Researching poetry in visual art

I have been researching the currency of poetry in art practice. I have always been interested in the written word and poetry. I appreciate poetry as performance but also how it can be visually portrayed. I had been aware of poetry in art, mainly in the form of Fluxus. Jumping forward I have been looking at modern concrete poets, its origins and what it is today. The concrete poets seem to have seeped into every aspect of our lives, lived online and in advertising and the way graphically products, ideas and politics are served up to us. I wanted to take a look at the origins of the concrete poets, and see if my work has any relationship to their work. They also made a significant contribution to sound art and the development of minimal sound music.

I found a book from the exhibition at the Hayward Gallery The New Concrete, visual poetry in the 21st Century from 2015. During the research I found that the first founders of the movement used performance of the work as the most important element and some of these recordings seemed almost Dada in their execution. These concrete artists upon reflection and evaluation in relation to my own practice bear little resemblance and although I really am interested in the sound recording aspect of the concrete poets, the reality of their practice leaves me somewhat cold.

Upon reflection and during a recent tutorial with Kerry Andrews on the 3rd of December he pointed out that my poems indeed were in the work and I had in fact crossed that divide between the line and the word. I had found the language in which to put the poem into the work without speaking it. I would like to take this into sound recording and transfer this language into the purely visual, possibly in a minimalist way. We talked about how to possibly record the sound of the folding and tearing the materials. I am going to research the Fluxus group further.

I spent some time folding the paper differently in the studio and making other ways of folding less regular in my studio research and practice working from home before the studio’s reopened for the Semester B. I also spent time making sketchbooks with the graphic/word language translation.

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I still want to try to get the poetry I write and visual graphics into my work but I need to do more research. When I visited Paris in 1988 and saw my first Cy Twombly exhibition who at the time was relatively unknown in the UK. I saw the text in his paintings and read my own poetic interpretations into the work. I want to use my visual knowledge of Twombly’s work and get that feeling into my own work. Researching Twombly further he has many references to poets and philosophers. I have never really read into the world of Philosophy and want to understand more.

My next steps are to find some poetry that I may want to depict and interpret visually and keep pushing my practice by finding out more about the philosophers and poets who have influenced artists like Twombly, Hesse, Chadwick and Bourgeois.