Sacred and Profane: The devotional, the subversive and the magical in visual text practice

This paper was delivered at the International Conference of the Image, Chicago, in 2013

Relationships between image and language have informed key developments in twentieth-century visual art. Tensions between ‘word’ and ‘picture’ have prompted dynamic experiments across what had previously been distinct fields of literary and visual practice.
Relatively little work has been done to establish an overarching critical and historical context for these practices, which can be viewed as part of a larger set of cultural traditions extending beyond the individuated activities that modern conditions term ‘creative‘ practice, to be considered within the broader context of faith and belief systems.
Jeff Nuttall has observed of the cross-media experiments of the 1960s underground:
‘These games are called magic, original ceremonial, more recently are called art.’”’
Within the apparent contradictions of the visual text, the juxtaposition of mutually exclusive systems: (description and representation), provides a context of contemplative enquiry into the nature of being which links the poetic and the devotional.
This work occupies several overlapping domains: as well as visual poetry and the sub-categories of concrete, spatial, semantic and pattern poetry, it extends into the use of language in site-specific sculpture and dimensional typography.
Enquiry into the cultural dimensions of language was a key preoccupation of the 20th century avant-garde, and experimental typography was a key instrument of that enquiry, in a continuum of practice that can be traced from Stephane Mallarmé to Kurt Schwittters, encompassing key examples from Futurism, Dada and Surrealism.
Visual typography is explicitly subversive in calling into question both the defining conventions of both language and visual representation. Experiments in this field were to interrogate not only the margins and boundaries of the page and the fixed horizontals of the grid, (a defining feature of the printed word since Gutenberg) but the authority of language itself, and the social and intellectual orthodoxies which that authority was seen to denote and embody.
The canonical ‘Parole in libertà’ of Marinetti and his contemporaries may be viewed not only as formal graphic enquiry or literary experiment, but also as a contrarian attack upon the authorities of church and state which the authority of language had come to represent: it is a disruptive language-magic or spell.
The idea that words may be read as images, images as words, suggests a ‘counterworld’ of reversal and misrule, a feast of fools, a language of inversion and pattern-making familiar in any study of magical practices.
The equally subversive example of Kurt Schwitters was crucial to the emergence of many ‘underground’ art movements of the 1960s, and in particular the development of concrete poetry, as seen in the work of Eugen Gomringer in Switzerland, Emmett Williams in the USA, Bob Cobbing, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Dom Sylvester Houédard in the UK. In her 1970 book The Word as Image, Berjouhi Bowler defined the movement in this way:
‘The concrete poem is designed to be an object in itself, not an interpreter of exterior objects or subjective feelings’
Houédard states:
‘New poetry is concrete because it is a poetry of nouns… …it makes poems that are concrete objects themselves. It is spatial, because it creates its own space.’
Alongside these formal and linguistic distinctions, this movement reveals a significant spiritual dimension. Visual poems share with spells and sacred texts a common reverence for the word as something more than a working component of language, viewing it instead as embodied truth.
Bowler quotes Pierre Garnier’s 1962 Manifesto for a New Poetry – Visual and Phonic, identifying an explicit spiritual aspiration:
‘It is the task of poets to make the word holy again.’
The cultural resonance of the embodied word is a linking theme that connects established faiths, marginalised magic practices, and creative subversion, within the field of language.
In the visual poem ‘I am the resurrection’ by the Scots poet Edwin Morgan, a reflection prompted by his father’s death is simultaneously line and field, invocation and ritual intervention. Visual rhythm, subtraction, repetition and pattern are invoked; the poem is the visible residue of a programmed sequence of material actions.
Description and actuality
Relationships between word and image, description and representation, have energized artistic production and critical debate from the late 19th century to the present. Writers have used visual strategies to extend and disrupt the communicative values of words, while visual artists have used language to interrogate the conventions of representation and ideas of meaning.
The collapsing of distinctions between these activities was a characteristic of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, a world populated by painter-writers and poet-printers, notable for a cross-disciplinary spirit which debated the very nature and communicability of existence.
