Collaborative Mail Art Books

Otro librito de VIBROMAX:

I sent various different page arrangements to different people. I'm not considering this a problem.

De Villo, different arrangements.  I love that. It's even better that way. 

"chance operations" as some one or other once called it somewhere some place. Fear not - you received what you were meant to receive. And I remain grateful for your wondeful chapter.

De Villo - received your pages - great - thank you - as you know, Pollock one of my favorites - don't know why I didn't think of choosing him? But at least you included him :-) - Lisa - VERY sorry to hear that - they were ALL sent A LONG TIME AGO!! Thats a big drat!  Each copy was hand painted :-(  - Will make new ones for you - and have extra ones from John which I will post to you.  sorry about that.  Is anyone else missing pages from me?

Rec'd Nancy Scott Bell's pgs. today - very very cool

john

Angie - Yes, got yrs, also very cool - in fact, EVERYTHING has been wonderful so far! 

Hello

Thanx for the invitation, unfortunately, a lot of works. I'm participate the next project.

best: csaba

Its getting to three weeks past due date for the VISPO project. I have the following work outstanding:

Book One

Victoria Barvenko

Richard Canard (in process in think)

Cleveland Wall

Alfonso Filieri

Book Two:

E

Rosa Gravino

Samuel Montalvetti.

I will be contacting everyone privately and am aware that some of these pages are already in the mail, but PLEASE - I am receiving many enquiries from the participants who HAVE completed their  work.  Fairs fair :-) X

OK,OK - I will write the intros. Giver me A FEW DAys

Thanks De Villo :-)

And I have heard from Alfonso - he also needs a few days, so we're getting there  :-) X

Even the longer-than-expected took longer than expected BUT I did finally ship out my vispo today. Sorry for the delay, everyone!

Cleveland Wall - thank you for responding :-) Richard Canard is also posting, and Alfonso - I think that takes care of Book 1?  Many thanks to you all :-) Xi

Welcome Sue!

Documentation for Diane Keys's chapter for the collab vispo book can be found here:

http://iuoma-network.ning.com/profiles/blogs/received-a-new-queen-o...

Stunning Diane!

I know vispo can be an acquired taste sort of thing, and it's hard to know where so many different people are coming from, but, for me, Diane really, really pulled it off with this chapter.

For instance, Chirot is SO influential, but who do you find that is actually working in the same terrain? Diane is doing that and it's like taking on Kafka or something - you are going to end up looking like a joke. But she's doing it; she's finding her own direction from a common ground - which, to me, with David, was decisive for the direction of vispo. So I think this is is an especially good one, ya.

Many tastes are probably acquired in one or a variety of ways, but vispo has been wonderfully easy to appreciate and take off from thanks to this project and all the input of those knowledgeable about it. I have been a big fan of Diane's work, including on this project, since joining IUOMA, and can see appreciation of both Chirot and Jernigan in these particular pages of Diane's. It's especially great that she drew our attention to Jernigan, I think--someone I might never have encountered otherwise. It's beautiful and thought-provoking work, Diane--someday maybe we'll end up in the same volume of a collaborative project! But even if not, you know how much I love what you do and send, and that I and countless others value highly what you create and your pioneering spirit.

Well said NBS and the thing that really impresses me about this chapter by Diane is that it is entirely rooted in language. I suppose you can make some case for abstract art but I see mostly language and asemics and these really unusual forms she makes to hold it together. Vispo - visual images - yes - but I think DK pulls off something really unuusual - not sure what it is - but not mundane.

And with all my Chirot praise - I wish someone who really had a handle on it would comment - somewhere maybe in the early 90s vispo & concrete seemed to me to hit a kind of impass (?). They weren't moving forward then David came along, and of course JMB had been doing it people just needed to catch up to him - some log jam broke that slowed things down and things really started moving and thankfully they seem to be moving still - you know, forms and genres DO freeze up and cease to be productive

How about a Homage-to-Ray-Johnson?

richard did it...FABulously: 

And with Richard Canard's Vispo One, came also Cleveland Wall's! 

Fly with Magritte! FAB!

