Chema Madoz: Poetic Voice, Visual Silence and Transgression

 

 

“Perception of an object costs

precise the object’s loss –“

Emily Dickinson

 

“Convertir la palabra en la materia

donde lo que quisiéramos decir no pueda

penetrar más allá

de lo que la materia nos diría” (José Ángel Valente)

 

 

The seemingly oxymoronic art form of visual poetry is an artistic transgression in itself. Being poetry meant to be seen, it combines, merges or juxtaposes the visual with the verbal in pictograms, diagrams, ideograms, expressive typography or visual analogies. The genre presupposes both a viewer and a reader at the same time: two different artistic languages coexist so that the viewer-reader has to process information in verbal as well as visual codes. As a result, visual poetry defies the pre-established way of reading poetry line by line. William Bohn quotes a passage by Foucault that I reproduce here because it clearly illustrates the inherent transgressive essence of visual poetry: “Thus the visual poem claims to abolish playfully the oldest oppositions of our alphabetic civilization: showing and naming; representing and telling; reproducing and articulating; imitating and signifying; looking and reading” (Foucault in Bohn 1993:2).

 

By showing that the formal configuration of words reinforces the linguistic message, visual poets have also challenged a long established dogma in artistic criticism: the distinction between temporal and spatial arts. Lessing’s influential essay “Laocoon: or the Limits of Poetry and Painting” (1766), for example, positioned literature within the temporal arts (since the literary text was conceived as a succession of words, sounds and events), while sculpture or painting offered objects that were simultaneously apprehended, and thus belonged to the spatial arts.

 

Visual poetry is, however, a statement on the intersection – and complementarity – between temporal and spatial arts; between the verbal and the iconic, the simultaneous and the sequential (a symbiosis that is now more than ever diffused with the advent of digital poetry). The poem acquires the same ontology as a physical object: it becomes an artistic ‘object’ in itself. We could think of this fusion between the lyrical and the material in visual poetry not as print poems arranged in a particular pattern (a poem made object), but as objects with particular lyrical properties (an object made poem). By modifying the focus that most criticism has taken on visual poetry and keeping it on the lyricism of objects, I hope to suggest new directions theory can take in this field. These directions inevitably touch upon the connections between different artistic practices, such as literature, plastic arts, painting and photography. To explore these complexities, the analysis will centre on the ‘photo-poems’ by Spanish contemporary artist Chema Madoz (Madrid, 1958). These ‘photo-poems’ are photographs of ordinary objects found, manipulated, invented, juxtaposed or simply combined so that their conceptual, semiotic and lyrical properties are brought to the fore.

 

 

1. Visual Poetry, or the Word Made Flesh

 

Whereas the origins of visual poetry can be traced back to classical Greek literature – as seen in, for example, Simias of Rhodes’ visual poem The Egg (300 BC) – never until the European avant-garde had it experienced such an unprecedented revival. Just before the outbreak of the First World War, Apollinarie’s first visual poem “Lettre-Océan” (“Ocean Letter”, 1914) appeared. Carlo Carrá also published “Festa patrottica-dipinto parolibero” (“Patriotic Holiday-Freeword Painting”) in that same year, a collage made by different newspaper snippets which he called “word painting”. Their compositions primarily explored the visual properties of literary language, while also exposing the lyrical potential of visual art. Visual poetry became an exercise of rebellion against literary conventions and predetermined divisions between art forms. Deeply influenced by the Futurist poets and driven by their principle of parole in libertà, a generation of poets in France and Italy sought to transgress the layout of the physical page and the linear, sequential reading imposed by traditional poetry. In fact, in some visual poems where the visual predominates over the verbal, artists sought to generate a simultaneous impression of movement through language, an effect that in some cases could only be grasped at a glance, as shown by the verbal splitting headache of “Jaqueca” (“Migraine”, 1923) by Alberto Hidalgo or the falling acrobatic letters from “L’acròbata us diu adéu” (“The acrobat says goodbye to you”) by Joan Brossa.