Visual poetry is informed by tensions over the contested territory of the image, by a dynamic of contradiction and duality. Making words into physical objects invokes inherent ambiguities and contradictions; a play of mutually irreconcilable concepts which can be used to question the assumed relationships between language and material experience.
To give a text a visual form, whether abstract or mimetic, reveals the inherent contradictions of language. While we take for granted an equivalence between the word and its subject, they are not linked by any actual resemblance, but only by a shared perception of their meaning.
Rendering letters back into three dimensions reminds us that language is fragile and illogical, but also suggests that it could operate dimensionally, evoking three-dimensional space beyond the linear structure of the page.
The pictographic text, figured poem or carmina figurata, has a history longer than that of type itself, and it is from here that we can trace the origin of an active tradition of avant-garde practice which runs through the 20th century from the work of Mallarmé and Apollinaire to the present day.
The first western examples are generally recognized to be the work of Simmias of Rhodes in the 4th century. Others include the English metaphysical poet George Herbert, most notably in the poem ‘Easter Wings’, from the collection The Temple published in 1633. A key example of shaped text in devotional context, ‘Easter Wings’ is an invocation; It identifies its objectives and asks that they be granted, and thus performs a language-ritual which mimics the writers aspiration.
In Stephane Mallarmé’s ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’ , a dense and complex symbolist text is animated by the articulation of indents and margins to form a visual composition. This references the ancient tradition of the figured poem and anticipates subsequent developments in the work of Guillaume Apollinaire.
Apollinaire’s Calligrammes introduced the figured poem into the twentieth-century avant-garde. Visual poems such as ‘Il pleut’: (It’s raining) propose typography as two forms of telling: simultaneously description and representation, name and environment, language and image, describing the external world linguistically while also representing it visually.
Our reading of typographic space alters according to the expectations prompted by its formal structure. The figured poem or calligramme prompts us to interpret the white space as a figurative field, as a representational space. The space of the page thus becomes a conditional and contested zone, susceptible to reading either as mimetic and referential of visual or sonic values, or as specifically linguistic and typographic.
Apollinaire worked with both handwritten text and hand-composed type. With the advent of the typewriter, the act of writing took place in typographic space for the first time, creating the scope for writing to make controlled, measured and explicit use of space as a component in the conception of a poem or text.
As the gap was narrowed between the manual and autographic act of writing and the mechanical processes of print, typographic space became available to the writer as – to use a term utilised by Dom Sylvester Houédard after the Brazilian Noigandres poets – a ‘structural agent’ in the making of poetry. Its scope for intervention or origination was exploited by writers, notably William Carlos Williams and ee cummings – but also by visual practitioners. The performance typographies of Kurt Schwitters, and the ‘Tiksels’ of H N Werkmann, provided the foundations for the typewriter poems of Bob Cobbing, Henri Chopin, and Houédard, in which the mechanical attributes of the typewriter perform a crucial role.
Stefan Themerson, a key figure of the English avant-garde in the immediate postwar years, was to observe that language was one species of the genus sign and pictorial representations were another species of the same genus, before identifying experimental typographics as a field in which these
‘…can start an illicit liaison, so intimately integrated that one doesn’t know any more who is the bride and who is the bridegroom.’
Bowler quotes Garnier’s call for ‘a world in which the word is coming to be known as a free object’ while Dom Sylvester Houédard’s 1963 essay ‘Concrete Poetry’ declares:
‘Words hard and lovely as diamonds demand to be seen, freed in space; words are wild, sentences tame them.’
Houédard described the concrete poetry movement in these terms:
‘Concrete poetry begins by being aware of graphic space as its structural agent. A printed concrete poem is ambiguously both typographic-poetry and poetic-typography – not just a poem in this layout, but a poem that is its own type arrangement.’
Word as ‘free object’; object as poem
This distinction between the layout as structural device or as essential object, reflects the complex ‘liaison’ which Themerson proposes between the two species of signs, and is fundamental to Houédard’s work.
In the mid-1960s Ian Hamilton Finlay proposed the idea of the one-word poem; that a single word could be read as a poem. This concept repositions the word from its role as a component within the constructive system of language, and proposes it instead as a found object, an ‘objet trouvé’ given meaning by selection and intervention; revisited and reviewed through its expression in physical form.
