Concrete Poetry? Surprising association of words, isn’t it? Indeed, let’s be playful today! Set a little wave of poetry in motion…
Concrete Poetry is actually an artistic movement from the 1950’s based on a simple formula:
Form = Content / Content = Form.
Take a look at Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Acrobats.
Ian Hamilton Finlay, Acrobats, Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Observe how your mind looks for words and basically “plays” acrobat due to the spatial construct of the work! For Hamilton Finlay, “the mind will always try to make words out of letters – to create movement” (1966).
What about this tiny word arrangement currently on display at the Getty Museum, also by Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay?
Ian Hamilton Finlay, happy apple – for the painter Juan Gris, Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Happy. Apple. But did you see Pip showing vertically, triggering association of thoughts and squaring / rounding the meaning you read with the visual you see?
That’s Concrete Poetry, where the design and graphic quality of a poem plays as much a part in the meaning as the words contained.
Mary Ellen Solt, Forsythia, Getty Museum, Los Angeles
I will let your brain play with a few more examples because it won’t be able to help it…Delightful and deceptively simple.
Ian Hamilton Finlay, Broken/HeartBroken, Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Ho/Horizon/On is my favourite… Ho Ho Ho, until No No No, the Horizon is blocked by the letters piling in!
Ian Hamilton Finlay, Ho/Horizon/On, Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Concrete Poetry emerged in the 1950’s but built upon prior influences such as Dada. In the midst of the atrocities of WWI, Dada was a key movement challenging the precepts of Western Art to create non-sensical art, where chance was preferred and aesthetics largely ignored.
Yet I find there are a lot more than meet the eye with Concrete Poetry as long as you’re open and don’t brush past quickly. so keep reading till the end…
It’s a bit like the work of Frederick Hammersley that I managed to catch on its last days at L.A. Louver.
Frederick Hammersley, Gee Whiz, L.A. Louver
Frederick Hammersley’ s use of blocked-out shapes and the angularity of the shards of colors of his organic paintings are attractive.
Yet what really got me looking – and thinking – were his series of computer generated drawings dating from 1969.
Frederick Hammersley, detail from Gee Whiz, L.A. Louver
Using letters and signs, he created tonal contrasts and movement using an admittedly inflexible medium.
Frederick Hammersley, Tea Talk, L.A. Louver
Frederick Hammersley, detail from Tea Talk, L.A. Louver
There is even Hammersley’ s version of Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square, echoing a theme dear to my heart that I wrote about here.
Frederick Hammersley, Thought Holder, L.A. Louver
The forms composed of individual signs and letters are the essential and concrete elements of the poetic drawings in this series. Beyond this, there is no meaning in those signs.
I loved those. Can you imagine how much work went into them?
The subtle visual alteration of a letter by a double strike with Hammersley, the addition of a small word for Ian Hamilton Finlay…all can have a big impact on meaning.
Ian Hamilton Finlay, Little Fields / Long Horizons, Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Witness Little Fields / Long Horizons where the word “for” changes the nature of “long” from adjective to verb and sets the poetry going.
Or Ian Hamilton Finlay’s take on Malevich’s Black Square.
“A textual enigma to Malevich’s painterly one”: lack, lock, block, black are words with meanings recreating the tension intertwined in Malevich’s famous painting.
Ian Hamilton Finlay’s work evolved with time, never losing its poetic character but definitely adding to how concrete it became.
Ian Hamilton Finlay, Picturesque, Little Sparta, Scotland
Tongue-in-cheek with Picturesque, his work took a more sculptural approach, particularly in his Little Sparta garden near Edinburgh in Scotland.
Also with Unda, part of the Stuart Collection on the UCSD Campus in San Diego.
Ian Hamilton Finlay, Unda, Stuart Collection, UC San Diego Campus
Unda means wave in Latin. A word whose meaning is pictorially close to the S-like scroll that keeps changing position on each of the five roughly cut blocks of Cotswolds limestone.
Ian Hamilton Finlay, Unda, Stuart Collection, UC San Diego Campus
This beautiful curve is also used by editors to signify “transpose these letters”, interchange them…Meaning the word Unda keeps rippling on the stones as you transpose its letters.
In your brain, in the carved letters in front of you and as you look up from the stones towards the ocean on the horizon.
Ian Hamilton Finlay, Unda, Stuart Collection, UC San Diego Campus
Concrete Poetry is all about a subtle change, a ripple effect enticing movement. It’s visual yet it also expands the horizon of our thoughts unexpectedly. If only we give it a little time, as you are right now.
Time. That entity that is slowly destroying another form of concrete poetry I was puzzled to come across at the Getty Museum.
Jane and Louise Wilson, Casemate H667, Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Four large scale black & white photographs by sisters Jane and Louise Wilson. Four concrete blokhaus (bunkers) left by the Nazis on the Western coasts of France.
