Column070 — January/February 2005
A Morning at MAM
Volume 37, Numbers 1/2, January/February 2005
Beyond Geometry.
Edited by Lynn Zelevansky.
240 pp; cloth; 2004; The MIT Press,
Five Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142.
http://mitpress.mit.edu. $49.95.
On Saturday, 23 October, I did a presentation on concrete poetry (albeit, I called it “visual poetry”) at the Miami Museum of Art (MAM). I actually got paid for it! And got two nights at a Hyatt, paid for by MAM, which is also paying my traveling expenses. I have to brag about that, because it’s never happened to me before. My presentation was part of a seminar (I guess you’d call it) for teachers. that took place in conjunction with an exhibit of paintings and sculpture from the LA County Museum of Art coming later to MAM called Beyond Geometry. The exhibit catalogue is very fancy and will become a major text in the study of the kinds of art in the show, I’m sure. It even has a section, a worthwhile one, by Peter Frank, on “geometric literature.”
For me, the exhibit–which Peter Boswell, Senior Curator at MAM, showed an excellent slide show on–isn’t so much “geometric,” although many of the artists use geometric shapes, as what I’m tentatively thinking of as anti-sensual. Geometric shapes, for me, are just one device of many that most of the better illumagists (“visual artist” in my improved lexicon) since the last century’s beginning have been using to re-energize painting and sculpture by freeing them from representationality. In my presentation, I tried to show that collaging textual material into their works was an equally important de-sensualizing device for them.
Mainly, however, I pushed what I see as a century-long evolution in both illumagery and poetry toward visio-textual pluraesthetic art (or art that significantly uses more than one expressive modality, such as opera)–which came IN THE WORKS OF BOB GRUMMAN (and others) to include mathematics. Not ambiance-providing references to mathematics as in the work of the constructivists, the de Stijl artists or the suprematicists, but actual, operative mathematics (if mostly only in the workings of long division problems, in my case).
3. Since I was doing a workshop presentation, I meant to discuss in some detail how I operate as a mathematical poet, and provide exercises for the teachers to have fun with themselves, and use in the classroom I ran out of time, though, not having timed myself beforehand, and having lost a few minutes to the three presentations before mine, which was last of the program. Not to waste what I was going to say, I’m going to use it here (without cluttering it with quotation marks–which wouldn’t be all that valid, anyway, as I have rewritten parts of my text):
I’ve long composed visual artworks in which I treat verbal texts and visual images as mathematical terms I can subject to such operations as multiplication and division, or even differentiation. The idea is to attack one’s art from so uncommon angle that one almost has to make it new. Hence, one geometry-based excercise I think worth trying is to simply take verbal texts as measurements and ask how they will affect what they are used to measure visually. For instance, I’ve made a crude sketch of a circle in black, with a radius labelled, “r.” But what if I used a red r to represent the radius? A simple possibility is that I’d then get a red circle. How about if I used the words for the seasons for “r”? I did that and got: (1) a smallish green circle, (2) a much larger multi-colored circle, with green predominating, (3) a smaller, brown circle, then (4) a mostly monochromatic circle with its sides bent inward. Another thought: what if we used the word, “poetry,” as the radius? One guess: a many-hued pastel circle like mine for “summer”–but with breaks in it to indicate the openness of poetry. How about making the radius “fascism?” That gave me an ugly black, primitive-looking square.
Working similarly with the area of other geometric figures might produce solid images rather than outlines. They could even include representational images–think of what kind of picture a square each of whose sides are “the sound of footsteps” in length.
A variation on this exercise would be to go the other way: make a drawing of some geometrical shape, then decide what word might best represent some dimension of it. Would the length of one side of a square that depicted the brain of Bush or Kerry, for instance, equal “mush?” (Sorry for the intrusion of politics, but when I wrote this, the repetitious dumb boilerplate of both candidates for president were driving me crazy.)
Then there’s the use of mathematical operations, like the long division I’m addicted to One exercise that might prove useful not only in unleashing creative energy but in getting students to think deeply about famous paintings would be to ask them to divide such paintings with various verbal or visual images. What would you get, for instance, if you tried to divide the word, “dance,” or a drawing of a dancer, into a Jackson Pollock painting? To get back to geometry, what would be the result of dividing the same thing into the magic square of Josef Albers that’s in the Beyond Geometry show? This idea can be extended indefinitely, I should think. For instance, I have an ongoing series in which I divide the term, “poetry,” itself, by such terms as “reason,” “madness” and “music.” In other words, I’ve asked what must one multiply “reason,” “madness” or “music” by to get an “answer” approximating “poetry.”
While I was talking, the members of my audience worked on an exercise I described as follows in the hand-out I gave them:
(1) Participants write poetically charged words or phrases (like “hurricane,” “love,” “rose garden,” etc.) on slips of paper, mix them and put them aside in a box. (2) Each participant makes a collage of shapes out of construction paper, newspaper and magazine pages, etc. The collage would be designed to fit in a long division shed, as I call the two-sided thing around the dividend in a long division problem.
(3) Redistribute the collages and random words or phrases.
(4) Participants divide their words into their collages.
Later notes: I tried this exercise on my own and found it too difficult, so now suggest that participants think of more than one good word, each, (before knowing what the words will be used for), and keep their collages. Then have them told the assignment and allowed to choose words from the ones earlier written. And use the words and collages in any fashion they want to–that is, as remainder and quotient, or vice versa, etc.
Important: this should be presented as a preliminary exercise. The aim should be a rough sketch, not necessarily a masterpiece. Ideally, it should be something the artist can play around with–for hours!
I’m not sure how much use the teachers have gotten, or will get, from my exercises, but I heard that some of them were enthusiastic about them.