Re: [spidertangle] "Visual Poetry: Contemporary Art from Italy" open in Milwaukee
mIEKAL aND
Words to hang by
'Visual poets' take art to a different phrase
By MARY LOUISE SCHUMACHER mschu...@journalsentinel.com
Last Updated: April 9, 2005
Opening a book, a newspaper or a magazine and reading words, one after
the other, across a page is what most people consider the definition of
"reading."
In a time, though, when we can click through layers of Internet pages
or watch words, often snipped into abbreviated form, crawl across the
bottom of our television screens while we watch programs, it's safe to
say the thousands-year-old, linear way of reading may be under some
revision.
Oddly anticipating today's unbridled concentration of messages, a group
of Italian artists started the "visual poetry" movement decades ago.
Their form of poetry is hung on a wall as art rather than found on a
page and is looked at more than read or spoken.
An exhibit featuring the work of four of these "visual poets," who
began working in Italy during the 1960s, opened Thursday at the
Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University and will remain on view
through July 24.
What these artists do is collage together the familiar vernacular of
mass media, words and images ripped from newspapers and popular
magazines, the way Jackson Pollock entwined ribbons of flung paint or
the way Frank Stella built geometric forms in his paintings.
Ultimately, the words of the visual poets are not about something so
much as the compression of them is itself something.
In two of the best examples of this work, Eugenio Miccini blurs brand
names and headlines in circular collages that seem to whirl with
centrifugal force that could suck one in whole. It is a deep, violent
stew of unreadable words and nonsense.
Looking at Miccini's collages, it is hard not to draw a comparison with
the often circular, swirling works of Mark Lombardi on view at the
Milwaukee Art Museum through today.
In addition to the similar form and sense of movement, the works of
both artists present menacing messages with seduction and beauty. In a
single, shorthand image, Miccini and Lombardi can both provide
intricate diagrams of a complexity of the contemporary moment - media
saturation for Miccini and nefarious associations among powerful people
and institutions for Lombardi.
Musketeers and a Klansman
Lamberto Pignotti's "Un poeta 'pu' dire la verit (A Poet 'Can' Say the
Truth)," a 1966 collage in the Haggerty show, is divided into columns,
much as a newspaper page is. The images of the Three Musketeers, a
British military procession, a Ku Klux Klan figure holding a torch in
each hand, a man donning a stylish suit, a street scene with a
gun-wielding man are taken out of their original contexts.
Words, cut from publications and pieced together in what resembles a
fictional ransom note, say (or ask?) things such as: "A poet can tell
the truth," "certainly for peace and progress" and "defeat is already
determined."
To make his enigmatic social critique, the artist takes the elements
out of their original, literal contexts and rephrases them with unusual
juxtapositions.
According to the exhibition catalog, the artist may be asking: "What is
the role of poetry in a world challenged to the point of breaking by
the threat of powerful forces over which the individual has no
control?"
In Claudio Francia's more recent "La press (The Press)," from 1998, the
image of a giant newspaper stand holding an untold number of issues
fills out the entire background of the collage, while typography, a
giant splotch of ink and fragments of red text in French and Italian
congeal into a dramatic, immediate form.
The artwork, which resembles the earlier works from the 1960s, "offers
a stinging critique of the press for its hasty, slapdash work leading
to inaccuracies," writes Curtis L. Carter, the Haggerty's director, in
an essay for the exhibition catalog.
Forms go back millenniums
Words have wiggled their way into art, and art into text, throughout
history.
Picture-driven, pre-alphabet literary forms that focus on pattern and
rhythm date back millenniums. Some scholars say, in fact, that some of
this "writing" can be considered a form of poetry, according to Simon
Anderson. Anderson, a professor of art history, theory and criticism at
the Art Institute of Chicago, writes about the concept in his essay for
the Haggerty show's exhibition catalog.
Or, in the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages, for example,
letters contained entire scenes, and margins were filled with visual
narratives that amplified or provided an entertaining rest from the
devotional texts.
The closest relations to visual poetry are perhaps Dadaism and
Futurism. At the heart of the Dadaist visual montages of artists such
as Hannah Hck, for example, is a fascination with the effects of
advancing technology. Manifestos, a spirit of protest and complex,
visual jokes were also the mainstay of many Dada artists.
For visual poetry's half sister, "concrete poetry," or drawings formed
from words, syntax and language are not as incidental. Visual poetry is
art first and poetry second, sometimes minimally so.
Many of the works in the Haggerty exhibit seem to ask questions about
the power of imagery of women in contemporary culture, including some
from the history of art that have become as commonplace as the usual
spate from the covers of magazines.
'Extremist Mona Lisa'
Francia often slices images of women's faces and bodies taken from
famous paintings into precise, thin strips and reassembles them into
rhythmic patterns of image and text.
In a collage made last year, Francia presents an "extremist Mona Lisa."
The world-famous eyes of Leonardo da Vinci's iconic portrait peer
through the kind of veil many women wear in Muslim countries. The
incongruity of the familiar images paired up, coupled with the
subject's aggressive stance, is hard to reconcile.
Miccini, who with Francia probably represents the strongest work in the
show, borrows the suggestive poses of women in advertisements used to
hawk products from wallpaper to toilet paper. The context around the
scantily clad women is edited away and the desirability hangs oddly in
the air like an unfinished sentence. Sometimes Miccini flattens and
obscures female figures by filling their outlines with line upon line
of text.
"The new structures of Visual Poetry attempt to subvert the
manipulative stereotypes of advertising images," Carter writes in his
essay.
"In this respect, the Italian visual poets were among the first to
offer a critique of the visual and verbal language of mass culture,"
Carter writes later in the essay. "They propose first to analyze and
then decompose the sign systems of mass communications."
Links to Pop Art
The kind of appropriation found in visual poetry makes a comparison to
Pop Art and the work of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and James
Rosenquist natural, Carter says.
Pop Art absorbed and reflected both the beauty and banalities of
popular culture, though on the whole was more attracted to it than
repelled by it. It also restored figuration to art when Abstract
Expressionism had pushed it to the margins.
Visual poetry, too, steals its vocabulary from pop culture, as well as
imagery from art history. But mocking, exposing, subverting and
critiquing pop culture is usually the starting point.
The visual poets are generally a more cerebral lot, too, influenced by
the theoretical study of philosophy and semiotics. At its simplest,
though, what they do is take manipulative messages and re-enact the
manipulation to make their own points.
With the raw material of a media-drenched culture they pull a "return
to sender" move, writes Enrico Mascelloni, an international critic and
curator from Rome, in an essay for the exhibition catalog.
"One can say that in a certain sense Visual Poetry in a similar context
represents the very best retaliation against the abuse of images,"
Mascelloni writes.