 

Visual poetry took hold in Spain some years later, during 1919-1923. Numerous critics have remarked upon the great role the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro played in this emergence. Huidobro arrived to Madrid in 1918 after being immersed for a year in the Parisian avant-garde, where he also published a volume of visual poetry entitled Horizon Carré (Square Horizon, 1917). As Williard Bohn notes (2013:19-21), his visit was decisive in that it consolidated the French visual poetry movement in Spain. It also coincided with the decline of modernist poetry and the search for new models of lyrical expression. Among the most influential Spanish visual poets were Guillermo de Torre (author of the collection of poems Hélices), Josep María Junoy (founder of the Ultraist movement in Spain) and later Joan Brossa and Guillem Viladot, both Catalan artists who experimented with juxtapositions of objects and poetry.

 

Over the past few decades, Spain has witnessed a notable regeneration in the art of visual poetry. A series of contemporary artists have explored new instruments and spaces to generate new forms of visualization and reading through a combination of text with image, photograph and/or object. Javier Castañeda’s Micrografías are a good example. These “neonomads micropostards”, as the author himself calls them, are taken exclusively with the mobile phone and accompanied by text. They capture an increasingly popular form of ‘flash-journalism’. In a similar vein are the photo-articles by the well-known author Juan José Millás, published regularly by El País under the section La Imagen. Also worth noting are the photo-stories (“foto-relatos”) by Antonio Cardiel. These connect image to word, in particular by writing untold stories of historical figures. Another interesting case is that of Daniel Gil, designer of book covers for the Spanish publishing house Alianza from 1965 to 1990. His images aim to capture the essence of the book in an often abstract or surrealist image.

 

Despite the increasing growth of scholarship dealing with fusions of the verbal with the material or iconic in a variety of forms, criticism of visual poetry – specially Hispanic criticism – has seemed to focus to a great extent on the ‘objectification’ of poems through their visual arrangement; that is, on how poems become visual objects. The main line of thought has tended to be on how the principles of sculpture, painting, photography and other forms of visual or digital arts apply to poetry (Bohn 1993, 2013; López Fernández 2008; Millán Domínguez 2012). However, my intention in this article is to explore the issue from the other angle, by examining material objects that have lyrical and narrative properties.

 

How can the principles of poetry and narrative be applied to objects? How does an object become a metaphor? It can be argued that plastic art always possesses a rhetorical dimension, a poetic one, but this is not always brought to the fore. Some recent artistic projects serve as examples to illustrate a clear intention to enhance the lyrical voice of objects. They include “The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things” (curated by Mark Leckey, Notthingham Contemporary 2013), the “Theatre of Speaking Objects” (Eva Kotátková, Project Arts Centre 2014) and “The Museum of Broken Relationships” (Olinka Vištica, Dražen Grubišić 2003, Zagreb). The first exhibition seeks to capture a form of animism in objects that acts as a reflection on the influence of the virtual in the dissolution of the material in our contemporary culture. The different objects there seek to communicate with the audience as well as with each other in a dialogue that transgresses the distinctions of past, present and future. In Kotátková’s theatre performance, the artist offers a collection of objects each with an incorporated audio speaker. The audience is invited to walk around these objects and listen to the stories they have to tell. These objects act as mediators (as actors) of a message. They become a ‘subject’, each with its own voice and story. As the artist herself explains (2014), her concept was inspired by psychodrama, where several objects assist a patient in telling a traumatic story. Folowing a similar line of thought, “The Museum of Broken Relationships” is a healing space, a domain designed to host those objects deposited by their owners after a breakup. There is nothing extraordinary about most objects, except for the love stories that accompany them (e.g. Divorce Day Mad Dwarf, or A Cell Phone).

