Ica Roland 02

Roland
The magazine of the ICAs visual art programme Issue 2 / JUNE AUGUST 2009 Featuring A GUIDE TO
Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.

Gallery Guide EVENTS PUBLICATIONS EDITIONS FUTURE PROJECTS BACKGROUND MATERIAL
4 18 21 22 22 26
Exhibiting artists: Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, Anna Barham, Matthew Brannon, Henri Chopin, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Alasdair Gray, Philip Guston, David Hockney, Karl Holmqvist, Dom Sylvester Houdard, Janice Kerbel, Christopher Knowles, Ferdinand Kriwet, Liliane Lijn, Robert Smithson, Frances Stark and Sue Tompkins; curated by Mark Sladen Magazine also features contributions by: Charlotte Bonham-Carter, Augusto de Campos, Lewis Carroll, Michelle Cotton, Douglas Coupland, Eugen Gomringer, George Herbert, Joseph Kosuth, Liz Kotz, Giles Round, Stephen Scobie, Tris Vonna-Michell and William Carlos Williams
The ICA is proud to present the second issue of ROLAND, which has been produced to accompany our summer exhibition, entitled Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. The first half of the magazine contains a guide to the exhibition and its associated events, while the second half contains a wider range of texts and images, creating a more expansive context for the current project.
Roland / issue 2 / juneAugust 2009
Poor. old. Tired. Horse / Gallery Guide
Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.

Room one
Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. is an exhibition of art that verges on poetry. The exhibition starts with work from the 1960s, and with a group of artists who are associated with the Concrete Poetry movement that flourished during that decade. The movement can be taken as a symbol of the crosspollination between art and literature that was a feature of the 1960s, but the exhibition goes on to look at other artistic practices from this era that explored the intersection of the graphic and the poetic, and concludes with a group of younger artists who place such concerns at the heart of their work. As a genre, concrete poetry is understood as poetry in which the visual manifestation of words is as important in conveying the intended effect as the more conventional elements in the poem. The genre has ancient roots, and notable examples were created in the early twentieth century by the French writer Guillaume Apollinaire, and by the Dadaists. However, as a movement Concrete Poetry had its roots in the 1950s, in separate initiatives by Swiss and Brazilian writers, and it went on to become an international phenomenon in the 1960s, gaining adherents in many countries and extending out of the literary sphere and into the art world. The first room in this exhibition concentrates on the work of the Scottish artist and writer Ian Hamilton Finlay, who was a key figure in the Concrete Poetry movement in Britain. Moreover, the exhibition takes its title from a periodical that Finlay ran from 1962 to 1968, and which featured his own graphic and literary experiments alongside those of other artists and poets.1 Finlay, in one of his aphoristic assertions, maintained that stupidity reduces language to words. The current exhibition challenges this reduction and, like Finlay and his collaborators, seeks to demonstrate the rich possibilities of language when manifested not only as poetry but as image. Mark Sladen ICA Director of Exhibitions
Ian Hamilton Finlay
Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. No 18, Wild Hawthorn Press
1. The phrase Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. originated in a poem by Robert Creeley.
Ian Hamilton Finlays associations with the Concrete Poetry movement begin in the early 1960s, around the time that he founded Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. Finlay would go on to become the most important concrete poet in Britain, with work that paid homage to the Japanese haiku, and to the Carolingian scholar-poets, as well as to the Modernist avantgarde. He would also become one of the key promoters of the Concrete Poetry movement in this country, through his publishing and correspondence. The exhibition features a display of printed ephemera by Finlayincluding copies of Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. and two of his concrete poems realised as wall paintings.1 Finlay would come to feel confined by the acceptance of the Concrete Poetry movement by a wider public, and would disassociate himself from it in the later 1960s. His own practice was constantly developing, however, and he continued to experiment with the idea of giving form to syntax. In the early 1960s, Finlay made a number of poem objects, which frequently took the form of stone pieces, and
in 1966 he began to work directly in the landscape at his home in Stonypath, in the hills outside Edinburgh. Finlays most famous creation is his garden, Little Sparta, a fusion of poetic and sculptural elements with the natural landscape, and which employs the classical, revolutionary and martial imagery that would be a feature of his later work. Ian Hamilton Finlay was born in the Bahamas in 1925, but spent most of his life in Scotland. He published his first volume of short stories in the early 1950s, and in 1961 he founded the Wild Hawthorn Press, which printed his prolific output of poems, cards and booklets as well as Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. His career was long and varied, and included a solo exhibition at the ICA in 1992. Finlay died in 2006.
1. In his later career, Finlay often chose to realise texts as wall paintings, recreating his older poems or creating new pieces. The wall paintings were often made in partnership with Les Edge, who has executed the installations at the ICA. One of the works at the ICA is Sea Poppy I, which is based on a concrete poem from 1968 that uses the codes of shipping boats.
Room Two
The second room in the exhibition contains work by a number of artists who, like Finlay, were associated with the Concrete Poetry movement, demonstrating some of the range of positions that it embraced. This room also features other artists who emerged in the 1960s and 70s and whothough sometimes known for very different affiliationscreated work that offers interesting parallels to that of the concrete poets. We now associate the deployment of text in 1960s art with the use of written instructions or records within Conceptual practice, or of advertising language within Pop, but these artists, just like the concrete poets, sought to explore the poetic or expressive possibilities of language.
Dom Sylvester Houdard

