收到文学所“当代文学与文化论坛”通知，全文如下：

文学所“当代文学与文化论坛”第二讲邀请到美国威斯康星州米瓦尔基大学柯提斯·卡特(Curtis Carter) 教授做专题报告，题目是“视觉诗”。时间为3月26日（周二）下午两点，地点在文学所会议室。

柯提斯·卡特(Curtis Carter)为美国威斯康星州米瓦尔基大学哲学教授，大学美术馆馆长，国际美学协会会长。其研究领域包括美学理论、艺术史理论，以及中国当代艺术。

始于20世纪60年代的视觉诗（Visual Poetry）是一种特殊类型的实验诗歌，它把不同语言和图案等元素共置于同一图像中。其基本元素包括词和从印刷品上择取的图案碎片，通过拼贴或者其他各种图形技术将两者融合到一起。词的语言学特征让位于其视觉特点，图像本身也舍弃了再现功能。在新语境中，词和图像根据艺术家的想象和意图被随意排列，组成一个新的整体，词汇的和视觉的功能在其中保持了一种具有创造性的张力。同时，视觉诗歌也诉诸对大众传媒语言的批判性使用，比如杂志广告、电视图像、海报等。卡特教授将对视觉诗的形式、美学以及实用性等方面作出分析，然后讨论具体艺术家的作品。

此次讲座为英文演讲，有中文翻译。欢迎大家届时参加！

                                                              文学所“当代文学与文化论坛”

 【讲稿】

“ Poesia Vivas :  Italian Visual Poetry”

China Academy of Social Sciences March 2013

Curtis L. Carter

Copyright all Rights Reserved

       In 2005. I spent time researching the work of Italian Visual Poets in Florence and Rome.  The research consisted of personal interviews with the artists and viewing their original works in the artist’s studios.  This research let to an exhibition and the lecture  to be presented here.

       The movement Poesia Visiva or Visual Poetry under discussion here began in Italy in the 1960s among artists working in Florence and Rome and gradually spread to other parts of Europe and elsewhere.  This art intends to offer a critique of mass media and explores the relationship of poetry, language, and literature to contemporary mass media culture. 

Visual Poetry is influenced by the circle of Italian semiotics initiated by Umberto Eco and his colleagues.  Their aim was to extend poetry from the verbal into relationship with the visual arts. The Visual Poets of 1960s recall earlier experiments such as Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tumb, 1914  which experimented with unknown syntax and innovative typographic conventions as well as smell, weight and sound in order to free language from its conventional forms.[1] Similarly the Dada artists at Café Voltaire in  Zurich launched their own assault on syntactic and philological habits.

 Although attracting lesser notoriety than its artistic forerunners, Visual Poetry as represented here shares a family resemblance with earlier art including Post-World War II neo-avant garde movements such as “Concrete Poetry,”  “Sound Poetry,”  and “Fluxus.”  Visual poetry differs from these other Post-World War movements in that its roots do not lie in the visual arts.  Rather the visual poets see their grounding in poetry first, while they  appropriate visual and other material means from the techno-media culture to create a new multi-media language to confront the threat of this same  techno-media’s commodity driven cultural domination. The Visual Poetry movement expanded to include other Italian artists such as the Italians Sarcenco and Claudio Francia, the Flemish Paul De Vree, the French Julien Blaine, and others in Brazil, Japan, and elsewhere.  Although there may have been ideological differences, the Visual Poetry group shared some common interests with the Gruppo 70 founded by Eugenio Miccini, (1927-2007) in the 1960s, and the Journal Poetic Struggle founded in 1971.  Gruppo 70 was comprised of  poets, painters and musicians working in Florence  during the 1960s  Their interests centered on “Art and Communication” and “Art and Technology.”  The Visual Poets in this group set out to produce compositions using  words and visual images, as well as sound together in the same assemblage, without intending to resolve syntactic and  semantic continuities between the respective sources.  The Visual Poets aimed their poetry at the language of the masses. The artists in this group shared a common slogan: “semiological guerilla warfare.”[2]

