Wednesday, June 5th, 2013
Today I’m just bringing you more ARTnews evidence of artists not calling themselves visual poets who seem to be doing much better in the BigWorld than those of us doing the same kind of work much better but calling it visual poetry:
Gillmore’s piece is better than anything by Jenny Holzer, but Wallengren’s isn’t.
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Sunday, October 21st, 2012
I’m posting the following here because I like it, and because I have nothing else to post today:
“The Blind Canoe” by Greg Evason. From The Last Vispo Anthology, coming in October.
For anyone happening here who is interested in its taxonomical class, which isn’t easy to specify, in my system, it’s a musical visimage, not a visual poem (because its few words do not contribute significantly to its aesthetic effect).
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Thursday, September 13th, 2012
From the same box the other items I’ve been posting were from:
John M. Bennett sent me the cow; I don’t know who made it; I don’t know who made the piece featuring the four-suit King, or where it came from. I’m pretty sure the bottom piece is by John Byrum.
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Saturday, June 1st, 2013
This also is from the June issue of ARTnews.
Okay, Weatherly is a fine craftsman, and his still life is interesting–a fine expression of a now widely-accepted value of superior art: its reminding us of the ability of the ordinary to provide aesthetic delight. But nothing more. Thinking about why brought to mind Williams’s red wheelbarrow, but much better. Or does it? I think so because both works present ordinary objects sensitively-arranged. But Williams’s arrangement is also a poem. Weatherly presents a cup, Williams a wheelbarrow–and something made of words, beautifully-made of words.
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Monday, September 10th, 2012
Stephen Dean: “Untitled (Crossword),” 1996–from http://www.artequalstext.com/stephen-dean.
I’m not sure what to say about this. Emily Sessions says interesting things about it and similar pieces by Dean at the website I stole the above from (which has two other Dean works–and, as I’ve mentioned here before, a large quantity of combinations of text and graphics that visual poets should definitely take a look at. The website, which is curated by Rachel Nackman, will soon be updated, I understand.
After reflection, I’ve classified this as a visimage (work of visual art). Whereas Emily Sessions thinks of it as an entrance to an underlying universe of colors, it seems to me an act of–well–desecration; Dean has stolen the crossword grid from anyone who wanted to solve it. His repayment, needless to say, more than makes up for the crime (the crossword, after all, will still be available in many other copies of the newspaper it’s in) by doing what Sessions says it does–although it seems more an overlaying of another universe than an entrance into one, for me. Klee seems to me the magician these magick squares are most in the tradition of. But they enter the day-to-day of social interactivity in a way Klee’s works do not (as Sessions points out).
My thought at this point, as I consider the work for the first time from my critical zone, is that it surprises one out of a readiness to obey rules, pursue a goal, use analysis–in the familiar context of a newspaper’s entertainment section–and into . . . colors, nothing more. Or, to elaborate, into a purely aesthetic experience one can flow unanalytically, goallessly, freely with. Yet, a final, numbered order remains ever-so-slightly visible . . . this newness is safe.
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Monday, September 10th, 2012
Stephen Dean: “Untitled (Crossword),” 1996–from http://www.artequalstext.com/stephen-dean.
I’m not sure what to say about this. Emily Sessions says interesting things about it and similar pieces by Dean at the website I stole the above from (which has two other Dean works–and, as I’ve mentioned here before, a large quantity of combinations of text and graphics that visual poets should definitely take a look at. The website, which is curated by Rachel Nackman, will soon be updated, I understand.
After reflection, I’ve classified this as a visimage (work of visual art). Whereas Emily Sessions thinks of it as an entrance to an underlying universe of colors, it seems to me an act of–well–desecration; Dean has stolen the crossword grid from anyone who wanted to solve it. His repayment, needless to say, more than makes up for the crime (the crossword, after all, will still be available in many other copies of the newspaper it’s in) by doing what Sessions says it does–although it seems more an overlaying of another universe than an entrance into one, for me. Klee seems to me the magician these magick squares are most in the tradition of. But they enter the day-to-day of social interactivity in a way Klee’s works do not (as Sessions points out).
