MechanicalBrides_Atsui_AngelsintheAngles

EXHIBITIONS

ANGELS IN THE ANGLES

October 9-Nov 3, 2009

Bachelor Machines, Mechanical Brides and Gallery Atsui present

an exhibition of Concrete Poetry

Donato Mancini

Christian Bök

Marina Roy

Gallery Atsui, 602 E.Hastings, Vancouver BC

Curated by Steve Calvert, co-produced with Rebecca Plucer and Gallery Atsui

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Collection Catalog

Exhibition D ocumentation and Event Photos

preliminary 'sneakpeak' slideshow

A Concrete Hystery [-background check-]

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ARTISTS

Donato Mancini is the author two books of procedural and visual poetry, Ligatures (2005) and Æthel (2007), both from New Star books, both nominated for the ReLit Award. He also co-directed the world's first genuine in-world avatar documentary AVATARA (2003). Long time member of the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver BC, he was a principal organiser of the N 49 15.832 - W 123 05.921 Positions Colloquium in August 2008. He is now finishing a third collection of visual and textworks for New Star and beginning to prepare for publication his book-length study of the ideology and ideolects of poetry reviewing in Canada.

Christian Bök is the author not only of Crystallography (Coach House Press, 1994), a pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, but also of Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001), a bestselling work of experimental literature, which has gone on to win the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence. Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. Bök has also earned many accolades for his virtuoso performances of sound poetry (particularly the Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters). His conceptual artworks (which include books built out of Rubik’s cubes and Lego bricks) have appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique. Bök is currently a Professor of English at the University of Calgary. He was recently named one of Utne Reader's 50 Visionaries who are Changing the World.

Marina Roy is a Vancouver based artist working across a variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, animation, video, performance and writing. Roy has exhibited work across Canada, as well as in Europe and the U.S. She is assistant professor of visual arts at the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory, UBC since 2002. The ideas investigated in her artwork and writing stem from her ongoing research in such areas as psychoanalysis, gender, and biopolitics. In 2001 she published the book sign after the x ______ , published by Arsenal Pulp Press and Artspeak. She is currently working on a new book Queuejumping, which will investigate the construction of nature, nomadism, human-animal distinction, and the letter Q.

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CURATORIAL ESSAY

Angels in the Angles -- an introduction -- Steven W. Calvert

"Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth." - Theodor Adorno

Concrete is poetry at its endgame. With nothing but an aspriated breath left to say, by the simplest of twists, the material aspect of language pins its verbal component into a semiotic corner, text declaring its checkmate. Penultimate to folding up the board and shifting the rules to some fresh and unidentifiable digital novelty, something somehow simultaneously inter/trans/sub/pre&post-linguistic, at very least post-literate... first, in a lightning stroke of self-defense, the alphabet inverts in its protein sheath and bites back, grabbing hold of the reader [or was it the writer] to cinch closed the reflexive circuit of meaning. Disoriention in the resultant feedback loop tells us as much again about language as we thought we knew before. Illuminating the simultaneous location of reading and writing, pointing to the role of attention in the construciton of meaninful events, our own projections reflecting in the copies we've twinned from the page. Translation errors occur, opening new windows for mutation. Concrete abandons or amplifies all the usual coercive hegemonies and rhetorical devices of literary tradition: dispelling lyricism, dramatic arc, wry argumentation, enchantments of meter and cadence; forsaking rhyme and consonance, wends of metaphorical imagery, and all other familiar contrivances of poetics, which are here removed from their rarified milieu brought under the strict constraints of a reflexive formalist abstraction familiar to visual artists. If literature is fifty years behind painting, then poetry has paced itself for taking the lead. To the surprise and delight of all gathered, a fresh game begins...

As artists adapt to the growing insecurities of our national institutions, creative communities are pressured to galvanize and grow stronger, more industrious, more independent and interdependent, developing an interdisciplinary solidarity within the means of production, colluding to share in trading networks preestablished in cultural and cosmopolitan niches far and wide. In the absence of socialized support, producing autonomously, even anonymously, we work for a future milieu which does not yet here exist. Rushing in to fill the vacuum, exchanging ideas with a non-linear, open source, transhistorical temperament, we braid our conceptualizations beyond sanction, openly hostile to that trust which has forsaken us... this utopia has been dreamed before.

