CONCRETE POETRY / SUPERSIGNS / MULTIPLE LANGUAGE
PETER TYNDALL RICHARD TIPPING JEFF STEWART MARIE SIERRA ALEX SELENITSCH PETER O’MARA PATRICK JONES ALEKS DANKO GEOFFREY BAXTER
EDITED BY PATRICK JONES REVERIE PRESS PUBLICATIONS 2004
AND ANOTHER THING The starting point for this publication came about, in all likelihood, more than five years ago. Perhaps it stems back to when my mother first introduced me to William Blake. It’s hard to tell. In my early twenties, a teacher of mine, Glen Dunn, introduced me to the work of words and numbers painter Colin McCahon. At the time I was studying painting, but writing poems, attempting to propagate the Riverina landscape on the page through lines of text and notational drawings. Whatever the motivation, I had been looking for the means to bridge my interests in art and literature. It therefore made sense to make books, and three one-off works were completed followed by the more conventional publication Songs of Volatility: monotype and word drawings (Reverie Press Publications) which was launched and exhibited at the 1999 Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
If you keep on doing newspaper work you will never see things, you will only see words ... – Gertrude Stein 1933 UnAustralian Art... – Rex Butler 2003
collision is unavoidable in nature / tolerance is a discipline 1
This was five years ago, and concurrently running was the Edinburgh International Book Festival, where I asked Stewart Conn, a keynote poet whose subject centred on early Modernist art, if he had considered whether a poem itself could be an object or a thing like a work of art. At the time I was not entirely sure of the significance of the question for myself. In hindsight I was asking Conn whether poetry (as a skill) and the poetic (as perceived in nature) could be amalgamated in some concrete way. After much deliberation he replied, “Yes, I think it can”. At the same time my partner Mel Ogden was visiting another poet, Ian Hamilton Finlay, a few shires away (in the Scottish Lowlands) at his garden Little Sparta. Finlay had not only asked that question forty years before, he had created a life’s work around and well beyond it. Little Sparta is a garden where the poem and the poetic collide at the same instance, and an environment where you feel classically under-read and, as an Australian, ‘exceptionally oversized’ (Ogden). It is here that the form of the poem, in my view, has never been so wholly unhinged in late twentieth century Europe.
i
I discovered many artists, designers and architects who were interested in the poem from a spatial, ironically explicit, and not strictly narrative location. I was introduced to graphic designer Ian Robertson. We talked about perceiving the poem; that once you ascertained for yourself what a poem is or what is poetic, the potential form of the poem becomes infinite, or at least specific to its subject.
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Soon after returning to Australia we met Aleks Danko and Jude Walton who had both visited Finlay’s garden a few years before. Danko told me about the work of Finlay’s son, Alec Finlay, and his press Morning Star Publications in Edinburgh. I redefined my own library focussing on multiform poetries and publishers supportive of this kind of work, and soon realised that there was a whole continent of artists and poets (living and long dead) who have attempted, especially in the past two centuries, to dismantle the art/literature wall enforced by a parallel age of specialisation. Admittedly, much of the material I collected was just good reference. It was often tricksy, sometimes too formal, or too folksy. I spent hours in the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh, The State Library of Victoria in Melbourne, and later (in 2001), in the New York City Library punching in the co-ordinates: SPATIAL/CONCRETE/VISUAL POETRY.
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While contemporary visual artists have continued to subvert dominant modes of representation, poetry has on the whole retained conventional literary discourse as the norm, and reaps the consequences.2
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Although you will be hard-pressed to find examples of his work in recent poetry anthologies, especially those coming out of England, you will find Finlay’s poetry in major survey publications and exhibitions of international contemporary art.
3
In 2001 I first spoke to a number of the contributors in this book about a small survey publication I wished to produce that represented visual forms of literature and text-based art. I had just had a series of visual poems accepted in Meanjin’s Special Poetics Issue (#2/2001), and was looking to produce something more substantial. At this time my friend Peter O’Mara was reassessing his own work, and contrary to Seamus Heaney’s ‘redress of poetry’ (1995) was looking to make his form more candid. O’Mara was first influenced by Gary Snyder, Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg, and later by the Australian assemblage artist Rosalie Gascoigne. He began to combine his usual emotive and personal content with a stripped-back visual element. Prior to this O’Mara and I had begun work on a solo publication of his entitled wordlung. But, this was premature work for both of us and we decided something collective would be more appropriate. I spoke to Aleks Danko and he recommended for inclusion into the publication Peter Tyndall, a conceptual artist who had long been using the concrete properties of the ‘word’ in his work, and who had co-curated the Word show with Linda Michael at the MCA, Sydney in 1999. Danko also recommended Richard Tipping, one of Australia’s most widely exhibited poets, and the architect and concrete poet Alex Selenitsch.
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Alex Selenitsch had the first concrete poem published in Australia in 1969, and the first exhibition of concrete poems in Australia in the same year. He has written widely on Australian concrete poetry, and has compiled a large personal library of much of the activity in this field since the 1960s, part of which is now housed at the Museum of Modern Art at Heide. Alan Riddell (another Scot) had the first solo publication of concrete poems published by a major press (Eclipse: Concrete Poems, Calder and Boyars, 1972) and when he came to Melbourne in the mid 1970s, he was surprised to find a flourishing scene. Selenitsch, Ruth Cowen and Sweeney Reed were instrumental in establishing a critical concretist scene in Australia, and by the 1980s a second generation had formed in Melbourne, which included the writers πO, Jas H Duke, jeltje, Thalia and thereafter Collective Effort Press.
