(Above) Philip Guston, The Cellar (1972), ink on paper. Picture © Philip Guston and Clark Coolidge, courtesy McKee Gallery, New York
Exhibition: Poor.Old.Tired.Horse, Institute for Contemporary Arts, London, until 23 August 2009
A fascinating exhibition has opened at The Institute for Contemporary Arts, shedding some welcome light on the Concrete Poetry movement of the 1960s.
The show features work by a group of artists who experimented with the typographical arrangement of words, investing them with as much importance as conventional elements of a poem. The effects were unprecedented and astonishing, producing a remarkable fusion of art and literature.
Springing up from an international exhibition in Brazil in 1956, Concrete Poetry was inspired by the works of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, who placed emphasis on the visual quality of words in a poem gave them a central function as part of the verse.
Liiane Lijn, Sky Never Stops (1965), letraset on painted cork cone, motorised turntable. Poem Leonard Marshall, Collection V&A Museum
Curator Charlotte Bonham-Carter freely admits that the movement defies categorisation. "There were so many different groups working across the world that it becomes difficult to pin down," she says.
"The main point of departure for all of the other works, however, is the Scottish artist and writer Ian Hamilton Finlay. He is one of the most influential figures in the movement and really the axis on which all of the other poets revolved."
This exhibition's title comes from the magazine of the same name, founded by Finlay in the 1960s. The backbone of the show are copies of the publication, revealing his lifelong quest to give form to syntax.
"Finlay was interested in how syntax looked on the page," adds Bonham-Carter. "He believed it was as important as the words themselves and throughout the work displayed here, we see a constant fusion of form and content."
Alasdair Gray, From the Soul's Proper Loneliness (1970), ink on paper
Finlay would later dissociate himself from the movement, but not before he had influenced many other revolutionary artists. The bulk of the show pays homage to these artists and reveals the ways in which they experimented by combining language with graphics.
One of the most striking works is by Liliane Lijn, an American who helped develop material for NASA in 2005. Lijn was intrigued by the movement of words and created a number of truncated cone shapes inscribed with letters.
"Lijn began by simply placing letters on a cone, thereby making the words come alive," explains Bonham-Carter. The words on the cones spin so quickly that it is almost impossible, at first, to determine what they are.
As the letters shift and blur, it prompts you to contemplate the notion of language, how it is made up and even the instabilities of the reality we so heavily rely upon grammar to expound.
Ferdinand Kriwet Text Sign (1968), stamped aluminium. Picture courtesy BQ, Berlin
The show is concerned with tracing the influences of Finlay and Lijn's work and bringing it firmly up to date. It displays the practices of a group of contemporary artists who find a correlation between poetry, expressive language and performance practices, but also exposes the limitations of linguistics and art.
"We are not aiming to produce a definitive survey here, but to revisit a movement which hasn't always enjoyed as much limelight as others," says Bonham-Carter. "If viewers are left with one overriding impression, I hope it will be of the possibilities offered by expansive, texted based practices."
The overall effect is undoubtedly thought-provoking, raising questions about communication and suggesting that language is often impossible to surmise when it is twisted and reproduced in unexpected contexts.
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