FROM LINE TO CONSTELLATION

Granoff Center // Brown University

March 12 - April 10, 2015

In Eugen Gomringer’s 1954 essay, From Line to Constellation, he discusses poetry that “can be perceived visually as a whole as well as in its parts” and for this reason it “is memorable and imprints itself upon the mind as a picture” and “becomes an object to be both seen and used.” Considering the poem as picture, we are reminded that text is image as well; built from formal components, considered with aesthetics, comprised of shapes and symbols. The written languages that we know and use today are not only letters that form words that form sentences, but are also a series of content driven visual decisions manifested through mark making. With this logic, we have collected a group of works from the contexts of both poetry and visual art that utilize language as either a medium or a layer within the visual landscape. We have combined these works as a suggestion that in both art forms there exists movement towards similar objectives, seeking to employ in one medium what is taken for granted in the other. We extend Gomringer’s suggestion of a line of text further, to a line that is not only written but drawn, printed, painted, tufted, filmed. Perhaps, when joined together, these efforts establish a context of their own, where what might commonly be recognized as ‘visual art’ or ‘poetry’ becomes integrated into a singular practice. Existing notions of image and text as two distinct devices for communication become partially erased: what is drawn can be read, what is written can be seen and experienced. “In the constellation something is brought into the world. It is a reality in itself and not a poem about something or other. The constellation is an invitation.”