 

 

2. Chema Madoz’s Lyrical Objects

 

Born in Madrid in 1958, Chema Madoz is perhaps the most interesting artist in contemporary Spain who currently experiments with the fusion between object and the lyrical. Although still relatively unknown outside his native country, this poet, photographer and visual artist has received Spain’s National Photography Award, the PhotoEspaña Prize as well as the Higashikawa Prize (all three in 2000). His work has been displayed in the Museo Reina Sofía (Objetos 1990-1999, first retrospective of a Spanish living photographer) and his travelling show Poética has won the appraisal of international art critics.

 

There is a clear turning point in Madoz’s artistic path. In the 1980s, Madoz became increasingly aware of the need for a change in his artistic practice. As a result, he eliminated the presence of the human body in his photography and devoted all his attention to objects. “I need to reconsider language. […]. At this point, I’ve decided to work with a universe that is much more closed, where the object acquires the size of the image and the notion of time becomes totally different”, (2009:316). An ordinary key he found was one of his first objects: he forged the keyhole in the upper part of this key (2009:315). Whereas initially it might seem just an interplay between visual analogies, this object also invites philosophical reflection (as do all his ‘photo-poems’). Bearing no title, like most of his work, this puzzling object is, paradoxically, a key to itself.

 

Madoz’s work hasn’t been short of comparisons. His photographic poetics have been related to surrealism and Freudian psychoanalysis. His metaphysical reflections on language have earned him a comparison with Jorge Luis Borges. His impossible photography has drawn parallels with Duan Michals and Man Ray and his impossible objects, with those by Jacques Carelman. His distortion of ordinary reality through a fusion between the visual and lyrical has given rise to a correlation with Joan Brossa and with Ramón Gómez de la Serna, inventor of the literary genre of the Greguerías, which are short aphorisms that, as Gómez de la Serna put it, encourage us to “see things differently and find mysterious analogies between them” (2009:11). Madoz’s lyrical view on objects is, however, unique. His work is consistent and highly original, transgressing ontological differences between lyricism and object. This makes it ideal for exploring artistic juxtapositions.

 

 

2.1 Poetic Voice

 

The Fantastic Binomial

What turns an ordinary object into a lyrical artifact? Leaving aside the technical and formal aspects of photography, one of the most common rhetorical strategies in Chema Madoz’s lyrical objects is what I will call ‘the fantastic binomial’. This technique is based on the poetic devices of synesthesia, oxymoron or semantic impertinence in that it juxtaposes semantic fields which are, if not incompatible, at least unconnected. This conceptual disjunction gives rise to an unordinary association embodied by Madoz’ object.

The fantastic binomial is a creative writing technique popularised by the Italian writer and pedagogue Gianni Rodari (see Gramática de la fantastía, 1983). Rodari proposes a creative method based on the disassociation of words from their ordinary context in order to “liberate them from the verbal chains they commonly are part of. Estranged, displaced” (Rodari 1983:23). The basic principle is the connection of two words from distant semantic fields: “The word, when isolated, acts only when it finds a second one that provokes it, that obliges it to exit the worn paths of habit and discover new ways of meaning” (Rodari 1983:21).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flash-fiction

Some of Madoz’s pieces have a very remarkable feature, one that truly juxtaposes the notion of the simultaneous (image) with the sequential (narrative): they tell – or rather evoke – a story. Beyond the poetic image a potential plot is hidden behind that combination of objects or images. And suspense is a feature of this plot.

 

The best example of this is “Tú”, in which the graphic accent has been replaced by a knife (note the parallelism with Gómez de la Serna’s greguería: “El acento es la vacuna de la palabra” (“the accent is the vaccine of the word”, 2010:75). Once more, this invites us to go beyond merely identifying the shape of the accent with that of the knife. The combination of you with a knife creates a story, a plot of which only the denouement is presented. A similar narrative emerges from the dead figure and the glass (fig. 4) These two works prompt a series of questions that stimulate the reader/spectator to (re)create a mental narrative in the form of detective fiction in order to hypothesise on questions such as the identity of the victim, that of the assassin, the place, the time and the crime motive, for example.