Welcome to the new members of Collaborative Books :-) X

GREAT to see Cleveland Wall and Richard C in the bag - thank you both X

Rosa is busy wrapping up her Bottle Project, but is getting to the Vispo and I have heard from Victoria is is also at her work.  Susan I think I read somewhere has sent, Samuel has sent, Alfonso is sending - E - where are you???? Looks like we may hit a full line up with this one - I'm holding thumbs :-) XX

Vispo book participants - I documented Susan Mortimer's chapter in Edition #1 in a blog:

http://iuoma-network.ning.com/profiles/blogs/received-susan-mortime...

Many thanks to Susan for a really interesting contribution.

Hello, vispo book participants. KDJ's Magritte chapter is blogged & documented. Pages have been posted in a number of places. You can find the whole text here:

http://iuoma-network.ning.com/profiles/blogs/received-kdj-dumps-tra...

Welcome to the new members of Collaborative Books :-) X

Hello Sue - we are still tying up the last two books, so nothing on the go at the moment :-) X

Another PLEAD! PLEASE will the members of the collaborative VISPO book who have not sent their work send already! Its really time that this was wrapped - we are month and a half past due date.  Many thanks to those of you who completed on time. 

Hello, vispo book contributors. Three more chapters are documented. I'm using an anthology concept for this now:

http://iuoma-network.ning.com/profiles/blogs/received-visual-poetry...

Any word from Alfonso in Italy or Victoria in Russia? What a pity, the Vispo Book One could really be "complete" soon, I hope!

I have heard from both of them that they are submitting work - so I hope so too, for sure I do! X

De Villo has written fabulous introduction to the VISPO books - its added as a new discussion - MANY thanks - its a great read XX

Cheryl, Katerina...a word, or rather two: I will send my pages but I will not do more work with photocopies: I can not, I find an office job. I like to sail the seas and rivers, the handmade paper, natural things ...
in this work give a cut.
for others they are ready to go ...
go!

Good to hear from you, Alfonso! Sail the seas and rivers of handmade papers and natural things...we will wait patiently :-)

Wlcome to new members Gail and Harry!

I love the concept of add and pass on so the idea of making a book and allowing others to fill it is fantastic!  If there are any projects currently in the process then I'd love to be added in!

Laura Daniels

101 Blagrove Drive

Wokingham

Berkshire

RG41 4BD 

Hello vispo collaborative book participants, I did another anthology blog documenting more chapters:

http://iuoma-network.ning.com/profiles/blogs/received-visual-poetry...

Compilation book edition proposed by David Dellafiora: VOL2; YEAR 4

In this edition: Reed Altemus, John Bennett, Mark Bloch, Jim Hayes, Otto David Sherman, State of Being, (USA) ; David Dellafiora (Australia); Horst Bauer (China); Eberhard Janke, Kommissar Hjuler, Andrew Niss (Germany); JF Chapelle (France); Allan Revich (Canada); Lubomyr Tymkiv (Ukraine); Simon Warren, Barrie Tullett (UK); Guido Vermeulen (Belgium); Cheryl Penn (South Africa); Tiziana Baracchi, Vittore Baroni, Serse Luigetti (Italy)

O - exciting Guido!!! That means mine is on its way - thanks for posting.  Reminds me I must make my next contribution.  For anyone interested - please google ReSite - David Dellafiora - an ongoing project where contributors create and post 40 pages to David in Australia which are assembled into this artists book. 

Introduction to Edition #2

Visual Poetry Collaborative Book Project - 3

A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels.

I will tell you, one day, of your newborn portents:

A, the black velvet jacket of brilliant flies whose essence

Co-mingles, abuzz, around the cruelest of smells,

Wells of shadow; E, the whitewash of mists and tents,

Lances of glaciers, albino kings, frost-bit fennels…

Rimbaud’s poem can be read as notes for the construction of a visual poem. Individual letters are isolated from words and given color designations, melding word and image. The color-vowels generate a sequence (montage) of associative images that provide content. Many of the poems in this visual poetry collection are a realization of Rimbaud’s vision, using image as language and language as image.

