June 2016 Cover Artist: Anna Maria Maiolino
This month's cover art came to us after visiting Hauser & Wirth's remarkable show, Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947–2016, during the 2016 AWP Writers Conference in Los Angeles. I encountered Anna Maria Maiolino's São 8 [They Are 8], 1993 and Rolinhos na Horizontal [Horizontal Small Rolls], 1993/2015, which I think look like poems. I reached out to the artist's studio and discovered that in addition to sculpture, Maiolino's work includes visual and written poetry, and that all of her works are to be considered "poetic actions." (It seems we know it when we see it...) She explains:
Written poetry has appeared in my work since the early 1970s, when I was in New York with my two children, aged two and four years old, and due to a lack of time to focus on my artwork I carried a notebook in my pocket to jot down ideas for future projects. These notes resulted in some poems per se, while others would become projects for films and installations. Poetry placed me before the sheet of paper in a qualitative sense, and later led me to develop drawings which feature the written word, which I called Mental Maps, 1971–1976. It also enabled me to execute a work with minimal argument and enrich my alphabet with new tools.
It pleases me to give credence to some language researchers who believed that expressing oneself, doing art, is an innate human faculty, part of our genetic makeup which, therefore, does not depend only on the evolutionary process. So, if we believe that others, the public, also share these same perceptive foundations, their soul will be a territory open to poetic occupation by the artist, otherwise, there would be no resonance.
Therefore, I see poetry as the foundation of every creative act. It is a way of contemplating the world in an operational movement of transforming experience into consciousness. There are people, artists, who refine this perception, making it a work tool that is manifested in the use of different media for creating their art.
Through poetry, the artist fulfills her destiny in poetic attempts to mediate in the reality of worldly things. Like a demiurge, she sculpts time in the development of the past, the present and the future, relegating both heaven and earth.
—October 2002, revisited in 2016
We asked her to comment specifically on the title of her series Photopoemaction and she provided the following:
In 1973 I began to produce films in Super-8, installations, performances, and works using photography entitled Fotopoemação (Photopoemaction). The experimentation with these new media enabled new poetic experiences to be added to my oeuvre. It allowed the articulation of a completely new repertoire of imagery that was not related to my ongoing studio-based parallel production, with its associated craftsmanship, particularly within the field of drawing and sculpture. With the new media I attempted to elaborate on the political moment, to reflect while doing, searching in the act of poetic freedom the resistance to that which is established, imposed by the military dictatorship and that took hold of national life from 1964 to 1982.
The photographic series Fotopoemação is a result of the elaboration of images that emerged from my written poems. In other cases they are images from Super-8, video, and performance productions that have been reorganized. These photographic works were often produced in collaboration with friends. In more recent years the photographs were taken by myself on a digital camera.
These series, other than constituting a challenge to the poetic labour, are efficient instruments of both innovation and freedom. They result from thinking about the things of the world, from the attempt to transform what we live through into consciousness in a poetic operational movement of conduct.
—1975 revised in 2009
And so naturally follows a poem, by Maiolino, about her work The Disappeared:
It’s morning
it’s already been night
I write poetry
a word
another word
more words
on the square-ruled pages
one two three four sides
a square
yesterday was nasty
it rained and we had visitors
strange people
faces poorly designed
they had no mouth
only eyes
weeping all the time scarlet tears
blood
finally they went
left were the stains on the wooden floor and the smell of death in the livingroom
washing the floor and opening the windows were in vain
the pain remained
still throughout the house was heard:
—los desaparecidos...los desaparecidos—
They
the inheritors of Cortez—El Conquistador—
buried a thousand in shallow graves
without a cross without anything
seeding the Latin-American land with the sons of the land
we didn’t sleep last night
I stayed up writing here
with my beloved working in the other part of the house
I dip my pen into the Chinese ink—Pelikan
Gunther Wagner trademark
net weight 125 cubic centiliters
Made in Argentina
—Musala bien—my beloved said to me—te la regalo
it’s drawing ink and I’m writing poetry with it
drawing letter by letter beautifully as if I were Chinese
—Las hojas son calmantes...—
the radio is broadcasting something about a popular cure
—En las verrugas hay que passarle en cruz...—
—De la noche a la mañana desaparecerán todas...—
at the bottom of the ink bottle there is sediment—sign of the years
it’s better not to to shake it
I turn off the radio
I stop
I shift my attention to the silence in the house
what could my beloved be doing?
—O que fazes?—I ask
—Colo—he yells—Maldita cola acrilíca...!
—Me recuso a husar cola acrílica!
—Es una question moral
—Entendes?—Buenos Aires, September 20, 1984