slowly extinguishes Alana’s syntax and vocabulary, but also plays with the reader through her attempts to correct herself, as in this passage in which she eliminates both the identifiers of place and, via the “tao/doubt” interchange above , the “way” in or out. Nonetheless, the Jetty remains a focus for all the characters in the text, posing as an instrument of both centripetal force (Alana’s turn inward) and centrifugal force (Hugh’s exile of himself from his old life and immersion in foreign travel). The spiral symbol appears again and again in the book, both literally and figuratively, be it in photographs of rock art or the idea of DNA sequencing and disintegration inherent to the family structure and its breakdown and to disease.

Olsen is clearly engaged with a tradition of ergodic literature here — the most popular example being Danielewski’s House of Leaves though this quality is most often associated with hypertext lit. But neither this nor materiality suffices  in Theories; he even brings in his own system of punctuation which, true to intertextual Olsen form, is only identified and explicated in another of his recently published books, [[there.]] (Anti Oedipus, 2014). Amongst the notations in [[there.]], is a nod to the quadruple colon (or perhaps it is a double-quadruple ellipsis) depicted as ::::, which is explained as “special punctuation for not being at home…for what cannot be articulated accurately.” Likewise, there is mention of the double bracketing mark [[  ]], intended “for what must be removed from the chronic to be experienced.” Such moments occur within Hugh’s literal travels following his wife’s death and the oscillation between suspended and mortally finite time in which Alana’s final months play out.

Regardless of the direction of the spiraling, it is ultimately time that takes priority here. Be it deep, geologic time or the span of a human life, both the Jetty and Theories of Forgetting serve as meditations
on being, and maintaining, the ephemeral. This is perhaps best summed up in Levi-Strauss’ notion of entropology, a term adopted by Smithson to explain his own process. In a recent lecture, Olsen describes how, for Smithson, “entropology embodied structures in a state of disintegration but not in a negative sense, not with a sense of sadness and loss…[it] embodied the astonishing beauty inherent in the process of wearing down, of wearing out, of undoing, of continuous decreation, at the level, not only of geology and thermodynamics, but also of civilizations, and ultimately of the individual within them.”

There is astonishing beauty throughout Theories of Forgetting, both in its text and in its form, in its disintegrating archives and its insistence that choices be made, momentums potentially altered. It moves and makes us move. It makes demands both physically and intellectually. Perhaps most importantly, it affirms the materiality of the book at a time when the numbers of digital publications are surging. However, Olsen, whose own interest in hypertext and other digital forms is well documented, does not offer an admonishment in Theories, but rather an alternative and complementary means into a text. It is something akin to travel or the questions Alana asks of herself, and perhaps unknowingly of Hugh

                  Which direction will he go now?

                  And now?

Theories of Forgetting
by Lance Olsen
FC2 (Fiction Collective Two)
384 pgs
$22.95

About the Author
Lance Olsen is the author of eleven novels, one hypertext, four critical studies, four fiction collections, and two textbooks about writing innovative fiction. He is the recipient of Guggenheim and N.E.A fellowships as well as the Berlin Prize and a Pushcart Prize. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, Village Voice, BOMB, and Best American Non-Required Reading. He teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah.

Up and Upcoming: To The North
Exhibition Listings in Northern Utah
Prepared by 15 Bytes staff unless otherwise indicated. UPCOMING and UP listings should reach us by the last Wednesday of the month. Those accepted will run until the closing date, or for one month if no closing date is given. Readers using the guide are cautioned to check with the exhibitor if the accuracy of the listing is crucial. Please send listings for this page to editor@artistsofutah.org.

OGDEN AREA
The Ogden First Fridays Art Walk takes place every month on the First Friday of the month. Galleries will hold receptions 6-9 pm.

Weber State University Shaw Gallery UP: Motoi Yamamoto, creating a salt installation—a piece named Floating Garden—along with a series of recent drawings, photography, sketchbooks, a video about the artist, and a 170-page color catalogue documenting fourteen years of the artist’s saltworks around the world (see our review in the March 2014 edition).|1| Through April 12.

Whitespace Contemporary UP: Korean Vision is an exhibition of works by 8 contemporary Korean-born artists: painters, sculptors and photographers. This exhibition hopes to highlight how contemporary Korean artists are exploring and bringing into play a wide diversity of new materials bound together by the use of time-established and more innovative techniques. Readily apparent is a culture exhibiting a proficiency of execution, a particular finesse and dexterity with material, a thoughtfulness about artistic concerns, and a preoccupation with detail. April 4 - May 30.

Eccles Community Art Center UP: The Weber County Secondary Student Exhibition brings selected works from Junior High and High School students to the Eccles Community Art Center. This exhibition is a competition for which the Weber County School District provides a judge, and awards. A best of show is awarded for both the High School students and the Junior High School students. First, Second, Third and Honorable Mentions are awarded in a variety of art categories. Through April 26.

