Poetry Plastique: An Introduction: | (click here to print)

Jay Sanders

How to start...We had a gallery and we wanted to flood it with poetry. Not with "poetic" artwork, but with actual poetry, made by poets. But, we have gallery walls, not pages in a book. So we organized a show of art overrun by poetry and a show of poetry riddled with art.

Why aren't poets more central to contemporary visual art? "Poetry Plastique" makes this question impossible to ignore. For many contemporary poets, the connections and affinities with the visual arts are readily acknowledged. Indeed, today's most innovative poets have challenged traditional ideas of the literary, moving their work into close proximity to the most radical questionings of current visual artists. And, indeed, the proximity of avant-garde poets and artists has a vibrant history that our show hopes to bring up to date.

Take, for example, the crucial 1995 anthology Poems for the Millennium (edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris), which is emblematic of the wide-reaching and multifaceted history that contemporary poetry increasingly considers its own. For the editors of this anthology, poetry exists in an active context that includes such poet-artists as Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, and John Cage (not to mention Picasso, Cendrars and Delaunay, Marinetti, Stepanova, Kandinsky, Grosz, Klee, Michaux, Tzara, Ball, Arp, Picabia, Breton, Ernst, Artaud, Brecht). In their respective practices, these individuals-most of whom are primarily known as visual artists-and many more, are of real interest as poets, informing the survey, connecting the dots, and giving key insights into contemporary poetic practice.

Poems for the Millennium reminds us that poetry has historically played a central role in most of the key art movements of the twentieth century. Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism were all, first and foremost, literary movements. And while the story is perhaps less known today, contemporary poets continue to produce works that rival any other medium in terms of innovation, variety, and accomplishment. With regard to the relationship between poetry and the plastic arts, we've tried to take poetry out of its expected-but not necessary-contexts, pulling poetry out of the book and throwing it up on the wall or down on the floor.

"Poetry Plastique" presents an important aspect of the often underrepresented visual works of contemporary poets. We offer a constellation of intellectually compelling, poetically dense, visually dazzling works that represent some of the most exciting efforts in current practice. Additionally, we shed light on an essential gathering of historical progenitors. Known primarily as visual artists (Smithson, Arakawa, Phillips, Andre, Berman, Twombly), poets (Coolidge, McCaffery, Mac Low), filmmakers (Frampton, Snow), and composers (Cage), the artists in our historical component each exhibit an understanding of the possibilities of enacting the verbal and visual-centering their concerns on a real exploration of poetry and language-rather than simply "text." Such a grouping, shown concurrently with critical contemporary examples, updates the recent historical crosscurrents of poetry and visual art, and contextualizes the contemporary works in a broad manner that extends beyond the specificities of a single medium.

We have taken a wide, interdisciplinary view of "poetry plastique" which looks favorably on convergences, collisions, and corruptions between categories in the arts. For many of the participating artists, this means highlighting lesser-known (but more pertinent for us) aspects of their creative endeavors. One of the common hallmarks of the "historical" artists is an unabashed irreverence for the divisions between artistic mediums. Each artist has allowed their practice to transcend disciplinary categories, making vital innovations in more than one milieu. And, as we illustrate here, each has critically explored the limits of language and poetic text in a visual context.

For many of the contemporary poets and language artists (Antin, Bök, Drucker, Goldsmith, Grenier, Hejinian, Lin, McVarish, Piombino, Scalapino, Wershler-Henry), we are highlighting both special projects and ongoing corollaries to their practice as writers. For the most part, these poets also publish less visually intensive poetry, but it is their works that combine visual and verbal sensibilities that are central to our concerns. Additionally, we include key painters (Bee, Schor) whose canvases-in a complementary manner-provide grounds for intensive explorations of poetics and language.

We have also chosen to exhibit important collaborations between poets and visual artists. While some of these pieces were made specifically for this exhibition, we did not organize any of the collaborative pairings. Instead, it was our intent to seek out existing relationships that demonstrate a dynamic synthesis of the physical/visual/material with the poetic/textually-dense. While there are many poet/artist collaborations, each of these (Clark Coolidge/Philip Guston, Madeline Gins/Arakawa, Robert Creeley/Cletus Johnson, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge/Kiki Smith, Charles Bernstein/Richard Tuttle, Lyn Hejinian/Emilie Clark) has intricately intermeshed the visual and the poetic to the utmost degree.

For our show, we have chosen to include neither artist's books nor poetry that is primarily "concrete" or typographical, in part because these forms have been more commonly exhibited, but also because we are especially interested in works whose visual materiality is not fully reproducible in books, anthologies, or on the internet. The present exhibition is by no means an exhaustive view of "poetry plastique." But we do give definitive examples of works that push the frontiers of poetic format and suggest a fundamental new direction, a new realization about the verbal/visual interconnection in art.

For this reason, we have made every effort to display "originals," even of works designed to be read in reproduction. And we have included a number of works-sculptures, paintings, films, and video-where paper is not the medium upon which the words are inscribed. Not simply poems on the wall, the works in our exhibition share an interest in materials and visuality, and exist as "unique" objects ideally viewed in a gallery setting and best appreciated in person.

To the curators of this exhibition, mounting such a show in a commercial New York gallery is an important component. It annexes these poets and their works into the context of contemporary art, and generally restates the importance of poetry in the realm of the visual arts. In organizing and presenting these works, we have taken every measure to acknowledge them as equally compelling as any grouping of artworks.

Organizing a gallery exhibition full of poetry actively pushes against categorical definitions separating artistic mediums. In their endeavors, the poets involved in "Poetry Plastique" are all consciously concerned with boundaries. The boundaries between poetry and criticism, verse and prose, reading and looking, meaning and material are incessantly pushed to the breaking point. We have endeavored to exhibit an element of that spillage, where creative works extend limits so far, they can potentially turn into something else.