Dom Sylvester Houdardor dsh, as he called himselfis, with Ian Hamilton Finlay, one of the two principle founders of the Concrete Poetry movement in Britain.1 Houdard began experimenting with what he called typestracts in the 1940s, and developed a highly distinctive style of typewritten visual poetry, using coloured typewriter ribbons and carbon papers. When Concrete Poetry emerged as an international movement in the early 1960s, Houdard becamethrough his legendary letter writingone of its most active participants, advocates and theorists. The work of Houdard is notable for its extraordinary formal discipline, for its exploration of the multiple combinations of letterforms and words, and for its examination of the spatial possibilities of the page. He saw Concrete Poetry as an extension of an ancient tradition of shaped verse, and his works are allied to notions of mystical contemplation. His interest in mysticism also encouraged him to explore Buddhism and Hinduism, and some of his works echo the mystic-psychedelic imagery of the hippy era. Dom Sylvester Houdard was born in 1924 on Guernsey, and studied at Jesus College, Oxford, and at St Anselmo, Rome. In 1949, after serving in British Army intelligence he became a monk at Prinknash Abbey in Gloucestershire, and was ordained as a priest in 1959. Houdard made many contributions to religious life, becoming a champion of the ecumenical movement in the 1960s, and working as a theologian and as a translator of the Bible and other religious texts. Houdard died in 1992.
Henri Chopin
Henri Chopin is a key figure within experimental art and literature in the post-war years, as an artist and writer, but also as a highly active curator, editor, designer and publisher. In 1958, Chopin founded the review Cinquime Saison, which became OU in 1964 and ran until 1974. Over the course of its life, this journal brought together figures associated with Dada, Surrealism, Lettrisme, Fluxus and Beat Poetry, as well as innovators of Concrete Poetry including Ian Hamilton Finlay. Chopin was an advocate of interdisciplinary production and multi-sensory art, echoing Raoul Hausmanns view that We are able to speak and write, because we hear with our eyes and we see with our ears.1 OU was notable for its inclusion of recordings of sound poetrythe area in which Chopin himself is probably most famous as an artist. This exhibition includes a number of Chopins typewriter poems from the 1960s and 70s, which reflect another key aspect of the artists work: a fascination with the relationship between order and disorder, a preoccupation deeply rooted in his experience of war. Henri Chopin was born in Paris in 1922. Deported to Germany in 1943, he spent periods in prison and in hiding before being repatriated, and subsequently enlisted as a solider. In the 1960s in Paris he worked as a radio and television producer, but he left after the failure of the uprisings of May 1968, and moving to England, settled in Essex. Chopins solo exhibitions in the UK include Ceolfrith Arts Centre, Sunderland, 1972, Norwich Gallery, 1998, and Cubitt, London, 2008. Chopin died in 2008.
Ferdinand Kriwet
Ferdinand Kriwet is a multimedia artist who has engaged with text, language and concrete poetry since the 1960s. Kriwets Text Signs, 1968, a set of which are shown in the ICAs Lower Gallery, are made from stamped aluminium. The format implies a commercial function, and the pieces resonate with advertising culture. However, Kriwets circular use of text also has strong associations with the mandala, an Indian form imbued with spiritual significance in Buddhism and Hinduism. Moreover, it has the function of disrupting the linear process of writing, as words and names join together or are juxtaposed to suggest a clashing and fusing of ideas. Kriwets signs, like Finlays landscape pieces and wall paintings, were an attempt to move concrete poetry quite literally into the world. The use of the sign form to contest subjects such as militarism and sexuality, and to co-opt the public inscription of power, is also an interesting precedent for the work of Jenny Holzer and other artists in the 1980s. The circular form is further explored in Kriwets Text Dias and Text Sails, 1970, giant signs printed on PVC, a group of which are displayed in the ICAs Concourse. Ferdinand Kriwet was born in Dsseldorf in 1942, and lives in Dresden. As well as his text works, the artist has also produced sound-picture-collages and experiments in radio, television and publishing. Kriwet was included in the seminal concrete poetry exhibition at the ICA, Between Poetry and Painting, curated by Jasia Reichardt in 1965; more recently, he had a solo show at The Modern Institute, Glasgow, in 2008.
Dom Sylvester Houdard FOR THE 5 VOWELS (1), 1976
1. Houdard, like Finlay, was galvanised by a letter celebrating the movement written by the Portuguese poet de Melo e Casto to the TLS in 1962. The two British poets would share a long correspondence.
1. Cited in Alicia Drweski, Henri Chopin, in Henri Chopin, exh. cat., Coelfrith Arts Centre, Sunderland, 1972 (n.p.).
Liliane Lijn
In a text from 1968, Liliane Lijn wrote, WORDS = VIBRATIONS = ENERGY.1 Over the past forty years, Lijn has explored this idea through numerous kinetic artworks. In the early 1960s, she began experimenting with painting horizontal lines on revolving cylinders. Having decided to put words on the cylinders, she collaborated with the poet and filmmaker Nazli Nour, who had asked Lijn if she could make her poems move.2 Lijn extracted words and phrases from Nours poems and used Letraset to apply them to her cylinders. Around this same time, Lijn also began to experiment with truncated cone shapes inscribed with words in rhythmic circles and ellipses that visually recalled the sound of the text. The cones were placed on revolving record turntables. Lijn first showed her Poem Machines in La Librairie Anglaise in Paris, a popular spot for Beat artists and writers. In 1968, she was commissioned by the ICA to make a work for the exhibition Guillaume Apollinaire 18801918: A Celebration . The result, exhibited again here, is Poemkon=D=4=Open=Apollinaire. The cone has remained an important formal consideration for Lijn throughout her career, and she continues to investigate the notion of words, sub-atomic particles and reality in flux. Liliane Lijn was born in New York in 1939. After studying Archaeology at the Sorbonne and Art History at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris, she has spent periods of time in Greece before eventually settling in the UK. In 2005, Lijn became the first artist in residence at the Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, where she experimented with Aerogel, a material developed by NASA.
Vito Acconci
Vito Acconci began his artistic career as a writer and a poet, concerned less with the meaning of words than with the way in which they could be arranged across a page. Seeking to demolish the functionality of the word, in the late 1960s he made a series of works using pre-existing text. Sourced from a variety of material, Acconcis found poetry was relocated to the left or right margin of the page, thus disconnecting the words from a context that could establish meaning. Taken from Four Book, 1968, the pages on display at the ICA constitute one graphic collage poem, each page juxtaposing a photocopied image of a page of the Manhattan phone book with a column of phrases or words. Acconcis objectification of language echoed the anti-referential principles of Minimalism, which began to dominate the New York art scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As Acconci cut, spliced, moved and displaced words, he performed many of the principle actions of the new sculpture. These actions became increasingly performative, as Acconci asked himself: if Im so interested in this question of space and movement over a page, why am I confining this movement to an 8 x 11 inch piece of paper?1 From here, he began to operate in a variety of media, exploring the real space of human interactions, and creating some of the foundational works of performance art.
1940. He studied literature at Holly Cross College,
carl andre
Carl Andre, I I I left met was, 1975
Vito Acconci was born in the Bronx, New York, in
Worcester, Massachusetts, and received an MFA in creative writing from the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1964. In the early 1970s his performances were supplemented by film and video; thereafter his practice became centred on installation; and at the end of the 1980s he moved into design and architecture and formed Acconci Studio.
1. Lijn, Liliane, POEM MACHINES = VISION OF SOUND, Liliane Lijn Poem Machines, 19621968, National Art Library, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 1993 (n.p.). 2. Wilson, Andrew, Liliane Lijn: Poem Machines, Liliane Lijn Poem Machines, 19621968, op cit.
1. Kotz, Liz, Poetry from Object to Action, Art and Language, The MIT Press, Cambridge and London, 2007, p. 174.
Carl Andre is today best known as one of the founders of Minimalism, but he has also engaged in a parallel practice as a poet. Andre s poems are characterised by the way in which they isolate words from syntax, and from larger sets of words (often derived from a particular historical source). These isolated units are subjected to repetition, gridding and other arrangements, emphasising their materiality; Andre is especially drawn to nouns and proper names, words that emphasise their properties as things. There is a clear relationship between Andre s poetry and his sculpture of the mid-to-late 1960s, the period in which he was developing his material language of stacked, gridded and modular structures. Shown here are five pages from a seventeenpage poem by Andre entitled Shooting a Script, a project he began in the mid-1970s. In Andre s words, The main event of Shooting a Script is a mutually fatal gunfight that took place in Waco, Texas on April Fools Day, 1898. From a text presenting 17
eyewitness accounts of the bloody encounter, I have created a clastic reweaving of voices. The result is a Cubist-fugue rendition of the homicidal episode that reduces the orderly recollections of the witness to the panic and chaos of the event itself.1 Carl Andre was born in 1935 in Quincy, MA. He studied art at Phillips Academy, Andover, MA, and moved to New York in 1956. Andre first showed his sculpture publicly in 1965, and in 1966 his work was included in the seminal show of Minimalist art at the Jewish Museum in New York, entitled Primary Structures. Andre s poems became widely exhibited only later, and were the subject of an exhibition at Lisson Gallery, London, and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, in 1977.
1. Carl Andre, quoted in press release for the exhibition Carl Andre: Words & Small Fields, Sadie Coles HQ, London, 200102. Clastic, from the Greek word klastos, meaning broken is a geological term referring to sedimentary rocks made up of individual particles.
CHRISTOPHER KNOWLES
Christopher Knowles is best known for his typings of the 1970s and 80s, text-based pieces that were developed as a private pastime. The exceptional ability in mathematical organisation revealed in these works is a characteristic by-product of autism, with which Knowles was diagnosed as a child. His work also reveals affinities with the structure of serial art and music, and has a strong relationship to performance (the artist has also made live and recorded performances of his texts). Knowles typings employ lists of words and phrases, including those derived from pop charts as well as other words and phrases from the artists life. Additional features include geometrical patterns, carefully built up using the artists initial, C. The works were created on an electric typewriter, using red, black and green inks, and the pieces exhibited here were made in 1980 on scrolls of rice paper. Christopher Knowles was born 1959 in New York, where he still lives. His wider public exposure dates from his meeting, in 1973 at the age of fourteen, with the theatre director Robert Wilson. The latter had heard an audio recording by Knowles, and asked him to collaborate and perform with his company, a partnership that continues today. Knowles first exhibited in 1974, and had two solo exhibitions at Holly Solomon Gallery in 1978 and 1979.
Room Three
The exhibitions exploration of artistic practices from the 1960s and 70s, and the ways in which they were allied with poetry, is concluded in this room. However, unlike those in the Lower Gallery, these bodies of work use images in addition to wordsor are purely illustrational, in the case of David Hockneys etchings. The mid-century avant-garde often denigrated the pictorial or illustrative possibilities of art, but the four artists in this room all showed themselves capable of flying in the face of such opinion.
ROBERT SMITHSON
Robert Smithson had a special interest in language, and at the start of his career he created a group of drawings that explore its pictorial possibilities, including the two works exhibited here, Untitled (Moth) and Untitled (Encyclo), from 1962. These drawings combine nude and mythological figures with rows of apparently random words, numbers and phrases. They correspond to Smithsons recollection of phantasmagorical drawings of cosmological worlds somewhere between Blake and oh, a kind of Boschian imagery.1 Smithsons development of words as compositional elements on the page reflects his interest in William Blake and the idea of the painterpoet, but also offers a parallel with the way in which language is treated in concrete poetry. Smithsons idea of the radical properties of wordsonce freed from the usual systems by which they are contained, and including the idea of words as architectonic material or as ritualistic incantationwould be developed in a text entitled LANGUAGE to be LOOKED at and/or THINGS to be READ, from 1967.2 Robert Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey, in 1938. He had wide-ranging interests that took in science, natural history, anthropology and science fiction, and his complex ideas were manifested in a variety of ways. He is best known as a pioneer of the Earthworks movement, and for his association with Minimalism, but as well as being an environmental artist and sculptor he was also a filmmaker and writer. Smithson died in a plane crash in 1973, at the age of thirty-five.
Christopher Knowles Untitled, 1980
Robert Smithson Untitled (Moth), 1962
1. Interview with Paul Cummings in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam, 1996. 2. Reproduced on p. 5253 of this publication.
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Philippe guston
Alasdair Gray
Alasdair Grays best-known productions as a visual artist are his graphic illustrations for his own books, and he is interested in a tradition of writers who have also illustrated their own work, including William Blake and Rudyard Kipling. In this exhibition, Gray is represented by two groups of prints: one is from a set of illuminated versions of his own poems, made between 1967 and 1971; the other is based on the illustrations for his celebrated novel Lanark, published in 1981. Both groups of prints were created from originals made with scraperboard and ink, and feature the combination of precise line and phantasmagorical subject matter that are characteristic of Grays illustrations (as well as of his murals). They also contain motifs that have recurred within the artists work; as he has observed, on inventing a figure of the sort I call a moral emblem I keep using it again and again.1 The poems that Gray has illustrated are from a cycle entitled In a Cold Room, 195257, written in response to the death of the artists mother. The illustrations for Lanark are in fact a set of frontispieces produced for the different parts of the novel, a postmodern portrait of the author and his native city, which Gray began to write in the 1950s. Alasdair Gray was born in 1932 in Glasgow, where he still lives. He obtained a Diploma in Design and Mural Painting from Glasgow School of Art in 1957, and since that time has been producing mural commissions as well as portraits and illustrations. Gray established a parallel career as a writer, producing plays for radio and television in the 1960s and 70s, and has published many novels and other books since the international success of Lanark.
David Hockney
The Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (18631933) is famous for his gay love poetry, written in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Alexandria in Egypt in the 1920s. David Hockney discovered Cavafys poetry while still a student, and it inspired several works that he made in 1961. In 1966 he was commissioned to make a series of etchings relating to the poet, and in 1967 he published a portfolio entitled Illustrations for Thirteen Poems from C. P. Cavafy, works from which are exhibited here. As preparation for the commission, Hockney travelled to the Middle East, although he went not to Egypt but to the Lebanon, which was then the more cosmopolitan locale. Hockney returned with a set of pen-and-ink drawings of street life in Beirut, and several of these were used as the basis for etchings. However, the majority of the final prints concentrate not on street scenes but on interiors, and were based primarily on drawings of pairs of boys made in the artists bedroom in Notting Hill. These works are not literal illustrations of Cavafys poems, but evocations of the fleeting sexual encounters that are among their subjects. David Hockney was born in 1937 in Bradford, and educated at Bradford College of Art and the Royal College of Art, London, graduating in 1962. Hockney is one of the leading figures associated with British Pop art, and has worked as a painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer. In the mid-1960s he made Los Angeles his main residence, but he is now based primarily based in Yorkshire.
Philip Guston, I am the First, c.1972
From the late 1940s through to the mid-1960s, Philip Guston was a leading figure within Abstract Expressionism. However, between 1967 and 1968 he abandoned abstraction in favour of a new style of painting, which featured everyday objects realised in a cartoon-like fashion. The critical reception to his first showing of these works was highly negative. As a result, Guston left New York City, retreating to upstate New York, where writers and poets became his primary influence. The Poem-Pictures constituted a series of drawings first initiated by Guston in 1970 in collaboration with poets including Bill Berkson, Clark Coolidge, Robert Creeley and William Corbett. Guston was interested in the interplay of words and images. In a letter to Bill Berkson in 1975, he wrote, It is a strange form for me excites me in that it does make a new thing a new imagewords and images feeding off each
other in unpredictable ways. Naturally, there is no illustration of text, yet I am fascinated by how text and image bounce into and off each other.1 At the ICA, Guston is represented by a group of PoemPictures made in collaboration with Clark Coolidge. Philip Guston was born in 1913, in Montreal, but moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1919. As a painter in New York, he rose to prominence alongside Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions around the world. Guston died in Woodstock in 1980.
1. Philip Guston, quoted in Philip Gustons Poem-Pictures, Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts, 1994, p. 14.
1. From On Making Pictures, Frieze, issue 119, November 2008, p. 148.
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Room Four
The exhibition concludes with the work of six younger artists. Several are represented by text-based pieces, others use combinations of text and image, and in some instances their gallery-based works are allied to a wider poetic or performative practice. In recent years, the art world has been dominated by neo-Conceptual work, and where text has been used it has often been within the limits established by Conceptualism. However, artists are now turning towards poetry and expressive language in a way that has not been seen for many years. Like some of their forebears from the 1960s and 70s, these younger artists explore the potential of poetry to move beyond the constraints of linguistic and graphic systems, reflecting the true complexity of communication and creating meaning that cannot be pinned down.
anna barham
Much of Anna Barhams work centres on poetic texts, created using a self-prescribed set of rules, and in particular, the rules of the anagram. Inspired by the story of the archaeological discovery of Leptis Magna, an ancient Roman city east of Tripoli, in 2007 Barham created a series of drawings charting anagrams of the citys name. In 1816, some fragments of the ruins of Leptis Magna were given to King George IV, and used to build an artificial ruin at Windsor Great Park. Just as the excavated stones formed the foundations of an imaginary ruin, so in Barhams work the letters in the citys name become the building blocks of new poetry and prose. In recent works, Barham has added R, E, E and D to her existing pool of letters, thereby generating further anagrams. At the ICA, the artist is exhibiting the video Magenta, Emerald, Lapis, 2009, in which she uses a tangram (a square cut into seven pieces that can be re-formed in various ways) to create letterforms, eventually building up words into a text. The tangram pieces are shuffled and reshuffled at the moment they become recognisable as letters, illustrating how symbols are transformed by the reordering of their parts. Barhams interest in anagrams stems from the idea of revealing an unconscious meaning of a word, and exploring its associative potential. Anna Barham was born in the UK in 1974. She graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 2001. She works in a variety of media, including sculpture, performance, video and drawing. Barham has exhibited internationally and within the UK, and is currently showing in the exhibition Stutter, in Tate Moderns Level 2 Gallery until 16 August 2009.
Janice Kerbel
Janice Kerbel works with a range of materials, including drawing, text, audio and print, to explore the indefinite space between reality and fiction, and between abstraction and representation. Her work frequently involves extensive research, and takes the forms of plans, proposals, scripts or announcements for imaginative scenarios that cannot or will not actually happen. In conveying these imagined events, Kerbel draws upon the potentiality of language and text. In this exhibition, Kerbel is showing two works from the Remarkable series. Originally commissioned for Frieze Projects (for the 2007 Frieze Art Fair), the posters use precisely fanciful language to describe the appearance of a number of elusive and otherworldly characters. Borrowing from the hyperbolic language of fairground announcements, figures introduced in the series include: The Human Firefly, Faintgirl, One-Eyed Soothsayer and Worlds Shyest Person, The Regurgitating Lady and Temperamental Barometric Contortionist. The largeformat silk-screen posters were created digitally using typefaces inspired by the nineteenth-century letterpress. Each letter was set manually into the page in a laborious process that creates subtle variations in the uniformity of each work. Janice Kerbel was born in Toronto in 1969, and studied at Emily Carr College of Art and Design, Vancouver and Goldsmiths College, London. She now lives and works in London. The artist has had a number of solo exhibitions at institutions across the UK, including Norwich Gallery of Art, 2003, and Arnolfini, Bristol, 2000. Kerbel will be showing at greengrassi, London, in the autumn.
Sue Tompkins
While Sue Tompkins work owes much to various literary and art-historical movements, such as Concrete Poetry, the Beat poets and typewriter art, she frequently emerges as the rebellious offspring rather than as a clear descendent of these genres. Her performances usually involve three items: a stool, a microphone and a ring-binder full of hundreds of sheets of paper. She reads from these at a hyperactive pace, developing her rhythm. In a previous incarnation, she was a singer in the now defunct post-punk band, Life Without Buildings. Tompkinss typewritten works are not residues of her performances, but a parallel practice, often using broadsheets that have been folded to fit into a typewriter, and that still bear the creases of this process. She presents segments of language, often de-contextualised snatches of everyday conversations. Words are given emphasis through repetition, juxtaposition, misspellings and uneven spacing. Sue Tompkins was born in Glasgow in 1971, graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 1994, and is still based in the city. She has had solo exhibitions in numerous venues, including the Showroom, London, in 2007. Tompkins has also performed at institutions and events around the world, notably the Scottish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2005, and Tate Britain in 2006.
Sue Tompkins The artist performing at the Showroom, London, 2007
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Karl Holmqvist
matthew brannon
Matthew Brannon explores the potential of words to communicate, illustrate, misrepresent and confound. His work sometimes recalls the aesthetic language of advertising and posters, particularly from 1950s America. With hindsight, the 1950s has emerged as a decade in which the US presented a thin veneer of strength and unity that barely concealed a bored and disillusioned population, a situation that would result in profound social changes in the following decade. In many ways, this duplicity resonates in Brannons work, which is frequently comprised of images that would not look out of place in a cookbook, juxtaposed with unsettling or inappropriate snippets of text. Brannons work suggests a complex relationship between image and text. Sometimes, the text is printed so small that it can be difficult to read. At other times, it is nonsensical, or at least a non sequitur, and on further occasions it presents a literal, deadpan explanation of the image. Brannon has explored text in a number of forms, from micro-stories to concrete poetry. In the creation of his work, he uses letterpress, an outdated printing technique. In the exhibition, Brannon shows a number of works featuring text spewing from a typewriter, an important device in the artistic positioning of words in society and another reference to a bygone era. Matthew Brannon was born in St Maries, Idaho, in 1971. He received an MFA from Columbia University, and lives and works in New York. His solo exhibitions include a recent show at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, New York, 2007, and he will have a solo exhibition at The Approach, London, in the autumn.
Frances Stark
Frances Stark is exhibiting four works that adapt the writings of other authors. Having an Experience, 1995, traces a readers underlinings in a copy of Art as Experience, 1934, a book on aesthetics by the American philosopher John Dewey. The other three works employ quotations from novels: Robert Musils The Man Without Qualities, 193042 (The quantity of the effect and the effect of quantity, 1997); Witold Gombrowiczs Ferdydurke, 1937 (I must explain, specify, rationalize, classify, etc., 2008); and Samuel Becketts Watt, 1945 (Untitled (Drop Out), 2003). Stark often draws on book culture within her work, and she seems especially interested in the self-reflexivity that is a feature of modernist writing. Such self-reflexivity is echoed in the visual strategies that her work employs, which include repetition, fragmentation and collage (and her graphic treatment of text can create parallels with concrete poetry). However, Starks quotations from literary culture are more playful than didactic. They are also part of a wider interrogation of the creative act, and of authorial uncertainty, that has a pronounced autobiographical aspect for the artist, who often, as in I must explain, specify, rationalize, classify, etc., appears in her own work. Frances Stark was born in 1967 in Newport Beach, California, and lives and works in Los Angeles. She studied at Art Centre, Pasadena, and at San Francisco State University, graduating in 1991. Recent exhibitions include A Torment of Follies, at Secession, Vienna, and Greengrassi, London, in 2008; and in autumn 2009 the artist will have an exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary.
Karl Holmqvist, ONELOVEWORLD, 2004
Karl Holmqvist The artist reading at westlondonprojects, 2009
Karl Holmqvist is an artist and poet whose output has included performance, recorded sound, printed matter, video, collage and installation. His work is characterised by its social and political activism, albeit manifested in a highly personal and eccentric form. Filtered through a collage of cultural references, it takes in a lineage of figures associated with or appropriated by alternative culture, from Jesus and William Blake to William Burroughs and Patti Smith. Holmqvists readings are distinguished by their hypnotic, anti-spectacular quality, and his visual work is often deliberately functional, employing the tools and aesthetics of selfpublishing, and extending the notion of reading and performance into the gallery space. The artists installation at the ICA includes a copy of his photocopied book, ONELOVEWORLD, published in 2008, as well as a wall of posters that have been enlarged from it. ONELOVEWORLD demonstrates
Holmqvists particular interest in repetition and patterning, and features concrete and other poems, interspersed with appropriated images that include Op Art paintings and photographs of underground pin-up Arthur Rimbaud. Karl Holmqvist was born in Vasteras, Sweden, in 1964, studied literature and linguistics at Stockholm University, graduating in 1987, and now lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include The Living Art Museum, Reykjavik, 2008, and Argos Arts, Brussels, 2009. Recent group exhibitions include Manifesta 7, Trento, 2008, and For Fans and Scholars Alike, westlondonprojects, 2009.
Texts by Charlotte Bonham-Carter and Mark Sladen
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Poor. old. Tired. Horse / exhibition related events
Events
Dan Graham in conversation with Anna Lovatt TUESDAY 7 JULY 7 PM Nash Room / free / booking For more information please visit required www.ica.org.uk/poth The celebrated artist Dan Graham will be in conversation with Anna Lovatt, Lecturer in Art History, Stephen Bann University of Nottingham. The Tuesday 23 june 7 pm event will take in the linguistic Nash Room / free / booking turn in 1960s art, with special refrequired erence to the drawings of Robert Art critic, curator and art historian Smithson. The evening is co-hostStephen Bann is recognised as the ed by the ICA and Middlesbrough pre-eminent commentator on Ian Institute of Modern Art, on the occasion of mimas purchase of Hamilton Finlays work. Bann delivers a lecture on Finlays vast two Smithson drawings, exhibited in Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. and varied artistic output. Some exhibition-related events require booking. Please call the ICA Box Office on 020 7930 3647 Mark Sladen THURSDAY 25 JUNE 7 PM Meet in the Lower Gallery / free Director of Exhibitions at the ICA, Mark Sladen delivers a talk on the exhibition. Liliane Lijn: The Power Game TUESDAY 28 JULY 7 PM ICA / free Set in an imaginary casino, The Power Game is principally concerned with the power of words. It is both a game and a live performance, which investigates the politics of identity and power. The Power Game is the brainchild of Liliane Lijn, one of the exhibitors in Poor. Old. Tired. Horse., and was originally staged by her at The Royal College of Art in 1974.
This event is unconfirmed at the time of going to print. Please check the ICA website or call the Box Office for more information.
Xprmntl ptry Charlotte THURSDAY 30 JULY 7 PM Bonham-Carter ICA Theatre / 4 THURSDAY 9 JULY 7 PM ( 3 concessions, free to Meet in the Lower Gallery / free ICA members) Assistant Curator at the ICA, The Concrete Poetry movement Charlotte Bonham-Carter delivers helped to open up the field of a talk on the exhibition. poetry, and visual poetry is now practised by many poets at some What was / stage of their career. But is there is concrete poetry? ANNA BARHAM AT still a dedicated group of experiWEDNESDAY 1 JULY 7 PM THE PORT ELIOT menters in visual poetry, and how LITERARY FESTIVAL Nash Room / free / booking the shape on the page transFRIDAY 24SUNDAY 26 JULY does required late into live performance and A panel discussion looking at the Anna Barham, one of the exhibi- sound? Poet Chris McCabe organises an evening of avant-garde original Concrete Poetry movetors in Poor. Old. Tired. Horse., ment of the 50s and 60s, and exwill be staging a new performance and experimental poets, including at The Port Eliot Literary Festival Peter Finch and Jeremy Reed as amining its legacy. With Arnaud part of The Ginger Light. (held in St Germans, Cornwall). Desjardin, artist and publisher of The performance will incorpothe The Everyday Press; Chris rate sculptural elements, and will McCabe, poet and joint librarMichelle Cotton translate Barhams manipulation ian at the Poetry Library; and THURSDAY 6 AUGUST 7 PM other participants to be announced of shapes and letters into a live Meet in the Lower Gallery / free arena, presenting language as a (please check the website for details). Chaired by Mark Sladen, form of choreography. For details Curator of Cubitt, London and visit www.porteliotfestival.com Director of Exhibitions, ICA. freelance art critic, Michelle Cotton delivers a talk on the exhibition.
Alasdair Gray We Will Go into the Streets of Water, 1965
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Poor. old. Tired. Horse / publications
PUBLICATIONS
Northern Grammar Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA), Glasgow, 2003 10.00 ICA Members receive 10% off all Northern Grammar brings together books, ICA branded gifts and ICA many of the best known artists in films and DVDs. Scotland whose work incorporates the written word as a key element www.ica.org.uk/bookshop of their artistic practice. The following is a selection of the exhibition-related publications that are available in the ICA Bookshop. Hamilton Finlay (19252006), best known for the garden of Little Sparta he created for himself in the Lowlands of Scotland.
Janice Kerbel REMARKABLE: Faintgirl, 2007
To Say the Very Least By Matthew Brannon Art Gallery of York University, 2008 50.00 Liliane Lijn Words to Be Looked At Published in conjunction with the Works: 19591980 Language in 1960s Art exhibition Matthew Brannon: Try & Be Grateful, To Say the Very By David Mellor By Liz Kotz Least is the first comprehensive Mead Gallery, University of MIT Press, 2006 publication on the print works and Warwick, 2005 19.99 installations of Matthew Brannon. 20.00 This is a critical study of the use This book accompanied the first of language and the proliferation A Torment of FolLies major retrospective exhibition of of text in 1960s art and experiLiliane Lijns work and concenmental music, with close examina- Edited by Annette Sdbeck trates on the development of her Secession, Vienna, 2008 of works by Vito Acconci, work from the 1960s and 70s. The tions Carl Andre, John Cage, Douglas 16.00 illustrations feature not only Lijns Huebler, Andy Warhol, Lawrence early surrealist drawings, kinetic Secession is published on the ocWeiner, La Monte Young, and sculptures and light works but casion of A Torment of Follies, others. contemporary photographs that an exhibition of twenty-two new Lanark document and illuminate this era. large-format paper works by FranA Life in Four Books ces Stark. The catalogue includes an essay by Martin Prinzhorn. By Alasdair Gray About Carl Andre Canongate Books, 1981 Critical texts since 1965 Whats My Name? Edited by Paula Feldman, Alistair 9.99 Rider, Karsten Schubert By Karl Holmqvist Lanark, a modern vision of hell, Ridinghouse, 2005 is set in the disintegrating cities of Book Works, London, 2009 Unthank and Glasgow, and tells 25.00 12.00 the interwoven stories of Lanark Spanning four decades, this book and Duncan Thaw. Artist and poet Karl Holmqvist charts the gradual evolution of is interested in language, both as consensus about the meaning performance and as text. Whats Nature Over Again of Carl Andre s art, including My Name? is a new publication of The Garden Art of texts written by some of the most the artists writings. Ian Hamilton Finlay influential art historians and critics: Clement Greenberg, Donald By John Dixon Hunt Kuspit, Lucy R. Lippard, Robert Reaktion Books, 2008 C. Morgan, Barbara Rose and 29.95 Roberta Smith. Nature Over Again is the first book to examine all the garden designs and interventions of Ian
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Poor. old. Tired. Horse / editions & future projects
editions
To accompany Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. Frances Stark has generously created a special limited edition print which will be available to purchase from Wednesday 17 June. We offer ICA Members and Patrons priority purchase and a 10% discount on this edition and 20% discount on all previous ICA limited editions. For more information contact Vicky Steer,Editions Manager, on 020 7766 1425 or email [email protected] The ICA regularly publishes limited edition prints by internationally acclaimed artists involved in its exhibition programmerecent contributors include Fia Backstrm, Mark Leckey and Enrico David. To view all ICA editions visit www.ica.org. uk/editions. Proceeds from the sale of these editions provide vital support for the ICA, directly contributing towards the ICAs future exhibition programme.
future projects
piece, which includes excerpts from a film by German director Alexander Kluge, along with footage of Nashashibis own restaging of Kluge s scenes 10 September8 November 2009 using the artist Thomas Bayrle and his wife Helga. The second part of the exhibition will include London-based artist Rosalind Nashashibi has established a strong international reputation for her 16mm The Prisoner (2008), which is based on a work by film works, which are presented as gallery-based Chantal Akerman, and extends Nashashibis explorainstallations. Nashashibis work is influenced by cin- tion of vision and control. In this piece Nashashibis ematic history, including the legacy of ethnographic camera follows a woman through an anonymous film, and pursues an interest in myth, voyeurism interior and out onto the streets of London. It will and portraiture, using intuitive and experimental also include a new 16mm film commission that will filmic structures. This autumn the ICA is staging the be ambitious in scope. The latter is set on Hampfirst major survey exhibition of Nashashibis work, stead Heath in North London, and features scenes of including an ambitious new commission and a group men roaming in the park, as well as a sequence of a of films from the last four years. film crew shooting in the woods at night. The work The first part of the exhibition will set out a enacts the theatrical space of desire, as well as the number of recurring motifs within the artists work, dream space of cinema. and what she describes as a family tree of sym Nashashibis exhibition will be accompanied bols and signs. One featured work will be Eyeballby the first retrospective publication on the artists ing (2005), which was shot in New York, and which work, which will include texts by Dieter Roelstraete and Martin Herbert. The exhibition is a collaboration literally finds faces within the architecture and landscape of the city. Another featured work will be with Bergen Kunsthall in Norway, where it will be Bachelor Machines Part 2 (2007), a double projection shown later in the year.
Rosalind Nashashibi
Fia Backstrm Studies in LeadershipThe Golden Voice, 2009 Seven-colour silkscreen print on 300gsm paper, 81 x 61 cm Edition of 50, signed and numbered 250 including VAT (200 for ICA members and patrons)
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The second half of the magazine includes a collage of texts and illustrations, including new essays by Michelle Cotton and Charlotte Bonham-Carter, and previously unpublished artistic contributions by Giles Round, Frances Stark, Karl Holmqvist, Tris Vonna-Michell and Anna Barham. The publication also includes poems by Lewis Carroll, Augusto de Campos, Eugen Gomringer and George Herbert and texts and statements by Liliane Lijn, Joseph Kosuth, Robert Smithson and Carl Andre, as well as a section from the first chapter of Alasdair Grays forthcoming autobiography, A Life in Pictures.
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Poor. old. Tired. Horse. / Bonham-Carter
Visual-Linguistic Forms in the Work of Ian Hamilton Finlay

