Verbivocovisuality

Julian Lass: A singular encounter, 2012

The central themes are appropriation, constraint, visual and sound composition, and reliance on intertextuality, incorporating geometric and graphic elements into the poetic act or process. One example is Noulipo, or new Oulipo, whose writers rearrange words and letters according to strict rules. See here. It’s a move away from a purely verbal concept of verse towards a “verbivocovisual expression”. Also makes me think of: exophony (a useful description of the phenomenon of writing in a language outside their mother tongue - see here) and polyglottology (use of more than one language).

But to appropriate the term for my own interests, verbivocovisuality can point to an alternative attitude towards the mass of information circulating online, a larger narrative that questions the production, circulation and use of word and image in the iPad age. The significance of this is not in what the verbivocovisual looks like, or how it is arranged, but in raising questions about instrumentality, information, and use of text and image: what is being made and by whom; how the appropriation of text and image results in new functions, and, more importantly, how technology shapes such possibilities.

Key to verbivocovisuality is integrating writing (and copying) into the visual. This is made superficially easy by the copy and paste of the computer. But there is art in an act of retrospective control, when all the disparate elements are strung together. For example, Wendy Chun comments on the use of ‘sourcery’ (Chun (2008) On Sourcery, or Code as Fetish. Configurations 16, 3 (Fall) p.229) where agency and authorship are distributed between hardware, software and readers of texts. New relationships are created between the words and letters on the screen, the software and hardware that interprets them and presents them to the reader and the reader’s own interactions with the represented content/context.

Playfulness, appropriation and constraint have been central to writing for centuries (e.g. Shakespeare’s ‘seas incardine’). But verbivocovisuality has a preoccupation with rejecting conventional tropes of story, persona and scene. Arbitrary rules determine form. Making becomes fabrication and arrangement. It will not permit you to get lost in its content. It throws it back at you, jolts you, often to the point of irritation. It is ‘Anti-Text’, to use Art & Language’s phrase and so we are forced to pay attention to the idea. Verbivocovisuality wants you to discuss itself. Perhaps even fall asleep while doing so.

Conceptual writing and photography is a necessary response to new media, as both need to redefine themselves to deal with photo/textual oversaturation. The web only differs from conventional means of presentation by the speed at which it is deliverable. As Marjorie Perloff has said, ‘the artist is not necessarily someone who draws well, but someone who thinks well.’ In this way a verbivocovisual piece presented online has more in common with a conceptual video perhaps — treating information as material.

A polemic against artists’ appropriation rests on a familiar high-low culture argument — that it’s a self-congratulatory knowingness against those innocently producing and writing text on the internet to engage in this kind of self-reflection. Another polemic is that it’s navel-gazing: verbivocovisualists are distanced from the ‘real’ world and thus out of touch. But verbivocovisual artists move between such objections: playful Pop-orientated aesthetics and an ethnographic curiosity in collecting snippets are driving motives.

I came across the French Norwegian artist Caroline Bergvall - and was struck by a mixed media piece (in the sense that it’s acted out, then photographed and filmed, then posted online) where a plane draws a political script across the sky. The integration of the movement of words in space as part of a narrative against rendition is its main theme. I hope she can forgive me for publishing a picture from her website, www.carolinebergvall.com. I also wonder whether shown here and taken out of context it’s actually anything more than a residue of the original, but there’s something beautiful about the text against the cloud in this still photography that caught my eye that counters seeing the ‘real’ act of a plane flying words across the sky.

Verbivocovisuality: coined by Campos, Haroldo de; and Campos, Augusto de, (respectively, born August 19, 1929, São Paulo, Brazil—died August 16, 2003, São Paulo; born 1931, São Paulo), poets and literary critics, best known as the prime movers in the creation of Brazilian concrete poetry in the 1950s (Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Image © Caroline Bergvall