The ANNOTICO Report
The Visual Poetry Movement is a thinking mans Art. Your
mind and your
senses will be challenged!
It is not the frustrating art of "It is what it is" or
"It is what each
person sees it to be", thus absolving the artist of any
responsibility of
saying anything significant.
This Contemporary Italian Art has important things to
say, and says it in
incredibly creative ways with impact.
A group of Italian artists started the "visual poetry"
movement decades
ago. Their form of poetry is hung on a wall as art rather
than found on a
page and is looked at more than read or spoken.
An exhibit featuring the work of four of these "visual
poets," represented
in 40 works, who began working in Italy during the 1960s,
opened Thursday
at the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University
and will remain on
view through July 24.
What these artists do is collage together the familiar
vernacular of mass
media, words and images ripped from newspapers and popular
magazines, the
way Jackson Pollock entwined ribbons of flung paint or
the way Frank Stella
built geometric forms in his paintings.
But, whereas Pollack and Stella had no discernable message,
these Italian
visual poets were among the first to offer a critique
of the visual and
verbal language of mass culture". "They propose first
to analyze and then
decompose the sign systems of mass communications."
Some may make comparisons to Pop Art and the work of Andy
Warhol, and Roy
Lichtenstein,
that merely absorbed and reflected both the beauty and
banalities of
popular culture.
The Visual Poets are a more cerebral lot, influenced by
the theoretical
study of philosophy and semiotics.They take manipulative
messages and
re-enact the manipulation to make their own points.
Visual poetry is mocking, exposing, subverting and critiquing
of pop
culture and media.
This is a follow on Report to that of April 6:
"Visual Poetry: Modern Art from Italy- La Poesia Visiva"
'Visual poets' take art to a different phrase
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
By Mary Louise Schumacher
mschumacher@journalsentinel.com
April 9, 2005
Opening a book, a newspaper or a magazine and reading
words, one after the
other, across a page is what most people consider the
definition of
"reading."
In a time, though, when we can click through layers of
Internet pages or
watch words, often snipped into abbreviated form, crawl
across the bottom
of our television screens while we watch programs, it's
safe to say the
thousands-year-old, linear way of reading may be under
some revision.
Oddly anticipating today's unbridled concentration of
messages, a group of
Italian artists started the "visual poetry" movement
decades ago. Their
form of poetry is hung on a wall as art rather than found
on a page and is
looked at more than read or spoken.
An exhibit featuring the work of four of these "visual
poets," who began
working in Italy during the 1960s, opened Thursday at
the Haggerty Museum
of Art at Marquette University and will remain on view
through July 24.
What these artists do is collage together the familiar
vernacular of mass
media, words and images ripped from newspapers and popular
magazines, the
way Jackson Pollock entwined ribbons of flung paint or
the way Frank Stella
built geometric forms in his paintings.
Ultimately, the words of the visual poets are not about
something so much
as the compression of them is itself something.
In two of the best examples of this work, Eugenio Miccini
blurs brand names
and headlines in circular collages that seem to whirl
with centrifugal
force that could suck one in whole. It is a deep, violent
stew of
unreadable words and nonsense.
Looking at Miccini's collages, it is hard not to draw
a comparison with the
often circular, swirling works of Mark Lombardi on view
at the Milwaukee
Art Museum through today.
In addition to the similar form and sense of movement,
the works of both
artists present menacing messages with seduction and
beauty. In a single,
shorthand image, Miccini and Lombardi can both provide
intricate diagrams
of a complexity of the contemporary moment - media saturation
for Miccini
and nefarious associations among powerful people and
institutions for
Lombardi.
Musketeers and a Klansman
Lamberto Pignotti's "Un poeta 'può' dire la veritÀ (A
Poet 'Can' Say the
Truth)," a 1966 collage in the Haggerty show, is divided
into columns, much
as a newspaper page is. The images of the Three Musketeers,
a British
military procession, a Ku Klux Klan figure holding a
torch in each hand, a
man donning a stylish suit, a street scene with a gun-wielding
man are
taken out of their original contexts.
Words, cut from publications and pieced together in what
resembles a
fictional ransom note, say (or ask?) things such as:
"A poet can tell the
truth," "certainly for peace and progress" and "defeat
is already
determined."
To make his enigmatic social critique, the artist takes
the elements out of
their original, literal contexts and rephrases them with
unusual
juxtapositions.
According to the exhibition catalog, the artist may be
asking: "What is the
role of poetry in a world challenged to the point of
breaking by the threat
of powerful forces over which the individual has no control?"
In Claudio Francia's more recent "La press (The Press),"
from 1998, the
image of a giant newspaper stand holding an untold number
of issues fills
out the entire background of the collage, while typography,
a giant splotch
of ink and fragments of red text in French and Italian
congeal into a
dramatic, immediate form.
