Miami Art Museum.

Miami Art Museum, April 25 - November 16 2003

There is an interesting poetic speculation that "language is a 'cumulative project' of the species, comparable to animal husbandry." (1) If you want to witness the sharp visual divert this human-language-project has taken in modernism, papal court the exhibition Visual Poetics: Art and the Word, forward view at the Miami Art Museum within November 16. It consists of more than 50 works by way of 34 international artists who have place image and word on a collision course. The fruitss are expansive and varied moreover the show cohesively focuses upon avant-garde strategies of visual poetics and consolidated poetry. Most work chronologically spans the post-World War II period up to the near but stops short of broaching the digital domain. level so, this excellent exhibition presents a surprisingly relevant set of examples for current and future permutations of the human language project

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Curator Cheryl Hartup organized the point out to using three categories: "politics, poetics, and the merely formal." The categories function well as an organizing principle and have up to scrutiny even if we regard the "p" in "purely" as continuing the alliterative play of epistles Actually, the playfulness of linguistic form and meaning underpins and animates works in any category and drives a multilogue of intentions and formal experimentation that disregard easy classification.

Still, there are distinctive eruptions here of cultural politics in in the same state [i]or[/i] condition series as Glenn Ligon's Untitled (the Blackness Cannot be Separated From Me on the other hand Often I Can Stand Outside It). Quotations from black writers are stenciled large and stout-hearted and become progressively smudged, transposing their oral force into a somewhat blurr visual realm. on the same level one of the most formal works at Carl Andre (from 1956) summon forths politics and power in the repetition of the phrase, "Conquest Display," as a modular uncompounded body in the rhythmic pattern-images of a typewriter. "Poetics" is aptly discussed by the agency of Hartup as an intervention of language into desire, memory and psychological formations. Rivane Neuenschwander's video, "Love Lettering," displays words from e-mail messages attached to the tails of goldfish. Here the power of words and messages to in some way "arrive at their destination" be seens to dissolve literally in the watery goblet of video.

However fluid the boundaries between the thematic categories, message, and display, the exhibition clearly establishes a point of respect for experimental, avant-garde approaches to image and paragraph through the symbolist poem, "Un Coup de des" by means of Stephane Mallarme. The themes, visual strategies, and impulse to use chance as a generator of form are spread everywhere the exhibition both implicitly and explicitly. To explore these connections in profundity there is an entire gallery that fashions a girdle for the poem including the display of the 1914 publication along with more contemporary homages to it by way of Marcel Broodthaers, Andre Masson and Francoise Mairey.

This special gallery for "Un Coup de des" becomes indicative of by what means this seminal poem forms the foundation, not simply for the show as a whole, if it were not that also to the collections and sources from which the exhibit derives. According to Hartup, approximately 80% of the material was exquisiteed from the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of solidify and Visual Poetry, also based in Miami. upon the Mallarme cornerstone, the Sackner archive has evolv into an expansive resource for word/image art and numbers rather than a limited collection of artifacts with single ancestry.

In similar fashion, the point out to itself works wonderfully in broadening the focus forward avant-garde history to an open-end resource for time to come discoveries offered by visual poetics. I was personally excited according to the discovery of Jack Hirschman who adapted Mallarme's "Un Coup de des" to the radically changing landscape of signs and experience in the early 60 He derived poetic form from the systematic chaos of a four-lane highway interchange in the same way that Mallarme used chance. He fashioned a thinking principle of language as a whole just discovered existence in the landscape of roads using his "mind as a car."

Work like Hirschman's demonstrates the importance of visual poetics not as an homage to the rarified experimentation of neurasthenic avant-gardes on the other hand as pointers to wholly modern experiences of language emerging in post-industrial landscapes, now shaped of course by way of global information systems. Digital text/image/sound streams are forming the basis of "figural" modifications of communication that collapse oppositions between image and word. (2) This exhibition does not include hypertext web art, natural language processing or computer verse but it offers an awesome resource to contemplation the assumptions and conditions that underlie the upheavals in rhetorical figuration that lie before us. Language may continue to be the "cumulative brew of the species," but automated word/image hybrids, prefigured from the visual poetics, will certainly accompany it.