Module 2, Week 4

So! things got a little more complicated as each participant worked through their understanding of WHY and HOW I was using language as the subject matter in visual, creative studies, and what the relevance - if any of what such usage was.  We had a very fruitful discussion on the value of language in all its various forms as being the most accessible point of cultural entry and a very relevant departure point for creativity.  Unlike, for example,  a module dealing with landscape, or portraiture, language (the written word/prose/poetry/the letters of the alphabet/units/symbols/concepts/etc)  can be adjusted/manipulated/built up or destroyed and remade more than any subject matter a creative person wishes to access. Janina called my history lesson a 'skid' as I attempted to situate current visual poetry in a historic setting. I liked that :-) - 5 weeks to attempt a subject this broard, even at lightning speed, is just, well...impossible.



Janina
At this juncture, the important part is to remember I believe the 'liminal space' to be the area where creativity is 'engineered'. A troubling part? Emotive expression using language as its /matter/ includes disturbing trends in art like self mutilation and a general free-for-all, best defended by the loudest voices claiming no allegiance to any rational or transcendental ground. Its almost becoming about the ghost of language, the power of words to reinvent themselves to become self sustaining entities.

Annmarie

One might appropriate from any source, and play to compositional content, but I wonder if, in doing so, one is not contributing to a systematic destruction of lucid language structures and impoverishing dialectal stimulus? The new forms are image-text combinations which shape some sort of hybrid Ranger - a form which wanders the textual shadowlands finding somewhere to fit, no place to call home in a world beset with incoherent babble.  Not that this is cause for complaint - I mean, I'm doing it after all!

Jackie
Since mankind first inscribed its first mark onto papyrus and cuneiform tablets in certain structural and rhythmic patterns, poets have experimented with visual presentations of their work. Cummings' poem, "i carry your heart with me," changed the game a bit. Notes were given on Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrammes (1918) and the way Max Bill and Eugen Gomringer showcased vispo to the world in a 1956 concrete art exhibition in Sao Paulo, Brazil. What about Gomringer’s 1953  konstellations     which celebrated his view of concrete poetry as "a play area of fixed-dimensions" and his use of poems of very few words in simple structural arrangements to convey powerful messages, such as his famous 1954 poem, "Silencio." No wonder this was a skid!

Cheryl



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