Column109 — January/February 2012
A New Gathering of Visual Poems and Related Art, Part 2
Small Press Review,
Volume 44, Numbers 1/2, January/February 2012
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
Ten Superior Visual Poems
in the Pages at Poeticks
Web-Master: Bob Grumman
While engaged with the many fine pieces in Illuminated Script, I had an idea for a website that people could visit to see a few examples of superior visual poetry and read short commentaries on them, so be able to learn about visual poetry through more than mere exposure to them–although I’d never argue that serious exposure was not the best way to learn about them. I had the idea because of the number of works I found in the show that would be just right for such a site, four of which I thought I’d treat here, to provide an idea of both the site I plan and what’s in SCRIPTjr.nl.
The first is Marilyn R. Rosenberg’s “Drift Here” of 2003 (and I greatly approve of her dating her works, I might insert–something I fail to do all the time myself–art is wonderful, but art history is, too). Its main, large, wobbling-all-over-the-place words are “drifts,” “procrastination,” “puddling, babbling, whirling,” and, in just the right place, “lingers.” Its graphics include a small school of fish and gorgeously splishy brushstrokes in various ocean colors. “DRIFTS,” as it is actually spelled, can easily and very appropriately be taken for “DREAMS.” Changes of colors along sharp edges turn the work into a throng of rectangles working geometric precision against the swirl of all else, to suggest blocks of time in motion, being lost . . . On the other hand, the procrastination is allowing for–well, the eventual dreams I find to be one essential component of this composition. Go to my website. The work will be reproduced there, so you can see how accurate or inaccurate my commentary is.
The second piece is an untitled one by Carol Stetser. It features an array of primitive cave- or rock-figures, mostly anthropomorphic but with some animal-images thrown in and a few abstract symbols of some sort, including a vivid, unexpected, highly charged ampersand. It’s all white on black in white. Near the top is the printed label, “Pleasures and Terrors of.” Lower down in smaller print are the words, “Is it possible.” They are followed, lower, in cursive, by “We are the trustees of the future”–who seem to be represented represented by the upper torso of a human skeleton, with the side of a jaw showing, and strips of what strike me as mummy bandages covered with unreadable text. It all comes across to me as a celebration of all that early human beings bequeathed so wonderfully to us on the walls of caves and elsewhere in a kind of dark parallel with what we (may) be bequeathing to our descendants.
Number three is Márton Koppány’s “Dust.” A spectacularly simple evocation of dust and all it means that consists of a barely visible outline of the word “dust” on a dark blue page much larger than it, it resonates with its creator’s understanding of Zen koans, as is the case with much (all?) of his work. To one side of its word are two 6-shaped yellow quotation marks followed by a 9-shaped yellow quotation mark. On the other side is a second 9-shaped quotation mark, also in yellow. A yawn–unless you click sufficiently with what its punctuation is doing and its word is connoting both visually and verbally to seep through its entrance into the eternal night we’re all enclosed in. Or so it seems to me.
Last is K. S. Ernst’s “He r.” This poem, one of her should-be-famous-by-now sculptures of wooden letters on wood, these ones repeatedly spelling ‘HE’ and ‘HER’ in different sizes and orientations, drew a blank from me–until I realized it depicts the relationship between a ‘He’ and a ‘Her,’ the latter in the objective case so subordinate to the ‘He.’ But, among the many spellings of “He” and “Her” is a little s. It finishes a spelling of ‘hers.’ So who owns who?”
Now for a too-brief run-through of the work of the others in the show. Kaz Maslanka’s is important as the show’s only full-scale gathering of mathematical poetry. Most of his twenty pieces are direct equations with a fraction on one or both sides of the equal sign: e.g., one in which “Blood” is shown equal to “Liberty” times “manure” over “A Tree.” Basically statements more than lyrical imagery. Always with heightening graphic backgrounds to make them dynamically illustrated poetry (albeit not “visual poetry”).
Ebon Heath’s background in advertising design is evident in 26 deft textual designs, most of them using nothing but letters (asemically, as far as I can tell), but sometimes turning narrational in double exposures one of which has a person (the artist himself?) interacting with the text of the other.
Hassan Massoudy and Constantin Xenakis seem very different as artists from each other on the surface, but they seem to me close to identical (to Heath as well as each other) in what’s most important aesthetically in their work. Massoudy uses Arabic letters, Xenakis–well, I can’t tell from what I can make out on my screen if he uses any kind of letters; the point is that both aim for beautiful designs, gorgeous Arabic calligraphy and swirls for the former, equally engaging but computer-machined-seeming designs for the latter.
I think that perhaps six or more artists here are major (with the others not far behind). The one I am surest about is Scott Helmes–but that may only be because I’ve stolen more from his work than from anybody else’s, except maybe Karl Kempton’s, who also seems major to me. In any case, I’ve raved so much elsewhere about what he does that I’ll only say here that 72 of his pieces are in this show, and that they run the gamut from asemic to highly verbal.
Ditto with Karl Kempton’s work, of which there are over fifty highly varied pieces. Also included is a 33-frame asemic collaboration he did with Loris Essary (who shortly afterward left the scene, so far as I know) more than two decades ago, I’m sure. Very pleasant visit to the kind of typoglific (i.e., type-written letters in rectilinear placement, often crossing under or over each other) pop-art designs Kempton was doing then, and the startlingly interesting surrealistic riffs Essary worked off them.
Finally there is the work of the show’s curator, Andrew Topel. He may be the only 30–something participant in it. In any case, his work here (and elsewhere) encourages me about the future of visiotextual art, for he seems to have studied and learned from just about all the artists in the field (even having done some mathematical poems, although none of those are here). As a quick bit of evidence of his talent is his use in one piece of a blue musical staff. The use of the staff makes him cutting edge; the simple but possibly unique use of it in a circle makes him superior cutting edge.
With that, I close this installment of my column.
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