The term Poesia Visvia or Visual Poetry, as represented in the art of The Florentines Eugenio Miccini, Lamberto Pignotti (the initiators and theoreticians of the movement) and other artists such as Giuseppe Chiari and Carlo Francia working in Italy since the 1960s, refers to a particular type of experimental poetry formed as an amalgam of language and pictorial elements positioned simultaneously in the same image. In Visual Poetry the multi-linearity of comics, picture stories and illustrated magazines replaces Guttenberghian linearity. In its use of both the linguistic and the pictorial, it differs from concrete poetry which mainly works within the field of a single language code.[3] Instead of approaching Visual Poetry from the perspective of a detailed comparison with its counterparts in the evolving avant-garde, or examining its broader societal context,

 I will focus on the artifacts of Visual Poetry themselves.  First,  let us have a look at some of the formal, aesthetic, and pragmatic characteristics of this movement and then look at particular examples. 

The formal elements of Visual Poetry may vary with the individual artists, for example Chiari works mainly with musical sources, but they include some common features.  Their basic components are words and cut-up fragments of pictures abstracted from printed materials and merged in part by means of collage and various other graphic art techniques.  Both the words and pictorials are altered in their new context where they abandon the rules of construction and meaning that they might have enjoyed in every day life.  Typography and linguistic features of the words yield to their visual features, and the images give up their representational functions. In their new context words and images are arranged freely according to the imagination and intent of the artist and become a new whole, where the verbal and the visual function in creative tension with respect to each other.  It is useful to think of a visual poem as a metaphor which compresses its message into a complex symbolic form that is intended to stimulate a creative response from the viewers that may include aesthetics as well as ideas and actions.

In what sense does Visual Poetry relate to poetry in its traditional linguistic modes?  At the very least it can be said that Visual Poetry shares with poetry from Aristotle’s mimesis and the Romantics through the present a desire to lift human conscious out of the mundane narcosis of routine daily experiences. Poetry in its more conventional forms as well as Visual Poetry aims to inspire through heightened states of emotion and aesthetic pleasure, or perhaps to incite people to action. Both traditional poets and Visual Poets share a love of the well-crafted object, whether in metric schemes or in juxtapositions of  its  verbal and visual elements.

It is nevertheless true that mainstream poetry typically invokes a more intimate experience taking place between the reader and the page, or shared with a group of like minded literary aficionados in a salon setting. Perhaps a critical difference is that traditional poetry is both read and spoken, while Visual Poetry is not spoken in the traditional manner.   In this respect, it appears that the latter invokes the visual more than the verbal senses, a fact that allows Visual Poetry a place in the categories of the visual arts.  However, this circumstance did not preclude the Visual Poets from performance art, which includes both elements of the verbal and visual, as the careers of Miccini, Pignotti and the others attest.  Absent too in Visual Poetry is the close relation of book and individual reader in the study or the salon of aesthetes.  Indeed, the arena for Visual Poetry might well range from an autographic drawing to street poster to the football stadium as the artist Pignotti observed.

On another level, a central  element of Visual Poetry is its critical engagement with the languages of mass communication including advertising in magazines, TV images, and posters in public spaces. A comparison of the still images of visual poetry and modern advertising images conjoining words and images confirms their connections.  However, the images borrowed from advertising are used in a different sense.  The new structures of Visual Poetry attempt to subvert the manipulative stereotypes of advertising images intended to promote merchandise and services to consumers, or to homogenize thinking and behavior. This action is accomplished through displacement of existing form and meanings of the advertisements and substitution in their place critical consciousness-raising images in a new sign system.[4]

Unlike forms of “pure” poetry valued mainly  for their  aesthetic or literary merits that depend upon the sensibilities of a cultivated reader, visual poetry, draws upon the contemporary vernacular language of news paper captions and the magazine advertisements of popular culture. It aims for accessibility to the same audience as does mass media that is, the public at large.  Because Visual Poetry  contains materials from popular culture, it is  accessible  the public because it shares in part the vocabulary of consumer culture.   Except that Visual Poetry embraces elements of social-ideological comment intended as a critique of the culture of mass communications.

