Archive for the ‘Irving Weiss’ Category
Entry 1093 — Thoughts Regarding Minimalism
Saturday, May 4th, 2013
I suppose the minimalist artwork below is not bad, but seeing it in the latest issue of ARTnews depressed me, reminding me that minimalist painters, even mediocre ones like Hanne Darboven seemed from this one example to be, were continuing to make big bucks forty or more years after the birth of minimalism while someone like me is making the most money of his life after fifty years or so of adulthood because of food stamps. . . .
Note from 1 February 2014 when I was reviewing the past year. Apparently the computer problem mentioned in my next entry screwed up this entry. The reproduction of the Darboven visimage got deleted and all my further comments. No doubt they had to do with the following specimens of much better specimens of minimalism I found by bp Nichol (the top one) and Irving Weiss the other two:
I’m sure I had fascinating things to say about them.
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Entry 1092 — More Cursive Writing by Irving Weiss
Friday, May 3rd, 2013
I was going to discuss the minimalist works of the previous entry in this one but had so much trouble simply setting the entry up due to my deranged computer and/or my blogsite’s programming, that I couldn’t continue after losing half my commentary, who knows why. In desperation, I scanned another piece that was in Irving Weiss’s Number Poems (The Runaway Spoon Press, 1997) and managed to post it here:
Nifty visiopoetic portrait of a lady, I think. I haven’t tried super-hard to read the writing but suspect it consists of various scribbled female names–one is Echo. Wait, at the top are Scylla and Daphne. I now suspect these are all nymphs or the like who suffered badly at the hands of various gods and goddesses–hence, if full life only a moment. And en masse here a barely legible flurry representative of all the feminine magic and mystery of the old religions now long-gone.
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Entry 1091 — Waves
Thursday, May 2nd, 2013
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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Entry 940 — Pronouncements & Blither, Part 2
Sunday, December 2nd, 2012
A few days ago, I got an e.mail from Irving Weiss. He made some nice remarks about my Scientific American blog, then said that neither “read” nor “peruse” satisfied him “for the way one sticks to looking at a work of abstract art or abstract expressionism or, for that matter, any visual poem lacking identifiable content and without a title to help the viewer. I muse: if you look long at a Pollock, Moherwell, de Kooning, what do you do with your looking mind? You have to avoid thinking of what the painting “looks like” on the one hand and going into a mystical mood or trance. It’s like, if you practice any kind of meditation you must try to avoid going to sleep. What kind of “looking at” is it you exercise while standing in front of a work of abstraction?”
Here’s my answer, to take care of this blog entry: “Glad you’re continuing to keep track of my blog, Irving! I agree with you about “pleruser,” but I do believe some such word is needed and so far haven’t come up with a better. Most excellent question you pose. I think I do a lot of different “looking ats” in front of something by Pollock, say. A kind of averbal analysis but a purely sensual absorption, back and forth, but maybe, if it’s possible, both at once? I hope other kinds of perception are going on, too. Sense of rhythms—associative glimpsing probably mostly unconscious to my own life-experiences but to other painters, other visual images. And I don’t go long without trying to think of words I could use to describe what the painting is doing for me, the writer’s gift or defect. I’m maxixperiencing it! I’m a maxixperient. Or “magniceptor,” “Magnicepting?” “a maxcipient?” My first good word for this was “aesthcipient,” but I gave it up because it was too hard to pronounce. Urp, Urp, and Away, Bob.”
Close to philogushy, but with some substance, I think.
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Entry 895 — “Gloss Twombley”
Thursday, October 18th, 2012
Here’s something from Irving Weiss’s collection, Identities, which is published by Xexoxial Editions (www.xexoxial.org). I’m posting it here so people following the discussion I’m moderating at ART=TEXT=ART, which so far has been almost entirely about Twombly’s “Untitled” of 1971, can come and see it.