Peter Porter picked a poem! 4 [albeit uninspired and boring]
The post Joyce and Beckett literary cannonade has blown and blustered far beyond the velveteen lips of Harold Bloom, but on a typical poetry bookshelf today in your regular franchised bookshop you wouldn’t know it. In Australia, mindsets acquired from an intellectual dependence upon the English literary tradition have largely denied the existence of language art and visual literature, despite film being the dominant form of literary expression for most of the twentieth century. Publishers and academics have rarely addressed the concrete works of Ezra Pound or e e cummings, or Apollinaire’s ‘Plastic Imagination’ (Willard Bohn, 1986), let alone the graphic literature of Dada and later Fluxus writing. The more-Englishthan-the-English Australian academic poets dismiss the importance of devolution or anti-art in the development, or more importantly, the nondevelopment of art itself. When Australian poetry needed punks we got instead safe-and-sound patriotic or worse, polite academic verse. I think it was Robert Adamson who said recently that it’s the poet’s job to make poetry relevant again.
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At the turn of last century Christopher Brennan dabbled with early modernist forms when he returned from France, although until the 1960s, with the exception of Ern Malley (by default), innovative literary practice has a relatively diminutive history in Australia. Much of the exciting work over the past 40 years has been sidelined by publishers, and is otherwise thriving in the art world. In Melbourne bookshops like Readings and the Hemensleys’ Collected Works, and journals like Going Down Swinging and Cordite have held long-term commitments to multiple forms and experimental literature, but these are exceptional cases. All of the artists invited to contribute towards this mostly regional publication are, in some way, concerned with the augmentation of language, space, object, and sometimes, site. Editorially, it is this, and the geographical proximity shared by most of the contributors and graphic designer Ian Robertson, that binds this book together. Peter Tyndall’s contribution centres on a paradigm of the ‘literal’. His work is a distinctive counterpoint to abstraction. The given site (the immediacy of the page), the title of the book and therefore the subject are the found materials for this work. How we read things has been Tyndall’s long-term focus. Humour plays its part in this book. Aleks Danko’s contribution – the rearrangement, or rather re-writing, of the words to the Song of Australia – illuminates the baloney of patriotic language. From the view of one of its independents, it is a barbed account of an Anglo-American dependent country. This lack of independence has resulted in Australia being reliably trigger-happy in other people’s countries on a regular basis since the 1800s, and furthermore, following America’s lead, is producing a flamboyant culture of ‘educated idiots’ (Glosso Babel, 2004).
1953 John and Janette Jean Genet 5
v
In Jeff Stewart’s co-visual essay both paint and words present a personal and pronounced sentimentality. The world picture is brought into the living room. The everyday objects he paints are written into intimacy by retelling their domestic history. Geoffrey Baxter incorporates in his work nonsense humour, inter-cultural jokes, concrete-typography and found signage. Drawing on both previous work and reading, these wordplays are cut and pasted orchestrations of abridged thought and linked memory. Richard Tipping has subverted popular signage for twenty years. His work often lies between the poem and the roadside joke. In his Whispering Fence, couplets of text explore themes such as security and isolation, public and private property, domestic and bureaucratic boundaries. Signs are also prevalent in Marie Sierra’s and my own contributions. Sierra’s main interest is in how we have constructed nature in our minds. She uses signage to illustrate how we ‘read’ landscape, and how literature has enabled us to see nature. This is also a major concern with my own work, and I’m particularly interested in how literature enables us to imagine things like gods and angels and devils, especially in light of the ‘nu-speak’ of fundamentalist Christianity. As signage nearly always involves explicit language, it is therefore a perfect medium for implicit ideas.
The title for this publication has a recent but packed history. For the purposes of this publication it was appropriated from the foreword of The Order of Things (Morning Star Pocketbook, Edinburgh, 2001), edited by Alec Finlay and Ken Cockburn. This is a survey work, which includes Renaissance pattern poems, catalogue poems and contemporary concrete, sound and visual poetry. Aleks Danko and I had both read this essay and, while discussing it, it seemed appropriate we acknowledged the crosscontinental movement in this area – between the little country of Scotland and the little country of the Hepburn Shire – by naming this publication after it. But, prior to any of this was the publication of a major theoretical work by Michel Foucault – The Order of Things – appearing in French in 1966 and in English in 1970. Foucault had originally wished to call his work ‘Words and Things’, but two books with the same name had been published earlier. The Order of Things is also the name of a radio play that Jeff Stewart wrote in the 1980s, named after the Foucault text, and first aired on 3RRR radio in Melbourne. Patrick Jones Lyonville 2004
f. EN-1 + rapTuRE 6 1 Patrick Jones, prescript/postscript, Songs of Volatility: monotype and word drawings, Reverie Press Publications, 1999 2 Alec Finlay and Ken Cockburn, Foreword, The Order of Things, Finlay & Cockburn (eds), Morning Star Publications, 2001 3 Christian Morgenstern, ‘Fishes Nightsong’, Gallows Songs, W.D.Snodgrass and Lore Segal (trans.), University of Michigan Press, 1967, p.70 4 Patrick Jones, desk furniture, a Peter Porter rubber stamp for poems rejected for publication, manufactured in 2002 5 Patrick Jones, sound poem, 1953, from a watercolour of the same text, 2003 6 Patrick Jones, inscribed entry step, 2004, former church converted to domestic dwelling, Glenlyon, Victoria
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INFLIGHT’ NIGHTLIFE
Prelude: Calm; Suspended; Whippy. I:
Agitated: Coagulato; Ineffable.
II:
Incommensurable; Vacillating.
III:
Tenderly; Runny; Deftly yet Witheld.
IV:
Lustral; Langorous; Suspended.
(observe verbose obverse)
graines engrais
loftier trefoil
(REPULSIVE to PULVERISE)
Finale:
Rollicking.
serfdom / deforms
fretful truffle BREASTED DEBATERS
Which reading lends most weight to orthodoxy ?:
or: looniest oilstone!
thawed out a roll for you thought out a role for Hugh (see p.369 for solution)
The WARD directory for global positioning: afterward, eastward, forward, northward, westward, homeward, toward, untoward, wayward, inward, outward, leeward, skyward, steward, onward, awkward, downward, landward, rearward, sideward, reward, upward,
KCABWARD Selected excerpts from Livy’s “Hannibal’s Crossing of the Alps”
“He determined to act swiftly ... Begin a war that will fill your pockets with gold ... At the beginning of spring they reassembled ... 870 slingers ... Finally there were twenty-one elephants ... Indignation prevented proper precautions being taken ... A number of rough and more or less shapeless hulls ... No part of Earth reaches the sky ... Through their territory without molestation ... Elephants proved both a blessing and a curse ... Pointing to Italy far below ... Men’s rations of sour wine were thrown upon it ... The crossing of the Alps took fifteen days.”