Several decades later, Ezra Pound’s Imagism established a foundation for Modernism. The imagist agenda called for inclusion of poetic traditions outside Europe, economy of language - a paring of rhetoric - in favor of image primacy and a belief that the image by itself can convey meaning and provide lyrical expression. Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” (1913) is an example of Imagism that also foreshadows visual poetry:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

The economy and precision of the poem helped pave the way to minimalist poetry. The structure is two images, separated visually on the page with line breaks. Again, this piece could be translated into a visual poem. The primacy of the image expanded and increased from Modernism into the Postmodern.

William Carlos Williams and later Robert Creeley further refined poetic minimalism and use of the image. Visual poetry took root elsewhere, of course, and in different ways. Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons is an influential

Introduction to Edition #2

Visual Poetry Collaborative Book Project - 4

experiment in language-painting. New York School poets sought to create a literary version of abstract expressionism and action painting. In the meantime, DaDa and Fluxus (among other avant garde movements) produced text-image hybrids, including concrete poetry, through anti-art that ran counter to Modernism. In the last quarter of the 20^th century, these efforts evolved and coalesced to make the concept of visual poetry possible.

We have an occasion in this edition to experience visual poets engaged together in exploring a terrain that is still largely uncharted in the recognizable form of the book and chapters. While their work is still labeled avant-garde (a term that is now essentially meaningless as are so many other similar designations), they draw heavily upon the tradition of literature (which after all remains a rich vein) following a charge to poets made a century earlier: “Make it New.” We find beauty, lyricism, and above all else, an affirmation of the power and need for human expression.

De Villo Sloan

Auburn, New York, USA

May 7, 2012

Introduction to Edition #2

Visual Poetry Collaborative Book Project - 2

The visual poetry concept, for most of us, is best understood through the lenses of painting, photography, collage, video and similar genres: Contemporary cultures program us to be adept at reading visual images, image sequences (from montage in film), and visual syntax. We can readily accept the notion that written and printed language is part of the larger visual image landscape. Thus, it is plausible that text and image can be integrated to create metaphor, rhetoric, lyricism, narrative, non-linearity, form and even visual prosody – elements associated with literary tradition and the notion of the poetic.

What is less apparent, but revealed especially by the work in this edition, is that the “Great Tradition” of poetry has evolved in such a way that visual poetry is now a viable, if not a desirable, genre in the post-literature of the 21^st century. Poetry was an oral as well as visual tradition long before it was affixed in the printed word or quarantined as something called literature; it had forms, rhythms, and symbols that made it vital long before scholars froze and sought to create systems of measure and evaluation, making absurd assertions that jamming inane content into the form of a sonnet or counted syllables somehow automatically qualified as poetry.  

The Age of Literature and the printed word are only part of a far greater continuum stretching back into prehistory. Poetry will very likely endure as an essential human activity long after literary canons and theories have been forgotten, certainly in spoken word form, but also in visual form outside the limits of accepted definitions today. In addition to forms of digital visual poetry, the handmade books – such as this edition – are increasingly viewed as object and haptic poetry themselves.

Central to poetry in the 20^th century was a sustained engagement with the image and its refinement into image structures within the poem. Arthur Rimbaud in the 19^th century, whose work is a precursor to Modernism, foresaw not only the rise of the image but the possibility of visual poetry in his sonnet “Vowels” (1872):

Introduction to Edition #2

Visual Poetry Collaborative Book Project

In December 2011, Cheryl Penn (South Africa) and I placed a call through the international mail-art network inviting artists and writers to contribute a chapter each for a new collaborative book project we were coordinating. Responses were enthusiastic, warm and generous: We soon announced this second edition.

On the pages ahead, you will find innovative work by members of the international visual poetry community including Nancy Bell Scott (Maine, USA), John M. Bennett (Ohio, USA), Rosa Gravino (Argentina), Samuel Montalvetti (Argentina), Marcela Peral (Argentina), and TIC TAC (Germany). Fluxus is represented by contributions from Reed Altemus (Maine, USA) and Svetlana Pesetskaya (Russia). We were pleased to be joined by veteran mail-artists CT Chew (Washington State, USA), Angie Cope (Wisconsin, USA), Skybridge Studios (Indiana, USA), and Svenja Wahl (Germany).