Charlotte Bonham-Carter
Medieval frescoes on ceiling of Church of St George, Topola, Serbia
In his seminal work of 1593, Iconalogica, Cesare Risa declared: an image is a definition.1 And certainly, the post-Renaissance trend towards representational painting suggested as much. The relationship between language and image is dense, and it comes as no surprise that the impulse to combine ones literary and visual experiences is a clear trajectory in the history of culture. From the origins of language as pictographic forms such as hieroglyphics, to the use of imagery in language, it is evident that the visual and the linguistic are interrelated. Take, for example, the word Revolution in a political sense: the word derives from medieval pictures of the Rota Fortunae (the wheel of fortune), which spun unpopular monarchs out of power and lowly people into good fortune.2 This image, amongst millions of others, has infiltrated language. One of the most influential examples of visual-literary conjunctions is the emblem book, a popular form across most European lands by the sixteenth century. These books containing pictures and mottoes were used to embody an abstraction, a concept, a nation or occasionally, a person (though usually one of great social or regal standing). The emblem almost always had a subtle religious message, either Protestant or Catholic. In the eighteenth century, emblems began to be taken less seriouslya movement instigated
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1. Ian Hamilton Finlay and Ron Costley with commentaries by Stephen Bann, Heroic Emblems, Z Press, 1978, p. 9. 2. Alasdair Gray, Text as Illustration, The Guardian, Saturday 7 November 2007.
by John Bunyans moralistic book of poems for children, Divine Emblems; or Temporal Things Spiritualized, 1724, which popularized the form amongst childrens literature.3 In 1978, Ian Hamilton Finlay published a booklet called Heroic Emblems.4 It contained a series of emblematic forms that borrowed from the Classical, the Renaissance and the Modern era. According to Finlay scholar Yves Abrioux, for Finlay, the form of the emblem generates a free-floating metaphor, formed from the conjunction of motto and image, setting it apart from more conventional methods of established meaning.5 Finlays employment of the emblem was recurrent throughout his lifes work; it surfaces in many of his early prints from the 1960s and 70s, and continues later on, as he began to explore neoclassical forms through sculpture and works in the landscape. Although, in Finlays work, one thing can often be seen in terms of another, his use of analogy and metaphor is so complex and richly circuitous that one thing never definitively stands for another. Instead, he creates a new syntax, established by a network of visual and literal correspondences. The tradition of the emblem is continued in a more illustrative sense by the few writers/artists that have managed to carve out a unified position in what can often be two mutually exclusive roles. Works in this category include, among others, Ben Jonsons writings, Robert Burtons Anatomy of Melancholy, much of William Blakes work and the illustrated poems and texts of the septuagenarian Glaswegian, Alasdair Gray. Grays most famous illustrated novel is Lanark, published in 1982. Each book of the novel is richly introduced by an emblematic frontispiece. Gray juxtaposes realistic and antiquated phantasmagorical
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3. Ian Hamilton Finlay and Ron Costley, p. 10. 4. Portions of the booklet are reproduced in this publication, on p. 4450 5. Stephen Bann, Neoclassical, in Yves Abrioux, Ian Hamilton Finlay, A visual primer, Reaktion Books, London, 1992, p. 105.
Poor. old. Tired. Horse. / Bonham-Carter
or allegorical illustrations with excerpts of contemporary discourse to create an intricate web of meanings, associations and references. It is the possibility of establishing new systems of interpretation that has propelled the consideration of form in writing. And for Finlay, as the progenitor of the Concrete Poetry movement in the UK, it was using words as objects, at first on the page and then in real space, that spurred his continual development as an artist. In the catalogue for an exhibition at Tate St Ives in 2002, Finlay remarked, There is always a distance between a name and what it names.6 In giving words a power beyond that of mere signifiers of a remote signified, Finlay imbued language with a level of autonomy and authenticity that was not otherwise possible. In the same vein, he often worked with abbreviations, words that had a found poetry7 to them and that offered no actual means of deciphering meaning. Words were deliberately distanced from their referents in order to stand alone as objects on the page or in the landscape. One of Finlays most important found poetry works is a series of four poems from 1966, Sea Poppy (see page 38) and Sea I, II and III. The works are comprised of fishing boats names (the abbreviation of the port they come from, followed by a number) arranged in concentric circles. Thus the works in the Sea Poppy series adopt the shape and style of another historically significant visual-linguistic form, the mandala. The mandala is a geometric design enclosed within a circle and imbued with mystical significance in Buddhism and Hinduism. It is often used as a spiritual training device, to focus attention or to embody an imaginary place that is contemplated during meditation. It is comprised of different layers of symbolism, from the outer edge to the
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6. Tom Lubbock, Ian Hamilton Finlay Maritime Works, exh. cat., Tate St. Ives, 2002. 7. A practice common to other artists in the exhibition Poor. Old. Tired. Horse., such as Vito Acconci, Carl Andre and Sue Tompkins.
inner core. As a whole, the mandala is often understood to be a representation of the cosmos, or the universe. Possibly connected to a resurgent interest in Buddhism during the 1950s Beat generation and the 1960s Hippie era that followed it, a number of Concrete poets experimented with the form of the mandala, including, amongst others, the German artist, Ferdinand Kriwet. In works such as his Rundscheiben series of 196063, Text Signs 1968, and Text Sails and Text Dias, both 1970, Kriwet gave the spiritual symbol a contemporary Pop twist. Liliane Lijns poem machines bear a strong resemblance to another spiritual device, the Tibetan prayer wheel. A spinning drum inscribed with prayers or mantras, the prayer wheel is used to visualise the dissemination of the mantra, and as a means of purification. It is interesting to note affinities between Concrete Poetry, which sought to circumvent conventional systems of interpretation, and spiritual practices that share a similar aim. In Finlays web of metaphors, analogies and associationsrealised through poems, prints, sculptures and work in the landscapehe established a methodology of interpretation that is endlessly coded and infinite. Understanding and the means to an understanding are one and the same. This kind of interpretational conundrum is played out in Plutarchs dialogue On the E at Delphi. The essay, which is constructed as a dialogue revealing a number of opinions on the meaning of the large, enigmatic E inscribed on a stone fragment near the shrine of Apollo, was an important influence on Finlay.8 Fascinated by the relationships between things, he discovered that the Enterprise, a World War II battleship and a recurring motif in Finlays work, was nicknamed the big E.9
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8. Stephen Bann, Ian Hamilton Finlay, exhibition catalogue, Serpentine Gallery, Arts Council, London, 1977, p. 27. 9. Ibid.
Prayer wheels
Poor. old. Tired. Horse. / Bonham-Carter & herbert
800 year old frescoes depicting mandalas at Dungkar Caves, Tibet
In Plutarchs dialogue, there are several explanations offered for the significance of the E, ranging from its position as the fifth letter in the alphabet (the number five was important for its association with the five sages) to its meaning, in one sense, as the Greek word for if , and in another, for thou art. The latter would offer the most intriguing hypothesis for the purposes of understanding Finlays work, and the Concrete Poetry movement in general.10 Read this way, the letter exists as pure being, and it is both the provocation of, and resistance to, interpretation that reifies its existence.
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10. Ibid.
George Herbert, Easter wings, 1633
Poor. old. Tired. Horse. / Stark & Gray
rhymes
frances stark
Picture-making: Infancy to Art School, 19371954