“The
trouble with Ethics”
( a video script for a violently proclamatory two shot “interview” )
legal / illegal. lawful / criminal. sanctioned / prohibited. cleared / banned. tolerated / blacklisted. passed / outlawed. licit / forbidden. justified / unlawful. consented / illicit. permitted / debarred. approved / discredited. defensible / culpable. ratified / invalid. accredited / penalized. condoned / annulled. rightful / illegitimate. enfranchised / condemned. legitimate / inadmissable. orthodox / improper.
The most important thing I learnt whilst among these colourful people was this: it is easier to
memory
cut the rind from the cheese than to cut the cheese from the rind.
desire
UN TRAIN PEUT EN CACHER UN AUTRE
Song(s) of Australia dead cocky on the kitchen floor (fed-up mix) There is a land where, the truth is...
There is a land where, there must be, something, somewhere?
There is a land where, first God made idiots There is a land where, everything is right, but it is not beautiful
There is a land where, I wasn’t hearing, but I could hear There is a land where, nothing can be changed
There is a land where, I worry very much There is a land where, I hate to think
REFRAIN
REFRAIN Aus - tra - li - a,
Aus - tra - li - a,
Aus - tra - li - a!
Aus - tra - li - a,
Aus - tra - li - a,
Aus - tra - li - a!
There is a land where, we go, before they whistle
There is a land where, ordinary Australians think...
There is a land where, we should all take a shower
There is a land where, there is a premium on ignorance
There is a land where, it’s always a pleasure
There is a land where, we merely deregulated the truth
There is a land where, intelligence is not a science, it is an art
There is a land where, they shall not land
REFRAIN
REFRAIN
Aus - tra - li - a,
Aus - tra - li - a,
Aus - tra - li - a!
Aus - tra - li - a,
Aus - tra - li - a,
Aus - tra - li - a!
There is a land where, we can bugger off, around and about
There is a land where, I’m not ruling things in or out
There is a land where, men shouldn’t cry
There is a land where, I am, You are, We are
There is a land where, disappointment is a wonderful fertiliser
There is a land where, we sing out loud and stand up proud
There is a land where, no one says sorry
There is a land where, we make unpleasant choices
REFRAIN
REFRAIN
Aus - tra - li - a,
Aus - tra - li - a,
Aus - tra - li - a!
Aus - tra - li - a,
Aus - tra - li - a,
Aus - tra - li - a!
There is a land where, You know, what, I mean
There is a land where, where you sit, depends on where you stand
There is a land where, I’m paralysed by choice
There is a land where, we should all just move on
There is a land where, another wicket’s fallen
There is a land where, we are doing, what we are doing
There is a land where, bad things happen, and good people do nothing
There is a land where, denial is a river in Egypt
REFRAIN
REFRAIN
Aus - tra - li - a,
Aus - tra - li - a,
Aus - tra - li - a!
Aus - tra - li - a,
Aus - tra - li - a,
Aus - tra - li - a!
Patrick Jones Prohibitions in the Age of Interpretive Signage OED definition 2003 Site: Noosa Regional Gallery, Tewantin, Queensland as part of the exhibition Floating Land Photography: the artist
BELOW
RIGHT Bored Walk 2003 Site: Weyba Creek mangrove colony, Noosa, Queensland as part of the exhibition Floating Land Previously published in Artlink Vol 24 No 1, April 2004 Photography: Jonathan Sligh
Patrick Jones Prohibitions in the Age of Interpretive Signage Between the Flags 2003 Main Beach, Noosa, Queensland as part of the exhibition Floating Land Previously published in Artlink Vol 24 No 1, April 2004 Photography: Jonathan Sligh
BELOW
RIGHT Sexeco Colonial: Bush Poetry 2003 Wombat Forest, Victoria Photography: Pete Swan
Patrick Jones Prohibitions in the Age of Interpretive Signage Tourist Sign (one Blade) 2003 Wombat Forest, Victoria Photography: Pete Swan
BELOW
untitled (Private Road) 2004 site specific installation, Melbourne Photography: Pete Swan
RIGHT
Patrick Jones Prohibitions in the Age of Interpretive Signage untitled (Public Road) 2004 site non-specific installation, Melbourne Photography: Pete Swan
BELOW
Tourist Sign (3 blades) 2004 Wombat Forest, Victoria Photography: the artist
RIGHT
brothermebrothermebrother
++++++++++++++ jesus-boy supermarket chain
[] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] inside/every/child/builds/a/brick/wall
heroin
summer autumn winter no spring
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I am greater than television
:: :: :: :: :: :: :: I am greater than television
:: :: :: :: :: :: :: I am greater than television
television listens to no one & no one listens to the sea
[elite]
elitism
ism
@ where
minim, n 1. The smallest unit of liquid measure in the imperial system, equal to 59.193880 x 10 -6 litres Minim, n. Member of a monastic order [founded 1435] practising humility as their chief virtue minus/ ’maines/, prep 2. lacking or without
Patrick Jones asks me for eight pages for a new book: “something which builds from page
to page... something (which) makes a ‘whole’ dimension also.” Lightning (Rivers of Light #4)
is a possible candidate, but it has nine letters/works in its set; other suites of current work
don’t fit. Then as I type an email to him, I realize that ‘monotone’ – the mot fixée in my work
is eight letters long. Using Lightning as a model, I type up another set of white lines: in Arial
Black typeface, through Word X, on an A4 page format. In the word ‘monotone’, two letters
have branches, one is a quasi-spiral, one is a cross and three are circles.