Early in the 60s, such an ideal moment took shape, demonstrating that it can, has, and will yet be done again. Vancouver in that era produced a rich disarray of talents who remain the western pillars of viaual poetry in Canada. Judith Copithorne's early concrete poems date from the late fifties, and bill bissett's prolific visual work with his blew ointment press was active and influential during the time of the american Beats, who passed through town and worked abreast of numerous literary contemporaries and interdisciplinary art enclaves . A sophisticated new intermedian Canadada was rising, colllaborating and competing to develop radical new design vocabularies for the integration of art and life. Creative praxis implied the nurturing of integrated creative communities, where experimentation, technical innovation and formal investigation of concrete, visual, sound and pattern poetry were leveled-up in equivalence and intermixed within an emerging electronic intermedia-without-borders. Vancouver artists have long participated in the international traditions of samizdat networks, wherein small presses and mail art exchanges helped to spread concrete poets' graphic experimentations throughout the dominion. With intermittent support [and subsequent abandonment] from once-valued cultural ministries, support falls to the relentless organizational labors of inspired volunteers and the generous curiousities of cultural participants everywhere.

This constellation from which concrete and 'pataphysical traditions emerged can be roughly drawn by this approximate outline, emulating narratives spun in available historical accounts: Modernist explorations of 'pataphysics corresponds with the emergence of cut-up hypergraphics first developed in turn of the century Berlin, Paris, Rome, St.Petersburg... then continued on in New York, Buenos Aires, Sao Paolo, Tokyo, Toronto... [Post]Modern avant-garde research begins in and occupies the representational problematics of print media. Within this near-universal literary commonality, international experimental communities accrete and expand slowly, wherever fine books are sold. From first stirrings in French Symbolist poetry, whose decadent pseudomystical inversions of reason and temperance gave inspiration to the nonsense provocations of Alfred Jarry, Lewis Carroll, Windsor McCay, Antonin Artaud... Elsewhere, Constructivism, Dada and Surrealism, then in Lettrism, Oulipo, Fluxus, Intermedia, Conceptualism liquefied all fixed relations attributable to sign systems, and devastated all boundaries between the arts... In this transformational cascade of midcentury -isms, one can tease out a common concern - each movement took the construction of history into their own hands, and developed for the vehicle of record, some kind of print culture for mnemonic purposes. In this, internet remains insufficient. All movements so far mentioned left multiple copies behind, and interestingly, now that the liberatory poetential of the infinite copy is a commonplace, the defenses of authorship in tatters, still the material production of memory, matters. Each historical movement mentionable imagined its own history, seizing upon that one indispensable artifact among all other double-edged boons of late industrial revolution: the printing press, the copying machine, the internet.

Around the copy room, in 1960s Toronto, an intersection between 'pataphysics and concretism reached critical levels of tension. In a fruitful period of creative partnership between bp Nichol and Steve McCaffery developed, and these two characters would localize and inculcate a distinctively potent strain of the experimental and 'pataphysical tradition with their Toronto Research Group. Legendary concrete, visual, sonorous and theoretical materials were produced, which remain strong beacons of influence in Canadian poetics. Their legacy is remembered in part thanks to exemplary support work from Coach House Books (who have also in the interim published and employed brilliant visual poets like Darren Wershler-Henry and Damian Lopes). Such small presses have struggled against odds to sustain a culture of book media in this country. Art Metropole should also receive a salute for providing a venue for artists concerned with the multiple. And jwcurry's Room 302 books in Ottawa are national landmarks for the art. The reliable materiality of the book retains traction here in Vancouver too, thanks to ongoing efforts by staff at the Kootenay School of Writing, SFU Special Collections Library, and New Star Books, who deserve kudos for having the foresight to sign Donato Mancini. Christian Bök's Crystallography, from Coach House, and his later dissertation on 'Pataphysics, with Northwestern, are the central pivot-points for this study, and stand for me as two of the most outstanding moments in Canadian art and literature as I know it [granted, I'm a visual artist, and my specialties are not literary]. In years intervening since the sixties, a wryly conflated scientistic mythopoesis exploring the abstract deconstruction of phonic and scriptive language, a chain of influence or mutual interest, draw along a line of living writers: jwcurry, Christopher Dewdney, Steve Venright, Mary-Lou Rowley, Jordan Scott, a.rawlings,... there must be uncounted others... these luminous 'pataphysical research poets have dispatched with all limiting conceptions dividing poetry from more scientific ontologies, art from the language of theory, sound from its muscular haptic image... so each interdisciplinary artist willfully opens and reappropriates any and all available tool chests, to leverage by any means necessary their linguistic and conceptual [de]constructions.

