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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.
[Convert the word to the material
where what we would like to say cannot
penetrate beyond
that which the material would tell us] (translation by Manus O’Dwyer)
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Chema Madoz seems to constantly play this game in his artistic practice. Once this fantastic association is displayed in the photo-poem, the audience has to work on searching for a nexus between the binomials. An excellent example is that of the binomial cloud-skeleton (fig. 1). What do a cloud and a skeleton have in common? Chema Madoz offers an answer that goes beyond the resemblance of shape and colour. It also offers a metaphysical reading by correlating the ephemeral nature of life (the skeleton) with the ever-changing essence of the sky.
Fig. 1. Chema Madoz. Untitled. © Chema Madoz/ VEGAP
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Very often Madoz’s binomials relate to each other by formal and/or functional analogy, by metaphor or metonymy. This is the case of a series of objects linked by their similar shape or texture. The formal analogy is very clear in the stone-balloon, the pearl-castanets (fig. 2) and the butterflies-shells, for example, whereas other pieces such as the feather-flame and the grass-soles experiment with the sensorial, in particular with touch.
Displacing the object produces an entirely new association, which frequently conveys meaning through a literal interpretation of metaphor or through hyperbole. As figure 3 shows, the soles of those flip-flops are literally (as soft as) grass.
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Chema Madoz states in various interviews that, although the photographed object remains recognizable, his aim is to make it loose its essence, to defamiliarise it so that it gains new dimensions of meaning (Madoz, 2009:89). This loss very frequently translates into the creation of innovative, unexpected uses. A new context is also a new function and thus a redefinition of the two objects represented, as illustrated by the pipe-flue, the book-toaster and the drainpipe plate holder (fig. 3). By so doing, as Catherine Coleman has stated, Madoz provokes “a reexamination, not only of the function of the object, but also of the nature of the object itself” (2009:16). I will return to the issue of ontological transgression in the final section.
Fig. 3. Chema Madoz. Untitled. © Chema Madoz/ VEGAP
Fig. 2. Chema Madoz. Untitled. © Chema Madoz/ VEGAP
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Fig. 4. Chema Madoz. Untitled. © Chema Madoz/ VEGAP
2.2 Poetic Silence
One of the characteristics that mark Chema Madoz’s visual poetics is the creative use of ellipsis. As his work has matured, Madoz’s photos have become more elementary, more bare. This process has been explained in various interviews: “Some objects can still be located in specific places but in general information is increasingly eliminated from the photographs and there are times when I feel they’ve reached a point in which it is difficult to keep removing elements because the next step would be the absolute void”, (interview 2009).
His black and white objects are devoid of accessories; they are untitled and placed in an undefined background. The consistent use of black and white erases any identifiable sign which would help us place the object in a specific temporal frame: “The combination of black and white makes it harder to place the pictures in time. Colour makes it easier to identify a specific era”, (interview 2009). The object is thus suspended in space and time, abstracted and decontextualised from its everyday setting.
In particular the absence of a title is something Madoz is frequently asked to comment on. By not giving his pieces any title, his figures take centre stage. It seems that by silencing title, background, temporal and spatial setting, the object is given its own voice. Conversely, the spectator is invited to create a personal interpretation of the work with no previous cues imposed by the author. It is precisely these visual ellipses that allow for a multiplicity of readings.
Madoz’s use of the non-said to generate meaning can be related to Mallarme’s conception of visual silence as an essential ingredient of the poem: “The white spaces indeed take on importance, are initially striking; ordinarily versification required them around like silence” (Mallarmé 1956: 455). This concept of visual silence confers great importance to the act of reading – that is, to the recipient of the work of art – an aspect that has been adopted later in reader-oriented approaches to literature. A well-known example is Wolfgang Iser’s concept of semantic gaps (1978). According to this principle, narrative tissue is necessarily incomplete because it is based on selection of information. It is only through inevitable omissions that a story gains its dynamism. The act of reading helps weave connections between those loose ends and elaborates causal relationships silenced in the text. In other words, the literary text only gains meaning when experienced by the reader. The same mechanism seems to be performed when we confront the silences present in Madoz’s ‘photo-poems’. It is up to us to establish causal relationships between the seemingly random binomials or to (re)create a plot evoked by, for example, the two previously mentioned works of flash-fiction (fig. 4).
2.3 Transgression
There is no doubt about the fact that Chema Madoz’s work is motivated by an impulse to transgress: a transgression that operates at multiple levels.
His ‘photo-poems’ very often are founded upon a transgression of the dimensions of space and time. The combination of materials and textures leads to impossible figures that defy the laws of nature. This is the case, for example, of the stone-balloon floating freely in space, or the cloud being impossibly held by a tree trunk.
Chema Madoz also offers a transgression of linguistic codes. The most striking and recurrent one is his personal ‘translation’ of the musical into the visual. Madoz has highlighted in different interviews his attraction towards musical language and his lack of music literacy. This limitation has become a source of inspiration.
Sometimes, the formal characteristics and potential parallelisms between a musical note and a large variety of ordinary objects are brought to the fore, as with the bell clapper-note, the cherry tree with hanging notes or the martini glass with an olive-note. In other pieces, Madoz plays upon the principle of synesthesia: because he cannot read music, he sees music. Hence music sheets are visually translated into and juxtaposed with chessboards or dominos (fig. 5), for example.
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Fig. 5. Chema Madoz. Untitled. © Chema Madoz/ VEGAP