Column096 — November/December 2009
The State of North American Vizpo, Part Four
Small Press Review,
Volume 41, Numbers 11/12, November/December 2009
October is Dada Month
Edited by Marshall Hryciuk
2008; 94 pp; Pa; Nietzsche’s Brolly,
30 Laws St., Toronto ON
M6P 2Y7 Canada. $100.
October is Dada Month is particularly helpful in revealing what’s been going on with visio-textual art for the past fifteen years or so, for it consists of a series of numbered broadsides (most of them in full color) which began to be issued by Nietzsche’s Brolly in April 1990 with a piece by jwcurry called, “BGyHUJkKkPsDrfFFuffli joboten forti raken maserid. Martil, marl,” and ended with my own “Mathemaku for Persephone.” The term “dada” in its title certainly comes closer than any other term I can think of to pinning down what’s in the anthology. It may be the best term to sum up the main thrust of contemporary visio-textual art, too. As a critical term, it suffers from nebulousness, but if we take it as a blanket term for various mixtures of collage, surrealism, extremely divergent thinking and a disinclination, possibly even a disdain, for saying anything with words, it works well enough to describe most of what’s in October is Dada Month, and the other collections I’ve been discussing, or will discuss, in this survey of mine.
curry’s piece is a collage, one portion of which consists of a text each line of which begins with many letters crowded together, then shifts to what seem to be nonsense words–as in its title, “BGyHUJkKkPsDrfFFuffli joboten forti raken maserid. Martil, marl,” which is also its first line. Jutting sideways out of this text is a window, Its panes are painted light yellow upon which lines of what seem some kind of hieroglyphics are printed.
Textuality but no linguistic meaning that I can make out. Surrealism, collage and minimal attempt to converge on some unifying principle.
Much of dada is merely puritanical anti-art: work intended to be pointless and generally what most people would term decadent. Its aim is to shock and/or annoy those of us who take art seriously. While I do think some of the works in October is Dada Month partly do this, I think most, and possibly all, of them strive mostly to give those willing seriously to consider them genuine aesthetic pleasure–however much some may be out to annoy the uniniated. Not incoherences but mysteries they are, but solvable, or–at least–half-solvable-mysteries.
For me, the curry work is a half-solvable mystery. It seems to be saying something about communicability: one of its two sides seems to be supplying the other side with letters the latter is trying incompetently to make into words. A view of a mind trying to speak, or beginning the process of shared understanding? The universe, clumsily trying to utter itself into something comprehensible? With science plunging a window of viewing device into the thick of things in an attempt to discover what is going on back to the beginnings of written language. . . ?
My piece, “Mathemaku for Persephone,” is as undada as a piece could be, but might well be taken as dada by the ignorant. It’s one of my long division poems–mystery divided into June yielding Persephone, with a remainder of Erato (the muse of poetry). Simple on the surface but with all kinds of subtle details that (I hope) distance it sufficiently from the slushiness my description of it might suggest. One point of interest: Geof Huth accepted it for his Poetry gallery but it was vetoed by higher-ups, costing me my last chance at fame.
To be serious, a more important point of interest is that the page just before the page my poem is on is transparent, with a black&white grid printed on it the title of which is “Frame.” It’s by carlyle baker. Nine rows of nine squares, each; five of the rows with five alternating texts or additions or who knows what consisting of four lines of mostly what seem to me to be Chinese characters, with occasional English letters and other matter overlaying them. Some kind of calendar? Weak eyesight as well as week critical acumen
prevent me from guessing better. But baker’s piece makes me want to continue to guess, so I can’t call it anti-art. Moreover, it works beautifully as a both graphically-enhancing and mentally-provocative layer on top on my poem–as well as on top of the poem on the preceding page.
This anthology needs more than a column’s worth of critical analysis, so I plan to come back to it in my next column. For now, I will just recite the names of the artists with work in it, besides curry, baker and I: Peggy lefler, Brian David Johnston, Melody Wessel, Marshall Hryciuk, Susan Parker, Guy R. Beining, Daniel f. Bradley, Ken Lewis, Richard Beland, Steven Hartman, Lucile Barker, John Vieira, damian lopes, Richard Tipping, John Barlow, Jennifer Books, Gerard J. Klauder, DEC Books, Gustave Morin, Kevin Angelo Hehir, Rob Read, Thom Olsen, Karen Sohne, Karl E. Jirgens, Mark Laliberte, Derek beaulieu, Greg Evason. curry and Beining each has ten pieces in it, Bradley eight, and theirs seem to me among the most interesting in the collection.