Art: Enactment, Presence and Prophecy

”Art is the only twin life has ... art does not seek to describe but to enact.” (Charles Olson) In his essay, Human Universe (1950-51), on the real work of poetry, the early C20th American poet, Charles Olson, sought to question convention and the received rhetorical structures of poetry; to, in effect, ‘wild’ language and thereby return to it the immediacy of experience, process and change. By so doing he conceived human creativity as acting empathetically within the wild energy of the Cosmos. Olson’s term ‘to enact’ is analysed here alongside Jean-François Lyotard’s formulations on art, specifically those made in the essay, ‘Scapeland’ (1989), in the terms of the event and the figural as indicators of a re-wilding of meaning freed from society’s grand narratives. Referencing Maurice Blanchot’s essay, ‘The “Sacred” speech of Hölderlin’ (1949), consideration is also given to the poet-artist as prophet. Using the example of Hölderlin’s last poems, prophetic language unfolds to a point where to enact finds a natural conclusion in the poet’s non-being. In this paper art practice, creative writing, and theoretical analysis are interwoven to establish a new metaphysics of enactment amongst complex social, political and cultural contemporary narratives. Nature is the place or common theme that is at the core of this paper, and where the wilding of language begins