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This is my favorite of Guy’s three. I didn’t get the game the text plays right off. Even without it, the piece is major–one of those works that make me think I’m in some non-human species so little do I understand why so much trash wins adulation and works like this hang nowhere but in galleries like this, at best.
I had all kinds of trouble getting the following images into this post, and I’m exhausted, so won’t say much about them until tomorrow. I will say that I consider the top one an example of what has been wrong with the arts world for the past 40 or more years.
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Sunday, April 17th, 2011
Finally I’m returning to Clark Lunberry’s installation. Ironically, I already had the words I’m posting written–they’re all from the diary entry I made when I got home from Jacksonville, although somewhat revised:
So, we spent time at a Farmers’ Market–part of it very very pleasantly, under a freeway underpass on a bank of the river through Jacksonville, the name of which I now forget. We had lunch there, while listening to a girl singer accompanied by guitar–in the folk vein, I guess, and nice. Then quite a distance to the college Clark teaches at to see his installation (as well as an excellent exhibition of some of Marton’s pieces) . I wasn’t prepared for the outdoor part of the installation, “SENSATION” making an X with “THINKING” floating in the center of a small pond with geese swimming in it in front of where we parked. An evolving installation: later Clark rowed out to the X in a kayak and changed “THINKING” to “INKING.” It seemed okay to me. The words are from a quotation from Cezanne he’s done many variations on at other installations of this particular (4-year) installation.
The installation continued in the library building next to the pond. First, the long glassed-in exhibition space in the library’s lobby I had a picture of a few entries ago. In it were a huge number of books on water, trees and sky, plus an intriguing mush of torn pages of text in the jar that summed up the adventure into a secret cave that all the books contained. Then three visual poems, each taking up one portion of the stairway window, or glass wall, that faced the pond. The first featured repetitions of the word, “WATER,” the second “TREES, the third “SKY.” These are in many of the other versions of the installation’s . . . “frames.” Several other texts in much smaller letters, some of them sentences, crossed the windows. I was enthralled with the way one could see through these texts into the pond, and the trees beyond, and–finally–into the sky (wonderfully cloud-clumped when we were there) . (Sound effects were included although only the ones for “WATER” were working at this time.)
I immediately thought of Bob Lax (a favorite p0et of Clark’s too, I learned). Clark is a big fan of Samuel Beckett’s (whom he’s been teaching many for five or more years), who is also an obvious influence. But he’s also absorbed and created out of many other influences, many of them non-literary.
According to Billy Collins, E. E. Cummings is, in large part, responsible for the multitude of k-12 poems about leaves or snow
But, guess what, involvement in visual poetry has to begin somewhere. Beyond that, this particular somewhere, properly appreciated, is a wonderful where to begin at. Just consider what is going on when a child first encounters, or–better–makes this poem: suddenly his mindflow splits in two, one half continuing to read, the other watching what he’s reading descend. For a short while he is thus simultaneously in two parts of his brain, his reading center and visual awareness. That is, the simple falling letters have put him in the Manywhere-at-Once I claim is the most valuable thing a poem can take one to.
To a jaundiced adult who no longer remembers the thrill letters doing something visual can be, as he no longer remembers the thrill the first rhymes he heard were, that may not mean much. But to those lucky enough to have been able to use the experience as a basis for eventually appreciating adult visual poetry, it’s a different story. Some of those who haven’t may never be able to, for it would appear that some people can’t experience anything in two parts of their brains at once, just as there are people like me who lack the taste buds required to appreciate different varieties of wine. I’m sure there are others who have never enjoyed visual poetry simply because they’ve never made any effort to. It is those this essay is aimed at, with the hope it will change their minds about the art.
I need to add, I suppose, that my notion that a person encountering a successful visual poem will end up in two significantly separate portions of his brain is only my theory. It may well be that it could be tested if the scanning technology is sophisticated enough–and the technicians doing the testing know enough about visual poetry to use the right poems, and the subjects haven’t become immune to the visual effects of the poems due to having seen them too often. Certainly, eventually my theory will be testable.
The following poem by Cummings, which is a famous variation on the falling letters device, should help them:
But Cummings uses the device much more subtly and complicatedly– one reads it slowly, back and forth as well as down, without comprehending it at once. Cummings doesn’t just show us the leaf, either, he uses it to portray loneliness. For later reading/watchings we have the fun of the three versions of one-ness at the end and the af/fa flip earlier–after the one that starts the poem.
Marton Koppany returns to the same simple falling leaf idea but makes it new with:
In this poem the F suggests to me a tree thrust almost entirely out of Significant Reality, which has become “all leaves”–framed, I might add, to emphasize the point. So: as soon as we begin reading, our reading becomes a viewing of a frame followed quickly by the sight of the path now fallen leaves have taken simultaneously with our resumed reading of the text. Which ends with a wondrous conceptual indication of “the all” that those leaves archetypally are in the life of the earth, and in our own lives. And that the tree, their mother and relinquisher, has been. Finally, it is evident that we are witnessing that ” all” in the process of leaving . . . to empty the world. In short, the archetypal magnitude of one of the four seasons has been captured with almost maximal succinctness.
So endeth lesson number one in this lecture on Why Visual Poetry is a Good Thing.
Note: I need to add, I suppose, that my notion that a person encountering a successful visual poem will end up in two significantly separate portions of his brain is only my theory. It may well be that it could be tested if the brain- scanning technology is sophisticated enough–and the technicians doing the testing use the right poems, and the subjects haven’t become immune to the visual effects of the poems due to having seen them too often. Certainly, eventually my theory will be testable.
My career, by BigCity standards, may have hit rock bottom, but it CONTINUES: shown here is a wall of our county administration building with a few of the pieces in my latest local Arts & Humanities exhibition, which I hung this morning:
![100_0085[1]](/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/100_00851.jpg)
What the heck, here’s another wall:
![100_0087[1]](/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/100_00871.jpg)
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Márton Koppány says: They look great, Bob! Good to see them exhibited.
All the best,
Márton
Thanks, Marton. Who knows, maybe some nut will notice them and be so impressed by them that he’ll scrawl, “Wow!” in chalk on the wall!
Actually, if I were really ambitious, I’d sneak in and vandalize them, at last thereby getting press coverage.
Hmmm . . . . all leaves in fall.
Was this one of the response to Dan Waber’s “Fall leaves” project?
– endwar
I’m away from the files in my main computer so can only tell you it was a response to one project of Dan’s, probably the one you mention. Not sure, though, It had to do with work by bp Nichol, though.