How does something fast, bright and hot, go through such granules?
Marie Sierra, Twice as Natural 2001 Quotations from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (above) and Henry David Thoreau (opposite) Site: Seawinds Parkland, Arthur's Seat, Victoria as part of the exhibition Old Landscape, New Garden
Marie Sierra, Twice as Natural 2002 Quotation from Tim Low Site: Birrarung Marr Parkland, Melbourne, Victoria as part of the exhibition Yarra Array Sculpture Festival
Marie Sierra, Twice as Natural 2002 Quotation from e e cummings Site: Birrarung Marr Parkland, Melbourne, Victoria as part of the exhibition Yarra Array Sculpture Festival
Marie Sierra, Twice as Natural 2003 Quotation from David Brower Site: Cooyar Street, Noosa Heads, Queensland as part of the exhibition The Floating Land
Object 1
intimacy of objects
It’s raining. The vehicle is old, recently restored, and you are warm and secure in the passenger seat, driving enclosed in a metal jacket invulnerable to accident. The car’s body acts as a talisman, where nothing can harm you. Yet inside you imagine the crash is inevitable. The blue car with water droplets beading off its waxed bonnet smashes into oncoming traffic. Head on. You meet at 110 km per hour the synthetic dashboard still smelling of Pine Fresh. Two vehicles, the one you are in with empty cans spilt across the back seat, and the other, red with its female driver, baby seat, discarded paper cup and chocolate wrappers, reach a closing speed of 210 km per hour. Collision. You are an object amongst others. Is there a difference between things?
It sits on top of a small TV beside the rabbit ear antenna, one of many things I brought back from my father’s house after his death. This was the first time I had ever visited Jack’s house. It was also the first object, the first thing that I saw, that I noticed. I packed away his suits, war medals, bed sheets, photos of family, landscapes and fishing trips with mates, his painting of a bare breasted Tahitian woman, and a large print of wild horses in wind swept mountains, amongst other things. Perhaps because it was so sweet, and it surprised me when I picked it up and discovered the slot in the back of its head, a strangely soft to the touch moneybox. Empty. I know nothing of this monkey other than it was on top of the TV when I arrived to pack my father’s things away. I do not know who gave it to him, or if he bought it. How long it had sat on the TV, whether it was once a prized possession, but now sat unnoticed with dirt and dust stuck to the crimson felt, and chipped polystyrene daisy.
Sentimental “Sentimentalism: susceptibility to sentiment, tendency to be swayed by emotion, rather than reason, proneness to superficial or exaggerated sensitivity.”1 As an epitaph sentimental “triggers shame, embarrassment and disgust.” It is often the fear of the sentimental that “marks the limits of critical discourse as if this was natural”. 2 But what if we open to it? What if we acknowledge the sentimental in the objects we hold dear?
Sentimental objects It seems more difficult to admit to the resonance of the raised word ‘Love’ on a fresh plaster mould of a heart laced with flowers, bought at a Sunday market, than it is to be disturbed by the skull headed general, bought from the same stall, where you experience readily the associations of power and death. Love stumbles and embarrasses while death so easily bites. But while they are being painted the skull assumes a flesh that wraps it ever closer to the floral tribute . The pastel shades revealing love’s latent potency, intimating the humble inevitability of the everyday.
Object 2 You shake the ornament and coins rain down on the leprechaun and his large pot of gold. It was given to me by my sister, Sandra, not long after the death of our mother, Sylvia, and used to sit on the second shelf of a stand always beside my mother‘s orange vinyl chair, from which she watched TV. On the top shelf she would have her cigarettes, disposable lighter and a glass freshly taken from the fridge, cold, waiting to receive her beer. She would pick up the glass with her right hand, the one missing a finger nearest the thumb, like a cartoon character’s. Sandra thought I would like the shaker as a memory or memento of our mother. It is however not the one that was on the second shelf. It is another Sandra bought for me because she had lost the original. The one now on top of my bookcase was not in fact my mother’s.
Painting Two paintings, one from the front, the other from the back. The monkey sits facing the sun in a landscape painted from photographs taken by my father of the country surrounding his house, Shangri-La. The paints and brushes used to make the work are also his, and I take the paints from a case he made to carry his equipment around while painting on Sundays. The canvas is rested on a small stand made by my father from scrap wood, which he used for the same purpose. The hand is mine that paints the image.
Reverse From the back the monkey looks towards the sun casting a shadow. The slot is open to the viewer allowing the possibility of the emptiness inside the monkey to be filled with coinage.
The Turning The front and the back turning about each other, melding like a whirligig, with its pinned plastic wings blurring colours to white while spinning in the wind. Marking alongside other emblems of faded artificial flowers and a rude cross, the fatal roadside collision.
Money Money, more a substitute for objects, than an object itself. The monkey moneybox and the pot of gold are kindred objects in a cruel economy, married, living under the same roof in strife.
Painting The background is Sylvia’s most beloved flower, Daphne, painted mauve, which she always said was her favourite colour. I picked the flower at night from a friend’s front yard using a torch to spotlight the blooms. The form is there, but I could not paint its scent, but perhaps there is a sense of the fragrance in the flannelette quality of the flat mauve background.
The Copy
Sentiment It is an object not chosen by me, and it is not my mother’s. Sylvia first saw it while visiting her sister Beryl, and loved it. She thought it was lovely, Beryl said. A friend had been to England and brought it back for a present. It was close to my mother’s birthday so Beryl gave it to her, pretending that she had bought her another. Mum would have become upset if she thought Beryl had given her the one she received as a gift. Beryl later bought herself one locally.
