Poetry Plastique Statement
Sprung Monuments, which I painted especially for the Poetry
Plastique show, includes lines and fragments of poems by Charles Bernstein.
We have collaborated on five books together: The Occurrence of Tune (Segue, 1981), The Nude Formalism (Sun & Moon, 1989), Fool’s Gold (Chax, 1991), Little
Orphan Anagram (Granary Books, 1997), and Log Rhythms (Granary Books, 1998). In addition, I have done several
artist’s books on my own and have a new collaborative book with the poet Susan
Howe, Bed Hangings, forthcoming in
2001 from Granary Books. Notably, although painting is my main preoccupation,
this is the first time I have incorporated lines from Charles’ poetry into one
of my paintings.
Over the years, I have
painted many works with images alone. Since 1996, I have occasionally
incorporated titles and blurbs from B-movie and film noir movie posters and
slogans and titles from pulp novels into various paintings. Text alters the
framework for the images and repositions the viewers in relation to the
paintings. In Sprung Monuments, I have reset excerpts of
several of the poems I had previously set in Little Orphan Anagram and
Log Rhythms.
The settings in the painting
are different from those in the books. Here I have used the absurdist humor and
mock or perhaps all-too-real profundity of the line, “Poetry fakes nothing
happening,” to show a man rained down on by relentless trickles of enamel paint
as the cloud encompassing this thought nears him. Meanwhile, the poem “My son is
going dumb I would pluck out my neighbor’s tongue if it would do any good”
forms an oval shield of words over the man’s belly, suggesting that these are
the thoughts of a worried father. “His wife she stood with a loaded gun,” the
bungled quotation from Emily Dickinson (“My Life had stood-a Loaded Gun”), is
framed by an errant 1940s woman watching her lover escape from an open window,
as well as a postcard of a loving 1950s father hanging a horseshoe over his
family’s door frame. The visual framing positions the text in the space between
family and seduction, sexual longing, and family values.
The images in the painting
touch on the humorous, mystical, whimsical, science fictional, surreal, and
philosophic underpinnings of the poems. But each panel of the painting puts
forward its own interpretation. Sometimes the images focus on just one word of
the poem and sometimes they stand in a stark contrast to the poem. I am not
interested in a strict illustrational approach to the words but rather an
oblique associative relation between image and poem.
The image is an echo and an
accompaniment of the poem. Much like writing music to a libretto -- the words
and the music stand in inverse relationship to each other. In setting these
poems however, I am also interested in legibility. The poems float in a clouds,
bubbles, and rocks, sometimes they are encased in linear boxes. They become part of the artificial landscape
created by the gridded space of the painting.
Each of these poems is set
in its own space. I also think of these small scenes as a storyboard or cartoon
frames or as fragments of the whole. As the poem puts it: “The parts are
greater that the sum of the whole.” This applies to the use of details in the
painting. The painting can be viewed in close-ups as a highly detailed reading
of the individual lines of the poems or a whole, where the fragments of a
puzzle fall into place to lend the appearance of a false unity. This unity is
created by the painted and collaged surface of the grid and is held together by
the boundaries of the stretched canvas.
This is also my sense of the
relationship between the artist and the poet who collaborate together. The
poems and images form a larger symbiosis that enhances the interpretation of
the synthetic whole. Thus, the idea of “poetry plastique” is an interpretative
visualization of the underlying abstract imagery and mood and emotions of the
poems. Particularly, when dealing with ironic, dense, and open-ended poems like
Charles’s, I feel free to provide my own interpretive response.
Different poets suggest
different approaches to collaboration. For example, in setting the poems of
Susan Howe in Bed Hangings, I felt
more directed by the poem’s historical subject matter: Puritans, religion,
colonial America, fabric design, and textiles. All of these were of major
importance to the interpretation and imagery of the pictures and so my images
centered upon them.
In collaborations between
poets and visual artists, I feel that the artist should match the wavelength of
her or his artistic intuition and vision to the intensity and demands of the
poet’s words. It is a challenge and pleasure to be able to form visual reponses
to overpowering verbal stimulants. Some of my inspirations have been the
medieval illuminated pages, the books of William Blake and William Morris, as
well as the work of Max Ernst, John Heartfield, and Hannah Höch. But, most of
all, the amazing ability of writers to conjure up whole worlds of images with
their words continues to fascinate and inspire me to follow suit with a visual
response.