Alasdair Gray
The world becomes a private world and shines like a rainbow* Some light can hit some rain at an angle of X degrees I was thinking Is this relevant? indulge me if you please accept my puerile format and relentless appetite for undivided attention and text thats fueled by spite But that is immaterial, the texts for texts sake too the thing that its in spite of doesnt mattereven if its true So what Im getting at is simply (or complexly actually) that the rainbow which is beautiful is simultaneous proof that light is but a falsehood assisting all bad lookers to ascertain that looks can indicate, obliquely, that beholding is a sham: appearing lit reveals the surface that I am A rainbow can astound with its ethereal appeal or fill a head with science facts because it is so real Believe me Im not trying to tell you how I feel nor am I describing what I intended you to think I wondered if you wondered that I wonder as I dare to loiter in publicity, sucking in thin air
I was born at the end of 1934 in Riddrie which with Knightswood was one of the earliest, best designed and poshest of Glasgow housing schemes. Houses in Riddrie were allocated to teachers, shopkeepers, clerks, nurses, postmen and men like my dad who had factory jobs during the depression years when nearly a quarter of Glasgow was unemployed. Like many British folk I assumed for years that I was Upper Middle Class. Apart from politicians mentioned in BBC news broadcasts I knew of nobody socially superior to my dad, whose hobbies included unpaid work for the Scottish Youth Hostel Association, a local branch of the Camping Club of Great Britain and the Holiday Fellowship. Through one of these organisations he knew Glasgows deputy town clerk who lived in a semi-detached corporation house, just like my grandfathers nearby, but a bit higher up the Cumbernauld Road. Like most of our neighbours I was a snob, one of a superior class to the proles of Blackhill, widely known as a slum clearance scheme divided from Riddrie by the Monkland Canal: now the Monkland motorway. At least two years before attending Riddrie Primary School my parents gave me coloured pencils and paper and liked me to use them. I enjoyed using them and was so lucky with my primary and secondary school teachers that they liked instead of discouraging my
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picture-making. My first art exemplars had been book illustrations, mainly illustrations by authors who had written the booksRudyard Kiplings in the Just So Stories, Hugh Loftings in the Doctor Dolittle books, Tolkiens in The Hobbit. The worlds in these pictures had fantastic historical and geographical scope that chimed perfectly with Walt Disney and Wizard of Oz films, and Peter Pan and Christmas pantomimes on stage. Chiefly in library books I had discovered the poetry and paintings of William BlakeBoschs Hell, sinister Garden of Eden and exuberant Garden of Earthly DelightsBreughels encyclopaedias of medieval, biblical humanity, including his Tower of Babel and Triumph of Deaththe exactlybalanced white and black and patterned areas of Beardsleys erotic worldsyes, four of my favourite artists had names starting with B. Norwegian Munch was the first great modern artist whose paintings I saw on their original canvases. He died in 1944 when I was nine, and about ten years later a great exhibition of his life s work filled at least three upstairs galleries of Kelvingrove Museum. I was then at Whitehill Secondary School and seeing all the great Munchs at exactly the right time. Like many adolescents, maybe most, I was finding life a terrible business. Though not unusually lonely, and with no doubt of my ability to paint anything interesting I imagined, I feared I could give no girl enough sexual pleasure for her to give me any back: an attitude only overcome (a little) in my late twenties, when I met a woman who decided to marry me. My teenage longing for sensual and romantic love was not relieved by masturbation which induced guilt. Frustration and guilt also alternated
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Public though the world is becoming what it is not is its best feature, amplified a private after-thought (1999, * Robert Musil ) Impossible the grassy maxims dream To grow as green as others seem Oh, to be as sound as a song Not simply flat and half as long So dark dark green the envy at which this hints In other places lights pitched happy tents* (1998, * Novalis)
Coveting is a copious thing Rip a body from the wing A wing from the body is more usual stuff Either way the pluck is rough And so a butterflys now butter Stupidly it tries to flutter (1996)
Some rebelliousness is bubbling up to posit In short gurgling gasps: This art arrangement is wrong, It would be better to give a song But rebel bubble I cant sing Then put a song in your thing (1998)
Roland / issue 2 / juneAugust 2009 Some poems as you know Read painful and slow But they flirt with whats wickedly fast The brain cells that wiggle Connect when a giggle Equates what is felt with a fact (1997)
Poor. old. Tired. Horse. / Stark, gray, Kotz & kosuth
a tree in snow will probably go repeatedly unnoticed instead I see just me me me and nothings there between us (1996)
with eczema of the face and joints and bouts of asthma. I also worried about passing the Latin and Maths exams that would get me into Glasgow University. I hated these subjectsthought it harmful for anyone to live well by studying what they did not enjoybut my mum, dad and teachers were sure that a working class Scot (yes, I had at last accepted I belonged to the working class) could only win the freedom to write and paint by first earning a secure income by doing something else. Bodily health made manual labour and factory work impossible for me. A university degree would allow a library or civil service job. That prospect struck me as equally loathsome. MEANWHILE, despite Britain having been on the winning side of a war that would have made all Europe a hell had Hitler won, wars were still being fought and nuclear wars industriously prepared by all the biggest, civilised nations whose governments, while building huge nuclear bunkers for themselves, were telling their populations that this was nothing to worry about. The world was obviously in as bad a state as I was. Both of us seemed heading for an even worse future.
Poetry from Object to Action

liz kotz
Grahams self-identification as a poet suggests the extent to which poetry appeared, in the 1960s art world, as a potential field for investigating language as such and, in particular for exploring the behaviour of words on the page. In this context, language is increasingly understood not just as a material but as a kind of site. The page is a visual, physical containeran 8 x 11 inch white rectangle analogous to the white cube of the gallery and also a place for action and a publication context. This site is implicitly relational and dynamic: words on a page operate in relation to other texts and statements, since language as a system is perpetually in circulation. Viewed in this way, conventional poetic forms, and especially individual lyric utterances, are but a small part of a much wider field. Understood in its most general sense, as language art, poetry is a form that explores the aesthetics, structures, and operations of language as much as any specific content. In the postwar era, various types of concrete and visual poetry, in particular, promised to probe the space of the typographic page and link contemporary literature with the visual arts. Yet a reliance on rather quaint illustrational or pictorial modesas in poems that take on the shape of their subjectsleft much concrete poetry out of touch with changing paradigms in the visual arts and the wider conditions of language in modernity. In their turn to compositional procedures
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I see you see little connection of your art to poetry?
Absolutely no relation at all. Its simply one of things superficially resembling one another. A poet wants to say the unsayable. Thats the reason the concrete poets have been doing street work projects, because of the fact that they dont feel in many ways that language is adequate to make the kinds of statements they want to make. And so theyve been doing a lot of performance pieces as well. But the typical concrete poem makes the worst sort of superficial connections to work like mine because its a kind of formalism of typographyits cute with words, but dumb about language. Its becoming a simplistic and pseudo-avant-garde gimmick, like a new kind of paint. (5152)
Joseph Kosuth, interview with Jeanne Siegel, 1970, reprinted in Art After Philosophy and After, Ed. Gabriele Guercio, MIT Press, MA, 1991.
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Excerpt from Alasdair Gray, Picturemaking: Infancy to Art School, 19371954, A Life in Pictures, forthcoming by Cannongate, 2010.
Poor. old. Tired. Horse. / Andre, Kotz & AcconcI
I have never been able to do
absolute nonsense poetry, and people may think that this poetry of mine is absolute nonsense, but I have never been able to use non-words or invented words or ersatz words. Other people have done that and tend to make music out of language, but for me, my poetic interest in language is exactly the palpability, the tactile sense of the words themselves. I have been accused of trying to treat words as things, though I know very well that words are not things. But words do have palpable, tactile qualities that we feel when we speak them, when we write them, or when we hear them, or read them, and that is the real subject of my poetry. To talk about the link between my sculpture and my poetry, all I can say is that the same person does both of them. Indeed all I know is that when there are words printed on the bricks I use, I always turn the words to the floor so that they cannot be read. I repeat that all I can say is the same person does both, and certainly my interest in elements or particles in sculpture is paralleled by my interest in words as particles of language. I use words in units which are different from sentences, grammatical sentences, but of course words always have grammatical connection when they are placed together, if they are not nonsense words. I have attempted to write poetry in which the sentence is not the dominant form but the word is the dominant form.
Transcription of the Audio Arts tape made to accompany Carl Andre s exhibition at Lisson and MOMA Oxford in 1975.
that sampled existing texts and fractured syntax, John Ashberry and Jackson Mac Low generated works whose extreme fragmentation of language seemed to divorce the utterance from the expression of any single speaker. Their collage-based treatment of words as found objects opened the door to much wider investigations of nonliterary uses of language, yet ultimately, their works tended to recontain these experiments back into something all-too-recognisable as poetic form. If Ashberys work rejoined a high-modernist lyric revitalised with the resources of nonliterary language, and Mac Lows poems ultimately reconventionalised Cagean procedures within traditional models of oral performance, what other possibilities might one envision for work with language emerging out of poetry? Alongside Graham, whose involvement with poetry was relatively short-lived, the crucial figures here are Carl Andre and Vito Acconci, two artists far better known for their work in other forms: sculpture for Andre; performance, video, and later architecture for Acconci. For both Andre and Acconci, their work with language is foundational for their larger projects: Acconci, as is well-known, began as a poet before he took up work in performance, and Andre produced much of his early poetry during the crucial period, 19601965, when he developed the core sculptural strategies that produced landmark works of Minimal art.
Vito Acconci From Four Book, 1968
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Excerpt from Liz Kotz, Words to Be Looked At, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 2007, p. 138-39.
Poor. old. Tired. Horse. / Finlay
Poor. old. Tired. Horse. / Kriwet & Lijn
poem machines = vision of sound

liliane lijn
SEE SOUND AS MOVING LINES OF LIGHT The words we utter travel in sound waves vibrating through the air into our inner ear. When we see the written word we forget these letters are symbols of vibrations. WORDS = VIBRATIONS = ENERGY When I put words on cylinders and cones and make Poem Machines, I want the word to be seen in movement splitting itself into a pure vibration until it becomes the energy of sound. First Poem Machine19623 ActionWordsPowerWords The Word Becomes Energy 196465 Poem Machine takes on shape, becomes Poemkon. Conic shape bends itself to the dematerialisation of the word. At the narrowest point of the cone the words may still be readable whereas at the base they become a vibration pattern. The word accelerated loses its identity and becomes a pattern pregnant with energy. It is pregnant with the energy of its potential meaning should it once again become a word. Invisible Poemkon : the cone becomes transparent. Words float on its almost invisible skin and spin into space. I make Poem Machines to transform words into energy patterns. In the Poem Machines the words we use are sublimated and become pure energy. DISSOLVE THE IMAGES CREATED BY WORDS SEE SOUND
Ferdinand Kriwet, Text Sign, 1968
Previous page: Ian Hamilton Finlay, Sea Poppy 1, 1968
From Liliane Lijn Poem Machines, 19621968, National Art Library, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 1993 (n.p.).
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Poor. old. Tired. Horse. / Round
Giles Round creates text out of his own uniquely designed fonts. Here, inset within the text, are two images which depict structures in the everyday environment that
resemble letters in the Latin alphabet; they are also examples of found concrete poetry and haphazard encounters with text and language in the world around us.
Giles Round, Font Especial Mirrored Tessellation, 2009 and inset Letters are things not pictures of things: O.T, 2009
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Poor. old. Tired. Horse. / finlay & Scobie
SIGNS OF THE TIMES Concrete Poetry in Retrospect