The artwork, which resembles the earlier works from the
1960s, "offers a
stinging critique of the press for its hasty, slapdash
work leading to
inaccuracies," writes Curtis L. Carter, the Haggerty's
director, in an
essay for the exhibition catalog.
Forms go back millenniums
Words have wiggled their way into art, and art into text,
throughout
history.
Picture-driven, pre-alphabet literary forms that focus
on pattern and
rhythm date back millenniums. Some scholars say, in fact,
that some of this
"writing" can be considered a form of poetry, according
to Simon Anderson.
Anderson, a professor of art history, theory and criticism
at the Art
Institute of Chicago, writes about the concept in his
essay for the
Haggerty show's exhibition catalog.
Or, in the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages,
for example, letters
contained entire scenes, and margins were filled with
visual narratives
that amplified or provided an entertaining rest from
the devotional texts.
The closest relations to visual poetry are perhaps Dadaism
and Futurism. At
the heart of the Dadaist visual montages of artists such
as Hannah Höck,
for example, is a fascination with the effects of advancing
technology.
Manifestos, a spirit of protest and complex, visual jokes
were also the
mainstay of many Dada artists.
For visual poetry's half sister, "concrete poetry," or
drawings formed from
words, syntax and language are not as incidental. Visual
poetry is art
first and poetry second, sometimes minimally so.
Many of the works in the Haggerty exhibit seem to ask
questions about the
power of imagery of women in contemporary culture, including
some from the
history of art that have become as commonplace as the
usual spate from the
covers of magazines.
'Extremist Mona Lisa'
Francia often slices images of women's faces and bodies
taken from famous
paintings into precise, thin strips and reassembles them
into rhythmic
patterns of image and text.
In a collage made last year, Francia presents an "extremist
Mona Lisa." The
world-famous eyes of Leonardo da Vinci's iconic portrait
peer through the
kind of veil many women wear in Muslim countries. The
incongruity of the
familiar images paired up, coupled with the subject's
aggressive stance, is
hard to reconcile.
Miccini, who with Francia probably represents the strongest
work in the
show, borrows the suggestive poses of women in advertisements
used to hawk
products from wallpaper to toilet paper. The context
around the scantily
clad women is edited away and the desirability hangs
oddly in the air like
an unfinished sentence. Sometimes Miccini flattens and
obscures female
figures by filling their outlines with line upon line
of text.
"The new structures of Visual Poetry attempt to subvert
the manipulative
stereotypes of advertising images," Carter writes in
his essay.
"In this respect, the Italian visual poets were among
the first to offer a
critique of the visual and verbal language of mass culture,"
Carter writes
later in the essay. "They propose first to analyze and
then decompose the
sign systems of mass communications."
Links to Pop Art
The kind of appropriation found in visual poetry makes
a comparison to Pop
Art and the work of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and
James Rosenquist
natural, Carter says.
Pop Art absorbed and reflected both the beauty and banalities
of popular
culture, though on the whole was more attracted to it
than repelled by it.
It also restored figuration to art when Abstract Expressionism
had pushed
it to the margins.
Visual poetry, too, steals its vocabulary from pop culture,
as well as
imagery from art history. But mocking, exposing, subverting
and critiquing
pop culture is usually the starting point.
The visual poets are generally a more cerebral lot, too,
influenced by the
theoretical study of philosophy and semiotics. At its
simplest, though,
what they do is take manipulative messages and re-enact
the manipulation to
make their own points.
With the raw material of a media-drenched culture they
pull a "return to
sender" move, writes Enrico Mascelloni, an international
critic and curator
from Rome, in an essay for the exhibition catalog.
"One can say that in a certain sense Visual Poetry in
a similar context
represents the very best retaliation against the abuse
of images,"
Mascelloni writes.
'Visual Poetry'
PHOTO: Lamberto Pignotti’s single collage, "Un poeta ‘può’
dire la verità
(A Poet 'Can' Say the Truth)," from 1966, is cryptic
social commentary
crafted from newspaper and magazine images and text.
It is included in
"Visual Poetry: Contemporary Art from Italy"
PHOTO: Artist Claudio Francia slices images of women from
famous paintings
and reassembles them in rhythmic patterns, such as in
"Cassandra" from
2004.
PHOTO: Media images with the feel of centrifugal force
fill this Miccini
collage.
PHOTO: Eugenio Miccini splices together colorful text
from magazines for
his circular collages about the overwhelming whirl of
mass media. .
Visual Poetry: Contemporary Art from Italy
WHEN
4/10/05 - 7/24/05
10 a.m.-4:30 Mon-Sat; 10 a.m.-8 Thu; noon-5 Sun
Web site: www.marquette.edu/haggerty
Ticket information: Call 414-288-1669
WHERE
Haggerty Museum of Art
530 N. 13th St.
Milwaukee, WI 53201
414-288-1669