Copying the original. Not using the Leprechaun itself, or the Daphne, but looking towards the smaller painting. Enlarging it from a 12” x 12” square, to a 36” x 36” square. Making a reproduction, another painting. But in the making it becomes another work, and I begin to change this and that, add a tone here, place the small snail on top of the signboard, which is missing in the ‘original’, add more purple into the flesh tones there. Then I go back to the smaller painting, and finish it by working on the shading, adding more detail, then return to the larger and copy from the original again. Turning backwards and forwards between the two.
Money “A coin has stamped on its body that it is to serve as a means of exchange and not act as an object of use... Its physical matter has visibly become a mere carrier of its social function. A coin, therefore, is a thing which conforms to the postulates of the exchange abstraction and is supposed, among other things, to consist of an immutable substance, a substance over which time has no power, and which stands in antithetic contact to any matter found in nature.”3 Thus creating its peculiar halo, its ritualistic authenticity and authority. Very much like the work of art.
Trauma of Objects Collision of the monkey and leprechaun. My parents were separated over thirty years ago, divorced when I was 15. My mother remarried and moved from Boronia to Alexandra, in northeast Victoria. Boronia was a small country township when they first moved out of Coburg. You could walk all the way from our house to school through three kilometres of bush. By the time Sylvia left Boronia the town had become Knox City, “home to 149,428 people, known for its clean environment, family orientated community and natural lifestyle”. My father also moved. Firstly to Eildon, and then Gobur, both near to Alexandra. In the 30 odd years since their divorce my mother never once spoke Jack’s name. When she would very occasionally see him on Alexandra’s main street she would spit out “The bastard”, with contempt. He had never been to her house, and she would have preferred he didn’t exist. Yet I am now bringing the moneybox and the leprechaun together. My mother has the leprechaun by her side as she watches TV; my father has the monkey on top of the TV as an object of his attention.
Nearness
The Responsibility of Objects
Distance between the two becomes their true connection. These two sentimental beings, separate objects not truly under the same roof until brought together in the home. They touch for the first time perhaps like surfaces of skin, where to recall and respond in this comforting touch of expanding corporeality (during, is it love and grief?) is to begin to recognize a loved one. This touch, like flashes of the real for the traumatized, is a moment briefly recalling the veracity of life’s happening. Being near to each other.
As a teenager my sister Sandra was smashed up along with her then boyfriend’s car. She suffered two broken legs, a broken pelvis, a broken wrist and severe facial lacerations. I remember visiting her at the Alfred Hospital in High St Prahran. Sitting by her bed I lied, saying she looked fine. Her swollen face was a mess of dried blood. I couldn’t believe she would ever recover. I kissed her good-bye and met Auntie Beryl in the corridor outside while I was crying. As much as I love her she insisted on bitching about my father, Jack, trying to score points for Sylvia. I can still see the mustardcoloured linoleum under my feet reflecting the fluorescent tubes.
Things A meeting, a day of assembly, to draw together.5
Uncertainty There is an uncertainty about bringing these two together here and now on these pages because of my parents’ own relationship. But it is too late. I need to see these two loved together and separately turning about each other. The coming together of the moneybox and the leprechaun, where the commodity-based nature of the object drops its spectacular presence and shines forth in relation to the world.
Sandra’s boyfriend, Geoff, had his stomach stapled back together and his intestines stuffed back inside. I never met the woman who lost her baby in the other vehicle. Once home I helped Sandra to learn to walk again, holding her hand as she painfully hobbled from one end of the polished lounge room floor to the other. Her twisted and bruised legs fitted with leather straps and iron shafts.
Things Toni Morrison speaks of the “headon encounter with the very real” in the Romantic novel and the opportunity this form gives for conquering fear imaginatively.4 These things, these mass-produced items, the monkey and the leprechaun, with their apparent lack of authenticity are revealed in their sentimentality in that region of which we are not supposed to speak, but in which the traumatized may gain voice. That gentle colliding where objects become things.
1 2 3 4 5
Shorter Oxford Dictionary, Oxford Clarendon Press, 1993 Sentimental Modernism, Suzanne Clark, University of Indiana, 1991, p. 11 Intellectual and Manual Labour, Macmillan, 1978, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, p. 59 Playing in the Dark, Picador, 1993, pp. 35-37 Chambers Dictionary of Etymology
Richard Tipping Whispering Fence 2003 engraved hardwood jarrah pickets 0verall dimensions 1.8m high x 7.5m wide first Installed at The Studio, Sydney Opera House in 2003 as part of the exhibition Richard Tipping: Exit Strategy Photography: Greg Weight TEXTS FENCE IN FENCE OUT / ENCLOSE EXCLUDE SAFE ON THE INSIDE / SAFE FROM OUTSIDE THIS IS NOT YOURS / THIS IS ALL OURS GO GET YOUR OWN / HOME SWEET HOME THE ALARM IS ON / JUST RING THE BELL WELCOME STRANGER / WE ARE NOT YOU SUBDIVIDE & CONQUER / FENCE SIT DEFENCE BLUE COLLAR / BLUE RINSE BLUE TONGUES / BLUE BUDGIES SILENT NIGHT / SECURITY LIGHT ALL WE IMMIGRATED / BOAT & JET PEOPLE TRIBAL CUSTODIANS / HOMELESS VACANCY HELLO GO AWAY / KNOCK KNOCK SWEEPING CHANGES / WHITE PICKET POVERTY RENOVATION CENTRAL / GARAGE SALE THIS SAT POPULATION DEFINE / NO PUBLIC LIABILITY DINGO + RABBIT PROOF / FREE CONVICT STOCK ONLY EMOTION ENDURES / DOMESTIC HARDCORE PROPERTY SETTLE MEN / MORTAGEE SALE LAWNMOWER SUNDAY / DOUBLE DEADLOCK WINDOW WATCHING / SURREAL ESTATES SUBURBAN DREAMIN / BUSHFIRES + TERMITES BACKYARD LANDRIGHTS / GOSSIP IN TONGUES RAZOR WIRE ASYLUM / REFUGEE SPELL QUEUE FLAMING GALAHS / GOD SAVE OOROO