In this respect, the Italian visual poets were among the first to offer a critique of the visual and verbal language of mass culture. Perhaps they share this honor with the Pop artists of the 1960s.  Visual poetry proposes first, to analyze and then decompose the sign systems of mass communications.[5]  Mass communications is seen by the Visual Poets as a means of subjugating people and turning them into inactive social instruments.   By activating in their art and in the minds of audience members a spirit of experimentation, the Visual Poets raise their voices against institutional and market coercion of human freedom that would result in a homogenized culture of consensus and conformity.   Yet, as has been remarked, this critical function of the artist has become very difficult in a world in which the art market absorbs the artists’ products quickly, allowing little or no opportunity for the artist’s critique to effect social change.[6]

To place the artifacts of Visual Poetry in a context of parallel international art movements occurring at the same time, it is useful to compare its artifacts with those of Pop Art.  Curiously, Pop Art and Visual Poetry emerged on the cultural horizon at about the same time, in the late 1950s and early 1960s in England and the United States.  Both art movements respond to changes in mass culture.  But their approaches are quite different.

 The objects of Pop Art address both Abstract Expressionism, their immediate art historical precedent, and also objects in popular culture. Pop Art repudiates the premises of Abstract Expressionist art, the latest brand of high art, while it reflects on commodity based popular culture. While the Pop artist embrace avant-garde collage techniques  from early modern art, as in the case of Robert Rauschenberg’s constructions, the artifacts of Pop Art often reflect stylized figuration as seen in the paintings and silkscreens of Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and James Rosenquist.  The works of these artists focus on the common objects of ordinary life  from soup cans to billboard advertisements and media stars. Its reception among the public and traditional art historians is ambivalent, drawing abhorrence from traditional art lovers to applause especially from  the younger generations who may identify with mass popular culture.

There are still more differences between Visual Poetry and Pop Art.   Pop Art absorbs and reflects the banalities, as well as the ironies of mid-twentieth century life. Visual Poetry also appropriates materials from the visual language of popular mass culture, as well as images from the history of art, but it transforms these elements into a critical comment on the sources lifted  and what they represent. Missing in Pop Art are the analytic and critical perspectives brought to mass culture by Visual Poetry. Unilike Visual Poetry, Pop art seems more attracted to than repelled by the dominant media forces of popular culture.

Visual Poetry and Pop Art also differ in their foundations and in their uses of language and the visual.  Pop Art is grounded first in the history of the visual arts.  To the extent that Pop Art incorporates language, it is always as a secondary element.  On the other hand, Visual Poetry begins with the language of poetry and is notably influenced by theoretical studies of language in semiotics.  It gravitates toward the visual, primarily as a means of extending the domain of poetry.

II.

       One of the earliest works in our discussion is Miccini’s “1968.”  This  collage references the Vietnam war. A prominent feature of the piece is its title, “1968,” placed near the upper left of the image  in bold red typography.  The upper right of the image features  a display  of U.S. military figures juxtaposed against a missile  placed above the U.S. flag.  Opposite is a fighter plane in flight.  Between the two images are the words “VietnamL  Ventun Anni Di Guerra Senze Gloria.  On the lower left is an aerial photo of New York City skyscraper with the inscription in red: “Yankee Go Home.” On the opposite lower right is a male figure uttering a cry of anguish.  Between them is a pictogram in the shape of a human hand covered with a colored montage of photographs incorporating power symbols of politics, mass communications media, religion,  and corporate business. Depicted across the spread hand are political leaders such as Lyndon Johnson,  ----------Bresznev, Fiedel Castro, and Charles de Gaulle, the Pope, a meida commentator, entertainer,  and corporate figures.  A military rocket, television screens, cars and air planes, and  a bundle of cash are disbursed throughout the image. The overall effect of Miccini’s 1968 is a fairly transparent commentary on the story of the United States’ problematic intervention in the Vietnam War.  Here Miccini integrates almost seamlessly the interplay of the words and the images to create a work that expresses more than either part represented separately.

