Visual Poetics: Art and the Word.

Miami Art Museum, April 25 - November 16, 2003

There is an interesting poetic speculation that "language is a 'cumulative project' of the species, comparable to animal husbandry." (1) If you want to witness the sharp visual turn this human-language-project has taken in modernism, see the exhibition Visual Poetics: Art and the Word, on view at the Miami Art Museum through November 16. It consists of more than 50 works by 34 international artists who have set image and word on a collision course. The products are expansive and varied but the show cohesively focuses on avant-garde strategies of visual poetics and concrete poetry. Most work chronologically spans the post-World War II period up to the present, but stops short of broaching the digital domain. Even so, this excellent exhibition offers a surprisingly relevant set of models for current and future permutations of the human language project.

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Curator Cheryl Hartup organized the show using three categories: "politics, poetics, and the purely formal." The categories function well as an organizing principle and hold up to scrutiny even if we regard the "p" in "purely" as continuing the alliterative play of letters. Actually, the playfulness of linguistic form and meaning underpins and animates works in any category and drives a multilogue of intentions and formal experimentation that defy easy classification.

Still, there are distinctive eruptions here of cultural politics in such series as Glenn Ligon's Untitled (the Blackness Cannot be Separated From Me But Often I Can Stand Outside It). Quotations from black writers are stenciled large and bold and become progressively smudged, transposing their oral force into a somewhat blurred visual realm. Even one of the most formal works by Carl Andre (from 1956) evokes politics and power in the repetition of the phrase, "Conquest Display," as a modular element in the rhythmic pattern-images of a typewriter. "Poetics" is aptly discussed by Hartup as an intervention of language into desire, memory and psychological formations. Rivane Neuenschwander's video, "Love Lettering," displays words from e-mail messages attached to the tails of goldfish. Here the power of words and messages to somehow "arrive at their destination" seems to dissolve literally in the watery bowl of video.

However fluid the boundaries between the thematic categories, message, and display, the exhibition clearly establishes a point of reference for experimental, avant-garde approaches to image and text through the symbolist poem, "Un Coup de des" by Stephane Mallarme. The themes, visual strategies, and impulse to use chance as a generator of form are spread throughout the exhibition both implicitly and explicitly. To explore these connections in depth, there is an entire gallery that fashions a zone for the poem including the display of the 1914 publication along with more contemporary homages to it by Marcel Broodthaers, Andre Masson and Francoise Mairey.

This special gallery for "Un Coup de des" becomes indicative of how this seminal poem forms the foundation, not only for the show as a whole, but also to the collections and sources from which the show derives. According to Hartup, approximately 80% of the material was selected from the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, also based in Miami. On the Mallarme cornerstone, the Sackner archive has evolved into an expansive resource for word/image art and poetry rather than a limited collection of artifacts with single ancestry.

In similar fashion, the show itself works wonderfully in broadening the focus on avant-garde history to an open-ended resource for future discoveries offered by visual poetics. I was personally excited by the discovery of Jack Hirschman who adapted Mallarme's "Un Coup de des" to the radically changing landscape of signs and experience in the early 60s. He derived poetic form from the systematic chaos of a four-lane highway interchange in the same way that Mallarme used chance. He fashioned a sense of language as a whole new existence in the landscape of roads using his "mind as a car."

Work like Hirschman's demonstrates the importance of visual poetics not as an homage to the rarified experimentation of neurasthenic avant-gardes but as pointers to wholly new experiences of language emerging in post-industrial landscapes, now shaped of course by global information systems. Digital text/image/sound streams are forming the basis of "figural" modes of communication that collapse oppositions between image and word. (2) This exhibition does not include hypertext, web art, natural language processing or computer poetry, but it offers an awesome resource to study the assumptions and conditions that underlie the upheavals in rhetorical figuration that lie before us. Language may continue to be the "cumulative project of the species," but automated word/image hybrids, prefigured by the visual poetics, will certainly accompany it.

NOTES

(1.) Rasula, Jed, and Steve McCaffery, eds. Imagining Language: An Anthology. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), p. 130.

(2.) See Rodowick, David Norman. Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media. Post-Contemporary Interventions: (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).