the "green apple", a little modern food for thought

I went to see Marjorie Welish give a lecture yesterday. She’s a poet, artist, and art critic—all of which shinned through in the lecture. Also, it might be interesting to note that she was previously a professor at Brown, teaching currently at the Pratt Institute, and is on leave as a Fulbright Scholar in Frankfurt. Needless to say, she is a very intelligent and accomplished woman…and honestly was a little much for me to grasp. I mean, did anyone in that room really understand everything she was saying? I heard the words and followed the sentences, I suppose it was just difficult to put all the sentences together into a thought I could hold onto. Ms. Welish spoke much like a modern artist, by which I mean that she spoke in the way a modern painting looks. You have to have certain eyes to know how to see it because it is so abstracted and often disjointed in feeling. Perhaps I just don’t have the ears to hear what she’s saying. Anyways, let me discuss a little of what I ascertained.
Her lecture was basically a sort of history of modern art, explaining the sequence of a handful of important artists. She listed a handful of important artists—most notably to me, the New York School, who marked the American expression of modernism, according to Ms. Welish. By way of explaining snippets of progression through modern art, she discussed one important concept. This concept lends itself to issues of current discussion in modern and postmodern circles. What is the significance of a word in terms of its true representation of reality? What makes a word represent the same thing to multiple people? At what point does the word need to change to represent another reality? And according to whom?
These are interesting questions, and remind me a little of my first blog post here where I was asking about the line between poetry and visual art. What happens in that grey area? Where is the line between these two terms, and who sets it? Marjorie used a few examples of her own to get us thinking about this same issue. For instance, the color red. What shade of red is the most fundamental red and what are other versions of it? When you add yellow, at what point is the color no longer red and becomes orange? She explains that different people have different eyes for red, perhaps due to cultural influence—such as “Chinese red” or “Vermillion red,” all shades of red traditionally associated with usage in different places.
To me, this sounds like a basic argument for relativism in terms of our linguistic usage. No one person can call something a certain word and say that is the only word that works to represent that thing. To illuminate this point, at the end of the lecture, she holds up a green apple and asks us what we say this is. Some would say, “a piece of fruit”, some would say “an object exhibiting the concept of ‘round’”, and others would say “not red”.
Though I don’t think this grand finale was all that original, I suppose it is a fertile discussion to touch on anyway. What elements are necessary to name something one word or another. For instance, does a “city” begin when there are a certain number of people, as Marjorie postulates? Or, does it begin when certain other essential forms are exhibited? While this is a rich subject to roll around in our minds and play on, I am not seeing how this is more than a typical post-modern debate of relativism—in a linguistic sense. I think it makes a point about the fluidity and created sense of language—that it cannot hold perfectly because it is created by man. A green apple is still exactly what it is—and what it is not—whether or not we find the words to describe it. It is the representation that can be so relative. Representation can take on unending forms, as I could describe the green apple with a million words, or paint it in a million ways, etcetera. Our language is just a representation and a grasping, not the reality behind it which is still.

I guess that Marjorie’s lecture, despite not understanding all of it, really did get me thinking!