CONTRIBUTORS GEOFFREY BAXTER Geoffrey Baxter would most likely be the only contributor to pass as an authentic War Baby (DOB 1945). Until his return to Australia a few years ago, his activity as artist was mainly in Europe, primarily Italy and Switzerland. Where language comes into his work, he looks for polar oppositions of semantic overload/rarification = the consciously bathetic. It is all a question of manipulation of levels of “resistance” (in the electronic sense) in an attempt to touch everything from the absolutely pellucid to the definitely turgid… Those instances where language has constituted the marrow of the event would have to include: From 1997: “AIR’S – CUBIC – MILES”, an outdoor installation of three heavy plastic tablets impressed with these three words, spread as a very attenuated phrase across the width of Belgium at three infamous sites – Passchendahl, Waterloo, Bastogne. From 1998: the installation “In OFF”, part of a three month artist in residence stint at 200 Gertrude Street in Fitzroy; and a sound installation, “Air’s Cubic Miles” (Curator Jason Smith), at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Also in 1998: an installation “Memory/Desire” in the headquarters of Arts Victoria (Discrete Projects Series), Melbourne. Moving on to 2001, at Horsham Regional Art Gallery, Victoria, there was an installation “Necessaire” where a word (transparent) vs object (obscure) dichotomy was set up between a formally presented Shipping Bill of Lading, played off against 2.2 tonnes of crated objects shipped from Belgium. Email: geofreebax@hotmail.com ALEKS DANKO Aleks Danko was born in Adelaide in 1950 and studied at the South Australian School of Art, 1967–1970. He has exhibited extensively in Australia and overseas. His work is represented in all State and major Regional Galleries in Australia. His practice is made manifest through: installations, site-specific projects, live art interventions, collaborative works, public commissions, audio works, sculpture and drawing. Since 1996 he has been working on his Songs of Australia cycle. It began with SONGS OF AUSTRALIA VOLUME 1 – CARING, COMFORTABLE AND RELAXED at Sutton Gallery, Melbourne. In 2002 he received the 2002–2004 Contempora Fellowship Award through the National Gallery of Victoria and Arts Victoria, Melbourne. SONGS OF AUSTRALIA VOLUME 16 – SHHH, GO BACK TO SLEEP (an un-Australian dob-in mix) 2004, exhibited at the Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia, Melbourne, is the culmination of his two year association with the gallery. Key publications of his work include, What are you doing boy? 1991, Zen Made in Australia 1994, and the The Song Cycle Volumes 1–16, 2004 published by the National Gallery of Victoria. Aleks Danko is represented by Sutton Gallery, Melbourne Email: art@suttongallery.com and Gitte Weise Gallery, Sydney Email: weisegal@chilli.net.au PATRICK JONES Patrick Jones is an artist and occasional publisher who utilises the conventions of the page as a site for the augmentation of art, ideas and literature. Multiple media such as photography, planted works, sculpture, installation, site-based public art, performance, nonsense verse, film and poetry contribute to a pool of information, before they are edited for the page as an overall work. He has produced several publications, artist books and associated printed matter. His work has appeared in Artlink, Meanjin and Cordite journals. His last solo exhibition RAMBLINGS OF AN AMATEUR NATURALIST (Mass Gallery, Melbourne, 2001) attained reviews in The Age, the Herald Sun and on RRR radio. He has been awarded a 2004 Bundanon Residency, and was a guest artist at the 2004 Sydney Poetry Seminar, University of Technology Sydney. Email: reverie@ netconnect.com.au Web: www.reveriepublic.com.au PETER O’MARA Peter O’Mara’s writing and visual art concentrates on the relationships between nature and culture, and our place and nonplace in the natural world. He explores the distinction between the conformist mind and the mind for change. His recent work incorporates a minimal approach combined with an emerging visual representation. Peter’s work has been published in major literary journals throughout Australia such as Meanjin, Overland, Going Down Swinging, and Verandah and has studied writing at Deakin University. In 1998, he was the recipient of the Varuna New Writers Fellowship in Katoomba, NSW. Email: petero@netconnect.com.au
ALEX SELENITSCH Alex Selenitsch is a Melbourne-based poet, sculptor, architect and teacher. His up/dn poem on Broadsheet 3 (1969) was the first concrete poem to be published in Australia; his show at Strines, Melbourne (1969) was the first exhibition of concrete poems. He has exhibited visual poems, architecture, furniture and books in many solo and group formats. His most recent exhibition was BITS IN PIECES: the half life of data at CSIRO Discovery, Canberra, in May 2001. He is currently a senior lecturer in architecture at the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne. See www.arbld.uni melb.edu.au/staffpages/selenitsch/home.shtml MARIE SIERRA Marie Sierra has held numerous solo exhibitions within Australia, and has participated in over thirty group shows in Australia, the US, and France. She has won several grants and awards, including Australia Council Grants for Professional Development, and the studio residency in Barcelona. In 2004 she participated in the Helen Lempriere Sculpture Prize Exhibition, where she worked in collaboration with landscape architects Phil Murphy and Jim Sinatra. How the idea of nature is socially constructed is central to her art practice, which primarily takes form as spatial, public, and temporal interventions. Marie is the Head of Sculpture at the Victorian College