The sign of materiality: convergences between artist's book and visual poetry

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the convergence between concrete and visual poetry and the production of artist's books in Portuguese and English. The movement of concrete poetry, exponent of visual poetry, was very fruitful in Brazil, and had many contacts with avant-garde groups such as Fluxus, which had the participation of Emmett Williams - and produced several books. In Brazil, the books of the concrete poets, Décio Pignatari with Organismo and Augusto de Campos with Poemóbiles, among other books, stand out. The guiding project of concrete poetry envisaged a "critical evolution of forms", which considered the page of the book a 'spatio-temporal' structure. In The New Art of Making Books, Ulises Carrión, an artist's book theorist, calls attention to concrete poetry as an alternative to poetry, thinking that the book as an "autonomous sequence of space-time" associated with the 'new’ art that sees the book beyond the text. Thus, we are interested in exploring these relationships in a deeper way, demonstrating how they materialize in artist books and, potentially, in the structure of visual poetry.