Women in concrete poetry

Women in concrete, visual, and sound poetry

Works

Anni Albers, Typewriter study to create textile effect, n.d. Typewriter printing in blue ink on paper mounted on board, 27 x 16.8 cm. Made on Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter. (Source). Printed in 1974 monograph by Albers. More.

Ewa Partum, Active Poetry, 1971-1973. 8 mm film, b&w, no sound, 5'53". Documentation of five actions in the surroundings of Warsaw. For her action in 1971, "the artist cut up a single page of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses and scattered the individual letters in a pedestrian arcade in Warsaw. The letters became distributed through the space creating new texts and chance meetings as passers-by moved around the arcade. It was described at the time by the literary critic Marek Ławrynowicz as revealing ‘that a poet’s activity does not have to be reduced only to the verbal sphere, but can have a situational character as well’. The concept marked a turning point in Partum’s career and is one with which she has continued to play in order to critique the means and modes of textual production. Partum went on to create a series of works using letter cut-outs, often releasing them into natural spaces, including the ocean and a hilltop. These free-form, action-based works enacted what Partum saw as a feminist critique of the patriarchal structures at the heart of language by resisting the rules of grammar and the traditional linear structure of text, allowing the work instead to be shaped by coincidence, the environment and the movement of the body" [1]. View film on Filmoteka. Tate. Reina Sofia. Generali. 2006 re-creation of 1971 performance at Tate.

Mirella Bentivoglio, L’(assente), positivo/negativo, segno/figura [The Absent One, Positive/Negative, Sign/Figure], 1971. Serigraph on paper, 62.55 x 48.26 cm. (Source).

Mirella Bentivoglio, E = congiunzione [And = Conjunction], 1973. Serigraph on paper, 20.96 x 29.85 cm. (Source).

Cover of Cozette de Charmoy's collage novel The Colossal Lie (Collection OU 4), 1974.

Mirella Bentivoglio, Io [Me], 1979. Photo­mech­anical print on paper, 60 x 40 cm. (Source).

Mirella Bentivoglio, Moduli a E [E Combinations], 1980. Ink on paper drawings after 1977 wooden constructions, 29.53 x 20.96 cm. (Source).

Irma Blank, Radical Writings, Rosa geatmet, rosa gechrieben [Pink Breathed, Pink Scripted], 1987. Acrylic on canvas (diptych), 2 × 2.4 m. Photograph: C. Favero. (Source).

Irma Blank, Osmotic Drawings D-7, 1996. Acrylic on paper, 23 × 30 cm. Photograph: C. Favero. (Source).

See also Women in Concrete Poetry channel on Are.na.

Sound works

Anastasia Bitzos, Konkrete Poesie, Sound Poetry, Artikulationen, 1966, vinyl LP; 2004, CD. A selected documentation of the performance organized by Anastasia Bitzos on 26 May 1966 in the Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland: "Konkrete Poesie, in Tonband, Lichtbild und Lesung". The production of the performance, the selection and the compiling of the record made by Anastasia Bitzos. Compositions by Bremer, Jandl, Gomringer, Mon, de Campos, Greenham, Bense, De Vree, Döhl, Geissbühler. Discogs.

Katalin Ladik, Ballada az ezüstbicikliről (1962-1968), Novi Sad: Forum Könyvkiadó, 1969. Texts.

Lily Greenham, Internationale Sprachexperimente der 50/60er jahre / International Language Experiments of the 50/60ies: Tendentious Neo-Semantics 1970 in English, Frankfurt am Main: Hoffmann, 1970, vinyl LP. Lily Greenham reading poems by Peter Greenham, Jandl, Mills, Morgan, Cobbing, Gamier, Bense, de Campos, Braga, Pignateri, Rühm, Arias-Misson, Heissenbüttel, Molero, Sanmark, Steen, and her own poetry. Discogs.

Katalin Ladik, Phonopoetica (Phonetic Interpretations of Visual Poetry), Belgrade: Galerija studentskog kulturnog centra, 1976, 7" vinyl. Discogs. [2].

Lily Greenham, Lingual Music, Paradigm Discs, 2007, 2xCD. Works from 1968-1974. Discogs.

Writings, statements

Lily Greenham, "Lingual Music", in Kontextsound, ed. Michael Gibbs, Amsterdam: Kontexts Publications, 1977, p 22.

Poets, artists, collectives

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  Mirella Bentivoglio, Io [Me], 1970s. Source.

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  Françoise Janicot, Encoconnage, 1972. Photo: Bruno Scotti. Source.

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  Katalin Ladik giving a sound poetry performance at the Chapel Gallery in Balatonboglár, Hungary, July 1973. Photo: György Galántai. Source.

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  Ewa Partum, Zmiana, 1974. MS Lodz.

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  Cozette de Charmoy, 1975. Photo: Rodney Grey. Source.

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  Michèle Métail, 1976. Photo: Françoise Janicot. Source.

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  Irma Blank photographed in her studio, Milan, 1977, in front of Law I and Law II, 1975, ink on parchment-like paper. Photograph: Maria Mulas. Source.

Exhibition catalogues

Group exhibitions

Materializzazione del linguaggio, ed. Mirella Bentivoglio, Biennale di Venezia 1978-Arti visive e architettura, 1978, 55 pp. Catalogue for exh. held 20 Sep-15 Oct 1978. Text by Mirella Bentivoglio, biographies of the exhibiting artists including Sonia Delaunay, Natalia Goncharova, Irma Blank, Mirella Bentivoglio, Lia Dreai, Chiara Diamantini, Elisabetta Gut, Ketty La Rocca, Lucia Marcucci, Simona Weller, Carla Vasio, Giulia Niccolai, Paola Levi Montalcini, Maria Lai, Tomaso Binga. [3] {{it}

Solo exhibitions

Mirella Bentivoglio: Pages: Selected Works, 1966-2012, ed. & intro. Frances K. Pohl, Claremont, CA: Pomona College Museum of Art, 2015, 152 pp, Excerpt (pp 57-90). This book is the first museum publication in English on Italian artist Mirella Bentivoglio (born 1922). It includes critical essays by art historians Frances K. Pohl, Leslie Cozzi and Franca Zoccoli, interviews with Bentivoglio and John David O'Brien, and a biographical note by Rosaria Abate, plus a bibliography. The book highlights work from the recent exhibition at the Pomona College Museum of Art, which surveyed nearly 50 years of the artist's work as an internationally renowned member of the Concrete and visual poetry movements. Including works in paper, stone, metal, wood, cloth, plastic and Plexiglass and with numerous previously unpublished images, it reveals the ways in which Bentivoglio engaged with many of the most significant formal and theoretical issues of postwar art--for example, the relationship between image and text, the impact of mass media and consumer culture, feminist critiques of patriarchy and artistic interventions in public spaces. Exhibition: Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, USA (20.01-17.05.2015). [4] (English)

Cozette de Charmoy: Podróże wyobraźni, eds. Urszula Czartoryska and Jaromir Jedlinski, Lodz: Muzeum sztuki, 1987, [16] pp. (Polish)

Reception, art historical studies, theory

Leslie Cozzi, "Notes on the Index, Continued: Italian Feminism and the Art of Mirella Bentivoglio and Ketty La Rocca", Cahiers d’études italiennes 16, 2013, pp 213-234. (English)

See also

Concrete poetry, Sound poetry