fery, or Joan Retallack, as Bergvall would be the ¤rst to admit, but her par-
ticular focus here is on verbal/visual contradiction.^18 The Magritte allusion
of line 8, for example, “Ceci n’est pas une fesse” (“This is not a buttock”) is
heard as “Ceci n’est pas une face.” And line 9, “Past nest urn face” is a homo-
phonic translation-reversal of “n’est pas une,” the transposition reminding
us of the faces carved on Greek urns, those “nests” where the remains of the
dead body are contained as so much dust. The “urn face” thus “sees here your
passing”: its stability is that of death, which will soon be the fate of the pass-
ing observer.
In the next stanza, what is sounded cannot be properly seen: “yes transcrpt /
s easier li this” is heard without dif¤culty as “Yes, [the] transcript’s easier like
this,” but on the page the words break down into presemantic morphemes.
“A face is like a rose” in the stanza’s fourth line alludes to Gertrude Stein,
for whom the rose remains a noun to be “caressed” but ¤nally rejected in
favor of non-nouns. Bergvall refuses to leave it at that. Her “face” is just as
easily a verb as a noun and hence calls up the lines “n fss / correlated to ah
yes tt t / waltzing t change”—lines that take us back to those buttocks (fesses),
whose “correlation” remains an unnamable (“ah yes tt t”). The off-color al-
lusion remains masked; we know only that there is “waltzing t change,” that
somehow an about face has been accomplished.
This is only the beginning of a complex network in which found prose
texts from artists like Christian Boltanski, whose astonishing photographs
of students at the Lycée Chases in Vienna modulate into blow-ups that recall
skulls—the skulls these faces would become in the course of the Holocaust—
alternate with complex poetic passages that explore the meanings of facing
the other (Levinas), faceless, face up, and so on. “About Face” is a bravura per-
formance that must be both heard and seen, the aural and the visual under-
mining one another so as to produce a very dense investigation of our facings
and facelessness. Toward the end, one of the stanzas reads:
Like a curtain pulled a face it violent
Fc t
fc
vile unforgiving like a spectaclewhere “fact” transforms aurally (but not necessary visually) into a “fuck”
that is somehow “vile” and “unforgiving”—no longer a face to be seen as the
Other, but mere Spectacle.
Like Christian Bök, whose initials serendipitously match hers, Caroline
Bergvall takes the semantic to be produced both aurally and visually. In
Procedural Poetics of Bök and Bergvall 225