Column097 — January/February 2010
The State of North American Vizpo, Part Five
Small Press Review,
Volume 42, Numbers 1/2, January/February 2010
October is Dada Month
Edited by Marshall Hryciuk
2008; 94 pp; Pa; Nietzsche’s Brolly,
30 Laws St., Toronto ON
M6P 2Y7 Canada. $100.
Visio-Textual Selectricity
Edited by Bob Grumman
2008; 44 pp; Pa; The Runaway Spoon Press,
1708 Hayworth Road,
Port Charlotte FL 33952. $50 ppd.
Eleven of the 88 works in October is Dada Month are by jwcurry by himself or in collaboration with someone else. They are all a challenge for a critic, all Dada mysteries on the verge of some consequential meaningfulness just out of sight. Or, to put it less pretentiously, they are expressions of strange, hard-to-define moods. His “stigation,” for instance, has the “word,” “STIGATION,” printed sideways down the piece’s left half against some kind of mottlely who-knows-what background. “Instigation,” needless to say, comes to mind–someone’s been goaded to do something shady . . . Like make art?. Art? This particular piece of art?
I ask, because most of the small words on the cut-out rectangles that are pasted here and there either parallel or at right angles to “STIGATION” speak of actions related to making a collage, like this piece: “he glued,” “rearrangement,” “he constructed.” Another rectangle has the phrase, “the text does not minimize.” Other words in an oval near the center of the piece have undecipherable words–except for several instances of “seem.” The muddiness of the rest of the entirely monochromatic piece contribute a feeling of mystery and illicitness to it. Along with the “stagnation,” “stigma,” defective sight (stigmatism), and (for me, at least) the Styx that the piece’s title-word hints of.
Is what I’ve said of any help? I probably shouldn’t admit it, but I spent over a month looking at the work and thinking about it before trying to critique it. Most of the better works in the anthology had the same effect on me. Something about them makes them impossible simply to dismiss, but near-impossible, too, to be cogent about.
Not quite from the same realm is Guy Beining’s “Upper and Lower Translation of Text for Beige City.” Beining has several varieties of signature poems to his credit, and this is the four quadrants one. I doubt the set-up is unique to him but he makes unique, uniquely
resonant use of it: it is merely the division by two crossing lines of the page into four sections, each containing a text or graphic or combination of the two on the piece’s central theme. In the piece’s upper left quadrant (but overflowing into the quadrant below it, the text, “BEIGE COPY/ THAT THATCH/ THAT TUFT/ THAT BLONDE BEIGE/ TERRITORY OF HER/ COMMINGLED EDGES/ FRAMED BY HER/ FOUNTAINED SELF.” Strange, but coherent. The other three quadrants contain texts that act as variations of the colors in the first text, blond and beige–for instance, “spit white on/oven fat/ bis/ bise/- – -/ yelowish-grey” in the upper right quadrant.
I’m going to cheat here and not try for a close reading of the above. That would require a full column by itself. I will simply tell you that I think I could come up with a plausible interpretation that made sense. Hence, the “not quite from the same realm,” for I believe the mystery here can be cleared up as well as the mystery in every halfway-decent (modern) poem can be. But you need all the text, and the extra elements in the piece such as the font selection, the intentionally low-grade resolution, the larger bold black “BLOND” off to the side of the upper left text (whose “blonde” has a line through it) to be able to follow me. One impression; that the piece is a rough draft of an attempt to capture some blonde, and each of its texts is a rough draft of a fraction of that attempt.
Beining has several other fine pieces in the issue, some of them in gorgeous full color. Another contributor with well more than one excellent piece in the collection is Daniel f. Bradley. One, “after,” resembles curry’s “STIGATION” in being a monochromatic Dada mood piece. At the top of it is a rectangle that suggests a blackboard with lots of old chalk on it. The words “after” and “air” in white type are super-imposed on it, “after” high and to the left, “air” lower and to the right. Oh, and a white comma is under “after,” with a white period below that to the left, a little higher than “air.” Underneath is a big 50’s televsion set, with a cat perched on it, looking a bit lost. That’s it.
Note for the finicky: the author of this piece considers it poorly reproduced. I find it
imperfectly but certainly sufficiently well-reproduced. There are many in visio-textual art who remind me of the kind of people who write authors of detective stories when they get some detail of a hero’s handgun wrong. Who cares? Not that I would not love everything to be perfectly reproduced, it’s just that perfect reproduction is trivial compared with the over-all design and meaning of a piece (and most everything else about it).
I find it hard to explicate the Bradley piece, but here’s an attempt: some event has happened whose aftermath the poem is describing, or trying to describe, but what it presents is a . . . well, a sentence that peters out after one word, hits a pause after a good deal of blankness, then stops when its period appears after much more blankness. What happened is hard to communicate. What follows is air. But air can transmit the electronic waves responsible for the information on a television screen. So here there’s a strong intimation of meaning inside the air spoken of. But the screen it apparently is being transmitted to is . . . blank. Waiting to be turned on? The cat is indifferent, but gives the scene an ambiance of Total 70’s Normalcy. Life goes on whatever in this case it is after. And it is serene, hakuable.
Another lame grapple, this explication of mine? Who knows. It’s as good as I can do at the moment. I hope it will at least suggest ways into an appreication of this piece–and others like it Melody Wessel’s charming visual poem, “Gossip,” I had less trouble with, for it’s a black-and-white design in which typography (many question marks and commas) suggests something I see as a lighthouse in the midst of a confusion of mad non-language. Its beacon seems a mad swirl from which a jumble consisting of the letters, G, O, I, S, S, P tumbles out.
There are many other first-rate works here, particularly Marshall Hryciuk’s “History of the Marketplace, 51st performatif,” Karen Sohne’s suite of entirely nono-verbal, non-representational artworks, and John Vieira’s “two strains of music.” The price of the collection is considerable. I would suggest trying to get the nearest college library to buy a copy, and visit it there every few months. Unless you’re more affluent than I.