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"Untitled #22"
from The Untitled Project
by Matt Siber
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Darren Wershler-Henry has argued that, despite rumours of its decline, visual poetry has in fact colonized the entire, iconic landscape of capitalism, creating a graphic terrain already infused with optical artistry—and he goes on to suggest that most modern, visual poetry in fact owes its existence to "people who are…talented enough to be graphic designers, but, in the best slacker tradition, basically don’t give a fuck"—and thus they abuse these skills in order to make trouble….

Matt Siber in The Untitled Project has highlighted the degree to which the graphic designs of textuality have already overrun all available substrates in our environment, insofar as his photographs feature an anonymous cityscape, entirely denuded of such language. Siber has gone to the trouble of stripping out all visible writing from the urban scene, and then he repositions these words at the same scale in a kind of spatial tableau, now juxtaposed alongside his remodelled photograph.

Siber suggests that the absence of any printed wording in these photos begins to showcase the ubiquity of text in the modern milieu. Without such textuality, the world now seems oddly muted, as if given over to a monumental illiteracy. The urban scene now seems devoid of any chatter, almost as if the addressees for such cultural messages have gone extinct, thereby leaving the city to abide in the apocalypse of its own aphasia. We see here the intimations of a world where poetry itself has disappeared.

Siber, nevetheless, suggests that, despite the absence of any printed wording in these photos, the images also emphasize the importance of nonalphabetic communication, including the symbology of executive heraldry and corporate branding—the cartoonish, exurbanite architecture of globalized capitalism. He seems to suggest that, even in the dystopian quietude of his photos, we can still hear the echo of public voices speaking to us through the ruins of their, otherwise vanished, language.

Siber detaches words from the context of their urban field in order to display their "layout" as a scene upon the blank field of the page itself, and by doing so, he shows us the degree to which we "inhabit" a lingual ecology of poetic, visual stimuli, cocooning ourselves within the matrix of these capitalist invitations and conformist imperatives. He almost suggests that, everyday, the cityscape reconstitutes for us a whole array of visual poems, available for both our aesthetic pleasure and our political critique….