In his poetic and philosophical essay on the materiality of language, Crystallography, Christian Bök reflects "My father opened the field guide to crystals to pages with fine print to show me how to decipher a language - he gave me his gemcutter's eyepiece and left me alone to revel in detail - the edges of serifs, fibres in paper - only later did he teach me to sound out the words." [Diamonds - 3)] -- Concrete poetry must be among the most ancient artforms [phylogenetically and developmentally] still to be identified with an avant-garde. Something simultaneously pre- and post- literate leaps forth in a work of concrete. In an burst of incredulity, a shudder of recognition and laughter surges through the body, raising it to an alert and receptive state of primal confusion. The uncanny flashes its wizened visage in the earliest of signs: memories triggered by resemblances in clouds or stones, twisted wood and broken turtleshells. Simultaneity between phoneme and grapheme sets these twins wrestling in moot debate over precession. The mind takes amusement in these paradoxical conflicts, ambivalencies of projective recognition, and upon first contact, will henceforth continue to seek more of the ilk, and do so joyfully. Speculative and affective readings of pattern and gesture encode new forms in the flickering shadows and lights, space and form enrapture the poet in a praxis of deciphering the graphemic surface of the world - tracking the angel of libraries through her hallowed corridors. Babel's LibrariesBabel's Libraries must always have excited this same restless impulse to leap to conclusions, provoking tentative practice with the irresolvably mystical conundrum of asemic glyphs - curiosity chases its tail, tracking every possible lead; slippages of knowledge claims begin to occur, leading the inquiry forever back in to itself. Where contemporary lettrist calligraphists and concretist typoglyphers evoke this singular function - readers reading themselves engaged in the act of reading - an amplifying loop is constructed, the friction of confusion causes a temporary failure of prescriptive reading systems, and in the combustive heat of that cognitive dissonance, the first dark flame of a critical self-reflection and a comically freed cognition must have first arisen.

When not the message but the medium's massage is raised to the center of attention, Mcluhan's homophonic pun resembles a Cage-ian turn where all noise become signal, where all sound is musical to the receptively attuned ear, so concrete offers the signature flourish of providing an astonished laughter. The Fountain, wherein everything you put in comes back out at you. Aesthetic science is now recognized as a field of production located only in the labour of the reading subject. The archetypal matrices of sensation take form and 'meaning' only at the locus of perception. Here the play of ambiguities introduces a sublime openness to the text; a charged valence of uncertainty. With the medium-stripped-bare, language unfurls its subtexts and under-codes, making levity and light of arbitrarily constrained systems of syntax, grammar, diction, structure, form, arc, angle and spin... More sublime categories arrive, resembling the problem-space presented by the distribution of primes, set theory, state space, fields of probabilistic permutation, we expound upon a combinatorics of wonder - the parodic order of 'patalinguistic glyphs emerge within renewed postmodern consciousness (as it is, the old, again...?). Alphabetically associative processes obediently enshadow and obstruct an easily diverted attention, strobing to flash elevations of consciousness, command-order breaks down, a calculated feint leads the reader to drink, thinking then takes claim on what was thought to be one's own authority - clearly, one must investigate play more seriously. The very world-assembling activities of our cultural, linguistic and neurotic observational filtration mechanisms of conventional languages, like this one, delude and delimit sensitivity of awareness to the depths of our puzzles' strangeness. The poet's prerogative is to challenge these cultural conditions. Dressed in the sprezzatura of , finding or faking calm in the moment of confusion, a revelation: those habituated thoughtforms and motivational syndromes express an unrelenting labor for encoding/decoding of symbolic meaning - this preconscious automaton steps into the foreground, curtsies, and momentarily bows out of frame. That function for obsessively reassembling connective subtextual associations beneath and between the printed characters or the typesetter or calligrapher's strokes, evoking suggestive tensions and haptic synaesthesias of affect, even where there should and need be none. These gnomes are not easily known. Engaging directly with biomechanism of literacy, the imitative and adaptive reflex of mimesis, one finds that one always finds just what one is looking for. At the liminal threshold of sense and sensation, each formal element is teased into an illuminating relationship with a perception of the anomalous and impersonal qualities of meaning. Requiring an exercise in diversion and division sufficient to disable our ordering attentions, concrete lets another kind of eye wander the page, toward that serendipitous rediscovery of those 'angels in the angles', powers of perception negotiating proportion, balance, rhyme, rhythm, tone... Read through the distributed and haptic intelligence of the body, still indeed your own, the requisite lateral thinking and synaesthesia demanded by the the concrete poem sews the page and the plage [beneath the paving stones] together in a protean and chimerical multiplicity - a living probability engine you can hold in your hands. "A darkness so intense the eye sees through it." [Bok]

This reading of concrete poetics crosses through a 'pataphysical metatext. Not all would agree with this parallelism, but to this selector the relation is crystalline. Each tends toward a [de]construction of the medium's innate problematics, the question of its Image, objective metarepresentation of an imaginary nature attributing to itself a rhetoric of intrinsic and explicitly coercive, persuasive, and controlling agency - qualities of the linguistic material itself - to incline a reader toward the necessary immanence of a transcendental materialism, indeed to recreate or to simulate that strange simultaneity on its own terms, in its own voice - note a co-evolute entanglement with sound poetry. Analysis of the mediumistic properties of the medium are undertaken, utilizing elaborately constructed artificial systems, programs of procedures, arbitrary idiomatic contrivances, and absurd rule-based etiologies, an artificial didactics to articulate parodic images of the imaginary, tools which can lay satirical challenge and retort to the over-reduced elegance of conventional industrial science - those belligerently simplified reductions and faith-based rationalizations of authoritarian logic are made a beautiful mockery, rebuking all comparable forms of hegemonic knowledge claim in a single poetic stroke - a rictus spasm of significance and signification renders the super-ego mute with paralysis, the textual tape-worm is entangled within its own thought-terminating cliché. Concrete ensnares the word into its internalized argument, wherein the rhetorical prerogative of the typographic material can present itself to itself, in its own colors against its own ground. A mirror-phase moment for language itself, metastasizing in the mind of every future reader.

