tom moody

These works "found on the internet" have almost nothing in common beyond grids of circles. Bury was a European proto-Op kinetic artist and Downing was a member in good standing of the Washington Color school, painting large "stain" style canvases on cotton duck.

Am guessing the Downing work above is vastly larger than the Bury in real life. The Bury suggests lunar phases as well as cartoon googly eyes all looking left. Am not sure of the medium.

Downing was a student of Kenneth Noland's and worked almost exclusively with dots and uninflected pigment. Like Paul Feeley's work, his canvases give a softening touch to otherwise precise, machinelike patterns.

Speaking of Noland & Co, Washburn gallery is showing some early 1960s Ray Parker paintings. Am looking forward to seeing them later in the week. Parker would be considered a second generation Abstract Expressionist but that '60s work, with its large bold color blobs, forges a missing link between Rothko and the Noland school.

To bring our theme of computer-represented abstraction full circle (commencing with the jpegs above), here is a simulated Ray Parker, painted last night.

topical remix of TM-ucce post

Am continuing to make notes for my talk at EFA on Wed., Dec. 7. The topic now includes consideration of "whether the concrete poetry movement of the 1950s anticipated the mechanics of the Internet, as some have said, or whether the movement still exists in a 'street' form on websites such as Tumblr.com and Dump.fm."

Augusto de Campos, Lygia, 1953
Marjorie Perloff, Stanford U: This love poem juxtaposes the “red” title word with green, yellow, blue, and purple word groups to create a dense set of repetitions with variations and contrasts. The need for translation is minor here, since Augusto himself has invented a multilingual poetics that oddly anticipates what is sometimes known in poetry circles today as “The New Mongrelisme.” Lygia contains English, Italian, German, and Latin words and phrases, bristling with puns and double entendres. Thus finge (“feints” or “tricks”) in line 1 becomes finge/rs (line 2). Do Lygia’s fingers play tricks? The third and fourth lines confirm this possibility with the anagram digital and dedat illa(grypho). As Sergio Bessa has explained, in lines 3-4, Augusto deconstructs the Portuguese verb datilografar (“typewriting”) in order to insert his beloved’s name into the scene of writing: grypho, moreover, can be read both as ”glyph” and “griffin.” By the time we reach line 5, Lygia has morphed into a lynx, a feline creature (felyna), but also a daughter figure (figlia), who makes, in a shift from Italian to Latin, me felix (“me happy”). Note too that Lygia contains as paragram the suffix -ly (repeated five times, twice color coded so as to stand out from the word in which it is embedded)—a suffix that functions as teaser here, given that the adjective it modifies (happily? deceptively? treacherously? generously?) is wholly indeterminate. The German phrase so lange so in line 8, puns on Solange Sohl, whose name Augusto, as he tells it, had come across in a newspaper poem and had celebrated as the ideal beloved in the Provençal manner ses vezer (“without seeing her”) in his 1950 poem O Sol por Natural. In line 10, the second syllable of Lygia morphs into Italian to give us gia la sera sorella—“already evening, sister,” where sorella may be addressee or an epithet for sera, the longed-for evening. The poem then concludes with the English words so only lonely tt- and then the solitary red letter l, recapitulating the address to Lygia, but this time reduced to the whisper or tap of tt- and a single liquid sound.

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by Lolumad
my talk topic next week is going to be "Concrete Poetry vs 'Doing Internet'" (or words to that effect)
am scouting around for examples of work that might superficially prove Kenneth Goldsmith's thesis that concrete poetry anticipated the internet but in fact proves nothing of the kind

remix of michael manning phone art; hat tip Nullsleep for stick and ball molecule

In connection with the "Telefone Sem Fio" show I'll be giving a talk on Dec. 7--more on this soon. The show celebrates the work of Augusto De Campos, a Brazilian poet who, together with his brother Haroldo and Decio Pignatari formed the Noigandres group in the '50s. Am reading an essay by Marjorie Perloff about them (hat tip Alessandra) and thinking about how much or little concrete poetry has to do with "the internet" or "net art."

1. Perloff begins her essay with this quote from poet/artist/Ubuweb founder Kenneth Goldsmith:

Everything [Pignatari] was saying seemed to predict the mechanics of the internet . . . delivery, content, interface, distribution, multi-media, just to name a few. ... [I]t’s taken the web to make us see just how prescient concrete poetics was in predicting its own lively reception half a century later... [W]hat had been missing from concrete poetry was an appropriate environment in which it could flourish. For many years, concrete poetry has been in limbo: it’s been a displaced genre in search of a new medium. And now it’s found one.