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Entry 856 — Another from Irving’s New Collection
Sunday, September 9th, 2012
This one’s quite a bit different from yesterday’s–to show you the range of the work in Irving Weiss’s new Identities:
It seems wonderfully to represent the Jewish/Hebrew/Yiddish/Middle-Eastern experience–to Gentile me. I recognized “Moishe” as a Jewish name, but looked it up on the Internet to check and found out that, as I should have known, it is also a Hebrew (or Yiddish) Variant of “Moses,” which was Egyptian. But I’d already interpretted the work to be about the Exodus (“Moses” already being written in it)–and about the whole Jewish experience–the quest for a home, the struggle against . . . near-Hell? but certainly the hostility of the desert. But also, for me, the glorious triumph over, or out of, oppression both by Nature and by tribal enemies. The magical (note the amount of astrology in the piece) triumph. Knowing Irving, though, and having had a lot of Jewish friends throughout my life, and been exposed to a great deal of Jewish comedy–the Marx Brothers to Woody Allen (before he sold out to “seriousness”), I find a kind of irony, even farce in it–from its title, which suggests both an imploration of the Heroic Leader to get the tribe through its perils but also –well, calling a Jewish kid to dinner. But I also take “Moishe” as a pun for “Mercy!” which would make the piece essentially about a final escape into a promised land not yet attained.
I could go on into a sociological analysis of Jewishness, which I do think I have a good idea of because they don’t seem to me that much different from me, if different at all (one reason I got quite involved in geneology was the hope that I’d find out that at least one of my ancestors was Jewish; the closest were all the Protestants who were the heretics of their time). No time for that. I’ll just repeat that this piece seems to me a powerful, far-ranging expression of Judaism. And a wonderfully moving piece of verbo-visual art whatever it is taken to mean!
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Entry 855 — An Appropriately Titled “Untitled”
Saturday, September 8th, 2012
The following infraverbal masterpiece is the world’s first artwork given the title, “Untitled,” appropriately. It’s just one of the 78 pieces in Identities, a collection of work by Irving Weiss just out from Xexoxial Editions. It’s something to wonder through many more times than once, with a fantastic skitter through the arts, from low to high, 100% verbal to 100% visual, the comic to the largest ultimates (as well as a combination of both). I hope to say more about it here and elsewhere.
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karl kempton 
As I announced when I first posted this, I am hoping to publish an anthology of mathematical poems, like this one, so if you have one or know of one, send me a copy of it, or tell me about it.
the word ‘poetry’ within the two word term ‘visual poetry’ frames the discussion. we are not saying visual calligraphy nor graphics poetry, nor comix poetry etc.
as long as you focus on your self centered lexicon rather than seek an universal point of viewing, all this is perhaps a talking passed each other.
to continue: because of the steady decline since its peak in the early 1990′s, and because the term visual poetry was coined circa 1965 to break away from the limits of what became concrete poetry, i now prefer the use of sound illumination or illuminated language/s to cover all the visual (must see to fully grasp) use of language that can be composed. the best visual poetry is but a small subset as a result of what took place in the 1990’s. the following is a very abridged outline as to my shift.
just as concrete became cliché, what has become american vizpo/vispo (a term i used since the late 1970′s onward in my correspondence as an abbreviation for visual poetry), much american vispo, since the mid 1990’s attempted take over by a certain click of the language poets, has become neo/retro concrete. many american visual poets aloud themselves to be hypnotized (or consciously gave themselves over) by a perceived center of power of the moment to serve in order to gain recognition and or power, rather than serve the eternal muse of poetry.
vispo is now a cliché. it is no wonder the title of a forthcoming anthology is called the last vispo anthology. the editors themselves not only unconsciously have announced its death but also date its birth as 1950’s concrete movement (: “The Last Vispo Anthology extends the dialectic between art and literature that began with the concrete poetry movement fifty years ago.”) they themselves and those within this particular group consciousness admit they work in a temporal moment without homage to the eternal muse.
visual poetry roots are many thousands of years deep. illuminated language and its ancestral pictorial pictographic petroglyphic images even deeper. those not knowing history are condemned to repeat it. that is obviously true for those cutting history of this form off at 1950.