Stephen Scobie Among the favourite subjects for the original imprese were the various machines of contemporary warfare: siege-engines, flint-lock guns and numerous types of cannon. Here is a modern equivalent for these citations from the technology of war. But the motto that is added casts the device back into an entirely classical context. The three words employed, which are a fragment of the work of the preSocratic philosopher Heraclitus, imply that the tanks fire-power holds two symbolic meanings: as an index of its dominant role in modern field warfare, and also as a metaphor of fire as the governing principle of the universe. The tank is the modern equivalent of Heraclitus thunderbolt, in that it represents not only the supreme natural force of destruction, but also the dynamic element that regulates the cosmos. It may be added that this fragment from Heraclitus has attracted numerous different interpretations. Part of its ambiguity lies in the fact that the thunderbolt is both a conventional personification of Zeus by synecdoche (substitution of the part for the whole) and a metaphor illustrating the philosophers own cosmology. The new impresa retains and builds upon this ambiguity. The tanks equivocal status suggests a conjecture of traditional Epic form, in which the divine guarantee of order is always present, and the demythologised forms of Modernism. Jacques Derrida Ian Hamilton Finlay
As concrete poetry recedes into retrospect, then, it is in some ways easier to describe its properties, and to situate it within the cultural and intellectual history of the twentieth century. I wish to propose some very broad generalisations along these lines: namely, that concrete poetry in its classical phase can be described in terms of modernism, structuralism and metonymy. In The Banquet Years, Roger Shattuck characterises the art of high modernism under the headings of selfreflexiveness, juxtaposition and simultanism. A self-reflexive art is one that endlessly studies its own behaviors. Among the Cubist painters, Shattuck writes, Juan Gris was the most exclusively concerned with this aesthetic Gris painted by watching himself paint, and his immaculate compositions of tables and chessboards convey the impression of intense observation directed inward rather than outward. The degree to which concrete poetry is about its own modes of existence and communication is obvious: every concrete poem demands a re-thinking of the ways in which a poem is written, or is read.
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Juxtaposition Shattuck defines as setting one thing beside another without connective, and he contrasts modernist art to the traditional art of transition. Again, concrete poetry is an example even purer than the Apollinaire conversation poems cited by Shattuck, since the essence of concrete poetry lies in its suppression (or modification or substitution) of syntax, the most fundamental connective in language. For Shattuck, juxtaposition ultimately proves inadequate, since it still implies succession, whereas Shattuck is trying to define an art form in which the elements are to be conceived not successively but simultaneously, to converge in our minds as contemporaneous events. So Shattuck adopts, principally from Robert Delaunay, the term simultanism. Admittedly, there are visual concrete poems that extend for more than one page (and sound poetry significantly diverges from visual poetry at this point), but by far the majority of the concrete poems collected in the three definitive anthologies are single-image constructions, deployed spatially across the page (or poster, photograph, wall, field) in a manner that invites the analogy to the way in which one perceives a painting. Indeed, the analogy to painting is in itself the most telling indication of the modernism of concrete poetry, since the evolution of modern painting (from, say, the Salon des Refuss in 1863 to the Dada soires in 1916) presents the exemplary paradigm of modernism: painting, not music, became for that period the art towards whose condition all other arts aspired. Thus Shattuck takes his ultimate term for the aesthetic phenomenon he wishes to describesimultanismfrom a painter, Delaunay. Attempts to describe tendencies within con45
One of Panofskys most justly celebrated essays in iconology (the term he takes directly from Cesare Ripa) is concerned with Poussins painting Et in Arcadia Ego. Contemporary disputes about the significance of this enigmatic work lead him back to Greek pastoral poetry and the progressive formation of the cultural concept of Arcady, with its almost infinite tissue of poetic references converging upon the point that even here, in the ideal pastoral world, death is present. But Panofsky has not checked the speculation about the inner meaning of Poussins picture, which may indeed be bound up with a hermetic interpretation of the golden section and might even lead (it has been suggested) to the rediscovery of the lost treasure of the Albigensian heretics in a particular part of southwestern France. The metaphorical presentation of the tank as Poussins inscribed monument, within the Arcadian setting, offers us not so much an emblem as an enigma. Estienne describes the role of Enigma as that of serving as a Rind or Bark to conserve all the mysteries of our Ancestors wisdome . We are not immediately tempted to generalise or extend the implications that we see, as in the moral emblem. The treasure, such as it is, is necessarily remote from us,
Roland / issue 2 / juneAugust 2009 and we have no foolproof method of lifting the hermetic seal (an oblique comment on the fact that here, particularly, Finlays adoption of a pre-existent motif has proved a stumbling-block to those who would deny the relevance of wide-ranging cultural reference, Estienne s ignoramusses).
crete poetry have frequently used vocabulary drawn from the history of modem painting: the most frequently used pairing is expressionist and constructivist, while Finlay at one time used fauve and suprematist. Even more strikingly, a 1982 study of inter-artistic analogy, Wendy Steiners The Colors of Rhetoric, concludes with the bold hypothesis (which indeed it is) that Cubism is the master current of our age in painting and literature andwhy not?criticism itself . From there it is only a short step for Steiner to argue that There is no clearer working out of a cubist ideology than concrete poetry. Steiners argument is largely a theoretical one. She points to the balance, in Cubist painting, between the self-reflexive exploration of paintings own modes of existence and communication, and its concern to represent an external world, its refusal to move into total abstraction. Such a balance is also maintained, Steiner rightly observes, in concrete poetry, which is inhibited from complete abstraction by its very existence in language. Steiners theoretical argument could have been considerably bolstered by pointing to Ian Hamilton Finlays explicit avowals of the debt to Cubism, especially in the widely quoted letter to Pierre Gamier, in which Finlay explains the huge uncertainty with which he came to concrete poetry by recalling that One of the Cubists said that it was after all difficult for THEM to make cubism because they did not have, as we have, the example of cubism to help them. Finlays closest affinities with Cubism are with the painter also singled out by Shattuck, Juan Gris, and with the exposition of Gris theories in the most dogmatic statement of Cubisms high-modernist aesthetic,
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Daniel Henry Kahnweilers Juan Gris: His Life and Work. I have already written in some detail about Kahnweilers importance in Finlays work; here, I wish only to recapitulate briefly a couple of points from that essay. Kahnweiler defined painting as the representation of thought by means of graphic signswriting, and insisted that such writing had to he legible, i.e. that it convey to the informed reader information about the external word (hence his outright rejection of abstract painting). There is a kinship between poetry and painting, Kahnweiler continues, for both are writing; but whereas the very existence of painting is bound up with its signs, which in consequence have a value of their own, for the poet graphic signs only serve to transcribe vocal signs. (Briefly anticipating the argument, let us note here, despite Kahnweilers insistence on writing, the classical assumption of the priority of speech, which was to be the focus of Jacques Derridas attack.) In my previous article, I noted the various points in Kahnweilers book at which he seems to lead up to a theoretical basis for concrete poetry, and I tried to suggest what the culminating steps would have been. I also noted that Kahnweilers description of the way Gris used emblems and rhyming shapes accounts exactly for similar features in Finlays work. The point of these techniques, I concluded, for Finlay as for Gris is the establishment of metaphoric identity between the various elements Finlays view of nature as a unity, a network of correspondences finds its fullest expression in the garden at Stonypath. Metaphor is the central literary technique of Finlays work, even though the terms of the metaphor are usually established by non-literary, visual means. From the
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The crucial events that were to determine the outcome of the Pacific War are celebrated in this image. Under the emblematic cover of a Renaissance pastoral, we see enacted the conflict of 4 June 1942, when the four ships of Admiral Nagunos I Carrier Striking Force were destroyed by dive-bombers from their American counterparts, Enterprise and Hornet (Yorktown being the major American casualty). The dramatic success of this action depended on the fact that the American planes were able to engage the Japanese fleet at its most vulnerable whilst each of the carriers bore a full deckload of armed and fuelled aircraft. The effect of American bombing was therefore to ignite petrol tanks, bombs and torpedoes, causing unquenchable conflagration. The analogy of the Renaissance garden shows us the carriers as hives, the American attack planes as swarming bees and the conflagration of overspilling honey. Formal trees in tubs fill out the pastoral conception, while signifying at the same time the ocean, in whose lush distances the opposing carriers were concealed from each other. At Stonypath, Ian Hamilton Finlays home in Lanarkshire, there is an interaction and interpenetration of the Garden and
Roland / issue 2 / juneAugust 2009 the Ocean. A series of stretches of water of greater and less magnitude is juxtaposed with the enclosed (the inland) garden. But even within the garden, poem inscriptions pick up the distant murmur of the sea. The axis of this opposition, which can hardly he explained more fully in this context, has perhaps become the base structure of Finlays poetics.
fishing-boat as circus pony to aircraft carrier as the four elements, Finlay bases his work on a system of metaphoric connections. Metaphor is also a central characteristic of modernism in literature; it works as a vertical system of correspondences, identifying, for instance, Leopold Bloom with Ulysses. It depends upon highly structured and relatively stable works; it is a spatial rather than temporal relationship; it is (in structuralist terms) synchronic rather than diachronic. Thus the whole of cultural history becomes simultaneously present and accessible, as Eliot proclaimed in Tradition and the Individual Talent. Eliot and Pound redefined the usable past, demanding that their readers acquaint themselves with, say, Sextus Propertius, Arnaut Daniel, or Sigismundo Malatesta, Similarly, readers of Ian Hamilton Finlay have found themselves called upon to the pre-Socratic philosophers, the revolutionary writings of Saint-Just, and the Spanday diaries of Albert Speer. Conrete poetry, or at least Finlays version of it, is simultaneously Classical and avant-garde, a blend of innovative form and traditional sensibility (as indeed was the Cubism of Braque and Gris, if not always of Picasso). What unites these disparate elements is the controlling structure of metaphor. Concrete poetry, as a synchronic structure creating metaphors out of the relationships between spatially distributed elements, can therefore be related to structuralism, and it is perhaps no accident that its period of greatest activity (195579) roughly coincides with the ascendancy of structuralist thought. Finlays critics (especially Stephen Bann and myself ) have frequently resorted to the work of the structuralist anthropologist Claude Lvi-Strauss, with particular reference to his
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notion of the small-scale model, in order to comment on Finlay. In Ian Hamilton Finlay: an illustrated essay, the catalogue to the 1972 exhibition of Finlays work at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Bann wrote that the contemporary inquiry undertaken in the fields of linguistics, anthropology and biology promises a new Classicism based on the constant relational figures that may be extrapolated from the operations of the human mind. Bann linked the work of Lvi-Strauss with that of Noam Chomsky in linguistics and Franois Jacob in biology, and stated that Finlays work relates intimately to the new Classicism, since it has an exemplary value for the notion of linguistic constants underlying visual structure. Bann is here re-stating, in structuralist terminology. Kahnweilers notion of painting as writing. The confidence of Banns structuralist faith in constant relational figures was already, in 1972, under severe attack. Indeed, a major part of Jacques Derridas Of Grammatology (1967; trans. 1976) is devoted to a deconstruction of Claude Lvi-Strauss. The structuralist study of the relations between signs requires that the signs themselves remain stable; what Derrida did was to question and undermine the very possibility of a linguistic constant. There is not a single signified that escapes, he wrote, the play of signifying references that constitute language. Saussure s synchronic system of difference is invaded by the endless recession of Derridas diffrance; the word, far from being the sign of meanings presence, becomes the trace of its absence. Every sign is put under erasure, simultaneously present (since we cannot do without it) and crossed out (since we cannot ever define it): sign becomes sign.
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Excerpt from Stephen Scobie, SIGNS OF THE TIMES, Earthquakes and Explorations: Language and Painting from Cubism to Concrete Poetry, University of Toronto Press, 1997.
Through that pure virginshrine, That sacred veil drawn oer thy glorious noon, That men might look and live, as glow-worms shine And face the moon; Wise Nicodemus saw such light As made him know his God by night. Henry Vaughans poem, The Night, invokes Nicodemus, the wise man who came to seek out Jesus by night in order to learn the secret of salvation. For Vaughan, the night is a shrine, in which the mysteries of the true light are veiled from view, and the searcher after truth, who would otherwise be dazzled by its brilliance, has the task of training his own miniature apparatus of perception upon the occluded prospect. That he is able to see in the night is, of course, a result of the fact that God has planted all creation with the seeds of external light: even the flint-stonewhich gives its title to Vaughans Silex Scintillans reveals by its flashes of mica the destiny of all sublunary matter to act as a theophany, leading men towards the eternal unclouded being.
Ian Hamilton Finlay with Ron Costley and Stephen Bann, selection from Heroic Emblems, Z Press, USA, 1977. Courtesy the Estate of the Artist.
Poor. old. Tired. Horse. / finlay
Letter to Pierre Garnier 1963

Ian Hamilton Finlay
I feel that the main use of theory may well be that of concentrating the attention in a certain area-of providing a context which is favourable to the actual work. I like G. Vantongerloos remark: Things must be approached through sensitivity rather than understanding ; this being especially acceptable from Vantongerloo since he is far from being against understanding (it seems to me)-his must I take to mean must because the world is such and we are so An understanding (theoretical explanation) of concrete (in general) poetry is, for me, an attempt to find a non-concrete prose parallel to, or secular expression of, the kind of feeling, or even more basically, being, which says, if one listens carefully to the time, and if one is not sequestered in society, that such-and-such a mode of using words-this kind of syntax, this sort of construction-is honest and true. One of the Cubists-I forget who-said that it was after all difficult for THEM to make cubism because they did not have, as we have, the example of cubism to help them. I wonder if we are not all a little in the dark, still as to the real significance of concrete. For myself I cannot derive from the poems I have written any method which can be applied to the writing of the next poem; it comes back, after each poem, to a level of being, to an almost physical intuition of the time, or of a form to which I try, with huge uncertainty, to be true. Just so, concrete began for me with the extraordinary (since wholly unexpected) sense that the syntax I had been using, the movement of language in me, at a physical level, was no longer there-so it had to be replaced with something else, with a syntax and movement that would be true of the new feeling (which existed in only the vaguest way, since I had, then, no form for it ). So that I see the theory as a very essential (because we are people, and people think, or should think, or should TRY to think) part of our life and art;
and yet I also feel that it is a construction, very haphazard, uncertain, and by no means as yet to be taken as definitive. And indeed, when people come together, for whatever purpose, the good is often a by-product it comes as the unexpected thing. For myself, on the question of naming, I call my poems fauve or suprematist, this to indicate their relation to reality (and you see, one of the difficulties of theory for me is that I find myself using a word like reality while knowing that if I was asked, What do you mean by reality?, I would simply answer, I dont know ). I approve of Malevichs statement, Man distinguished himself as a thinking being and removed himself from the perfection of Gods creation. Having left the non-thinking state, he strives by means of his perfected objects, to be again embodied in the perfection of absolute, nonthinking life That is, this seems to me, to describe, approximately, my own need to make poems though I dont know what is meant by God. And it also raises the question that, though the objects might make it, possibly, into a state of perfection, the poet and painter will not. I think any pilot-plan should distinguish, in its optimism, between what man can construct and what he actually is. I mean, new thought does not make a new man; in any photograph of an aircrash one can see how terribly far man stretches- from angel to animal; and one does not want a glittering perfection which forgets that the world is, after all, also to be made by man into his home. I should say -however hard I would find it to justify this in theory-that concrete by its very limitations offers a tangible image of goodness and sanity; it is very far from the nowfashionable poetry of anguish and self It is a model, of order, even if set in a space which is full of doubt. (Whereas non-concrete might be said to be set in society, rather than space, and its satire, its revolt, are only disguised symptoms of social dishonesty. This, I realisej goes too far; I do not mean to say that society is bad.) I would like, if I could, to bring into this, somewhere the unfashionable notion of Beauty, which I find compelling and immediate, however theoretically inadequate. I mean this in the simplest way-that if I was asked, Why do you like concrete poetry? I could truthfully answer Because it is beautiful.
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Poor. old. Tired. Horse. / Smithson & barham
LANGUAGE to be LOOKED at and/or THINGS to be READ (1967)

robert smithson
Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification. The power of a word lies in the very inadequacy of the context it is placed, in the unresolved or partially resolved tension of disparates. A word fixed or a statement isolated without any decorative or cubist visual format, becomes a perception of similarity in dissimilarsin short a paradox. Congruity could be disrupted by a metaphorical complexity within a literal system. Literal usage becomes incantory when all metaphors are suppressed. Here language is built, not written. Yet, discursive literalness is apt to be a container for a radical metaphor. Literal statements often conceal violent analogies. The mind resists the false identity of such circumambient suggestions, only to accept an equally false logical surface. Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning. An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words. Other words constantly
shift or invert themselves without ending, these could be called suspended words. Simple statements are often based on language fears, and sometimes result in dogma or a non-sense. Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things. References are often reversed so that the object takes the place of the word. A is A is never A is A, but rather X is A. The misunderstood notion of a metaphor has it that A is Xthat is wrong. The scale of a letter in a word changes one s visual meaning of the word. Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising. A word outside of the mind is a set of dead letters. The mania for literalness relates to the breakdown in the rational belief in reality. Books entomb words in a synthetic rigor mortis, perhaps that is why print is thought to have entered obsolescence. The mind of this death, however, is unrelentingly awake. Eton Corrasable
Anna Barham Tangram Alphabet I, 2009
This text was originally the press release for Language to be Looked at and/or Things to be Read at the Dwan Gallery in June 1967.
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Poor. old. Tired. Horse. / Holmqvist

THE WORD MADE FLESH BATTY BOY HOPE IS THE LAST THING THAT LEAVES U WENT BACK 2 WHAT U KNEW & U DEAD HAND STRETCHING PAYBACK THE GREEN U STOLE 4 YR MONEY & U DEAD HAND STRETCHING U WENT BACK 2 WHAT U KNEW SO FAR REMOVED FROM ALL THAT WE HAD BEEN THRU FINAL UNFETTERING & U DEAD HAND STRETCHING PAYBACK THE REAL DEAL BIRDS & THE BEES PAYBACK THE TREES THOUSHALTNOTKILL THOUWHATDOWILT CORPORATE CANNIBAL TREAT U LIKE AN ANIMAL LIKE A HANNIBAL LIKE A PLANT BATTY BOY BOOM BOOM BATTY VEGETABLES R PEOPLE TOO NEED 2 STAY AWAY FROM WE THE CHOSEN FEW THE WHO IS WHO? THE YOUNG WILL B OLD TALK 2 ME BOUGHT WILL B SOLD BATTY BOY BOOM BOOM BABY BOOM TELL ME YR DREAMS TELL ME YR STORY AM I IN THEM? BATTY BOY BOOM BOOM BATTY RICH WILL B POOR ITS A WAR THOUSHALTNOTKILL THOUWHATDOWILT TREAT OTHERS THE WAY U YOURSELF WOULD LIKE 2 B TREATED TREAT OTHERS THE WAY U YOURSELF WOULD LIKE 2 B TREATED SHALL B THE WHOLE OF THE LAW MR & MRS SMITH TOTALLY FAKING IT SHALL B THE WHOLE OF THE LAW TIME OF THE ASSASSINS BOOM BOOM BATTY CORPORATE CANNIBAL EAT U LIKE AN ANIMAL LIKE A MANIMAL LIKE A BEAST IM A MAN BOOM BOOM BATTY PRAY FOR ME IM A MAN BOOM BABY BABY BOOM CANT GET ENOUGH PREY PRAY FOR ME IM A MAN, A MAN EATING MACHINE THE WORD MADE FLESH HURRY UP & WAIT OPEN UP & BLEED PRAY FOR ME KIDS WITH KIDS ITS A WAR ONE CHILD PER HOUSEHOLD THE BOOK OF LOVE BOOK OF BOOKS S P R E A D I N G THE WORD MAKING YOURSELF HEARD IM A MAN BOOM BOOM BABY BOOM IM A MAN CANT GET ENOUGH PREY PRAY FOR ME IM A MAN, A MAN EATING MACHINE IM A MAN, A MAN EATING MACHINE CANT GET ENOUGH PREY PRAY FOR ME IM A MAN, A MAN EATING MACHINE I NEVER COULD FUCK U I NEVER COULD HOLD U I NEVER COULD TOUCH U HEY, HE-E-EY YOURE A SOLDIER I NEVER SHOULD HAVE TOLD U, WHAT I TOLD U HEY, HE-E-EY WHAT U DO? I NEVER COULD FUCK U I NEVER COULD HOLD U I NEVER COULD TOUCH U HEY, HE-E-EY YOURE A SOLDIER THE THIRD EYE SOMEBODY ELSES GUY I NEVER SHOULD HAVE TOLD U, WHAT I TOLD U HEY, HE-E-EY IF THE HILLS COULD KILL IF YR EYES COULD SMILE OPEN UP & BLEED SEE YR EYES SEE FEEL YR HEART FEEL THE VOID GIVING VOICE 2 THE VOICELESS AN UNKNOWN SOLDIER CALLING PEOPLE NAMES MDECINS SANS FRONTIRES SUPER TROOPERS SOUL SINGER DEAD RINGER LIKE-A-LOOK CONTEST SWINGER PICK-NICK MR & MRS SMITH TOTALLY FAKING IT ANONYMOUS SEX TIME OF THE ASSASSINS SEE YR EYES SEE FEEL YR HEART FEEL SOUL SINGER DEAD RINGER MAKING YOURSELF HEARD LIKE THE MOST NATURAL THING IN THE WORLD HE SAID, SHE SAID THE MOTHER PLANET ENDING THE ENDLESS SEARCH ON GOOGLE EARTH GUITAR NOODLINGS THE POODLES ESSENCE BIRDS & BEES WILD IN THE STREET HOPE IS THE LAST THING THAT LEAVES THE DEVILS ADVOCATE & U DEAD HAND STRETCHING CALLING PEOPLE NAMES U WENT BACK 2 WHAT U KNEW SO FAR REMOVED FROM
ILL MAKE THE WORLD EXPLODE

