An artist’s public persona can be used to domesticate genuinely opaque artworks

Evidence

The temptation, when writing about the Fall’s work of this period, is to too quickly render it tractable. I note this by way of a disclaimer and a confession, since I am of course as liable to fall prey to this temptation as any other commentator. To confidently describe songs as if they were “about” settled subjects or to attribute to them a determinate aim or orientation (typically, a satirical purpose) will always be inadequate to the vertiginous experience of the songs and the distinctive jouissance provoked by listening to them. This enjoyment involves a frustration — a frustration, precisely, of our attempts to make sense of the songs. Yet this jouissance — something also provoked by the late Joyce, Pynchon and Burroughs — is an irreducible dimension of the Fall’s modernist poetics. If it is impossible to make sense of the songs, it is also impossible to stop making sense of them — or at least to it is impossible to stop attempting to make sense of them. On the one hand, there is no possibility of dismissing the songs as nonsense; they are not gibberish or disconnected strings of non-sequiturs. On the other hand, any attempt to constitute the songs as settled carriers of meaning runs aground on their incompleteness and inconsistency. … The principal way in which the songs were recuperated was via the charismatic persona Smith established in interviews. Although Smith scrupulously refused to either corroborate or reject any interpretations of his songs, invoking this extra-textual persona, notorious for its strong views and its sardonic but at least legible humour, allowed listeners and commentators to contain, even dissipate, the strangeness of the songs themselves. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1149

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: how authorial personas in interviews operate as interpretive handrails that pin down meaning the work itself deliberately leaves loose.
• XREF: Connects to broader theory of the death of the author / Barthes and to how artists like Bob Dylan or David Bowie manage interpretation via persona. — connects to: The demand for transparent, topical art compounds the reductions of calculative reason. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 39

Broader Connections

• The demand for transparent, topical art compounds the reductions of calculative reason. #complicates (0.75) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 39