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From
early on, Steve Spence's compelling new collection Maelstrom Origami is concerned with the
visual. The second sentence runs 'Tonight there will be a magic lantern show'.
Nine-two pages later the volume closes with 'Shadows waver and sway from
every doorway. / As they come closer we begin to relax'. The gap between is
where Spence creates a powerful whirlpool of prose poetry in which each
political fragment or cultural snippet is carefully folded into the rising
and frequently disconcerting turbulence. Every minute but enigmatic twist
adds a swirling force to the narrative flow.
Throughout the five sections that make up the book, I was constantly reminded
of the 'push-pull' dynamic that characterises several New York School
artists, particularly the cryptic surfaces of Robert Rauschenberg's
'combines' where there is a contest between images (and/or objects) over the
revelation of meaning. Using montage to gain similar effect, Spence's
narrative movement is concerned with mapping the evasive texture and tension
of language that tries, but ultimately fails, to achieve disclosure through
meaning. Attentive to the shape
and materiality of each statement, the inventiveness of his juxtapositions
creates a momentum punctured only with Kafkaesque paranoia, for 'There is no
second building. There is panic in / the streets':
... Did you know
that many
of the world's security services still preserve
their most
secret material on paper alone? At moments, I
felt a
huge wave of relief, at others a pang of incipient
nostalgia.
Yet he simply painted sunshine and sand again
and again. These
are the dwellers in the mushrooming
trailer
parks and this is our feeding place.
In Spence's 'media house of mirrors' his continual slanting of a subject's
meaning is rendered by the rich surface of wordplay when 'what we all / need
are more windows on the / world. Yet our hard hats are discarded' and where
'swimming is banned and these / figures are shown simultaneously from a range
of angles'. Design, especially important for poets and painters adopting
montage, is a predominant motif: 'his / pattern-cutting is / masterly and
it's really / all about the lever / in your arm'. This equally applies to
natural history where 'one way to understand / human behaviour is to / study
its counterpart / in animals ... we all once / had a practical skill that /
connected us to our food'.
Our human capacity to opt either for knowledge or self-deception is another
recurrent idea that feeds and informs the incessant questioner who wants to
know everything from 'who do you / complain to?' to 'will the lights stay
on?' Perhaps some of these simple demands for practical information need to
be read as wider philosophical statements of existential angst, for we are
told to focus our curiosity about the world in the manner of a film-maker: 'you
need / to search for that ideal mix of close-up and distance shot'. Similarly
Spence manages to achieve coherent passages of thought even where the
jump-cutting or splicing between fragments is left to be more plainly obvious
and abrasively felt by the reader. This establishes the 'destabilising mode'
he seeks in his writing, as he explained in his 2010 interview with Rupert
Loydell for Stride. Spence
presents language as an entity not to be trusted and throughout the
collection one detects his preoccupation with our failure to have genuine or
meaningful everyday conversations about current affairs or to offer any
authentic response to a work of art:
Perhaps we
should talk
about the
idea of crime as
entertainment. Yet these
pieces echo
minimalist
sculpture
while also bringing
a
threatening vibe to the space.
In the
case of the mass media
the issues
are somewhat
different
but how do we then
join up
the dots in our own lives?
'You need
to get the words
into your
mouth', he said.
The virtuosity of the book, as well as its humour, is in the contrast between
the worlds of public pronouncement on politics, science and art, and the more
personal sphere of private conversation that frequently involves rumour and
folklore. Spence's narrative arc is concerned with tracking an assortment of
subjects that include: global policing, consumerism, military and ecological
catastrophe, political and artistic will, marine biology and fishing
practice. Then there is the matter-of-fact presentation of City financiers as
akin to outlaws and 'mounted robbers':
I turned
briefly in my seat before vowing never
to look
back. Suddenly, the peace is disrupted by
the sharp
crack of a rifle. Bandits are, by definition,
plugged
into market networks but you can always
return
with us now to the thrilling days of yesteryear.
Maelstrom Origami is an accomplished and mesmerising collection: every page presents
the promise of revelation, and yet simultaneously exposes the failure of
language to provide profundity or significance. Spence's artful method of
connecting phrases allows the reader, as if in the act of overhearing, to
break each one open to discover the absurdity that lurks within. Although
deadpan in delivery, he achieves fine poetic resonance as the meaning of his
astutely selected and placed fragments come satirically loose of their
moorings. Spence's stylish and considered writing is 'a dazzling kaleidoscope
of colour' where human miss-communication and social incoherence is necessarily
contingent. Subtly prismatic, these fractured
images float joyously free from the whorl on the page.
© Peter
Gillies 2015
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