karl holmqvist
CORPORATE CANNIBAL TREAT U LIKE AN ANIMAL LIKE A HANNIBAL LIKE A CLOWN CORPORATE CANNIBAL EXCUSE ME, WHILE I KISS THIS GUY THE HIDDEN LIES GLASS BOX IN THE SKY LIKE THE MOST NATURAL THING IN THE WORLD THE INI THE BATTLESHIP EARTH 4 WHAT ITS WORTH THE MOTHER PLANET CORPORATE CANNIBAL PRAY FOR ME THE BODY OF CHRIST PRAY FOR ME THE BLOOD OF CHRIST
THE CHOSEN FEW LIKE ME & U WHO SAID SENDING OFF PEOPLE 2 PRISON WAS NORMAL? CORPORATE CANNIBAL TREAT U LIKE A CRIMINAL LIKE A HANNIBAL SLAVE 2 THE RHYTHM OF YR CORPORATE PRISON PRAY FOR ME CANT GET ENOUGH PREY PRAY FOR ME BATTY BOY PRAY FOR ME BOOM BATTY BATTY BOY BOOM BOOM BATTY NEED 2 STAY AWAY FROM
WE HOPE IS THE LAST THING THAT LEAVES WHAT U NEED I DONT WANT WHAT U HAVE I CANT USE GOSPELS OF GREED SOMALI PIRATES & PONZI SCHEMES PRIMITIVIST HIT LIST ANTI-MATERIALIST BLISS TELEVANGELIST HOT TIPS HOW COME WE CANT ALL JUST GET ALONG? FIRST WILL B LAST FUTURE WILL B PAST NEED 2 STAY AWAY FROM WE TREAT OTHERS THE WAY U YOURSELF WOULD LIKE 2 B TREATED
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ALL THAT WE HAD BEEN THRU LES MATRES FOUS THE WHO IS WHO? THE WITCHES BREW PAYBACK THE REAL DEAL U STOLE 4 YR MONEY SLAPSTICK MYSTICS WITH STICKS THE STATION MASTER PAYBACK THE TREES VEGETABLES R PEOPLE TOO THE WHO IS WHO? IF ITS 4 FREE ITS NOT 4 ME LAST NITE ON THE WAY 2 THE POW-WOW THE POW-WOW CALLING PEOPLE NAMES MURDER HAS ITS SEXUAL SIDE WHAT ABOUT HUMAN SACRIFICE? ASSISTED SUICIDE? CALLING PEOPLE NAMES RITES OF PASSAGE TREAT OTHERS THE WAY U YOURSELF WOULD LIKE 2 B TREATED CALLING PEOPLE NAMES PRIMITIVIST HIT LIST ANTI-MATERIALIST BLISS THE DUDETUBE WHEN THE PUSH COMES 2 SHOVE WATER 2 WINE PEARLS 2 THE SWINE WEATHER UNDERGROUND VAMPIRE LESBIANS OF SODOM SECRET SERVICE BOOMERANG EFFECT U AINT SEEN NOTHING, YET GENDER BENDERS BEGGARS BANQUET LAZY LADY LYDIA LUNCH GOO-GOO-GA-JOOB CALLING PEOPLE NAMES PEEN-PEN-PENNY ARCADE ARISTOTLES MISTAKE GIVING THE ROBOT HAND A HAND REDRUM RIVERRUN BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN SLEEPING IN A CASKET LAST NITE ON THE WAY 2 THE POW-WOW THE POW-WOW CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON CADAVRE EXQUIS ROGER & ME CALLING PEOPLE NAMES MR & MRS SMITH DR JEKYLL & MR HYDE FROM THE OTHER SIDE HEY, HE-E-EY IF THE HILLS COULD KILL IF YR EYES COULD SMILE THE DUDETUBE DISCOVERY CHANNEL WHATEVER U DO UNTO ME I LOST AN ARM LOST AN EYE THE LION KING LOOKING 4 A PARKING THE BODY OF CHRIST TREAT OTHERS THE WAY U YOURSELF WOULD LIKE 2 B TREATED DUDE, WHERE IS MY DUDE? THE EMPERORS NAKED ARMY MARCHES ON ITS A WAR MAN VS. NATURE WOMAN VS. ARCHITECTURE CONSTRUCTION SITE THE DUDETUBE WHY IS DESIRE ALWAYS LINKED 2 CRIME? MURDER, SHE WROTE DESTROY, SHE SAID IM LIKE REALLY BAD AT REMEMBERING NAMES WHEN SPEAKING OF THE DEVIL THE WITCHES BREW THE WHO IS WHO? MEAT IS MURDER VIVA HATE IM LIKE REALLY BAD AT REMEMBERING NAMES ALLA BARN SKA HA RTT TILL EN MAMMA OCH PAPPA IM LIKE REALLY BAD AT REMEMBERING NAMES IM LIKE REALLY BAD AT REMEMBERING NAMES DJINNS, JEDIS & UFOS GIVE IT UP 4 NAUGHTY BY NATURE THE LAST FLIGHT FINAL COUNTDOWN WITH COUSIN IT BOARDING IT SMALLEST OF MY BRETHREN EVEN A BLIND HEN THE DEAF & DUMB IM LIKE REALLY BAD AT REMEMBERING NAMES MUDRACKER FUDGEPUSHER THE WITCHES BREW THE WHO IS WHO? IM LIKE REALLY BAD AT REMEMBERING NAMES THE MISSING LINK IS NOT WHAT U THINK IM LIKE REALLY BAD AT REMEMBERING NAMES SLEEP OF REASON PRODUCES MONSTERS THE DUDETUBE DOING NOTHING IS DOING SOMETHING TOO IM LIKE REALLY BAD AT REMEMBERING NAMES THE WHO IS WHO? CALLING PEOPLE NAMES MUDRACKER ASS CRACK LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE PROJECT RUNAWAY IM LIKE REALLY BAD AT REMEMBERING NAMES ITS THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING CALLING PEOPLE NAMES THE BOOK OF LOVE BOOK OF BOOKS S P R E A D I N G THE WORD MAKING YOURSELF HEARD THRU THE DUNGEON THE CESSPOOL THE WHITE NOISE WEATHER UNDERGROUND MEAT PACKING DISTRICT PULL UP 2 THE BUMPER, BABY DRIVE IT IN BETWEEN SLEEPING IN A CASKET THE GLORY HOLE THE DANCING POLE DO YOU REALLY WANT 2 LIVE FOREVER? AND EVER??
Poor. old. Tired. Horse. / Holmqvist & Smithson
Robert Smithson Untitled (Encyclo), 1962
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Poor. old. Tired. Horse. / Hockney & Holmqvist

THE DUDETUBE DISCOVERY CHANNEL CALLING PEOPLE NAMES A HANDSOME RANSOM ID RATHER GO BLIND LE PAIN QUOTIDIEN SONGS 4 DRELLA AT THE END OF THE BREAD-LINE FROM THE BOTTOMS UP TREAT U LIKE AN ANIMAL SLAPSTICK MYSTICS WITH STICKS CALLING PEOPLE NAMES THE BOOK OF LOVE BOOK OF BOOKS S P R E A D I N G THE WORD MAKING YOURSELF HEARD ITS THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING AS ABOVE SO BELOW TIME OF THE ASSASSINS FUZZY WUZZIES WITH UZIS PULL UP 2 THE BUMP, BABY THE BABY BUMP, BABY BUMP BABY LADY BUMP THE BABY BUMP PUMP & BUMP IT DRIVE IT IN BETWEEN IN YR BIG BLACK STRETCH LIMO WHO SAID SENDING OFF PEOPLE 2 PRISON WAS NORMAL? MORE COURAGE, LESS OIL STOP, REPAIR PREPARE ITS A WAR BETWEEN THE SEXES EVERYWHERE IS WAR ALL THE EXES & YR NEED 4 MORE ALWAYS MORE AMORE PEOPLE R MAKING TOO MUCH LOVE, THEY OUGHT 2 B HAVING SEX WAR 2 END ALL WARS ALWAYS MORE & MORE LA MORT CEST LA MORT PEOPLE R MAKING TOO MUCH LOVE, THEY OUGHT 2 B HAVING SEX STOP, REPAIR PREPARE COFFEE GENIE SPILLING THE BEANS ITS NOT WHAT IT SEEMS LOVERS+HATERS UNITE DONT GIVE UP THE FIGHT THE FIGHT, DONT GIVE UP THE FIGHT THE GHOST SCRIBE IM LIKE REALLY BAD AT REMEMBERING NAMES IM LIKE REALLY BAD AT REMEMBERING NAMES ALLA BARN SKA HA RTT TILL EN MAMMA OCH PAPPA IM LIKE REALLY BAD AT REMEMBERING NAMES DJINNS, JEDIS & UFOS IM LIKE REALLY BAD AT REMEMBERING NAMES IM LIKE REALLY BAD AT REMEMBERING NAMES DJINNS, JEDIS & UFOS U GO BACK 2 HER IM LIKE REALLY BAD AT REMEMBERING NAMES DJINNS, JEDIS & UFOS U GO BACK 2 HER NURSE MILDRED RATCHED THE MEDICINE MAN CAN AS CAN CAN U WENT BACK 2 WHAT U KNEW SO FAR REMOVED FROM ALL THAT WE HAD BEEN THRU & I TREAD A TROUBLED TRACK MY ODDS R STACKED WE ONLY SAID GOODBYE WITH WORDS I DIED A HUNDRED TIMES U GO BACK 2 HER & I GO BLACK 2 BACK DJINNS, JEDIS & UFOS MORE COURAGE, LESS OIL ITS A WAR WAR 2 END ALL WARS U GO BACK 2 HER & I GO BLACK 2 BACK COFFEE GENIE THE GHOST SCRIBE RUN & HIDE GOO-GOO-GA-JOOB BATS 4 LASHES BOUGHT WILL B SOLD YOUNG WILL B OLD DOING AS YOURE TOLD END OF THE BREAD-LINE FROM THE TOP DOWN HUTUS & TUTSIES DOING THE WATUSI LOVETHINENEIGHBOR & YOURSELF LIKE EVERYONE ELSE THE GOOD DEEDS WEEDING OUT THE WEEDS WOMEN WARRIORS FALLING TREES IN THE AMAZONIAN RAIN FOREST NO ONE CAN HEAR U SCREAM DUDE, WHERE IS MY DUDE? FUN 2 FUNKY GOSPELS OF GREED KLEPTOCRACIES ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST LOVE EVERYONE ELSE & YOURSELF FROM ALL YR HEART EGO WARRIORS 2 THE STARS PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS THE WEEPING WALL INSIDE US ALL WE SHALL OVERCOME WE SHALL FIND LOVE 4 EVERYONE I AM HE AS U R WE & HE & SHE & US & THEM HE IS HER & SHE & WHAT? & WHO R U & WHODUNNIT? GOO-GOO-GA-JOOB THE WHO IS WHO? CALLING PEOPLE NAMES SEPARATION OF CHURCH & STATE PLAYBACK THE REAL DEAL U STOLE 4 YR MONEY ITS CALLED BY INVITATION BY INVITATION, DAHLING MUTUAL CONSENT 2 YR HEARTS CONTENT BIRDS & THE BEES PAYBACK THRU YR TEETH
David Hockney Two Boys Aged 23 or 24, 1966
Poem by Karl Holmqvist, from the artists book Whats My Name? Bookworks, London, 2009.
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Poor. old. Tired. Horse. / Coupland else, too. It was those words that landed me in art school in 1980, where I received my next dose of words that made me warm and tingly: the work of US artist Jenny Holzer. Holzer came to prominence in New York in the late 1970s. She generated truisms wherein she went through the great classics and reduced them down to sentences or fragments of sentences, a body of work referred to as Truisms. For example, Machiavellis The Prince boils down to abuse of power comes as no surprise. These truisms were then collected together in extensive lists and wheat-pasted on to the hoarding boards surrounding SoHo construction sites. These lists were in turn ripped from the walls by classmates doing the art-student pilgrimage to New York and shown to me back in Vancouver. When I saw these ripped papers with their columns of hundreds of truisms, my brain popped like a popcorn kernel. Words were not simply what they connoted: they were art objects and art supplies in themselves. There is a eureka moment that most visual artists have at some point early in their career and, once the moment has happened, they take their first steps across the great divide between visual art and literary art, two camps to whom words mean totally different things. Once sensitised to text as an art object, the visual artist must, in way, learn his or her own language all over again from scratch. One looks at the shape of words and the texture of the paper they rest on. One looks not just at the book, but at its cover. Visual culture is a very free and permissive place; high culture, low culture, pop culture, all source material is permitted if its a part of your world. Literary students, however, dont relearn their language from a visual and material standpoint. They are, if anything, actively enin? The answer: Helvetica. What font do you think in? Its a strange question, but you know what Im getting at: how do you see actual words in your head as you think? Or do you see words at all? Is it a voice in your head? Do you see subtitles? I think that an inevitable and couraged to consider the process necessary step for written culture infra dig, and are certainly never over the next few decades is going allowed to fetishise the physical, typographical form of a word. In to be the introduction of a dtente between visual and literary worlds France there exists the convention of standardised unemotional at the very least, an agreement to agree that theyre not text-only book covers, basically mutually exclusive and that each a Salinger-like belief that a book (excuse me, a text) ought to speak feeds the other. The notion that for itself and not be compromised literary experimentation ended with the publication of Finnegans by such vulgarities as cover art, Wake doesnt leave much hope or non-standardised fonts or author inspiration for citizens on a digital photos. Words exist only inasplanet a century later. Acknowlmuch as they denote something edging the present and contemindividually and collectively, but that is all they are. Theyre merely plating the future doesnt mean discarding the past, and to be little freight containers of meaning, devoid of any importance on interested in prints visual dimentheir own. To see words as art on sion isnt the same as being antiliterary. People in the art world their own is heresy. This inflexibility makes sense do a spit-take when they hear that James Joyce is called modto a non-visual thinker, but to ern. The literary world has the visual thinkers such dogma is aura of a vast museum filled with depressing and sad, like forcing ballerinas to wear suits of armour. floral watercolours and alpine landscapes, a space where pickled Here s a personal anecdote. Someone recently asked me what sharks will never be contemplated the most beautiful word I know is. or allowed. Ten-year-olds now I thought about it and the answer discuss fonts, leading and flushrighting paragraphs. Words are came quickly: my father used to built of RGB pixels projected have a floatplane with those call directly onto the retina for hours a letters on the tailfin, ZRFZulu day. Machines automatically transRomeo Foxtrot. The way these late spoken words into Japanese. words look on paper is gorMedium and message are melting geous; the images they conjure into each other unlike ever before. are fleeting, rich, colourful and Zulu Romeo Foxtrot. unexpected. To savour the look of Zulu Romeo Foxtrot on a page From Granta 101, Spring 2008, p. 1722. is almost the sound of one hand clapping. The letterforms mean something beyond themselves, but the meaning is not empiricaland its pretty hard for me to imagine discussing this at a literary festival. Doug, theres no verb. Here s another question I was recently asked: when I see words in my mind, what font are they
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Visual Thinking
Zulu Romeo Foxtrot
Douglas Coupland a generic reconstruction of an interview with me in, say, 1999, just before I figured things out: Interviewer: So, I read your book and, uh, youre a visual thinker, arent you? Me: Uh yes. Interviewer: (pained silence). Me: (pained silence). Interviewer: Yes, your work is so (insert loaded sigh here) visual. Me (in my head): What is it with this person? Me (out loud): Well, isnt everybody a visual thinker? We all have eyes and we all see. How can people not be visual thinkers? Interviewer: (another sigh). And there s the gist of it. I tried for a decade to be a part of the book universe, and the harder I tried, the more I encountered that same feeling that might have been experienced, say, by a black musician walking into a Baltimore country club circa 1955, sitting down at a dinner table and expecting to be served. This is not a very good fit, is it? And so, around 2000, I began to rethink my relationship with words. I looked back on the origins of my relationship with text to the first time I ever remember getting an almost erotic charge from words. This would have been from reproductions of Pop art in elementary school encyclopaedias: Roy Lichtensteins Whaam! or Andy Warhols Campbells Soup Cans. They were words, but they were something
Last summer in Vancouver I attended a screening of the cult documentary Helveticaa biography of the classic sans-serif font designed in 1957. All 950 seats of the Ridge Theatre were filled, and I havent felt as much energy in an audience since attending the 1993 taping of Nirvanas MTV Unplugged at Sony Studios in New York. Had it been possible to buy pennants and banners in the lobby, the air would have been filled with such graphic bursts as Italics! or MEDIUM! or Light!, and Id have been holding one, too. Mine would have read: Helvetica Neue (T1) 75 Bold. The font is a rock star. Directed by Gary Hustwit, the film richly rewarded an audience comprised almost entirely of designers, artists and architects. Afterwards, during a Q&A session, I asked a question that revealed that roughly eighty per cent of the audience used Macs, not PCs, and those who held up their hands as PC users received mild boos. It was a tough crowd. This Mac dominance hardly came as a surprise to me. Last spring my New York publicist asked me who my reading audience was and I blurted out, Mac users. Why is that?
Because Macs are used by visual thinkers. I see. Silence No, he didnt see, because one is either a visual thinker or one is not. He was not. Im beginning to think that being a visual thinker is like being right-handed or red-haired; it was all decided the moment the sperm hit the egg. And just to be clear, being a visual thinker isnt a preference like Country and Western music or fondness for pugs. One has no choice in the matter. People who study the science of this stuff say that roughly one person in five thinks visually, which perhaps explains the four-to-one ratio of PC users to Mac users in the everyday world. My question here is, of course, if you dont see the world visually, then how exactly are you seeing it? I came to realise the fundamental perceptual difference in humanity rather late in the day, perhaps a decade after I began writing novels. Before writing novels, I worked as a visual artist and designer, and I naively and romantically assumed that writing precluded the making of visual art. Wrong. To illustrate the result of this assumption, let me provide
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Poor. old. Tired. Horse. / Vonna-Michell
Text Excerpt from an ongoing narrative

