Introductory Remarks by Penny Florence
[Given by Penny Florence on the first evening, Monday Oct. 16, 2006:]
I'm going to be very brief because these events, of which tonight is the first, are about action and performance as well as critical thinking. But I do want to tell you a little anecdote, which I hope will show you where the impetus for e and eye came from, as far as I am concerned, and at the same time say something about the larger project to which it belongs. In some ways the idea of this series is very simple and immediate. It is to put very recent electronic poetry into the gallery space alongside Modern and Modernist art and see what happens. The idea behind this is to contribute to bringing the relation between e-poetry and the tradition of visual art and interart poetry into a clearer relationship. This is primarily with the aim of enhancing understandings of contemporary art and poetics.
My anecdote is about the generally acknowledged ancestor of most trends in visually innovative poetry, the nineteenth century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé. One of his famous remarks is that "everything in the world exists to end in a book". The book as actuality and metaphor is central to his thought. This includes the feel and design of the page, the black and white of type, the whole book as talismanic object. This poet was close friends with the great painters of his day - Manet especially, all the Impressionists, and many others, right across the spectrum of movements and schools.
Among the strangest of his often weird and recondite writings is an odd little book on the English language, written in the 1870s. It's called Les Mots Anglais. In this book, Mallarmé indulges in a number of etymological fantasies that would do credit to the most Gothic of the writers he translated or wrote about, people like Edgar Allan Poe or William Beckford. One of them concerns the letter "f", about which he rhapsodizes as a most particular and evocative letter. Over 20 years later, this preoccupation surfaces again, now in the context of his great visual poem Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hazard. I will be talking about this is more detail in the last of the sessions of this series. He gave his typographers a really hard time about the typeface of this poem, especially the letters "s" and "f", and eventually had them hand carved. The poem ended up using a mix of fonts with some of it customized. It is therefore typographically unique. This uniqueness is not an effect of undue preciousness, nor is it restricted to typography, however. Mallarmé's whole oeuvre constitutes a truly radical work in a number of ways.
To illustrate this, fast forward to the present day and something John Cayley wrote about his work in the cave, a Virtual Reality or VR environment. He projected letters into the illusion of 3D space that is VR, and discovered that you as "reader-viewer" see letters differently, that the surfaces of letters change into different kinds of surface. Very significantly for what I'm saying now, the colour defining the letter-shape turns into a "surface of inscription" for other texts that had been perceived as "underlying".
In this way, John says "Letters both delineate and redefine spatial relationships". (cf. ‘Lens: the practice and poetics of writing in immersive VR’ and ‘Writing on complex surfaces’)
Just so. It perfectly explains all the fuss about the letters "f" and "s". Mallarmé writes about "the air or song under the text", and he means this literally - the literal is directly and indissolubly linked to the referent or idea. I could take up the rest of this evening elaborating on how this works. It is an entirely convincing explanation for the way Mallarmé thought about the letter in poetic language.
Throw in one more factor before I hand you over to my colleague and co-organizer, Tim Mathews: Mallarmé is not an isolated example of a freak occurrence. He may not be that widely known in England, even among art enthusiasts, but he was known to Picasso, to the Delaunays and to the radicals in poetry and painting whose innovations make up these collections at Tate Modern. I think this current hang is one that Mallarmé would have understood. As Johanna Drucker, the eminent book artist and writer on related matters, comments, there is a hidden tradition. New technologies have put into the hands of an unprecedented number of people the ability to design the language that appears, "whether on the page, in time and space or in electronic form." This will have a great impact on "sensitivity to reading visual form". It should enable access to "the really great, imaginative works that populate the 20th century (and earlier...)". This in turn is about engaging with contemporary work "to its utmost".
That is what this series is about: engaging with contemporary work to its utmost.
e and eye