BRIGHAM CITY
Brigham City Museum UP: From the Vault: New Acquisitions and Special Collections offers 49 works for viewing, specifically a hand-crank butter churn, circa 1900. Through April 8.

LOGAN
Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art UP: New Acquisitions 2013 features nine works of art recently donated to the museum by the late Joe Austin. Through December 20. AND: Man Up: Perspectives on Masculinity and the Male Form explores the visualization of masculine and feminine stereotypes through photos, drawings, and prints. The exhibit presents differing views of manhood from strong and hardworking to naked, vulnerable, or wounded.|3| Through Summer 2014. AND: Reliefs: The Art of Woodcuts, a selection of 22 woodcuts from the museum's permanent collection including landscapes, portraits and abstract patterns.|4| Through May 2.

PARK CITY
The Park City Gallery Stroll usually takes place the last Friday of every month.

Julie Nester Gallery UP: Illuminations: New paintings by Audra Weaser. Audra Weaser's paintings are based on the artist's memories and experiences in nature, which are reinterpreted as layered abstract paintings. She works intuitively to translate her memories into abstract paintings that have subtle references to landscapes. Through April 29.

Gallery MAR UP: Of the Earth exhibition with Ron Russon and Jared Davis.

Meyer Gallery UP: Camouflage, new paintings by Brian Kershisnik (see our artist profile page 1).

Kimball Art Center UP: Art of the Timepiece explores the history of our incessant journey to progressively master time, as well as the art and science of making and adorning timepieces. Featuring works from the expansive collection of Karol Renau as well as exceptional watches on loan from O.C. Tanner, as well as the timepiece-based jewelry of artists Krysia Renau and Stacy Sheers. Through April 6. UPCOMING: Wasatch Back Student Art Show in the Main, Garage & Badami Gallery. April 12 - May 25, 2014

Terzian Galleries UP: New work by Henry Stinson.

District Gallery UP: Longtime gallery artist, Sloane Bibb, and recent addition to the family, Scott Whitaker.

Coda Gallery UP: New works by local artists Maria Zielinska, Sylvia Davis, and Stacy Phillips.

BOUNTIFUL
Bountiful/Davis Art Center UP: The Annual Statewide Exhibit. Through April 4.

These listings only include fine art exhibitions. If you are looking for information on lectures, art talks, classes, workshops, calls for entries, employment opportunities and more, visit our message board.

Exhibition Review: Salt Lake City
Draw Till You Drop
Kristina Lenzi and Gretchen Reynolds' Durational Draw Out
by Alexandra Karl

Several features can characterize works of Performance Art. One is duration. Performance artists often (not always) push the boundaries of their audience’s patience, creating a corner in time that proceeds according to the work’s inner tempo. The artist’s stamina can also be pushed – to exhaustion. Another feature that can so easily accompany works of performance art is a binary dynamic created between two participants. Here I think of the works of Gilbert and George, Abramavic and Ulay, Valie Export and Peter Weibel, Chris Burden and his anonymous assistant.

Such was the case on Friday evening (March 21st) at Artspace, where Kristina Lenzi and Gretchen Reynolds sat at opposing easles, drawing each other for over six hours during Gallery Stroll. Facing each other at 180 degree angles, one could have assumed that the easels were attached to each other. In fact, the artists studied each other’s faces through a small gap between the boards and, with charcoal, graphite, colored and highlighter chalk undertook facial studies of each other – drawing each other.

The resulting drawings were displayed on adjacent walls behind each artist, serving as a backdrop to the central action. The results varied from the sublime to the ridiculous. Some achieved such life-like naturalism that the subjects almost started breathing. Others were rendered with simple contour drawings, or the grand gestures of Willem deKooning. Some placed a realistic eye squarely in the middle of a nest of scribbles, barely decipherable as the structure of a face. And towards the end of the marathon, meditative concentration dissolved into childsplay and portraits descended into charicatures, revealing disfigured proportions and Picasso-like monsters.

Forays into these drawing styles demonstrated the range of each artist, both of whom have taught drawing for several years at institutions throughout the valley.
The results also invited comparison. Who was more skilled? Who posessed a steadier hand? Who was the master of naturalism, who was quicker to abandon the torch and embrace the lighter side of the discipline?

While some observers are trained “not to judge” the dynamic of one artist pitted against another invariably emerged for this critic. Did the coupling mirror a scenario of rivalry, which can so easily emerge between partners of any kind? Was this a competition? Or, was this a paean to cooperation, of working in tandem and symbiosis, in the true spirit of partnership? As much as the arrangment was a ‘closed system’, it was also entirely complementary, as the personal styles of each artist quietly unfolded, while spectators meandered through the event. Perhaps in this sense, the performance more closely approximated M.C.Escher’s iconic work from 1948 Drawing Hands.

Kristina Lenzi and Gretchen Reynolds' Durational Draw Out took place on Friday, March 21. Geoff Wichert posted another take on the event on our blog earlier this month.