Márton Koppány’s deceptively simple images, are comprised of the small visual symbols of our modern life: yes, ellipses, quotation marks, and speech balloons, but also everyday objects such as a chair, a fish, some sunglasses. But he doesn’t attempt to represent these things, but rather presents simple photographs of them. It’s our clipart-world, our JPGscape. And these images — from the language of words or the language of visuality — play together on a flat field comprised of simple unmodulated colours. They live in that unhurried purgatory of the semantic present, living out the relationships of unworried signs in an semiotic utopian playground without hierarchies.
Study with poet Charles Bernstein in a master class workshop at the Chicago School of Poetics. This one-day online class offers an intimate environment within which to work with one of the key figures of contemporary poetry.
The class runs for 3 hours and will be held in our online, video-conferenced classroom, so you can attend from your own home, from anywhere in the world.
The opening selection from a work in progress, 'Barbaric Vast & Wild: An Assemblage of Outside & Subterranean Poetry,' edited with John Bloomberg-Rissman
COMMENTARY
The first traces of poetic mind begin in darkness: a mystery of figures — sorcerers or shamans — on a journey into hidden places, beyond the boundaries of light & human dwellings. It is in the depths of those caves — 30,000 years in the past — that we get the first glimmers of a move toward the recording of memory & an active imagination that frees such memory & brings it into a new configuration.
How Huang Engages with Pound and Fenellosa’s Theories of Chinese as a Poetic Language
This essay is by Gina Elia.
Within the first ten years of the twentieth century, American intellectual Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908) had written an essay, later edited and published by Ezra Pound (1885-1972), that was called “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” (1920; 1936). This essay proved crucial to not only American Modernism—Pound used it to promote the Imagist movement in poetry—but also to the development of the perception of Chinese language and culture in the West. The essay propounded the idea that Chinese is primarily a pictographic language, a view that has persisted in the West to the present day. Furthermore, it posits that this pictographic quality plays a key role in the writing and interpretation of Chinese poetry. While generally dismissed as Orientalist by contemporary scholars of East Asia, UC-Santa Barbara professor Yunte Huang disagrees with this simplistic reading. On the one hand, he agrees that the Orientalism rampant in this essay cannot be ignored. On the other hand, he sees the essay as key in the ongoing, roundabout inventing of culture that occurs as texts cross cultural and linguistic borders, and thus as important to the trajectory of thought concerning the Chinese language in the West today.
The name of Helen Hajnoczky's current project, Magyarazni, means ‘to explain,’ but translates literally to mean ‘make it Hungarian.’ Magyarazni is comprised of 44 visual poems based on Hungarian folk art, one for each letter of the Hungarian alphabet. Each visual poem is accompanied by a poem written in English, each titled with a Hungarian word beginning with the letter in the accompanying visual poem.
Helen spoke with me about Magyarazni.
GB: I’m intrigued by how this work engages with issues of art vs. decoration, artist vs. artisan, and handiwork vs. print.
HH: Though many people who create folk art are talented, skilled artists, folk art is at the same time something that lay people can confidently engage with and participate in. Some very charming folk art is not perfect, but contains irregularities that reveal the hand of the artist. This is certainly the case with my work. I am not skilled at drawing, but I don’t think that fact precludes me from making interesting folk art. One of the things I find appealing about making contemporary folk art is that you can draw from a broad set of existing designs to use in your own work. Making folk art does not demand that you be completely innovative.
Fabulist of the surface
Márton Koppány and the shimmer of meaning
Márton Koppány’s deceptively simple images, are comprised of the small visual symbols of our modern life: yes, ellipses, quotation marks, and speech balloons, but also everyday objects such as a chair, a fish, some sunglasses. But he doesn’t attempt to represent these things, but rather presents simple photographs of them. It’s our clipart-world, our JPGscape. And these images — from the language of words or the language of visuality — play together on a flat field comprised of simple unmodulated colours. They live in that unhurried purgatory of the semantic present, living out the relationships of unworried signs in an semiotic utopian playground without hierarchies.
Master class (on-line) with Charles Bernstein at the Chicago School of Poeics on 10/19/13
Study with poet Charles Bernstein in a master class workshop at the Chicago School of Poetics. This one-day online class offers an intimate environment within which to work with one of the key figures of contemporary poetry.
The class runs for 3 hours and will be held in our online, video-conferenced classroom, so you can attend from your own home, from anywhere in the world.
Outside & subterranean poems, a mini-anthology in progress (55): 'Figures in the Dark, the Dancer at Trois Frères'
The opening selection from a work in progress, 'Barbaric Vast & Wild: An Assemblage of Outside & Subterranean Poetry,' edited with John Bloomberg-Rissman
COMMENTARY
The first traces of poetic mind begin in darkness: a mystery of figures — sorcerers or shamans — on a journey into hidden places, beyond the boundaries of light & human dwellings. It is in the depths of those caves — 30,000 years in the past — that we get the first glimmers of a move toward the recording of memory & an active imagination that frees such memory & brings it into a new configuration.
Gina Elia: A Closer Look at Yunte Huang's SHI
How Huang Engages with Pound and Fenellosa’s Theories of Chinese as a Poetic Language
This essay is by Gina Elia.
Within the first ten years of the twentieth century, American intellectual Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908) had written an essay, later edited and published by Ezra Pound (1885-1972), that was called “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” (1920; 1936). This essay proved crucial to not only American Modernism—Pound used it to promote the Imagist movement in poetry—but also to the development of the perception of Chinese language and culture in the West. The essay propounded the idea that Chinese is primarily a pictographic language, a view that has persisted in the West to the present day. Furthermore, it posits that this pictographic quality plays a key role in the writing and interpretation of Chinese poetry. While generally dismissed as Orientalist by contemporary scholars of East Asia, UC-Santa Barbara professor Yunte Huang disagrees with this simplistic reading. On the one hand, he agrees that the Orientalism rampant in this essay cannot be ignored. On the other hand, he sees the essay as key in the ongoing, roundabout inventing of culture that occurs as texts cross cultural and linguistic borders, and thus as important to the trajectory of thought concerning the Chinese language in the West today.
Beyond the (fl)oral tradition: Folk art, Hungarian, and the visual poem
Helen Hajnoczky's 'Magyarazni'
The name of Helen Hajnoczky's current project, Magyarazni, means ‘to explain,’ but translates literally to mean ‘make it Hungarian.’ Magyarazni is comprised of 44 visual poems based on Hungarian folk art, one for each letter of the Hungarian alphabet. Each visual poem is accompanied by a poem written in English, each titled with a Hungarian word beginning with the letter in the accompanying visual poem.
Helen spoke with me about Magyarazni.
GB: I’m intrigued by how this work engages with issues of art vs. decoration, artist vs. artisan, and handiwork vs. print.
HH: Though many people who create folk art are talented, skilled artists, folk art is at the same time something that lay people can confidently engage with and participate in. Some very charming folk art is not perfect, but contains irregularities that reveal the hand of the artist. This is certainly the case with my work. I am not skilled at drawing, but I don’t think that fact precludes me from making interesting folk art. One of the things I find appealing about making contemporary folk art is that you can draw from a broad set of existing designs to use in your own work. Making folk art does not demand that you be completely innovative.