Language is often familiar. It is used to bridge gaps and to allow for sense to be made of a given scenario. In the realm of visual art, however, the work often “speaks” for itself. Knowledge of a piece’s history or style may illuminate aspects of its impressiveness or beauty, but for the most part, visual art and language do not rely on one another. In this space, language then becomes a pleasurable surprise.
A similar point can be made regarding visual images in poetry. While the construction of imaginative and sensory elements is central to the medium, it remains fairly unusual to come across a poem that contains or consists entirely of visual image.
The application of poetic language is not exclusive to poets and poetry, nor does innovative use of image belong entirely to self-proclaimed visual artists. I am interested in the overlap between these forms, and the ways in which a heightened focus on conceptuality coaxes poetry out of any genre of art.
This is a Mirror, You are a Written Sentence by Luis Camnitzer is one of the first text-based art pieces I recall being aware of. The idea posited by the work immediately fascinated me, especially as someone whose life was so consistently imbued with words.
Then, I zoomed out a bit and considered the medium overall. Camnitzer is considered one of the foremost artists of the 1960s conceptualist movement. Conceptual art is radically distinct from other styles of art due to its preoccupation with meaning and idea. Its use of text and language was also innovative for the time, building upon dadaist and cubist tradition.
So what, apart from their construction, differentiates this text-based art from certain poems? If a poem was written out on a canvas or a sheet of paper or modeled out of neon lights, would it remain a poem, or be considered conceptual art instead?
In theory, Joe Brainard’s “30 One-Liners” could have been presented as individual conceptual art pieces rather than combined into one single poem.
And conversely, the brief phrases included throughout Jenny Holzer’s “Survival Series” (or “Truisms,” or “Living Series,” for that matter) could have been collected into a poem rather than carved, printed, and projected onto various surfaces.
My argument here is that text-based conceptual art and particular, often minimal, forms of poetry are not all that different.
Take into consideration one of Aram Saroyan’s famous short poems.
This controversial piece begs to be perceived through a certain gaze. In the fascinating essay “You Call That Poetry?!,” Ian Daly offers this suggestion:
“Lighght” is something you see rather than read. Look at “lighght” as a poem and you might not get it. Look at it as a kind of photograph, and you’ll be closer.
Despite the piece’s confounding nature and the fact that it was, according to Paul Stephens in The MIT Press, “first published as a 24″ × 36″ poster” before going on to appear in print, Saroyan himself considers lighght and the equally puzzling four-legged “m” to be minimalist poems.
And what of works that can be viewed simultaneously as poems and as art pieces? Such is the purpose of concrete poetry, defined by Oxford as “poetry in which the meaning or effect is conveyed partly or wholly by visual means.”
Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrammes dons the subtitle “Poems of Peace and War.” Published in 1918 at the tail end of World War I, this collection breathed fresh life into the technique of typography, which was in the process of being replaced by film and audio recording as the quintessential means of dispersing information.
This was also only a few years before Apollinaire went on to coin the term “surrealism.” It marks a period of political, technological, and artistic change; a monumental expansion of possibility.
Thank you for reading! This was ridiculously fun to write and I have a lot more to say, but because of all the images I’m including alongside my commentary, limited space prevents me from putting everything in just one newsletter. So yes, I will make a sort of series out of this. Already, I’ve learned more about conceptual art and art in general, so I’m excited to make more connections.
For now, I’ll leave you with a line that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about, from “Duplex” by Jericho Brown: “I begin with love, hoping to end there.”
Until next time,
Bee <3
Right on! I look forward to reading your series on conceptual art. Holzer is a favorite of mine but I hadn’t heard of the others you’ve written about in this piece.