My thought at this point, as I consider the work for the first time from my critical zone, is that it surprises one out of a readiness to obey rules, pursue a goal, use analysis–in the familiar context of a newspaper’s entertainment section–and into . . . colors, nothing more. Or, to elaborate, into a purely aesthetic experience one can flow unanalytically, goallessly, freely with. Yet, a final, numbered order remains ever-so-slightly visible . . . this newness is safe.
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Tuesday, June 4th, 2013
One of my very lazy entries, just two steals from ARTnews.
This one is an example of what many Spidertangle artists would call “asemic poetry,” but which, unlike just about everything with that tag, gets into New York galleries or the equivalent. Why? It certainly is no better than much of the pieces shown at Spidertangle, although I do like it–the colors and shapes much more than the scribbling. Is it only because made by certified painters rather than people coming out of, or too associated with, poets. For one thing, artists like Brooker never think of their work as poetry of any kind.
A related example that I don’t at all like. In the spirit of Jenny Holzer. Yeah, makes yuh think but who in the world would hand it on their walls? On the other hand, like the Weatherly Dixie Cups, these bookspines could work as elements of my long divisions. That, needless to say, would complicate them beyond all possibility of being written up in ARTnews.
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Wednesday, June 5th, 2013
Today I’m just bringing you more ARTnews evidence of artists not calling themselves visual poets who seem to be doing much better in the BigWorld than those of us doing the same kind of work much better but calling it visual poetry:
Gillmore’s piece is better than anything by Jenny Holzer, but Wallengren’s isn’t.
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Tuesday, June 25th, 2013
The following is from the October 2012 issue of ARTnews, which I’d pulled out of another stack of ARTnewses yesterday to see if a later issue had more I liked in it than the one I discussed yesterday (it did):
The text is by Barbara Macadam writing about a selection of works owned by Robert Rauschenberg. I’m posting it because I find it fascinating that Ruscha made a sort of visual poem pretty close to what’s he’s making over fifty years ago–and, without trying for anything like the larger concerns of people calling themselves visual poets, has become famous and–I’m sure–wealthy, unlike any of the visual poets. Not that I don’t like his work, or don’t think he deserves his fame and wealth.
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Saturday, May 24th, 2014
From the same site as yesterday’s:
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Thursday, October 9th, 2014
Directly below is the cover featuring the design Craig Kaplan and I came up with for the latest issue of The Journal of Mathematics and the Arts. Beneath it, from the bottom up, are my initial rough draft for the cover, then two drafts of mine (from several) combining ideas of Craig’s and mine. The poem is my “Mathemaku No. 10.”
From down&dirty to fairly high-grade commercial art, it seems to me. Two equal but different expressions of aesthetic taste. If we had gone with my initial version, I would have wanted to boost its resolution and possibly made the heart-sequence more like the sequence in the one just above it–i.e., made the upward movement less predictable. I hadn’t realized when I made my first version that the lay-out of the cover was rigidly the way it is in the top image: image in square to top right, name of publication, image in square to bottom right. I’d have a single image take up the entire page with the publication data on top of it around two thirds of the way up. Different strolks for different fokes. Also a good demonstration of why I’ve never made any money from what I’ve done in the arts.
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Tuesday, July 23rd, 2013
I’ve always said that many commercial artists do work as good as “real artists.” The difference is simply their central goal, which is to persuade someone to buy something, however much they may at times also want to create a thing of beauty. So they are not making art, they are making advocature. I find the label below a wonderful specimen of advocary visiotextual art, but not of advocary visual poetry. A main reason I’m posting is to again make a point about what visual poetry is and is not. This is just an ornamented word. Excuse please, I should say that this is a beautifully-ornamented word, and one should be grateful for it, but that a visual poem, even an advocary visual poem, will do much more. Now if my creative brain hadn’t blown all sixteen of its fuses last year, with no new shipments of fuses due from Uranus until my next life, I’d show you what the melloyello logo would look like as a genuine advocary visual poem. That not being possible, I’ll just say it’d do something to make its visual appearance a metaphor for its text.
On the other hand, the lemon and orange slices seem pretty close to o’s–citrically mellowing beyond the o’s ending the text’s two words . . . Note: I think I couldda made a lot of money in advertising.
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