Interesting entirely unself-centered take on the history of visual poetry, Karl. But, as I point out, your definition of visual poetry is too general. If you disagree with that, you need to present an argument against it. You need to show, for instance, either that poems like “cropse” are visual poems, or why such poems need not be considered visual poems by your definition.
I would add that naming things for political reasons the way you say visual poetry was, retards the search for truth. But “visual poetry” is a good term. It is a good term because it specifies a kind of poetry that is specifically verbal and visual, and not, like concrete poetry, concrete in some other way, such as tactilely. That is why it is in my taxonomy. I would add that almost all concrete poetry is also visual poetry.
‘Visual Poetry is a Poetry that has to be seen.’ can be taken as a definition maybe. But lots of problems here, first of all, written poetry can be seen also. There is a form there and it is not always the same, especially after the free verse. Second, we have to ask maybe where a poem happens? This answer has to be relative. If it is in the paper, well, but what if it is in readers mind, relation to these signs (word, punctuation, structure etc)? If we can define where a poem happens, then we can talk about the eye and visual? But usually a poem happens between reader and the paper, reader “completes” the work as Duchamp mentioned.
Your problem with the definition can be taken care of easily by amending it to “Visual Poetry is a Poetry that has to be seen for full appreciation of its main aesthetic cargo.” The way a conventional poem looks on the page is not part of its main aesthetic cargo. Nor would the calligraphication of its letters be. The problems with it that I point out remain: it would cover too much that is not visual poetry, such as the pwoermd, “cropse,” and illustrated poems (which many artists who make them consider visual poems. A definition should always be as simple as possible, but simplicity rarely works.
As for where a poem happens, it seems clear to me that it happens in the mind. But rationally to define poetry, one needs to consider only what a poem is materially, which is generally word-shaped ink on a page, but which can include visual and other kinds of elements. And, of course, can be in the air as word-shaped sounds.
@Grumman; “The way a conventional poem looks on the page is not part of its main aesthetic cargo” How about thinking Mayakovski and other Russian Formalists and Futurists poems? I know these are not “conventional” but in a certain way they are modern now. How about haiku? and how about arabic or persian poetry for ages that has lot to do with the typography or calligraphy, ideograms etc where language or the sign is not just a carrier for meaning, it has the meaning only by itself. In western thinking these are not may be considered or not taken as main-frame but visual poetry has lots of roots with the “graphic-writing” history of the writing. If you are a verbal poet or as Ong say “verbomotor poet” these has minor importance but other way, every structural element has critical importance i guess. And how can we be sure that cargo, can be carried easily by any means and chance of the Language? Is poetry that good at that kind of information (communication)?
I think it’s a matter of a case by case decision whether a given poem’s aesthetic cargo is visual enough to make the poem a visual poem. I simply subjectively do not feel calligraphy (in most cases) does so. It’s decorative only. Spacing in poems isn’t enough, either, in my subjective view. I don’t see how haiku are visual. Chinese ideagrams may seem very visual to westerners but are essentially composed of symbols that are read, not seen.
As for language’s ability to carry an aesthetic cargo, I assume without the help of its visual arrangement and decoration, I simply subjectively believe that words can carry huge amounts of meaning and that in a good poem that meaning makes things like calligraphy minor.
One has to make subjective decisions like that or give up defining things. It seems to me that you are basically calling for a definition of visual poetry too broad to be useful. What isn’t visual poetry if haiku are or, apparently, any hand-written poem is?
i would have to say, the use of the phrase ‘eternal muse of poetry’ seems ridiculous here. taking wide sloppy swings at people you do nothing but miss and waste our time.
karl kempton sevişelim mi?
Concrete poem represents deep feeling