The idea of text as poem-object is mirrored in a concurrent tendency: the idea of the object as a text. The Catalan poet Joan Brossa’s ‘sculpture objects’ or ‘object-poems’ make a similar proposition for a poetic reading of objects: the object as poem.
Language as field: The land as a page
The concept of the word as ‘free object’ anticipates recent developments in environmental typography in extending the activity of reading across larger spaces:
Joan Brossa’s 1984 installation Transitable poem in three parts proposes the act of walking through its monumental typographic forms in a predetermined sequence, as a ‘reading’ of the poem’s three phases: Birth, represented as a letter A, the beginning of the alphabet; Path – with pauses and intonations, a series of punctuations, parentheses and brackets, and Destruction: the original A, fragmented. Brossa’s summary of his intended meaning is that the life of all beings is subject to a decomposing process that ends up in destruction.
In this context, the letters and punctuation marks become sculptural and architectural, but retain a poetic sequence of ‘reading’ fulfilled by walking the poem in correct sequence.
Gloria Bordons notes that
‘In this work, Brossa achieved the goal that he had always pursued: that of producing poetic art without borders, having passed from literary to visual poetry, and from visual to concrete.’
I’d suggest that this reading-by-walking of a text on mortality may be as usefully viewed as a ritual.
Language as magic
Typographic experiment is play. It is also magic. Since antiquity people have considered written words to be magical and, have used them as charms and protective devices.
Dick Higgins, ‘Intermedia’ poet and member of the Fluxus group, includes a short section on magic in his study of ‘Pattern Poetry’; the term he uses to describe the ‘proto concrete’ visual texts that predate the international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s. Writing about magical texts, he states that: “The general relationship between such magical texts and poetry is oblique, in that they often seem inadvertently to achieve an aesthetic end, although that clearly is not their purpose” but he goes on to observe that “to treat such pieces as literature may be taken as an example of metataxis, the shift in social function of an object.” Higgins is of course writing from the viewpoint of a poet, delineating the boundaries of an already marginal set of poetic practices. Bowler by comparison takes a view which is more integral and holistic. The Word as Image provides, in its fairly concise introductory text, a remarkable and unique insight into the shared territory occupied by magical text and visual poem. The author describes the structure of the book as a progression ‘from amulet to prayer to poem’ and makes an elegant analogy between acceptance of linguistic contradiction and the intellectual surrender of communion:
‘The immediate effect of a picture poem on the reader is disarming. Resistance is removed. The poem is an offering – a gift immediately accessible as an object. It can be left as a mere picture without further pursuit, like the communion wafer that is placed on the tongue. It is finally the celebrant’s faith and willingness to surrender to the metaphor which will make the spiritual transformation real’
For Bowler, this field of creative activity was closely interrelated with magical practices, affirming Nuttall’s observation that the distinction between these concepts was a largely a cultural construct of the 20th century. From this perspective she develops an analysis of concrete poetry and other forms of typographic experiment, which explores their analogies with the languages of magic and faith. One of her key examples – and a central image of her emerging thesis – was an Aramaic ‘devil’s trap’ from the 6th century. It is designed to capture evil spirits by enticing them to read at the centre of a spiral from which they cannot then escape. The bowls were buried face down and were meant to capture demons. They were commonly placed in the corner of the homes of the recently deceased. In the highly practical function of its visual structure it shares many of the devices and strategies of visual poetics.
Higgins considers the possible meaning of the ‘abraxas’: one of the universal palindromes; a spell invoked by either adding or subtracting the first and last letter of a palindromic word abracadabra’.
‘The historic triangular form of the abraxas is attributed to Serenus Sammonicus (2nd century) and is in no known language…. … an excellent account is given in Budge in which it is said to come from the Chaldaic … meaning ‘Perish like the word.’ Since it was meant to be eaten line by line, this makes better sense.’
This is a ritual enacted upon language itself; the text becomes corporeal in the measured destruction of the word as it is absorbed into the body. It is profoundly subversive of the order and authority of language, in a manner that would have made perfect sense in the context of a Dada cabaret.
