Category : Infinity’s Kitchen Blog

Google Books has a preview copy of Futurist typography and the liberated text By Alan Bartram

In the early decades of the twentieth century, European artists, poets and designers called for the destruction of outdated assumptions about vision and language. Numerous manifestos resulted, demanding new artistic forms. None of these manifestos was more aggressive and poetic, or wider in scope than Filippo Tomasso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1909. Painting, sculpture, literature, architecture, theatre, cinema, and music were all caught up in its net. Typography””until then a distant relative in the arts””also played a major role in Marinetti’s program. Written by leading design scholar Alan Bartram, this fascinating book examines the rise and evolution of the Futurists’ approach to typography and graphic design, placing it within the context of contemporary artistic and literary movements. The volume features examples of some eighty Futurist books or other designs for print, many of them relatively unknown or previously unpublished, accompanied by new translations of over twenty of the featured texts. Bartram illuminates the complicated meanings of the Futurist designers’ graphic works in order to provide a new understanding of their extraordinary and influential visual language.

Oulipo, or Workshop of Potential Literature, is a group of writers and thinkers interested in the notion of “constraint”. You can think of constraint as something like the rules of a game. For example, the rules of the sonnet game result in the creation of a sonnet. The rules of the short story game result in the creation of a short story. Are there other rules? New games? New things to create? By asking those questions, the Oulipo has become a workshop of potential literature.

Here are five constraints you can try. For example, the metro poem: “A metro poem has as many verses as your trip has stations, minus one.”

One Hour of Television is a bleeding, screaming, literary freak-beast adventure novel created by new Canadian voice-sensation Kristina Born. Told in poetic-micro-burst segments, Born transcribes a filthy world of wicked science, consumerism, bomb building, and Texas hold em. From a boiled pot of Gary Lutz, Andy Kaufman, and pure human fear, One Hour of Television is a story of mad consumption that will, through its paper, consume you.

In a recent interview with The Faster Times, Kristina Born the author has some interesting things to say about how the book was created, and what sort of style it is written in.

I wrote the majority of OHT during the summer after my second year of university. I came home and worked a 10-hour graveyard shift at a local gas station. I was alone from 8pm-6am and since no one came in after about 11 or so, I had very little actual work to do. I wanted to give myself a writing project for the summer, so I decided that I would write a small story based on every element in the periodic table. I looked up each element on Wikipedia and took down a few facts that jumped at me, and wrote them in no particular order. After 11 at the gas station, the rule was that I had to write three sections, and then I was allowed to read Infinite Jest until around 3, when I mopped and started making coffee for the truckers. After about three weeks, some themes started to emerge and I realized it was a book.

To me, it’s a novel. I really hate the terms “novella” and “novelette” because they don’t mean anything. It’s a short novel, that’s all. I’m not a poet and I would never describe my writing as prose poetry – which also doesn’t mean anything – and if I read something like Anne Carson’s DECREATION, which is a lot of different things, it seems pointless to me to try to classify it as plays or essays or poetry. It’s a book and it’s good.

An new exhibition of concrete poetry is on display at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. The exhibition is titled “Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.” gets its name from a periodical by that name that championed new works of visual poetry in the 1960′s.

One review says of the exhibition that “the term concrete poetry doesn’t do justice to the fluidity, the free-falling work that flies around these rooms. The true rebels have arrived.”

An art museum may seem, at first glance, to be an unusual venue for concrete poetry. The blog “The Art of Fiction” comments, “it highlights again how poetry (and literature in general), sometimes can only get attention by disguise.” Literature and the visual arts, they’re all art, though, so perhaps this isn’t such an odd combination after all.

For those who cannot make the trek to London the see the exhibition, there is an online gallery of images. The annotated guide to the exhibition also provides an overview of the exhibition. The curators have also compiled a links page, full of websites of interest for anyone looking to get more exposure to visual poetry.

The show runs until the 23rd of August. Exhibiting artists include: Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, Anna Barham, Matthew Brannon, Henri Chopin, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Alasdair Gray, Philip Guston, David Hockney, Karl Holmqvist, Dom Sylvester Houédard, Janice Kerbel, Christopher Knowles, Ferdinand Kriwet, Liliane Lijn, Robert Smithson, Frances Stark and Sue Tompkins.

“The Imaginary 20th Century” is a historical science-fiction novel takes the form of a large-scale projection, which is an interactive work that includes 2,200 images culled from different visual archives. The story focuses on the whimsical adventures of a woman in the year 1901 who has four different suitors, each with their own vision for the new century. Existing not only as an art installation, but also as a book and a DVD-ROM, The Imaginary 20th Century proposes a new approach to narrative.

Vorticism was a short lived British art movement of the early 20th century. It is considered to be the only significant British movement of the early 20th century but lasted fewer than three years.

Origins

The Vorticism group began with the Rebel Art Centre which Wyndham Lewis and others established after disagreeing with Omega Workshops founder Roger Fry, and has roots in the Bloomsbury Group, Cubism, and Futurism.

