Schwarz
View current page
...more recent posts
"Thomas Pynchon's novel, Gravity's Rainbow, declares an ambition to make physics become metaphysics; Douglas Huebler's work relates to Pynchon's in a vital respect, which is that Huebler seems to want to make the "sociological" achieve an analogous transcendence. By this I mean that Huebler wants to make ways of documenting events stand for a larger paradigm, one that can contain enough of the conditions of experience in the real world to stand as a sort of model for ordinary language itself. In Huebler, sociology—events in the real world—becomes a sort of phenomenological linguistics—language in the real world. This happens via a procedure which in Huebler's recent work, of which Duration Piece #7, 1973, is a useful example, employs a metonymical structure to present an event in the real world, and, by doing so, illustrates the incompleteness—reflexiveness—of ordinary perceptual experience in a way that is newly clear. Huebler's work is about the "deconstruction" of the familiar."