Sounds great but Perloff offers little proof that any of this is true. At the end of her essay she considers some examples of De Campos' poems rendered as interactive Flash video but the bulk of her writing is concerned with rehabilitating the concrete poets for other reasons, after they fell out of favor with the Academy in the '80s and '90s. Ultimately it seems like she's damning the movement with faint praise: "Thus Concretism, cutting-edge (literally!) as this arrière-garde was vis-à-vis the normative verse or painting of its own day, transformed the Utopian optimism and energy of the pre-World War I years into a more reflective, self-conscious, and complex project of recovery."

2. History:
(i) Perloff says: "Eugen Gomringer, generally considered the father of concrete poetry... differed from [the Brazilian-born Swedish poet Oyvind] Fahlström, as from the Campos brothers, in coming out of an artistic rather than a literary milieu. As early as 1944, he had seen the international exhibition of concrete art organized by Max Bill in Basel, and in 1944-45, he made the acquaintance of Bill and Richard Loehse at the Galerie des Eaux Vives in Zurich. Soon, he was collaborating with two graphic artists, Dieter Rot and Marcel Wyss, to create a new journal called Spirale. Bauhaus, Hans Arp, Mondrian and Der Stilj—these were Gomringer’s chief visual sources."

[^This is the sort of modernist kitsch I think of when I hear "concrete poetry" --TM]

(ii) "In 1953 Fahlström published a “Manifesto for Concrete Poetry” under the title Hipy papy bithithdthuthda bthuthdy, a version of “Happy Birthday” he took from A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh."

(iii) The road to political incorrectness: "in 1956, Gomringer declared that 'Concrete poetry is founded upon the contemporary scientific-technical view of the world and will come into its own in the synthetic-rationalistic world of tomorrow.' This functional definition of a 'universal poetry' brings concretism dangerously close to industrial design and conformity to the political-ideological status quo," says Perloff, adding: "In 1967, Gomringer took on the position of chief design consultant for Rosenthal, the famous china and glass manufacturer, and increasingly his work became that of consolidation rather than innovation."

(iv) Brazil: The Noigandres group breaks with Gomringer, looking back to Pound, Joyce, and other figures from the early 20th Century avant garde.

3. Perloff: "[Brazilian] concrete poetry, as represented by [Augusto's] Lygia... is less a matter of iconicity or even spatial design, striking as that design is, than it is conceived as verbivocovisual composition, all of whose materials have a signifying function. Pound’s familiar distinction between melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia is applicable here, but note that phanopoeia is transferred from the realm of representation (e.g., the word or word group as effective “image” of X or Y) to that of the materiality of the poem: its sound (emphasized by color) and its visual appearance on the page.

See Perloff for translation and unpacking of the complexities of the above. But then De Campos also did this, which for all the cleverness of its construction has aged poorly and looks like a return to the Gomringer school:

4: '80s/'90s theorists dismissed concrete poetry, claiming it was impaired not just by capitalist design cooties but the "iconic fallacy" first announced in Plato's Cratylian argument "that the sound and visual properties of a given word have mimetic value." Perloff, recanting her earlier criticism, distinguishes the Noigandres canon as "not a 'fallacy' in the sense Caroline Bayard took it to be one, for the whole point is that poetry is that discourse in which astre [star] and desastre [disaster] do belong together even if, in ordinary discourse, there is no meaningful relationship between the two." Good poets aren't mindlessly literal--who knew?

5. Perloff says an avant garde needs a rear guard to protect and consolidate its advances. Two ways the Noigandres did this: (i) Haroldo's demystification of Chinese characters and his more informed use of ideographic elements based on this research and (ii) taking the concrete poetry avant garde into the realm of the "digital" via, e.g., Augusto's experiments with electronic poems and interactive video. The latter doesn't seem very rear-guard since these tools didn't exist in Pound's day. Also, while Flash video is certainly a tool of the Net it is not the same as "the internet," which a decade after De Campos' Flash work we understand to be a more busy, polyglot place full of intriguing expressions that don't necessarily frame themselves as art. To make the case in Kenneth Goldsmith's statement above--that "the Internet" makes the concrete poets relevant again--would take another article.

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Telephone journal
Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts

"Dot matrix" version by GucciSoFlosy of my original virtual painting of a PBS videographer's video of Ryder Ripps or his simulacrum

speaking of Clyfford Still, here is a well-known internet meme by Dan Lacey, painter of pancakes (except this one has no pancakes)

posted on Phone Arts