Though the style grew out of Cubism, it is more closely related to Futurism in its embrace of dynamism, the machine age and all things modern (cf. Cubo-Futurism). However, Vorticism diverged from Futurism in the way that it tried to capture movement in an image. In a Vorticist painting modern life is shown as an array of bold lines and harsh colours drawing the viewer’s eye into the centre of the canvas.

The name Vorticism was given to the movement by Ezra Pound in 1913, although Lewis, usually seen as the central figure in the movement, had been producing paintings in the same style for a year or so previously.

BLAST

The Vorticists published the literary magazine BLAST, which Lewis edited. It contained work by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot as well as by the Vorticists themselves. Its typographical adventurousness was cited by El Lissitzky as one of the major forerunners of the revolution in graphic design in the 1920s and 1930s.

Anderbo.com is one of an increasing number of online literary journals. The magazine publishes three issues online and one print issue annually. It features poetry, fiction and “fact” writings. Here’s a clip from the journal’s facebook page.

Founded by The New Yorker fiction contributor Rick Rofihe (who has published nine stories in the magazine, as well as the short story collection “Father Must” with Farrar, Straus and Giroux), anderbo.com is a Literary Online Journal that publishes short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Work from previously unpublished and emerging talents, as well as established writers and poets, is welcomed.

For more information about Anderbo, listen to an interview with editor Rick Rofihe.

A “wake” was held for Baltimore’s defunct arts magazine, Link: A Critical Arts Journal in Baltimore and the World (1996-2006). For ten years or so, Link was a preeminent authority on the subject of ““ you guessed it ““ arts in Baltimore and the World. Notable contributors to the publication included Yoko Ono, in the final issue.

Out of respect for the deceased, presumably, no mention was made of the cause of death. A cautionary sermon, therefore, was conspicuously absent.

Link is gone, may it rest in peace, but the spirit behind the publication lives on. Tonight the torch was passed to a new publication in Baltimore, Locus Art Magazine. Locus has already published a fifth issue, and was named the 2008 best art magazine by Baltimore Magazine.

If you’re in the Los Angeles area, and you read Infinity’s Kitchen, then you should definitely check out the “Untitled” conference. If anything cool goes online, as a result of this conference, we’ll be sure to mention it here. Here’s the skinny on this year’s conference.

The fifth annual series of experimental writing conferences, Untitled: Speculations on the Expanded Field of Writing is a two-day conversation about writing which, in some manner, exceeds the printed page. The conference is October 24-25, 2008.

Untitled is a common name of contemporary art works and also refers to the incipient moment of a new text or idea. It was chosen to convey a sense of openness and process. A variety of writers and artists will discuss the use of language and words and/or their object status, the book and the letter, the question of the “emptiness” vs. the fullness of language as a poetic medium, the pictorial versus the narrative, the incorporation of extra-linguistic symbols and signs (maps, diagrams, formulas, etc.), the question of conceptual writing and words off the page — performed, cited, projected, incanted or invoked.

The conference will include two panels on the topic of Litterality, and examine how writers use what we normally consider non-linguistic elements, such as symbols, diagrams, maps, or scores placed in the context of writing. Also explored are invented writing systems, and what it might mean to think about the book as an object rather than as a collection of words or sentences.

As in the art world, many kinds of appropriation have been undertaken by experimental writers in the last several years. The panel on Appropriation and Citation will look at these practices, asking questions about whose work and what material gets appropriated, cited or resurrected, who owns texts, and if there is a difference between appropriation and citation.

A panel on The Meaninglessness or -fulness of Language will examine language as a vehicle of meaning. Rather than look at what texts say, it asks if language simply taken on its own is empty, saturated with meaning, both, or something else.

The fifth panel on The Concept of Conceptual Writing, looks at the use of writing not to convey meaning or tell stories but to convey concepts, asking how this might be similar, or not, to the work of conceptual artists in the visual arena.

In addition to the five panels, there will be two evening readings. The participants in the conference are Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Latasha Diggs, Johanna Drucker, Kenneth Goldsmith, Robert Grenier, Douglas Kearney, Steve McCaffery, Julie Patton, Salvador Plascencia, Jessica Smith, Brian Kim Stefans, Stephanie Taylor, Shanxing Wang and Heriberto Yepez. This event is organized by Matias Viegener and Christine Wertheim of the Writing Program at CalArts, and funded by The Annenberg Foundation.

Baltimore’s critically acclaimed High Zero is perhaps the most unusual festival of new music in the country, mixing no-holds barred experimentation on a large scale with all new, spontaneous collaborations between some of the most interesting musicians on the planet. Since 1999, the festival has inspired radical methods and brought utopian intentions to hundreds of varied performances, on stage and on the street.

This 10th anniversary DVD and CD gives a small taste of what audiences have experienced in the last ten years at the festival that Signal to Noise Magazine called “A fertile laboratory of musical possibility without equal.”