       Much of Miccini’s  work viewed for this presentation is taken from his later work created between 1999 and 2004.  During this period, he experiments with a range of processes where the form becomes increasingly important.  It results in Visual Poems that are octagonal, round, and in some cases following the form of a dancer in motion or the shapes of a living flame.  The octagonal and round images (“La Forza,” 1999 and “Una misura espressiva nuova,” 1999) are composed of cut strips of words from publications arranged in a swirling pattern extending out from a center.  These pieces have the energy of a swirling centrifugal force.  In them, the words become submerged into the visual pattern so completely that the didactic is subjugated to the formal elements of the composition.  “’E’ in deicola il monda,” a composition of 2004, returns again to a theme focusing on social commentary; this time the subject is the abuse of war captives as represented in the media.

        Pignotti’s Visual Poetry of the 1960s draws upon media images paired with typograpy appropriated from a newspaper or magazine to comment on societal issues in the age of media technology. He words and images are formed using collage technique into new constructions that convert literal intentions into his own critical purposes. “Un Poetica “Puō” dire la Verità, “ 1966,  is divided into three vertical columns perhaps suggesting the columns on a page from a magazine or news paper.  The upper right column begins with a proclamation (or is it a question?) concerning the role of the poet: “Una Poeta, “’Puo” dire la verilà.” Literally, a poet can tell the truth.  Or perhaps it is the question, can the poet tell the truth?  The quotation marks around the word puo (can) alert the viewer to Pignotti’s use of irony, concerning the very enterprise of poetry itself. Below the text are two images: the upper one  is of the Three Musketeers; the other portrays a military procession of British soldiers.  At the top of the middle column is a an image of a hooded Ku Klux Klan figure holding a flaming torch  in each hand.  Below are the words “Certo, per la pace e il progresso” as if to affirm, perhaps mockingly, the truth-telling capability of the poet in the face of a giant media enterprise that seeks to control thought and action. The image in the right column shows a suited man towering over a street scene below  showing  a man  standing in the street below  wielding a pistol. The difference in scale between the man and the street scene heightens the tension in the overall composition and draws the eye to the words below: “la sconfitta era gia segnata.”  These words proclaim that defeat is already determined.  Pignotti leaves it to the viewer to decipher the meaning of his enigmatic juxtapositions.  What links the three columns?  Perhaps it is the question, what is the role of poetry in a world challenged to the point of breaking by the threat of powerful forces over which the individual has no control.

       In his  “Chi si defende si salva,” 1965, or “Who Defends Himself Will Save Himself” Pignotti addresses again the theme of the individual’s response to the stress of contemporary life.  This time he makes reference to an advertisement for CYNAR, a popular alcoholic drink made from extract of an artichoke.  He incorporates into the piece the familiar words of the advertisement:  “Contro il logorio della vita moderna,” as a means for expressing with clever irony his concerns for human survival in the age of technological mass communication.  The wider context of the piece incoroporates  references to global Marxism.

       Also represented in the exhibition is a selection from Pignotti’s series of works bearing the heading “Visible, invisible” from the 1980s. Pignotti produced these works as a critique of fashion as a means of manipulating consumers’ choices through the media.  This aspect of Pignotti’s Visual Poetry is represented in the exhibition by two works (cat. no. 36, 37) each bearing the title, “Visible invisible,” 1982.  The images feature beautiful female models elegantly clothed and photographed in enticing poses.  When linked with a commercial product their aim was to attract attention to the product.  Here they are removed from their mass media advertising context and branded with the words “Visible, invisible” again leaving the viewer to ponder their new meaning.