of the Arts. Email: m.sierra@iinet.net.au JEFF STEWART Jeff Stewart’s paintings are usually exhibited outside the gallery at sites that are significant for the content of the work – home, workplace, places of sentimental attachment. Recently, subjects include love, memory, death and sentiment. Writing: puppet plays, where the site of performance is important to the reading of the work, concerned with childhood, memory and transformation. Radio plays, fairy tales and politics. Theoretical writing concerned with art-making and everyday life. Research: an integral part of painting and writing as well as being a concern in itself. Employment: art practice with a wide range of communities. Email: jeffst@vic.chariot.net.au RICHARD TIPPING Richard Tipping grew up in Adelaide, and now lives in Newcastle where he lectures at the University in the School of Design, Communication and Information Technology. In 1967 he began writing typographic concrete poems, and shared his first exhibitions with Aleks Danko in 1970 and 1973. In 1994 he shared an exhibition with Alex Selenitsch. His usual materials for “word works” are neon, aluminium with reflective tape, granite, engraved wood, and plate steel. Since 1996 he has had solo shows in Sydney (the Art Gallery of NSW, Multiple Box, and the Sydney Opera House); Adelaide (Greenaway Art Gallery); New York (Ubu Gallery, and Banning Gallery); Washington (BanningandLow Gallery); Cologne (Conny Dietzschold Gallery); and London (Eagle Gallery), and completed major public art commissions for the Powerhouse Centre for the Live Arts (Brisbane); Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery, NSW; Australia House, London; Art Circolo, Munich; and Galerie Seippel, Cologne. Richard Tipping is represented by Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide; Multiple Box, Sydney; BanningandLow, Washington; Galerie Seippel, Cologne; and The Eagle Gallery, London. Email: richard.tipping@newcastle.edu.au Web: www.artpoem.com PETER TYNDALL A selective biography IN PRINCIPIO ERAT VERBUM: In a WW2 newspaper clipping, a member of an RAF Liberator Squadron is named as W.O.R.D. Tyndall. Warrant Officer Richard Denehy Tyndall. He will be my father. Born 1951 at Mercy Hospital, Melbourne. Named Peter Julian, after Peter Julian Eymard, founder of the Congregation of the Most Blessed Sacrament, the Order with which my father had studied to be a priest before going to war. With Christine Stokes, has lived at “Bonzaview”, Hepburn Springs, since 1976. Author of … we are … described as being … and Lives of (The)(Adjective)(Noun)(s). Co-curator, with Linda Michael, of the exhibition word, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 1999. Favourite book titles include The Man Without Qualities, by Robert Musil, and Heroes of the Empty View, by James Aldridge. Peter Tyndall is represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne Email: mail@annaschwartzgallery.com
RELATED READING Yves Abrioux Ian Hamilton Finlay: a visual primer, Reaktion Books, 1985 Robert Adamson Mulberry Leaves: new and selected poems 1970–2001, Paper Bark Press, 2001 Stephen Bann (ed.) Concrete Poetry: an international anthology, London Magazine Editions, 1967 Javant Biarujia Calques, Monogene, 2002 Low/Life, Monogene, 2003 Willard Bohn The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry 1914–1928, Universities Cambridge/Chicago, 1993 Modern Visual Poetry, University of Delaware Press, 2000 Jean-Francois Bory Once Again, New Directions Books, 1968 Jerry G Bowles, Tony Russell (eds.) This Book is a Movie: An exhibition of language art and visual poetry, Delta, 1971 Andre Breton Mad Love, University of Nebraska Press, 1987 Nadja, Grove Press, New York, 1960 Bob Cobbing, Lawrence Upton (eds.) Word Score Utterance, Writers Forum London, 1998 Bob Cobbing, Peter Mayer (eds.) Concerning Concrete Poetry, Writers Forum London, 1978 Bob Cobbing, Sean Ohuigin Bill Jubobe: Selected Texts Of Bob Cobbing 1942–1975, The Coach House Press, 1976 Simon Cutts Seepages: poems 1981–1987, Jargon Society, 1988 Aleks Danko, Daniel Thomas Songs of Australia Vol. 3 – At Home, University of South Australia Art Museum, 1999 Aleks Danko Songs of Australia Vols 1–16, NGV Ian Potter Gallery at Federation Square, 2004 Johanna Drucker The Visible Word: Experimental Typography & Modern Art, University of Chicago Press, 1994 Figuring the Word: Essays on Books, Writing and Visual Poetics, Granary Books, 1998 Jas H Duke (πO, ed.) Poems of Life and Death, Collective Effort Press, 2003 Kate Fagan The Long Moment, Salt, 2002 Michael Farrell Ode Ode, Salt, 2002 Alec Finlay & Ken Cockburn (eds.) The Order of Things, Morning Star Publications, 2001 Alec Finlay (ed.) The Libraries of Thought and Imagination, Morning Star Publications, 2001 Ian Hamilton Finlay Works in Europe 1972–1995, Zdenek Felix & Pia Simig Cantz (eds.), Germany, 1995 Typewriter Poems, Peter Finch (ed.), Second Aeon & Something Else Press, 1972 Et in Arcadia Ego, Stroom, 1999 Maritime Works, Tate St Ives, 2002 Thomas Fitzsimmons (English ed.)Japanese Poetry Now, Rapp and Whiting, 1972 Peter Foolen & Tjeu Teewen Travaux Publics (Public Works) Peninsula, 1996 Liselotte Gumpel “Concrete” Poetry from East and West Germany: The Language of Exemplarism and Experimentalism, Yale University Press, 1976 Pamela Hansford Peter Tyndall: Dagger Definitions, Greenhouse Publications, 1987 Kris Hemensley Domestications 1968–72, Sun Books, 1974 The Poem of the Clear Eye, The Paper Castle, 1977 Kris & Retta Hemensley Theatre, Merri Creek Press, 1983 Dick Higgins Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature State University of NY Press, 1987 Ted Hopkins & Slab The Yallourn Stories, Champion Books, 1982 Garrie Hutchinson Nothing Unsayable Said Right, Sun Books, 1974 Patrick Jones Poems Memorials Plantings, (catalogue), Reverie Press Publications, 2002 Richard Kostelanetz (ed.) Text-Sound Texts, William Morrow, 1980
