{ Tuesday, March 18, 2003 }
Yesterday in Victoria, waiting for my ride, I was killing some time in a Big-Box Book-Selling Retail Establishment, and was surprised to find Poetry Plastique, the catalogue from a 2001 show at the Marianne Boesky Gallery, curated by Charles Bernstein and Jay Sanders, and comprised of concrete & visual poetry, "concrete" in the sense of tangible, "visual" in the sense of retinal --retinal-conceptual word-art, with tricklings-in of film, land art, book art, typewriter art & what have you, also including old timey favorites such as A Humument, Carnival, and a lovely plexiglass piece by John Cage called Not Wanting To Say Anything About Marcel*, created on the occasion of Duchamp's death -- as well as new stuff by a whole clod of experimental poets (including Christian Bok, whose interview I am meant to be finishing this week, in spite of having been detoured by travel, distractions and endless David Foster Wallace-style asides such as this one...)
So, naturally, I bought it.
Last night, unable to sleep as usual and up reading as usual, I came across an essay by Nick Piombino (who has an excellent weblog, click 'n' see) in which he writes about the work of D.W. Winnicott, 50's psychoanalyst:
(emphasis added)
Piombino goes on to relate his process of redefining his poetic and theoretical work by studying the visual arts, and by working in collage -- the collage pieces appearing in Poetry Plastique. He writes:
Jumping back and forth as I do between word and image, I've worked a lot in such a 'conceptual holding environment', but the idea of this thought-locus had remained unarticulated, in its own 'conceptual holding environment' (which I visualize as a kind of Cathedral of Erotic Misery/Hall of Mirrors/Funhouse, dizzying flashes of past, sense and nonce....).
Back to work.
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* And while you're stopping by the Cage piece, why not admire these Lithographs based on geologic maps of lunar orbiter and apollo landing sites by Nancy Graves?
LINK | 2:42 PM | TB
Thanks for your comment. I liked your blog! Didn't see an email for you at your blog page so I'm answering you here! You might check out the work of Vija Clemens - push pinned source material together to make collages...
Nick Piombino | April 11, 2003 5:55 AM{ Post a comment }
years back, up in Portland, I had a print of one of the Flemish guys' 'Tower of Babel'. next to it, kind of X-raying in on it, was a photo of Nancy Graves with a big-box camera on a long tripod among, as I recall, camels and native somebodies in some hot dry dusty place. the photo was pushpinned on to a turn-of-the-(last)century nautical map of San Francisco Bay.
msg | March 18, 2003 8:19 PMyou've reminded me of that, and how it felt to look at it, then. thanks