Co-coordinator Cheryl Penn – book artist, painter, visual poet – has done intensive research on artist Ray Johnson and his New York Correspondence School, which in the 1960s established the foundation of today’s thriving global mail-art network. Based on mail-art’s shared values of inclusive and collective activity, Cheryl has developed and refined an effective process for making highly individualized artists’ books. Her concept that each contributor’s chapter would be an homage to a favorite artist or visual poet provides thematic coherence.

The work in this edition reveals that visual poetry, a synthesis of the visual arts and literature, has emerged as a vital mode of expression that is inventing new forms. Approaches to visual poetics in these pages reveal great diversity. TIC TAC (Germany), for instance, draws upon minimalism that focuses on single letters and words to produce brilliant irony and complex narratives. John M. Bennett’s chapter is a flawless integration of text and image that offers both new ways of reading and seeing.

For visual poetry collaborative book (edition #2) contributors: Here is the intro for edition #2. Feel free to cut and paste for your books and/or documentation. You can find both intros here.

http://iuoma-network.ning.com/group/collaborativemailartbooks/forum...

Thanks! DVS

Really wonderful De Villo! [Can't say I agree w/ the Modernism to post as vispo/concrete is modernist, but be that as it may...&_^]. I love the way you led in w/ those lines of Rimbaud's. And after that, nice intro to modernism/language sensibility and the inception of Vispo. [H.D. is my fave. imagist - I believe I even read of Pound saying she was the master of the genre...?]

In that series I posted some pics from ["pre-Socratic body"] I did a number of bronze cuffs & shackles in which I etched Rimbaud poems. I think its rather astounding how such a young [brief!] visionary still holds such creative sway/influence... [Ah, such sublime fire...!] Have you ever heard Hector Zazou's "Sahara Blue?" Great CD from the early 90s w/ an amazing lineup of guests like Lisa Gerrard [DCD], David Sylvian, Ryuichi Sakamoto, John Cale, etc. Aaaanyway, the lyrics are all Rimbaud poems - Gérard Depardieu even reads!

Glad it at least partially meets you're approval, Cleo. I was really concerned. I'll have to write separate versions just for you from now on that take the position that postmodernism never existed. I think a few of us are aware of your position.

Yes, there were numerous imagists. I couldn't go into any detail given the space. HD is great, I think. Also Amy Lowell who Pound later in disgust said invented Amygism. Pound's two-liner was exactly what I needed to make the point about minimalism.

Thanks for the tip on the CD - I wasn't aware of it & for reading the intro.

lol! [& I love the quote abt. Amy!] I thought the 2-liner was a great idea... made me think of Williams, that master of brevity...

[I know it exists literally, just haven't seen anything new creatively. "New" is a dangerous word of crs..not to be misconstrued here, I don't believe it has importance. the need of it in the art-world/pop-culture too oft' subsumes the primacy of quality. [Yes, I know that's a po-mo "bad word" - I heard someone once suggest we use "integrity" in its place to subvert the hypocritical charge of 'elitism" supposedly implied by its usage.]]

Cleo, it's a great pleasure to give you an opportunity to express your views on postmodernism. Multiple perspectives enrich us all.

As I mentioned before, I'm really not a huge fan myself of postmodernism or the trainwreck it became. I think many went into it with the best of intentions & probably with a desire to correct some serious flaws in modernism's dna - such as a tendency toward extreme political & cultural fascism . But alas....

De Villo - many, many thanks - once again a great read,  It certainly is a pleasure to be reminded of Arthur Rimbaud again. I think I have letter from him from Africa. Time to look it up again.  I apologize for my absence - its been, um... fraught! But thank you for bearing the textual flag in my absence.  Its greatly appreciated as well I hope you know :-) - I hope I can be excused from the debate you and Cleo are engaged in!!   I had a good look at Meta-L today - a GREAT  piece of work.  Somewhere you said there was a particular text you used - could you remind me please - again - THANK YOU!!! :-) XX