Rudi Krausmann Flowers of Emptiness, Hale and Iremonger, 1982 Ferdinand Kriwet Publit, Nova Broadcast Press, 1971 Edward Lucie-Smith (ed.) Primer of Experimental Poetry 1, Rapp and Whiting, 1971 Vicki Macdonald Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, 1998 Peter Minter Empty Texas, Paper Bark Press, 1999 Peter Minter, Michael Brennan (eds), Calyx: An Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry, Paper Bark Press, 2000 Peter Minter, Penny Johnson (eds.) Meanjin Special Poetics Issue, Melbourne University, 2001 Rosemarie Pahlke, Pia Simig Cantz (eds.) Ian Hamilton Finlay: Prints 1963–1997, Germany, 1997 Tom Phillips The Heart of a Humument, Edition Hansjorg Mayer, 1985 πO, Peter Murphy (eds.) Missing Forms: Concrete, Visual And Experimental Poems, Collective Effort Press, 1981 πO (ed.) Off the Record, Penguin Books, 1985 Sweeney Reed Artist and Concrete Poet, MOMA at Heide, 1996 Barrett Reid (ed.) Words on Walls: a survey of contemporary visual poetry, MOMA at Heide, 1989 Joan Retallack How To Do Things With Words, Sun & Moon Press, 1998 Alan Riddell Eclipse: Concrete Poems, Calder and Boyars, 1972 Kay Rosen Home on the Range, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1994 Jerome Rothenberg, Pierre Joris (eds.) Poems for the Millennium Vols. 1 & 2, University of California Press, 1998 Edward Ruscha They Call Her Styrene, Phaidon Press, 1998 Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go, Lannan Museum, 1988 W.G.Sebald On the Natural History of Destruction, Hamish Hamilton, 2003 Austerlitz, Penguin Books, 2002 Vertigo, New Directions Books, 2000 Alex Selenitsch ‘On/In/Out of Print’ (essay), Aspect (Vol 5. No 4.), 1981 ‘Moments of Crisis, Jas Duke's Contemporary Sublime’, The Age Monthly Review (Vol 8. No 9.), 1989 For Those Who Can Read Only, Overland (No, 116.), 1989 ‘Real Estates of the Heart: Ruth Cowan’ (essay), Graphic Investigation Workshop, CSA, 1992 ‘pete spence in lower case/ALEX SELENTISCH IN UPPER CASE’, Imprint (Vol 34 No2.), 1999 John J Sharkey Mindplay: an Anthology of British Concrete Poetry, Lorrimer Publishing, 1971 Jesse Sheeler Little Sparta: The Garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Frances Lincoln, 2003 Mary Ellen Solt (ed.) Concrete Poetry: a world view, Indiana University Press, 1968 Terry Sturm (essay) Perspectives on Concrete Poetry, New Poetry, 1971 James Taylor (ed) Boxkite: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics (4 vols), The Poetics Foundation/ Monogene, 1997–2004 Richard Tipping Hear the Art, The Eagle Gallery, London, 1997 Public Works, University of Newcastle in association with Thorny Devil Press, 2002 Peter Tyndall Double Crossed Again/Death To All Mirrors, Daadgalerie, 1992 Peter Tyndall, Linda Michael (eds.) Word, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 1999 Peter Weibel (ed) The Vienna Group: A Moment of Modernity 1954–60. The visual works and actions, SpringerWien, 1997 Emmett Williams (ed.) An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, Something Else Press, 1967 Nicholas Zurbrugg (ed.) Visual Poetics: Concrete Poetry and its Contexts, Museum of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, 1989
In arriving at the title typesetting and section divider pages for this publication, the lead of John Cage was followed, in particular his 62 Mesostics re Merce Cunningham (1971), one of which is illustrated below. Cage’s mesostics (his version of acrostics) involved composing and aligning sentences so that the name of the subject was spelled out vertically, each horizontal line containing one highlighted letter. Chance operations were always employed. For Cage the mesostics represented “... a way of writing that, though coming from ideas, is not about them, but produces them.” Generally the mesostics were conventionally typeset, ie. uniform typeface and size, with the letters of the key words capitalised. In the Cunningham mesostics however, Cage combined different typefaces of varying sizes from letraset sheets to create word pictures, with the letters touching horizontally and the lines vertically. While working on this publication I was aware of wanting to avoid “design”. Cage’s activities demonstrated a way of circumventing those decisions usually central to design. The general style of the Cunningham mesostics was at first hesitantly, and then enthusiastically embraced. Typeface, size and style (roman, italic, bold etc) were determined by chance. Line breaks were decided by syllable. The letters in each line are in contact, and the lines touch at at least one point. The relationship of one line to the next however, is by whim. – IR
Illustration: John Cage, one of 62 Mesostics re Merce Cunningham. Reproduced from M: Writings ’67–’72 by John Cage, Wesleyan University Press, Connecticut, 1973, p.29
WORDS AND THINGS
SUPPORTED BY
CONCRETE POETRY SUPERSIGNS MULTIPLE LANGUAGE
Geoffrey Baxter Aleks Danko Patrick Jones Peter O’Mara Alex Selenitsch Marie Sierra Jeff Stewart Richard Tipping Peter Tyndall Edited by Patrick Jones Published by Reverie Press Publications June 2004 Edition 600 ISBN 0 9580307 2 3 © Copyright 2004 Patrick Jones and the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publisher. PRODUCTION ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Special thanks to the Regional Arts Fund who granted artist fees to seven of the nine contributors represented in this publication; and to the Hepburn Shire Council and K.W.Doggett Fine Paper for their valued support. Thanks also to Kevin Wilson and Noosa Regional Gallery, David Briggs and Regional Arts Victoria, Geoff Howard MP, Catherine King MLA, David Hall and the Words in Winter festival committee in Daylesford, Ross Redwin, Henrietta Cheshire, Graham Ogden, Dagmar Bauerle, Anthony Cheshire, Lyn Faulkner and Lowenstein Arts Management, Lois Ogden, Emma Hawkins, Ian Hislop, Madeline Bodenham at Daylesford Art Supplies, Julia Douglas, Steve Kelly and Mel Ogden. It has been a pleasure working with each of the contributors and Ian Robertson in putting this book together and I thank them all for their generosity and professionalism. – Patrick Jones
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