Tris Vonna-Michell Recently while installing Finding Chopin I placed a sheet of paper on a shelving structure. It was an invitation flyer printed in the 1980s, depicting a collection of cassette tapes from various artists. It never made sense in terms of an overall picture nor as a subtle pass-over or sub-plot. A few hours later I took it back to the hotel room, and tried once again to find a better place for it to reside. In fact I took the entire material installation to the hotel, but also a special Telex projector too. With difficulty I hobbled across a bridge with a bag full of small artifacts and a heavy slide projector; alternating hands from left to right every thirty metres. From left / right: mustard / relish, followed unremittingly by: tweezers / Pritt-Stick before the narration (usually at this point, 5-6 minutes into full volubility) collapses into accelerated passages of information, unless derailed by unexpected audience disruption or loss of concentration. Clicka gridlock seizure of narration and direction. RelapseI always claimed it started in the Lake District, after visiting Kurt Schwitters home in Ambleside. If available, a slide of a pencil museum would usually follow... I remember finding a neat stack of A4 sheets; seeming deliberately collated to form a solid breeze-block of paper-pulp. As for whether they were ever intended for further distribution remains to this day oblique. Black and white lo-fi printing aesthetic on thin off-white paper stock. The papers appeared to have been carelessly thrown into a removals stacker-box and somehow resisted any unwanted imperfections. At best, just adopted a suitably warped sheen and thick coating of soot. The box was one of many coming down from the attic space, where an assortment of reel to reel machines, microphones and bric a brac instruments were concealed, by a fire-proof door, displaying a three-tier lock system. I took a few sheets from the moulded slab of many more... they traveled with me and accompanied the mutations of form and content, yet never withered from the unassigned role of resolute aloofness. A late night flight to Glasgow. I had arrived early at Prestwick airport and immediately punished myself by indulging in a packet of crisps while waiting for the taxi driver to appear, with a name-sign. Twenty minutes had passed by and no more incoming flights, just pottering Polish passengers groggily playing bingo games and text-messaging. I bought another packet of crisps. By around quarter past midnight and after several attempted calls, using the clanky pay phones I finally managed to make contact with the taxi company. The driver had waited outside for 30 minutes, while I stood by the arrivals foyer among the early morning passengers, destined for Krakow. A London black-cab; the driver took me speedily to my hotel on Albion Street. The room was soon scattered with opened boxes and bags. A series of transformations, however my most persistent thought was how to overcome a sudden headache, inevitably caused by crisp poisoning. I sat on the edge of a Kingsized and felt-mantled bed, staring into the alterations of football tables on Sky television. Slowly
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undressing, while mounting my nocturnal adventure with a toothbrush dangling from my mouth. A spacious hotel suite, in a once familiar place, and another adjunct set of narratives gradually finding their way into this rehearsal... starting with the bundle of printed papers set beside me. I reached out for a cupboard door, and in doing so knocked over a 1664 beer can; I returned to memories of a red table from 2005, in Glasgow, where pins, eggs and bowls once laid. And now back in Glasgow in 2009, where just harmless puddles of beer gathered to my right. Selecting more slides for a verbal story, which ceased long ago to welcome any new visual motifs. I knew that at 7pm the following
evening Id have to perform again. The best way I knew how to rehearse had been with a screwdriver, mini-portable studio and analogue camera. By dismantling the interior solitary spaces that accommodated the soon-to-bespoken-words; and then capturing them in the most salient manner possible using a metal 1970s airline suitcase, suitably padded and rigid: a base easily found, place it on the floor or the coffee table, position, open and keep ajar. Studio lights to the left and right of the arena. Soft-boxes made instantly by slipping ladies underwear on. Unroll the felt and attach to the interior division buttons. Slab of opaque plastic inserted upon the baseline of the lower case. Small batterypowered fluorescent tubes underneath and adorned by a variety of colour films. Frivolous chocolate boxes with a golden gilt and tin foil wrapped postcard holders to supply any additional radiance. Reflectors positioned accordingly and the object soon to belong
in an endless sequence of hotel vocabulary, for a hermetic syntax. Two wooden tape measuring sticks expanded and lodged into both undersides of the suitcase cushioning. Brilliant white, jet-black and grey long sleeve shirts, all 100% cotton and fresh to drape over the spectacle and twist intricately around the upright measuring sticks. Light weight tripod and 35mm analogue SLR camera with a healthy quantity of out-of-date film stock. Wake-up call for 8am confirmed. Finding Chopin visual sequence still to be loaded in the carousel and ready for an early morning rehearsal. All other related original slides to be selected and dispatched for immediate duplication. Plastic archive boxes detached and further displaced from sought-after sequences: plants trees fungi and flora once contained... Categories of mounted and usurped slides followed my carbon footsteps. The same slides being used since the begin-
ning, still surpassing yet erroneously passing by. Yespassing my eye-view at an irregular pace; in buoyance to my hotel-imageacquisition-routine Many more minutes pressed by and all within selected and contained moments many more words entered, found and left images wailing. Why so many words, ushered swiftly away from an attentive ear when so few remain stoic? When excited Chopin spoke French, I attempted to understand but often didnt. When excited I spoke fast, he attempted to understand but probably didnt. I drank two cups of coffee. He drank three glasses of red wine. Neither ate breakfast. Before leaving he asked me to photograph him, I obliged. Light box still on; archive boxes almost full inside a relatively spacious hotel room, located directly opposite an abandoned hair dressing salon.
Henri Chopin archive / Tris Vonna-Michell, installation at Museum im Kulturspeicher, Wrzburg, 2008
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Poor. old. Tired. Horse. / De campos & Gomringer
Augusto de Campos Tenso, 1956
Eugen Gomringer flow grow show blow, 1954
Haroldo de Campos Concrete poetry: tension of things-words in space time. This phrase from one of Augusto de Campus theoretical texts, later incorporated into the Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry, explains the process of this poem. Its reading is open: you may depart from wherever you wish.
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Eugen Gomringer The constellation, the wordgroup, replaces the verse. Instead of syntax it is sufficient to allow two, three or more words to achieve their full effect. They seem on the surface without interrelation and sprinkled at random by a careless hand, but looked at more closely, they become
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com som = with sound cantem = sing contm = (it) contains tenso = tension tambm = also tomben = tumble sem som = without sound
the centre of a field of force and define a certain scope. In finding, selecting and putting down these words [the poet] creates thought objects and leaves the task of association to the reader, who becomes a collaborator and, in a sense, the completer of the poem.
Poor. old. Tired. Horse. / Williams & Cotton
From della primavera transportata al morale

william carlos williams
no ideas but in things

Michelle Cotton
April
the beginningor what you will: the dress in which the veritable winter walks in Spring Loose it! Let it fall (where it will) again A live thing the buds are upon it the green shoot come between the red flowerets curled back Under whose green veil strain trunk and limbs of the supporting trees Yellow! the arched stick pinning the fragile foil in abundance or the bush before the rose pointed with green bent into form upon the iron frame wild onion swifter than the grass the grass thick at the posts base iris blades unsheathed
It began with a heart attack, he said to the student from the city. I had lived for sports like any other kid. They let me go to school. But no more baseball. No more running. I didnt mind the running too much there was a boy up the street I never could beat. But the rest. Not being with the others after school. I was forced back on myself. I had to think about myself. And I began to read.1 The student was visiting William Carlos Williams at his home in Rutherford, New Jersey, sometime in the mid1950s; she had asked him how he began to write poetry. Williamss response is characteristically diagnostic: the short statements, the medical verdict; there is even a (selfprescribed) treatment. The townspeople knew him as Doc Williams, the local physician and paediatrician, and from 1913 until 1951, the ground floor of his house in Rutherford had held his private practice. Poems were sometimes jotted down between appointments, on the spare prescription pads he kept in his car or at the office. There was a studio in the attic with a typewriter for more concentrated work. His college friend Ezra Pound moved to Europe, but Williams remained in Rutherford, finding all the material he needed in the life observed from his attic window or the patients he visited during the day. Medicine, he said, far from interfering, was the very thing which made it possible for me to write it was giving me terms, basic terms with which I could spell out matters as profound as I cared to think of .2
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1. William Carlos Williams in Edith Heal (ed.) William Carlos Williams: I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet, originally published 1958, New Directions, New York, 1978, p. 1. The book is comprised of conversations that took place between
Spring and All (1923) was dedicated to another college friend, the painter Charles Demuth. Amidst the experimental typography, the Roman and Arabic numerals appearing out of sequence, chapter headings printed upside down and the discussion of Cubist painting, were eight lines that would become his signature work:
so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water white beside the 3 chickens
BUY THIS PROPERTY