Concretists liquefy the phrase, dismantle the word, fracture the phoneme, crack apart the letter-form... Atomized and in-solution, the base structural units of the linguistic material's graphic and rhetorical potentials reactivate and autoassemble. The underlying elements and stylistic embellishments of the typographic artifice pulse back to squirming chemical life upon transliteration and rehydration in the next reader's attentive gaze. Unburdened by literal significations and prescribed meanings, formerly task-oriented serifs and ligatures, load-bearing ascenders and descenders, erupt into wild and noisy new organisms. Language indeed is a virus; semi-autonomous, self-transforming, and virulently contagious. Abstract asemic glyphs and elliptical calligrams replicate behind the readers eye, spontaneously summoning an enthralling dimensionality, invisible worlds of nearly-audible language evoking impressions of independent entelechies, symbiotic symbolic intelligence systems mediated by patterns of ink, where clearly there should be none. This eerie catalysis, achievable in the laboratory of art and the crucible of a primitivist imagination, provides the very illustration of jouissance - perfectly and sufficiently meaningful and legible as a raw experience of vivid sensations. This zen-like flow-state short-circuit is a key for opening the vault of reflective thought, available to any readers with sufficient sensitivity to look. In attention, incidentally, any reading implies and invokes a style of lateral thinking which will test the thresholds of rational comprehension. Vibrating with subharmonic phonic uncertainties, a concrete poem is less a text to be read, and so much more an active object to be perceived.

Inspired by new reminders of the absurd poetic potentials presented in networked computation, the arbitrary matrices of visible language recede ever deeper into the distance, nodding in and out of a folded hyperspace, shuddering in a Derridean fugue of ecrits et parole... It remains of interest, a hundred years on, that this ongoing concern for the structure of signs cannot now, nor possibly ever, be resolved. But it recurs, almost always in the context of the anomalous, as a technology so sufficiently incomprehensible as to perceived as magic. Artists of all experience levels eternally return to reexamine the strange marvel of written figures and their concrete abstractions, straining the mysteries of visual language, endlessly exploring the cavernous interior of its own terms. Given history's restless pursuit of progress, its demand for seriality and 'improvement', one might presume that wherever we are, we have seen it all before. What becomes clear to hindsight is that we have repeatedly overstepped ourselves, tracked back without recognition of familiarity, misapprehending any directional flow of signs in time, forgetting the slippery transience and trans-historicity of the Great Alchemical Work of language. Any number of extraordinary visual-poetic innovations must have risen to be subsequently abandoned by their creators mid-stride, too early or too late maybe to recognize the full historic cultural dimension of what indeed had happened. Printform xerographic ghosts pixilate and reappear, reanimated from out of the vault, haunting the inspirations and imaginations of creative communities deep into our parallel futures. Simultaneously nomadic and sedentary, high and low, obscurantist yet hiding in plain sight, the return of the Concrete is a structural inevitability, a creative design constant. Embracing a non-linear historical perspective, reimagining the minoritarian rhizomatic history for our comically imaginary 'avant-garde', again we gently raise the dialectical brick of Concrete, and toast the generations.

Sincere thanks to the artists for their receptive conversation and generous participation.

- Steve Calvert. Angels in the Angels

posted 1 Sept 2009. text in process to 9Oct ...

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Steven W Calvert is an interdisciplinary graphic artist, independent curator, film industry worker, book collector, and cultural collaborator. Compelled by proposals like Bök's reinvigoration of 'pataphysics and Delanda's articulations on materials assembly, Calvert feels compelled by command of the the SearchEngines to make access to artists more awesome.

SWC holds a BA in art history and [non-western] religious studies from UBC, and a BFA in intermedia and critical theory from ECU. Previously, CDev served as audio archivist for inter.mission stereo, was a founding member of the Intermission Artists Society, creative director of IMAS Collaborative Drawing, and creative content curator for BARK ATC. Hub and host of Bachelor Machines online and Mechanical Brides editions, Steve Calvert is the curator of 'Angels in the Angles' at Gallery Atsui.

donato mancini - subjecthood and the light verb

"Subjecthood and the Light Verb" by Donato Mancini

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