Jane and Louise Wilson, Casemate SK667, Getty Museum, Los Angeles
I use to see blokhaus every summer I spent in Noirmoutier until I was about 10. Menacing by their size, concreteness and protruding rebars, I was always warned they were unstable, dangerous. The sea, with time, was going to make these monstrosities tip over, head first, off the dunes. Inexorably.
By then, will there be any WWII veterans left to tell the tale of what these blokhaus witnessed?
I thought these striking photographs captured another version of concrete poetry.
The war, the past, this is the “concrete” in our heads. But remember the little wave, the flicker of a movement, the power to “transpose”? It can set the “poetry” in our eyes…
Which one of these concrete poem did you enjoy most? Let me know in the Comment Box 🙂
Concrete Poetry is exhibited at the Getty Museum until July 30, 2017.
Sealander by Jane and Louise Wilson is at the Getty Museum until July 2, 2017.
Frederick Hammersley closes at L.A. Louver on June 24, 2017.
Concrete Poetry led to Concretism and Neo-Concretism, the latter being an artistic movement exemplified by Lygia Pape: A Multitude of Forms, on view at the Met Breuer until July 23, 2017 and covered in a previous blog post here.
© 2017 Ingrid Westlake
All pictures by Ingrid Westlake, unless otherwise stated.
Ingrid, I indeed find all of the works great pieces of art !
Thank you so much for sharing such interesting theme – Concrete Poetry.
I am so glad you liked Concrete Poetry, Becky! It’s so different, simple in appearance but so clever in so many unpretentious ways. I thought all these exhibitions carried pretty much the same undertone. I just love encountering new ways to think in a different way. Unda in the Stuart Collection is so good for this: a place to reflect as if sitting on a classical ruin in Greece 😉
I also remember the blockhaus at Biscarrosse . They used to be covered by street art until they buried them in grass. No memory left. Loved the poetries and how they challenge your mind. They remind me Apollinaire’s Calligaris from the beginning of the XXs century which I loved studying back in elementary . Thank you as always !
Hi Virginie, many memories indeed with the blockhaus. I heard somebody painted one bright pink in Noirmoutier so I am looking forward to check it out this summer since I have not been back since… 2003 when somebody proposed! 😉
I remember Apollinaire’s poems fondly too…”Il pleut”, I love! I am so glad you enjoyed this week’s post…just something different! It’s good for us 😉
Hi Ingrid,
There are so many interesting works here… I really enjoyed your take on them. Thanks for posting!
JB / dynamicstasis.blog
Pleasure, JB! All these exhibitions just seemed to “speak” to each other as I progressed through my day in LA 😉 I have always liked the works of Ian Hamilton Finlay but I know it can be hard to get “into” a work like Unda as it seems like a classical ruin in the middle of a university campus. Trying to decode the riddle somewhat with the blog, and I just love the power that transposition can offer in this piece of art but in life in general. Thank you for reading!
My favorite is the black block lack lock. I think it is so cool!!!😁
Can I just say how happy I am to get a comment from my very own 10-yr old daughter reading my blog? 😘 The fact that you worked out how to subscribe to my blog, that you’re reading a post about Concrete Poetry…All this boosts me beyond belief to continue sharing and writing what art around us has on offer! I am so pleased you liked the Homage to Malevich’s Black Square, my darling. I am looking forward to decoding this one with you! Thank you for reading and commenting. It means the world!
I love you Maman!❤️
It is absolutely brilliant.
Really clever, but really playful too!
JB / dynamicstasis.blog
It’s fantastic !
I like the concrete poetry “Forsythia”!
The words that represent the vase are very well chosen and offer optimism !!
I also love the “Unda” blocks posing on the San Diego campus, the graphic of the wave that separates the letters is very elegant and invites to escape !!!
Like you, I saw the blockhaus on all the Norman coasts !! The immediate reading that our brain does does not call for visual poetry perhaps a graphic poetry ????. It would be necessary that the wave “UNDA” “engloutisse ” these awful blocks and that it carries with it in the bottom of the ocean all the bad memories of the veterans of the Second World War !!! And a new concrete poetry would be born new landscapes of our French coasts …. but I dream …….
Thank you Ingrid for opening the door of such universes !!!
Dear Marie-Annick, you have no idea how happy it makes me to open new universes on this blog. You make a great point with Unda as wave to carry the blockhaus to the bottom of the sea. Yet, this could lead us to another debate: is it really appropriate to erase and forget those painful memories but also all the sacrifices made by people who fought? Big question on memory, memorials then…
Concrete poesy is chinese language for me and doesn’t not inspire me. Good to see Emeraude interested by the subject of your blog….Like Hamilton Finlay, Unda, Stuart Collection, UC San Diego Campus that I saw in the true life and “Picturesque”.
If you like all these then Concrete Poetry inspires you after all 🙂
[…] of a movement and subtle alteration that set Concrete Poetry going in the blog of a few weeks past (read it here). C.F. Ramuz elegantly sums it as […]