Column108 –November/December 2011
A New Gathering of Visual Poems and Related Art, Part 1
Small Press Review,
Volume 43, Numbers 11/12, November/December 2011
Illuminated Script: 30 Years of Visual Poetry & Intermedia
Guest-Editor: Andrew Topel
Script, Issue 2.2, June 2011,
Edited by Quimby Melton, with 8 Associate Editors
http://scriptjr.nl/issues/2.2
Andrew Topel has recently done visiotextual art the signal service of gathering large samples of some of the best work in the field (the international field, I should emphasize) from the past thirty years or more, and putting it on display as an issue of SCRIPTjr.nl, a wildly far-ranging Internet publication (“cyberzine?”) devoted to . . . well, the intro to the zine starts out, “The editors started SCRIPTjr.nl to explore literature’s last frontiers. Primarily interested in the theory and interpretation of filmscripts and teleplays, SCRIPTjr.nl nevertheless recognizes that these literary artifacts exist in a hinterland populated by other abject textual forms.” Such as visual poetry and what I call “textual visimagery” (for visual designs featuring textual elements sans significant verbal meaning like those of Fernando Aguiar I’ll soon be discussing ).
The artists represented are Fernando Aguiar (Portugual). Dmitry Babenko (Russia), Klaus Peter Dencker (Germany), Márton Koppány (Hungary), Hassan Massoudy (France), Constantin Xenakis (France), Ebon Heath (USA and Germany), and Americans K.S. Ernst, Scott Helmes, Karl Kempton, Loris Essary, Kaz Maslanka, Marilyn R. Rosenberg, Carol Stetser, Andrew Topel and Paul Zelevansky. Karl Kempton provides an introduction which my friendship for Karl prevents me from saying much about–except that his term for calls the works gathered, “Sound Illumination,” is the least helpful term for such art I’ve yet come across.
To continue being cranky, I feel I need to mention that I found getting around the exhibit somewhat difficult at times. It would have helped me if instructions like “click here to return to first page” were provided–instead of, or along with the icons that one can click to get around. True, the latter will tell you where a click of them will take you if you rest your cursor on them, but one as computer-unfluent as I may take a long time to figure this out.
My one other general gripe is that I found most of the show’s participants over-represented. This is a subjective view. As Karl told me when I complained that the site quickly wore me out in spite of–actually because of–all the good things in it, I could easily have dipped into it for a short time, left, then come back later. But that’s not for me. I would prefer a carefully edited collection of, say, five or six superior works from each artist with links to where one can view other works of theirs–at the end of the full exhibition so as not to distract from the central viewing.
Okay, mostly positive thoughts from now on, thoughts that will sprawl over two columns, so much is here to discuss, or at least mention.
The most prominent form of art in the show is the visiotextual collage. There are two kinds of such art here. One consists of atextual graphic images seamlessly merged with textual elements to make a unified, usually surrealistically arresting whole. Among the very best of those composing this kind of collage has long been Fernando Aguiar, with 26 samples of his work here. Rarely if ever do the textual elements he uses make words. They generally represent language or something made up of language rather than act as language, as in one of my favorites of his works in this collection in which the sonnet rhyme scheme, “abba abba cdc dcd,” crosses a river out of a young girl’s mouth.
Another first-rate example in the show of such collages is Dero Abecedarius, a 31-frame sequence by Klaus Peter Dencker. Dencker describes this as having “two principles of order: it develops alphabetically and uses New York’s Statue of Liberty as a primary motif. (It) presents the statue, a sort of public-relations symbol, in several variations.” These allow him collagically, with long flowing lines of cursive script in German, to treat freedom versus “the somewhat absurd representations of it that abound in consumer culture.” Also in the show are eight of his selected works, all of them equally effective combinations of graphics and text–in the way of the best magazine advertisements, which I don’t mean as a criticism (since they treat much larger issues than ads, much less predictably–and since many ads are extremely interesting aesthetically).
The other kind of visiotextual collage consists of what seem to be cut-ups thrown together to suggest haphazard spontaneity–that nonetheless (“accidentally”) result in often wonderfully unexpected sensibility- enlargers. Two exponents of such collages are represented in the show, Dmitry Babenko and Paul Zelevansky (albeit the work of neither seems truly “thrown together”).
Babenko’s image-packed work reminds me a bit of the packed eruptions of Wisconsin wildman Malok (who just about never has work in collections like this one, which I can’t understand). Each of Babenko’s 15 pieces consists of more than one closely inter-related frames, and all of them together very likely form a more or less unified sequence. Certainly their colors–browns, tans, greys and dark reds, for the most part–do not change much from one to the next. Not speaking Russian, I can’t comment on what they do verbally, if anything.
Paul Zelevansky only has 13 works here, ten of them illustrating different definitions of the word, “sweep”–amusingly–but, if one stays in each of his poems long enough, one finds them vividly insightful as well, and even more amusing. In the first, for example, he depicts a sheet of paper rising out of a typewriter with the line, “TO WIN OVERWHELMINGLY ALL THE GAMES,” five times, starting about an inch or two below the piece’s title, which is also, “TO WIN OVERWHELMINGLY ALL THE GAMES.” About an inch below the rising sheet of paper is a huge “ALL” in a box next to a second box containing a version of “THE GAMES” with the E of “THE” repeating downward in a stack, then sideways, then back up to its place in “GAMES.” There a hammer is giving it a good smack. The need not merely to win but dominate absolutely could not be more dynamically expressed. Nor how ridiculous it is, particularly considering the patently low quality of the typing. The rest of the sequence is similarly deft, and climbs into another level of amusingness via its interactiveness.
TO BE CONTINUED
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