Bowler notes also that:
‘The Tibetan, for example, will not destroy any paper upon which a word is written. For him the word and the object are one and the name of a thing is as real as the thing itself. Perhaps this is why the picture poem delights as it does; through its capacity… …to make a merger and thus represent metaphorically the greater spiritual urge for unity and for the reconciliation of opposites.’
As we have seen, the reconciliation of opposites is an implicit theme in the visual text, as it is in contemplative practices across a variety of belief systems. To embrace mutually exclusive dualities, is to adopt a consciousness that is not bound by the conditions of the material world.
Acceptance of the irresolvable tension between the word and the image creates a kind of portal; a space defined by neither, in which to commune with one’s God or engage with the ineffable.
Subversion & spirituality: Dom Sylvester Houédard
A synthesis of the sacred and profane dimensions of the visual text occurs in the work of the Benedictine monk Dom Sylvester Houédard, in which we can find a resolution of its subversive and devotional aspects.
Writing on the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Houédard notes that concrete poetry is characterised not only by significant visual form but by its semantic nature. Hamilton Finlay makes a point about the need to distinguish it from visual poetry, with the observation that in concrete poetry ‘the noun is the hero rather than the adjective’. Concrete poetry, strictly defined by Houedard as ‘pure (semantic) concrete’, is more like Haiku: not mimetic or concerned with equivalence, but with its own being as a direct act, a status affirmed by the writer’s concern for its form as a visual artefact.
Unlike the explicitly pictorial text (the work of Simmias, or Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’) it is a space in which the idea of representation is contested, as much as the idea of language.
For Houédard this equates closely to a view of the nature of God: it embodies a dialogue that runs through the whole history of the visual text; between doing and meaning, representation and actuality.
In his case these dualities are considered as the field for exploring the relationship between man and God, or as he says: ‘establishing mutually exclusive dualities helping the up and down traffic of angels’ He goes on to describe his typewriter poems or ‘typestracts’ as ‘icons depicting sacred questions’
Nicola Simpson remarks that:
‘Here again Houédard makes explicit the link between the dynamics of the concrete poem as he saw them and the spiritual ideas that could co-exist both in the methods of poetic construction and the resultant poem-object.’
In Houédard’s ‘typestracts’ and poem-objects, language first proposes itself as image, but only as a transition toward the transcendence of both, and the negation of representation itself, subsumed into a nonequivalent perception of essential being. He describes ‘paintings and poems that are not about life but that ARE live direct living acts’ and also referred in a sermon to: ‘…God himself who doesn’t have being but is being’ This echoes the opposing values held in balance within the field of visual poetry in general and concrete poetry in particular: the simultaneous presence of description and actuality that occurs when words – the tools of communication – are presented as visual entities in their own right.
God himself, in Houédard’s terms, doesn’t have being, but is being – and when, as in the examples we’ve seen, the visual form of language is acknowledged as ‘being’ rather than ‘having’ or ‘doing’, its sacred dimension is invoked, reintroducing to contemporary culture the devotional concept of the word as embodied truth.

REFERENCES
Berjouhi Bowler, The Word as Image (London: Studio Vista 1970)
Gloria Bordons, Brossa Itineraries (Barcelona: Fundació Joan Brossa 2006)
Dick Higgins, Pattern Poetry (Albany NY: SUNY Press 1987)
Dom Sylvester Houédard, ‘Concrete Poetry’, first published in Typographica New Series 8 (London: Typographica 1963) in Michael Beirut, Jessica Helfand, Steven Heller, Rick Poynor (eds), Looking Closer 3 (New York: Allworth 1999)
Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture (London: Paladin 1968)
Nicola Simpson (ed), Notes from the Cosmic Typewriter (London: Occasional Papers 2012)
Stefan Themerson, ‘Idéogrammes Lyriques’ first published in Typographica 14 (London: Typographica 1966) in Herbert Spencer (ed), The Liberated Page (London: Lund Humphries 1987)
Dom Sylvester Houédard ‘architypestractures?’ in Woods, G. (ed), Art Without Boundaries 1950–70 (London: Thames and Hudson 1972)
Zurbrugg, N.(ed), Art and Design Profile No. 45 The Multimedia Text (London: Academy 1995)