the complexion of the impossible (youll say) never realized At a desk in a hotel in front of a machine a year laterfor a day or two (Quite so) Whereas the reality trembles frankly in that though it was like this in part it was deformed even when at its utmost to touchas it did and fill and give and take a kind of rough drawing of flowers and April
Pound aligned Williamss poetry with Imagism, introducing him to London as a writer who apparently means what he says.4 The absence of false ornament5 fitted with the Anglo-American groups pursuit of a precise, economical language and a lyrical control of metre. The Imagist poets selected his work to be printed alongside their first published statements in 1913, advocating: 1. Direct treatment of the thing whether subjective or objective 2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to presentation 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase not in sequence of a metronome.6 Influenced by the Greek pastoral poets, Williams wrote verse that spoke of a rural situation, not the idyllic landscape of flutes and shepherds, but the austerity of work-yard
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3. William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems: Volume I 19091939, originally published 1987, Carcanet Press Limited, Manchester, 2000, p. 224. 4. Williams, I Wanted to Write a Poem, p. 12. 5. Williams, I Wanted to Write a Poem, p. 12.
STOP : GO
she opened the door! nearly six feet tall, and I . . . wanted to found a new country For the rest, virgin negress at the glass in blue-glass Venetian beads a green truck dragging a concrete mixer passes in the street the clatter and true sound of verse
Williams, his wife Florence, and Edith Heal, who was then a student at Columbia University. 2. William Carlos Williams, Autobiograpy, Random House, New York, 1948, p. 357.
the wind is howling the river, shining mud Moral it looses me
Roland / issue 2 / juneAugust 2009 Moral it supports me Moral it has never ceased to flow Moral the faded evergreen Moral I can laugh Moral the redhead sat in bed with her legs crossed and talked rough stuff Moral the door is open Moral the tree moving diversely in all parts the moral is love, bred of the mind and eyes and hands But in the cross-current between what the hands reach and the mind desires and the eyes see and see starvation, it is useless to have it thought that we are full But April is a thing comes just the same and in it we see now what then we did not know
New Jersey. His pastoral consisted in an idea of locality, reflecting his immediate situation in the subject and form of his writing. He drew on the American idiom to structure his verse; this term, he said, was better than language, less academic, more identified with speech.7 For Williams, idiom was not limited to something oral; it took on the increasing presence of the printed word in the home and on the street. The typographic design of the poems, their metrical arrangement, tone and phrase, and their collaged sense of reality referred to the way in which language was encountered at the diner or the general store. A poem describing the view from his studio is centred by the word SODA, the letters printed vertically down the page with a border of asterisks to represent the running lights around the neon.8 Similarly, Brilliant Sad Sun (1927) begins with a menu:
EES UNCH
Spaghetti Oysters a Speciality Clams9 and April (1930) quotes an entire list of ice-cream flavours, with their prices laid out in a column opposite. The same poem includes a pair of arrows and a skull-and-cross-bones amongst the words and symbols appropriated from signage. Orchid, 1977. @ 1977 The Estate of Robert Mapplethorpe Orchid, 1977. @ 1977 The Estate of Robert Mapplethorpe10 Sue Tompkins, More Cola Wars 2004
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6. F.S. Flint, Imagisme , in Peter Jones (ed.), Imagist Poetry, Penguin, London, 1972, p. 18. 7. Williams, I Wanted to Write a Poem, p. 65. 8. William Carlos Williams The Attic Which is Desire (1930), in Collected Poems: Volume I, p. 325. 9. Williams, Collected Poems: Volume I, p. 269.
Williams dealt with the objectness of words. He responded to how language was being reorganised by industry and technology; the way in which newspapers, advertising, packaging and other printed ephemera were communicating their message. The Imagist direct treatment of the thing becomes translated, in Williamss own terms, to a phrase that opens his epic Paterson (19461958): No ideas but in things.11 This objectness does away with commonplaces of opacity and ambiguity in the writing; complexity is everywhereit doesnt need to be invented. In contradistinction to Stphane Mallarms belief that to name a thing is to destroy three-quarters of the poem, things are named and presented on the page exactly as they appear in life, and yet they remain just as unfathomable. These words, clipped from a magazine or a programme on the radio, always remain so, part of a register or a specialised parlance, rather than a single voice. Subjectivity, then, emerges from the way in which these word-objects are gathered together, assembled and apprehended subvocally, or audibly, by a human voice. Sue Tompkinss spoken-word performances, for instance, often involve pop songs, beginning from the middle and cut before the end. More Cola Wars includes a fragment from Im a Believer, recorded by The Monkees in 196612 (via Robert Wyatts 1974 version) and finishes with God Only Knows, released by the Beach Boys the same year. Grease (2006) ends similarly with Frankie Vallis title song from the 1978 film soundtrack. They sound different from the original versions, but unlike many of Tompkinss citations, the words remain intact and the tune remains the same; they are direct quotations. Like Williamss SODA sign or the fragment from the menu, they sit adjunct to the
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10. Sue Tompkins, More Cola Wars, 2004, typescript for spoken-word performance, courtesy of the artist 11. William Carlos Williams, Paterson, W. W. Norton & Co, New York, 1995, p. 9. Williams use of this phrase in his poems pre-dates Paterson (e.g. A Sort
STOP : STOP
I believe in the sound patriotic and progressive Mulish policies and if elected I believe in a continuance of the pro tective tariff because I believe that the country cant do too much I believe in honest law enforcement and I also believe I believe in giving the farmer and land owner adequate protection I believe I believe I believe in equality for the negro
THIS IS MY PLATFORM
I believe in your love the first dandelion flower at the edge of taraaaaaaa! taraaaaaaa!
the fishmans bugle announces the warm wind reminiscent of the sea the plumtree flaunts its blossom-encrusted branches
of Song, 1944) however its coinage is more often linked to Book I of Paterson. 12. Neil Diamond wrote and recorded the song before The Monkees hit, releasing it in 1967 on the album, Just for You.
I believe Moving to three doors aboveMay 1st. I believe ICEand warehouse site No parking between tree and corner
Roland / issue 2 / juneAugust 2009 You would kill me with kindness I love you too, but I love you too Thus, in that light and in that light only can I say Winter : Spring abandoned to you. The world lostin you Is not that devastating enough for one century? I believe Spumoni $1.00 French Vanilla .70 Chocolate .70 Strawberry .70 Maple Walnut .70 Coffee .70 Tutti Frutti .70 Pistachio .70 Cherry Special .70 Orange Ice .70 Biscuit Tortoni 25c per portion treesseeming dead: the long years tactus eruditus
body of the writing, peripheral as opposed to core. Apart from the prescription pads, Williams composed his poetry and prose on a fold-up electric typewriter. In the introduction to The Wedge (1944) he spoke of the poem as a machine made of words its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than literary character.13 He was fond of talking about writing in a way that expressed an affinity with the practice of painting (having once considered being a visual artist himself ), he went on to say: When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes themwithout distortion which would mar their exact significances It isnt what he says that counts as a work of art, its what he makes.14 Objectness then, often involves a collection of words that effectively constitute a unit: a song, a list, a phrase taken piece-for-piece. In the abstract compositions of Christopher Knowles, optical patterns mapped out by typed characters neighbour inventories of peoples names, song titles, singles charts etc. In Knowless work, it is language itself that becomes adjunct. The text is ornamental, graphic, arranged according to visual principles, but the scheme is entirely limited by the typewriter. The colours are always black, red and green, the paper is always of a certain width, and the type is always laid out in rows, the letters automatically spaced and of relative size and shape. Williams spoke of making the verse coldly, intellectually considered, so that the concept of the thing itself would be stronger than the emotion, the heat of life .15 There are poems that seem to say everything in their
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13. William Carlos Williams, The Wedge, The Cummington Press, Massachusetts, 1944, p. 8. 14. Williams, The Wedge, p. 10.
Maple, I see you have a squirrel in your crotch And you have a woodpecker in your hole, Sycamore a fat blonde, in purple (no trucking on this street)
titles, like for instance, To Be Closely Written On A Small Piece Of Paper Which Folded Into A Tight Lozenge Will Fit Any Girls Locket (1919). There are others written in the tradition of verse addressed to a single reader, like a note. As such, they function as objects in themselves. Book IV of Paterson anonymously quoted a series of letters from a young Allen Ginsberg, who had been writing to Williams from various addresses in New York and New Jersey for almost a decade. In Notes After an Evening with William Carlos Williams, which Ginsberg published in 1952, Williams is recorded as saying: I dont even know if Paterson is poetry. I have no form, I just try to squeeze the lines up into pictures.16 Amongst Williamss child patients was the Rutherford-born Robert Smithson. In an interview from 1972, Smithson recounts returning to the town in the late 1950s to visit Williams at his home. The poet told him that he enjoyed meeting artists more than writers, and showed him some paintings by Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Ben Shahn and Hart Cranes boyfriend. There were also some stories about Allen Ginsberg turning up at all hours and Ezra Pound getting him into trouble with the FBI. Smithson ends the account by describing his early contact with the quarries in Paterson, the city on the Passaic River from which the Williams poem takes its name: As a kid I used to go and prowl around all those quarries. And of course, they figured strongly in Paterson. When I read the poems I was interested in that, especially this one part of Paterson where it showed all the strata levels under Paterson. Sort of a protoconceptual art, you might say.17
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15. Williams, I Wanted to Write a Poem, p. 83. 16. Allen Ginsberg, Notes After an Evening with William Carlos Williams, Portents, 17, Samuel Charters, New York, 1952.
POISON!
I believe
WOMANS WARD PRIVATE
The soul, my God, shall rise up a tree But who are You? in this mortal wind that I at least can understand having sinned willingly The forms of the emotions are crystalline, geometric-faceted. So we recognize only in the white heat of understanding, when a flame runs through the gap made by learning, the shapes of things the ovoid sun, the pointed trees lashing branches The wind is fierce, lashing the long-limbed trees whose branches wildly toss
William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems: Volume I 19091939, originally published 1987, Carcanet Press Limited, Manchester, 2000.
Poor. old. Tired. Horse. / Williams, Cotton & brannon
Smithson ends the account with a reference to his 1967 Artforum essay, The Monuments of Passaic, which, he had suggested in a previous interview, might be conceived of as a kind of appendix to Paterson.18 Smithsons essay bears some stylistic resemblances to Williamss writing, particularly in the textual fragments (from a newspaper, labels, signs, etc) that are fixed within the narrative of the essay. There is also a shared sense of the landscape and its merged material assemblage of geology and industry. Ultimately, though, The Monuments of Passaic presents the character of locality as we know it from Williams. Rutherford and the surrounding area become the subject of a work of Conceptual art and implied as a subject for Smithsons work in general. Williams has become part of the idiom, and Passaic, an amalgation of past and future, Smithson asks if it has replaced Rome as The Eternal City?19 Passaic center loomed like a dull adjective. Each store in it was an adjective unto the next, a chain of adjectives disguised as stores Actually, Passaic center was no centerit was instead a typical abyss or an ordinary void. What a great place for a gallery! Or maybe an outdoor sculpture show.20
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17. Robert Smithson interviewed by Paul Cummings, Interview with Robert Smithson for the Archives of American Art / Smithsonian Institution, 1972, in Jack Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, 1996, p. 285. 18. Robert Smithson interviewed by Gianni Pettena, Conversation in Salt Lake City, January 1972, in Flam, Robert Smithson, p. 298. 19. Robert Smithson, A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey, 1967, originally published in Artforum, December 1967, as The Monuments of Passaic, in Flam, Robert Smithson, p. 74. 20. Smithson, A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey, in Flam, Robert Smithson, p. 72.
Matthew Brannon Words on a Page, 2008
Poor. old. Tired. Horse. / Carroll
Colophon
Published on the occasion of Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. Curated by Mark Sladen Institute of Contemporary Arts 17 June23 August 2009 Editors: Charlotte Bonham-Carter and Mark Sladen Copy editor: Melissa Larner Designers: Sarah Boris assisted by Frederic Tacer Printer: Principal Colour Publisher: ICA, London The ICA would like to thank all of the artists and their representatives for their help in the preparation of this project. We would also like to thank the other lenders: British Council Collection, MIMA, Poetry Library (South Bank Centre), Stefano Basilico and Rosario Saxe-Coburg. We would also like to thank the following: Stephen Bann, Danny Birchall, Michelle Cotton, Gavin Delahunty, Diana Eccles, Les Edge, Rebecca Heald, Jennifer Higgie, Will Holder, Cameron Irving, Francesco Manacorda, Chris McCabe, Brigitte Morten, Jasia Reichardt, Pia Simig, Marina Warner. The design of ROLAND has been adapted from a template originally created by Will Stuart, and its name is taken from the artist and ICA founder Roland Penrose (please note that the use of the name is not authorised by the latters descendants). All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. All images by exhibiting artists are courtesy the artists, and as listed hereafter. Vito Acconci p. 37: Acconci Studio. Carl Andre p. 9: Sadie Coles HQ, licensed by VAGA, New York / DACS, London. Matthew Brannon p. 73: Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, and The Approach, London. Henri Chopin p. 63: the estate of the artist. Ian Hamilton Finlay p. 5, 38-9: the estate of the artist and Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh. Alasdair Gray p. 19: Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow. Philip Guston p. 12: McKee Gallery, New York. David Hockney p. 58: British Council Collection. Karl Holmqvist p. 16: westlondonprojects and Hollybush Gardens, London, photograph by KADN. Dom Sylvester Houdard p. 6: British Council Collection. Janice Kerbel p. 20: greengrassi, London. Christopher Knowles p. 10: Gavin Browns enterprise, New York. Ferdinand Kriwet p. 40: Bro BQ, Cologne. Liliane Lijn p. 2, 24: Riflemaker, London. Robert Smithson p. 11, 57: the estate of Robert Smithson, licensed by VAGA, New York, DACS, London. Frances Stark p. 76: greengrassi, London, and Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne and Berlin. Sue Tompkins p. 15: The Modern Institute, Glasgow. All other images courtesy the artists and photographers, and as listed hereafter. Stills from Helvetica p. 60-1: 2007 Swiss dots ltd. All texts copyright the authors, unless otherwise indicated. Institute of Contemporary Arts The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH United Kingdom +44 20 7930 3647 www.ica.org.uk Artistic Director: Ekow Eshun Managing Director: Guy Perricone Director of Exhibitions: Mark Sladen Director of Learning: Emma-Jayne Taylor Head of Press: Natasha Plowright Gallery Manager: Trevor Hall Assistant Curators: Richard Birkett, Charlotte Bonham-Carter Exhibition Organiser: Isla Leaver-Yap Press Officer: Zo Franklin Gallery Assistant: Kenji Takahashi Editions Manager: Vicky Steer ICA Patrons: Joan and Robin Alvarez, Ayling & Conroy, Charles Asprey, Robert Beat, Kathy Burnham Dimitris Daskalopoulos, Fred Dorfman, Denise Esfandi, Jules and Barbara Farber, Gerry Fox, Sam Hainsworth, Marc and Kristen Holtzman, David Kotler, Martha Mehta, Monica ONeill, Maureen Paley, Nicola Plant, John Scott, Rumi Verjee, Jay Verjee, Andrew Warren, Alison Wiltshire, Anita Zabludowicz.
The Mouses Tail From Alices Adventures in Wonderland, 1865
Front cover: Anna Barham, Magenta, Emerald, Lapis, 2009 P. 2 and 24: Liliane Lijn, Sky Never Stops, 1965, Victoria & Albert Museum, London Back cover: Frances Stark, I must explain, specify, rationalize, classify, etc., 2008

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Roland

Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.

Roland / issue 2 / juneAugust 2009

Poor. old. Tired. Horse / Gallery Guide

Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.

Ian Hamilton Finlay

Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. No 18, Wild Hawthorn Press

Roland / issue 2 / juneAugust 2009

Poor. old. Tired. Horse / Gallery Guide

Dom Sylvester Houdard

Dom Sylvester Houdard FOR THE 5 VOWELS (1), 1976

Roland / issue 2 / juneAugust 2009

Poor. old. Tired. Horse / Gallery Guide

Carl Andre, I I I left met was, 1975

Vito Acconci was born in the Bronx, New York, in

Roland / issue 2 / juneAugust 2009

Poor. old. Tired. Horse / Gallery Guide

Christopher Knowles Untitled, 1980

Robert Smithson Untitled (Moth), 1962

Roland / issue 2 / juneAugust 2009

Poor. old. Tired. Horse / Gallery Guide

Philip Guston, I am the First, c.1972

1. From On Making Pictures, Frieze, issue 119, November 2008, p. 148.

Roland / issue 2 / juneAugust 2009

Poor. old. Tired. Horse / Gallery Guide

Sue Tompkins The artist performing at the Showroom, London, 2007

Roland / issue 2 / juneAugust 2009

Poor. old. Tired. Horse / Gallery Guide

Karl Holmqvist, ONELOVEWORLD, 2004

Karl Holmqvist The artist reading at westlondonprojects, 2009

Texts by Charlotte Bonham-Carter and Mark Sladen

Roland / issue 2 / juneAugust 2009

Poor. old. Tired. Horse / exhibition related events

Roland / issue 2 / juneAugust 2009

Poor. old. Tired. Horse / publications

Janice Kerbel REMARKABLE: Faintgirl, 2007

Roland / issue 2 / juneAugust 2009

Poor. old. Tired. Horse / editions & future projects

Roland / issue 2 / juneAugust 2009

Roland / issue 2 / juneAugust 2009

Poor. old. Tired. Horse. / Bonham-Carter

Visual-Linguistic Forms in the Work of Ian Hamilton Finlay

Medieval frescoes on ceiling of Church of St George, Topola, Serbia

Roland / issue 2 / juneAugust 2009

Poor. old. Tired. Horse. / Bonham-Carter

Roland / issue 2 / juneAugust 2009

Poor. old. Tired. Horse. / Bonham-Carter & herbert

800 year old frescoes depicting mandalas at Dungkar Caves, Tibet

George Herbert, Easter wings, 1633

Roland / issue 2 / juneAugust 2009

Poor. old. Tired. Horse. / Stark & Gray

Picture-making: Infancy to Art School, 19371954

Poor. old. Tired. Horse. / Stark, gray, Kotz & kosuth

Poetry from Object to Action

I see you see little connection of your art to poetry?

Roland / issue 2 / juneAugust 2009

Poor. old. Tired. Horse. / Andre, Kotz & AcconcI

I have never been able to do

Vito Acconci From Four Book, 1968