The Play of Poetry and Art

In the Chinese tradition painting is referred to as silent poetry (wu-sheng-

shi). Poetry, calligraphy and painting are viewed as a unity. Poetry would

often be inscribed in the blank space of the painting in order to add another

dimension in which the vital breath would circulate.

Wang Wei (699 – 759) was a poet, musician and a painter. He developedmonochrome painting in the Tang period. SuDong-po claimed that “his pictures are poems, and his poems, pictures.”

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The poets of the Tang Dynasty introduce the notion of fullness and

emptiness with a play upon “full words” and “empty words”.

Liang Kai, Poet Strolling by a Marshy BankSouthern Sung

Li Bai the Tang Dynasty poet

Poetry is a picture without form, and painting is a poem with form.

Kuo Hsi (Sung Dynasty)

Poem from the Collection ofElegant Flowers (Reikashu)

Koogimi, 11th C

Poem on the Theme of a Monk’s LifeSesson Yubai (1290-1346)

Titian used the term ‘poesie’ for a set of late paintings that he painted for Philip 11 of Spain. They were largely based on Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses.’

Titian, Danae 1551-6

Titian, The Death of Actaeon 1559-75

Modernism and the relationship of poets and artists.

Charles Baudelaire was firstly a poet and at the start ofa great tradition of writers who played a pivotal rolein the development of modernist art. Apollinaire,Marinetti, Salmon, Tzara, Mayakvosky and Breton all served to articulate the respective avant-garde movementsof the early 20thC.

Manet was a friend of the Symbolist poet Mallarme.

Poetry in aspiring towards the

condition of the pure word or

caesura, interrupts, or forces

language to give way. In emptying

or hollowing out language, a new

reality or condition is opened.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Guillaume Apollinaire 1880-1918

Picasso, Portrait of GuillaumeApollinaire, 1913

Andre Salmon (1881-1969)

Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE.

Filippo Tommaso MarinettiItalian Futurist

Ezra Pound and the writer and painter Wyndham Lewis were founders of the Vorticist movement

“If you likeI'll be furious flesh elemental,or- changing to tones that the sunset arouses- if you like-I'll be extraordinary gentle,not a man but - a cloud in trousers.”

― Vladimir Mayakovsky,

The idea of a stream of consciousness allied to stylistic experimentation and the disruption of syntax characterized modernist writing forms. Modernist

poetry introduced new forms of spacing of words alongside the use of

chance encounter and loss of continuity.

Andre Breton published theSurrealist Manifesto in 1924and was the editor of LaRevolution Surrealiste from 1924.

Freud’s ideas influenced hisideas to do with automaticdrawing and writing

Andre Breton

Poetry as an art is not only an interruption of art, but

also of the mimetic or the already present. Rather is

captures the passage of there not-being into the

production of presence. This is outside of

representation because the process of coming into

presence cannot be represented. The presentation of

this passage records a doubling of figures, the falling

back into the abysmal and the opening of the ecstatic

beyond, a space of interruption between babbling

and the pure word. This draws together both what is

before and that which is beyond.

The Surrealist poet Paul Eluard

Max Ernst and Paul Eluard, Les Malheurrs des Immorteless 1922

Salvador DaliPortrait of Paul Eluard

Poetry functions or works on the other or reverse side

of language facing away from the world to touch that

which either evades naming or still cannot be named.

Poetry is solely the work of language and not some

other faculty of the subject such as imagination. As a

form it does not articulate a relationship to the world

in any direct sense and therefore is not constituted as

a medium in any usual manner because it is

uncommunicative. In this respect, it affects the

withdrawal of language and in turn a resistance to the

world.

.

Antonin Artuad

Language gives rise to the capacity of

naming and with this differentiation or the

question of what is and what is not. This is

the basis of language moving outside of

itself by becoming other than that which can

be possessed. Poetry seeks what is outside or

inhuman and is thus a search for the origin

within the mutual play of speaking and

silence.

In the second half of the 20thC the relationship between poets and the

visual arts becomes less pronounced.Instead, we are witness to individual

eruptions of such a relationship exploring various conjunctions of

word, image, and gesture.

Philip Guston tended toward mixingwith poets rather than painters.

He was seeking a language for his artthat was apart from that of aestheticformalism and poetry served to openout this as a possibility.

Cy Twombly made constantreferences to poetry which was both ancient and modernin origin.

Anselm Kiefer has used the poetry of Paul Celan

in order to make visible, a link between poetry

and painting. In ‘For Paul Celan: Ash Flowers’

(2006) the imagery of a straw field, darkened sky,

ashes, and flowers form a signifying chain in

which the lines of a poem find their place. The

relationship that is cast in these paintings are

uneasy because the intended homage appears one

that is impossible to sustain because they do not

belong to similar impulses. Paul Celan’s poems

are sparse and enigmatic whereas Kiefer’s work

is dense and vast in scale so the economy of both

is disjunctive.

Anselm Kiefer Your Golden Hair, Margarethe 1981

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Hollywood Africans, 1983

“graffiti is a poem that the city writes to itself”