       Chiari shares with Miccini and Pognotti their distrust of mass media (radio, television, newspapers, magazines). His performances and his Visual Poetry images are intended to counter the indiscriminate use of information by mass communication for manipulation of the relations of market conditions to every day life.[7]  Chiari’s Visual Poetry is strongly influenced by his identification with the avant garde Fluxus artists such as John Cage, and his identity as a composer and performer of avant garde music.  For Chiari, who works as a visual poet derives  mainly from the perspective of music and performance, the chief weapons of technology might be the microphone, the recorder, the radio, the record, and now the computer synthesizer, the internet down loads and CDs.  These are the means whereby music is produced, transmitted, and controlled for the mass market.

       Chiari’s works in the exhibition incorporate pages of  musical scores altered with bright color blotches and markings with newspaper copy.  The abstract colored marks effectively break down the conventions of traditional musical language.  Hence his Visual Poetry, as in “La Serenata,” 1995 alters the language of the music.  His “Decisisons,” 1996 is a mixed media collage incorporating overlays of media text with a sheet of music and with red, green, and purple color markings. In “Senza Titolo,” 2001 the artist forms a collage of colored paper strips and torn sections of an advertisement of Bernardo Bertolucci’s last film, “I Danced by Myself” or “Under Sheltered Skys” NOTE CHECK TITLE. The overall shape forms a guitar on a black background. 

Not shown in the exhibition are Chiari’s famous terse and provocative statements written in large black letters of India ink on paper or applied to canvas.[8] or his action pieces involving such events as deconstructing a piano or dragging a piano a piano across the stage as if it were a cart.[9] These efforts underscore his role as activist-performer.

Writer, film maker and  poet Carlo Francia first became involved with Visual Poetry in the mid 1980s.  This led to a film De la Poesie visuelle àl’art totale which is included in the exhibition.  Among his Visual Poetry shown in the exhibition  Giocanda inegralista, 1997 (cat. no. 11), Leonardo’s Dream, 1997 (cat. no. 12), and La Presse, 1998 (cat. no. 13).  Giocanda is dressed in  black covering her head in the manner of a Moslem woman with only her eyes revealed. Large black letters in block typography bleed into the costume completing the image.  In Leonardo’s Dream a jet fighter plane projects into the artist’s brain.  Beneath the artist’s portrait are the printed  words, Leonardo’s Dream.

La Presse 1998 (cat. no. 13) comes closer to the earlier works of Visual Poetry in appearance and message.  In the center of the image is a large splotch of black ink; underneath is a cut out text of newspaper copy with red ink.  The words placed on top of the image, some  French some  Italian, “La Presse Ne s’empresse pas de pressentir …Moindre impressin de Son pressapochismo” offers a stinging critique of the press for its  hasty, slapdash work leading to inaccuracies.

       As a second generation artist with respect to Visual Poetry, Francia approaches the medium primarily from his background as a visual artist and poet.  In this respect he differs from Miccini and Pognotti whose work is grounded in semiotics and philosophy.  As a result his works differ in aesthetic tone from the Visual Poetry of the earlier generation.  They reflect a stronger affinity to the aesthetic of fine arts.

                            III.

       What then is the outcome of the Visual Poetry movement as represented in the works of the four artists considered here?  First, their contributions to the visual culture of the late Twentieth century join those of other artists starting at beginning of the Twentieth century with the Futurist and others who wished to question the practice of limiting artistic explorations to the internal boundaries of a particular art form such as painting, music, or dance. In this sense, they belong outside the mainstream of modernism which sought to purify and isolate art in a particular medium.  They are not the first to challenge boundaries.  But they can be classified as earlier practioners of post-modernism. Still their scientific grounding in semiotics and humanistic philosophy, especially Miccini and Pignotti,  sets them apart.  Their theoretical understanding of mass communication  provided them with special tools to carry our their radical social program.  This knowledge enabled them to decode and expose the practices of mass communications.  On another level they were free to explore new artistic opportunities arising from inter-relationships between the linguistic and artistic functions of words and visual images.  Perhaps their greatest contribution lies in their refusal to yield the spirit of experimentation, which is so essential to creativity in art and in all aspects of life, to a spirit of concensus and conformity that so easily follows from the mindless influences of mass communication on the daily lives of us all.