Are Remarks History? Gertrude Stein as Conceptual Artist — Page 2:
6 Full of fragments and jagged edges, Stein's works find their shape less from punctuation than from the pauses her ideas induce in the reader's headlong habits of perception and engagement. Where one may be tempted to read her briskly, Stein changes the reader's tempo in an otherwise hasty process with bon mots that halt the eye's movement, if only long enough to reckon the fierceness with which she savages conventional wisdom. Stein's aesthetic of interruption, which postmodernists would later claim for themselves in the name of 'intervention,' not only contests the tenets of literary realism, but also pierces the smooth surfaces of literature and, in so doing, ruptures consensus narratives of art, gender, and history.
7 Stein's educational background provides clues into the sources of her concerns with the interplay among language, human perception, gender, and history. Ever since her student days, Stein had cultivated some fairly eclectic interests in philosophy, metaphysics, and psychology. She was nurtured in these studies by some of the most prominent scholars of the era. As a college student at Radcliffe's annex, Stein had studied with many of Harvard's greats, from Josiah Royce to William James. She conducted her own psychology experiments, including some related to the theory of automatic writing. Stein was intrigued by philosopher Otto Weininger's theories of psychological differences between male and female characteristics, as articulated in his controversial 1906 book on the subject, Sex and Character (1906). She inquired into the nature of history and the importance of its rendition. She had learned her metaphysics from no less than George Santayana, himself often quoted on the perils of insufficiently critical studies of history. To Santayana others frequently attribute such quips as, 'History is always written wrong, so always needs to be rewritten,' 'History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there,' and, perhaps most famously, 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.' Like Santayana before her, Stein knew the power of a winning line or a withering retort. From this sensibility, she mounted an attack on the insistent voices of the status quo — literary, artistic, philosophical, and historical.
8 In so many of her works, Stein proceeds by first gratifying, and then confounding, the reader's expectation of a single, continuous narrative from a unified perspective. It is as if the music of her language somehow replaces harmony with dissonance. Stein's pithy remarks and incisive wit enable her to assemble multivocal texts in which voices and perspectives featured clash rather than join in chorus. In this way, dominant cultural scripts get disturbed, then halted, then overtaken and rewritten by dissenting voices and views.
9 By crafting memorable lines, and then embedding them within narratives where those ideas would seem to be at odds, Stein interferes with and troubles the process of thought/statement the text begins, much as feminist writer Susan Griffin does in her own experimental works of history/documentary, including Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her and A Chorus of Stone The Private Life of War. More than a stylistic device, this technique enables Stein to layer her texts in such a way as to render conspicuous the underlying assumptions of familiar cultural practices and/or writing conventions. This self-interrupting narrative approach has the effect of simultaneously disrupting the concepts upon which conventional conclusions depend. This same tactic lives on in works by subsequent artist/author/activists whose efforts to challenge dominant cultural scripts rely upon elements of surprise, contradiction, unresolved tension, and fracture already at work in Stein's writing. Contemporary figures such as Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Laurie Anderson, Susan Griffin, Ann Hamilton, and the Guerrilla Girls use words to interrogate social orthodoxies: standards of etiquette and protocol, notions of objectivity and quality, paradigms of power and expertise, images of celebrity and infamy, icons of heroism and villainy, perceptions of legitimacy and taste, and so on. That — and how — they do so owes much to Gertrude Stein.
10 The primary focus within this discussion will be on unorthodox representations of history within two 1930 works by Gertrude Stein, "We Came. A History" and History or Messages from History, and their implications within subsequent word-based works by conceptual artists such as Barbara Kruger and activist collectives such as the Guerrilla Girls. This pair of Stein texts operates as a prelude to her later meditations on the subject of history, such as Four in America (1933) and The Geographical History of America (1935). While Stein's later writings engage in a fuller-scale subversion of historical master narratives, through such devices as impossible meetings among historical personages of different eras, the 1930 texts strike at the nature of history itself and, with it, the problematics of historical writing. Much as Stein tackled the paternalism of institutionalized religion's benevolence in "Lend a Hand or Four Religions" (1922) and the androphilic impulses enshrined by canonical literature in "Patriarchal Poetry" (1927), with these two 1930 texts, Stein seeks to recuperate the power and memory of history from its masculinist practices and accounts.