Page 36 - Studio International - September 1972

Everything Standing around the art galleries all last
winter reading wall messages I got to thinking
should be as simple as it is about my old acquaintance Jonathan Williams,
who never to my knowledge took to the walls,
but not simpler but produced a lot of visual information; about
Bern Porter whose messages could pass for
conceptual art, but could never be contained on
a wall. Depending on which page you scan
Dore Ashton either in Williams or Porter, you might well take
them for the perfect exemplars of the new art
forms defined by Nigel Greenwood Inc. Ltd.
recently as 'no longer based on the object and
its lasting physical properties.' Their books
might fit the definition of the movement's own
literary forms 'in which the contents include art
works as well as information and
documentation.' The conceptual artists who
dwell in art magazines, art galleries, and
international art jamborees, and the concrete
poets whose natural element is the little
magazine and the Book, share a great many
premises, and it seems to me finally (I who take
my poetry lying down) that the concrete poets
differ mainly in range : there is just more of it
available between the covers of a book than
there can be on the walls of a gallery. Despite
the paradoxes-the concrete poets want to make
poems objects and the conceptual artists want to
make visual art without an object-both share
pretty much the same shifting ground, the
Floating World of the West.
In terms of practical criticism a few clear
distinctions may be made before comparisons.
For instance, Art and Language as professed
mainly by British conceptualists with occasional
filial echoes in New York is remote from the
purlieus of poetry. The well educated young
men in the movement assume the mantle of
estheticians, a behaviour that scandalizes most
poets. Their linguistic analyses, even on walls,
tend to lean heavily on philosophy and the
philosopher's need to define. Before they can
make art they must define it, which means they
may never get around to making it. Their
propositions, though, may have the value of art
for them. The mathematician often finds his
formulae 'beautiful'. It is probably safe to
assume that the beauty of a mathematical
formula is best perceived by him who has
wrestled with it. The moment of illumination is
replete with a past for him, but for few others.
Those conceptualists who dally with philosophy
(informed by science nowadays) or who work
with numbers, are more distant from the
concrete poets than the ordinary painter is. But
those whose experiments with language and
image verge on poetry, such as Richard Long
and sometimes Douglas Huebler, can be said to
share many impulses with their writing
confreres. They share above all the need to
exert themselves in the terrific twentieth-
century housecleaning common to all the arts.
The advantage may lie with the poet in the book
though, for a book can also be an escape from
the house. But poet and concrete visualist alike
probably go along with the list of antecedents
offered by conceptualists in Brazil such as

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