Poetry Plastique. - book review

Art in America, Feb, 2002 by Raphael Rubinstein

Much of the anthology addresses the history and esthetics of the artist's book, broadly defined to include pre-Columbian codices, 19th-century novelty books and the illustrated volumes of outsider Adolf Wolfli, as well as more familiar examples by William Blake, Dieter Roth and Tom Phillips. In addition to numerous illustrations in black and white, there is a full-color foldout of "The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France," the famous 1913 collaboration between Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay. Recent figures are also touched on, such as Xu Bing, for his calligraphic installation Book from the Sky, and Buzz Spector, a visual artist who uses books as his chief material. Co-editor Jerome Rothenberg idealistically sees the late 20th century as the period when, through self-published books, "artists & poets took control of their own work apart from the nexus of dealers and markets." The final section of the anthology, "The Book to Come," ends with a thoughful consideration by poet Charles Bernstein of the changing role of poetry in the digital age.

"Why aren't poets more central to contemporary visual art?" This was the question posed last winter by "Poetry Plastique," an exhibition curated by Bernstein and Jay Saunders. Held at Marianne Boesky Gallery in Chelsea, which copublished the accompanying catalogue, it sought to present poems as visual objects, ranging from one of Carl Andre's concrete poems to a Guston-Coolidge drawing to a hypnotic digital poem by Tan Lin and an intriguing "poem-sculpture" by Bernstein and Richard Tuttle. Perhaps not since the heyday of O'Hara and his painter friends had a commercial New York gallery been the site of so much poetry-related activity. We may be nowhere near a new golden age of poet-painter collaborations, and poets may be as poor as ever, but "Poetry Plastique" suggested that contemporary art, having recycled every modern style and attitude to the point of sheer inconsequence, may be turning to poetry as a source of more productive ideas and inspiration. When it comes to current poet-artist collaborations, I suspect that "Poetry Plastique" and the books reviewed here represent merely the tip of the iceberg.