Column 115 — January/February 2013
.
The Vislature Continuum
.
Small Press Review,
Volume 45, Numbers 1/2 January/February 2013
Art = Text = Art, Rachel Nackman, curator. http://www.artequalstext.com
Identities. By Irving Weiss.
78pp; 2012; Pa; Xexoxial Editions,
LaFarge WI 54639. $20 ppd.
www.xexoxial.org
M@h*(pOet)?ica. Bob Grumman, Blogger. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/07/28/mhpoetica http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/08/25/mhpoetica-summerthings http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/09/22/mhpoetica-louis-zukofskys-integral
Repose and Reconstruction. By Bill DiMichele. http://tipchapknifebook.blogspot.com/2012/09/bill-dimichele.html
Yes, “vislature” is another of my coinages, an old one. VISual art to literATURE. That’s what it means, and what the subject of this column is.
I’ll begin with a website featuring artworks close to the “VIS” end of the vislature continuum, but containing blips of verbal matter sufficient to make them visual poems. They are “Repose” and “Reconstruction,” two inter-related sets of ten full-color collages, each, by Bill DiMichele, that I would term a diptych. You’ll find a short introduction by me with it, too, with four complete works in that by Bill from books of his I’ve published. From that you may assume that what I write here will be biased in his favor. Fortunately, you can check up on me at Bill’s website for free (one of the really nice things about the Internet is how much of it is free).
Bill’s two sequences here are vibrantly opposed to each other. The images of the first could not more effectively express the serenity of repose—which here is shown as a triumph achieved, not something subdued to. At least to me, a person who finds happy lyricism in almost every artwork. A representative sample image (the second in the sequence) practically sleeps out of beach-hues and beach-hints, with commotions of words just about entirely gone (just about escaped from?); all commotion of loud colors, too, just about absent; and almost no dramatic shapes, only a simplicity of rectangles somehow organically right despite their non-organic corners. A holiday perfectly rendered, or a wonderful retirement . . .
“Reconstruction,” on the other hand, jitters the other way, loud wrong colors everywhere, torn fragments, a sense (for me) of things boarded up—but large-lettered ambition, possible stories rising to be told, and a buoyant confidence of a major synthesis under way. Others will have different readings, which—finally—is the greatest virtue of Bill’s works, their multi-interpretability. I think few will find ways to read them without exhilaration, though.
Similarly mostly visual, are the works in the Internet catalogue for the show curated by Rachel Nackman at Rutgers’s Zimmerli Art Museum. It contains 109 works by 48 different artists, each represented by from one to three pieces. They’re from the Sally and Wynn Kramarsky Collection. Few of the works are more verbal than DiMichele’s, a good number of them striking me as being fascinatingly just short of being visual poetry. I was familiar with many of the contributors such as Cy Twombly, Ray Johnson, Alice Aycock and Ed Ruscha, but made a number of new discoveries, such as Trisha Brown and Stephen Dean. Brown was a big surprise to me because she turned out to do what I consider mathematical poetry, my specialty! Hers explores much different territory than mine, though: graphs, and elegant strange wave-forms, the combination somehow emotively deep (reposefully deep, in fact!). Stephen Dean makes interesting use of a kind of graphing with two daily paper crosswords overlain with magic squares reminiscent of Paul Klee’s. Dean’s squares are greatly different from Klee’s, however, due to their unusual interplay with what I’d call the overflow of the puzzles into the mornings of the thousands of people working them. Emily Sessions, who has a commentary here on Dean, neatly sums up what they do: “His interventions into this quiet system—his reinvention of these puzzles and inscription onto them of the language of color—allows Dean to call attention to these (social) links. By maintaining their siting within the folded newspaper sections in which he finds them, Dean explicitly points to the puzzles’ social power.” Similarly socially subtle is a help-wanted section Dean overlays with subdued magic rectangles.
The artists at Art = Text = Art, by the way, have 35 perceptive critics commenting on their work, Olivia Kohler, for instance, insightfully increasing our enjoyment of what Trisha Brown has done. Great to double the value of a show like this with critical commentary! (And not just because lazy reviewers like me can get out of work by quoting some of it.)
Much more verbal than most of the work at Art = Text = Art, is the TERRIFIC work at M@h*(pOet)?ica, a guest blog I somehow managed to get space for at the Scientific American website. As of this writing, three installments of it have been posted. It’s basically an introduction to poetry that has to do with mathematics, although so far the focus has been on what I call “mathexpressive poetry,” which is poetry dependent on mathematical operations for its effect. Many of the examples I discuss are visual poems as well as mathematical poems–in full color. The fact that I’m the blogger and many of my works are on exhibit in it does not mean I’m at all biased when I say that the blog is the best thing to appear on the Internet ever! Or anywhere else!!!
I will leave the Internet now to plug a fine new collection by Irving Weiss, who will soon be 91, so may be the oldest living American visual poet. This collection of his is right up my alley inasmuch as it is strongly verbal. One piece new to me (as a number were not, for this is a kind of “collected works”) especially appealed to me. It shows three rectangles, each overlapping one or two of the others. In the one at the top a t is printed touching an l. Under the box is the title, “united.” The middle box contains the same two letters but they are now separated; the title shown is, “untied.” The final box, larger than the others, has nothing in it. Title: “untitled.” Think about it.
Irving is joyously conceptual almost all the time, and more times than not, pretty funny. He can be dramatically high-hued, too, as in “Moishe! Moishe!” which I take as an overview of Jewishness from all sorts of angles, erupting from the flight of Moses and the Children of Israel to some Jewish mother (in Brooklyn?) yelling for her kid to come home. Or so I take it, but may be way off. Anyway, the collection is very nicely packaged and well worth its rather high price to anyone with an interest in visual poetry.
.
