LA POESIA VISIVA (1963 - 1979)
Gillo Dorfles, Vittorio Fagone, Filiberto Menna,
Ermanno Migliorini, Luciano Ori
Catalogo a cura di Luciano Ori: LA POESIA VISIVA (1963 - 1979) [From the series: "Le Care da Fuoco": collezione di cataloghi diretta da Sergio Salvio]. Florence: Vallecchi, 1979. First edition. Text in Italian with an English translation of Luciano Ori's introduction. A very good soft cover book with thick printed wrappers and minor shelf wear including a crease on the spine and a creased corner. Title page and FEPs slightly foxed. Title page has slight stain (does not occlude text). Otherwise, interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print.
8.5 x 9.5 soft cover book with 401 pages and approx. 200 black-and-white illustrations. Includes a foreword by Franco Camarlinghi. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name: Firenze, Sala d'Arme di Palazzo Vecchio [Dec 15, 1979 – Jan 12, 1980].
- Luciano Ori / Testo introduttivo [English translation as well]
- TESTI CRITICI
- includes Gillo Dorfles, Vittorio Fagone, Filiberto Menna and Ermanno Migliorini
- 1963 / 1967 includes Opere and Documenti
- 1968 / 1971 includes Opere and Documenti
- 1972 / 1974 includes Opere and Documenti
- 1975 / 1979 includes Opere, Biografie and Documenti
Artists include Emilio Isgro, Lucia Marucci, Ketty La Rocca, Eugenio Miccini, Luciano Ori, Michele Perfetti, Franco Vaccari, Lamberto Pignotti, Paul De Vree, Jean-Francois Bory, Takahashi Shohachiro, Jiri Valoch an Alain Arias-Misson.
Enrico Mascelloni has written extensively about the Visual Poetry movement. Take it away Enrico:
"Visual Poetry is a complex artistic movement, very extended over time and greatly divided by space. Succinctly put, it can be said to have been founded on the coexistence of various linguistic codes, in particular those of words and images. Even while it aims to distinguish its development from that of “Concrete Poetry” and “Sound Poetry,” both of which are generally assimilated by it but which find their greatest successes in the 1950s, Visual Poetry builds upon their best results and begins to manifest its own identity as of the early 1960s.
"Formed within national and even local micro-groups, when not by individualities scattered and hardly aware of each other (in places such as Florence, Naples, Genoa, Marseille, Paris, Lisbon, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Prague...), Visual Poetry, unlike Futurism and Surrealism, lacked a charismatic leader and a recognized capital from which to spread its doctrine. But soon this original fragmentation disappeared, giving rise to a vast network of alliances, groups, publications, all of them international in the strictest sense of the word, so much so that the national characteristics of the particular groups or individuals have become tightly woven into a sort of common language which claims, as do all expressions of the avant-garde, everyone’s understanding.
"Among the neo-avant-garde movements of the post World War II era, it remains the least decipherable, mainly because it has done very little to allow itself to be deciphered, almost as if it held that the state of being identified, measured, named would decree its demise. To suppose that one’s destiny remains unfulfilled is also a way to distance death; even though in the avant-garde, as in the case of Divine Kings, the best way to renew oneself remains that of being killed and eaten.
"Together with its avant-garde “sister,” Fluxus, and with its other “stepsisters” (such as Letterism), Visual Poetry has origins that cannot be simply traced back to the realm of the visual arts. The term “stepsister” indicates that the mother — that is to say, poetry — was the same for both and that the father, as usual, could turn out to be anyone who might have passed that way.
"At the beginning of the 1960s, Italians realized that they were no longer farmers. The country had become highly industrialized only in the northern regions, but sharp polarities are one of its historical characteristics: North/South; developed/developing; Communists/Catholics (or Fascists) reprise the contrast between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines that had defined Italian conflicts for many centuries. And the 1960s–handed down to future memory as an era of development and of hope in the future–will never cease to also represent an era of often ferocious conflicts, in those places where economic development and trust in the future did nothing but accelerate such conflicts.
"In 1963, which is also the year when one of the major groups of Italian Visual Poetry was founded, the Tambroni government fell (supported by the Neo-Fascists of the MSI–The Italian Socialist Movement), under blows from violent public square demonstrations that were violently repressed by the police, as is still the custom today. At any rate, Italy, which had traced the coming age of modernity for all of Europe several centuries earlier, had finally set out to become modern and moderately rich.
"Miccini, Pignotti and Chiari, all Florentines, are among the founders of Gruppo 70, which, in that very city of Tuscany, launched, in 1963, its program of “Technological Poetry,” that is, the use on the page (and why not on canvas or elsewhere) of words and images taken directly from magazines or from any other industrial (or technological) container. There is no longer, therefore, the simple visualization of the sheet of paper liberated from the severe bars of its lines, leaving to words the “pictorial” task of invading space in the most varied forms.
"The history of Gruppo 70 is instead contemporary and parallel to the entirely literary one of Group ‘63 (founded by Umberto Eco, Nanni Balestrini, and many others among the protagonists of Italian literature open to new “technologies” of narration). There never has been any real collaboration between the two groups, even though the network of friendships and personal relationships certainly gave rise to areas of permeability. Umberto Eco was able to jokingly state that he belonged to Group 133 (the sum total of Gruppo 70 plus Group ‘63). At any rate, the differences, even in their destinies, do not have less import than their affinities, which also concern the aging of Italian culture and its interest in (and even its employment of) formalism, structuralism, and revisionist Marxist criticism in Frankfurt or in Paris.
"But the “technology” of Gruppo 70 remained too “futuristic” not only on the linguistic plane, but also on that of its permanent conflict with the cultural system. In addition to the mixing of words-images-etc., it entered into competition with the frantic activism of the true protagonists of contemporary technological melange: television and advertising, joined from their very beginnings in an inextricable multimedia embrace. In its conflicting relationship with the media, the language of Visual Poetry, like that of any other neo-avant-garde movement, contains within itself its own drawback, which is fundamentally the unequal struggle against the soft belly of the techno-media universe and with its reabsorbing capacities. Thus, the messages were truly returned to sender, as Pignotti wished; but the technological media did not even realize it (or perhaps they had moved to a new address)."
Well, okay.