Landscape with Church, Culture Is Not Always Popular and Other Clever Things

 

 

ART

(Greek: Artios meaning “Complete”)

 

Skill in conducting and human activity; the principles or methods governing any branch of learning or craft.

- https://www.dictionary.com/

 

Describing the landscape of art through history is much like describing a legacy in terms of a map.  It all depends on how scaled and detailed the map is.  Below is an excerpt taken from the Philadelphia Inquirer (1967) describing a painting that is essentially a blank canvas, the “canvas of clues” are what Carl Fernbach-Flarsheim would actually term as ‘Cues’ that the viewer would need to understand what the artist is communicating.  Cues are like monuments that the viewer can recognize and perhaps that is a good way to get acquainted with this brief history in time.

The Canvas of Clues

“Landscape with Church,” however, is no picture at all but a canvas of clues to a landscape with neat printing identifying the spots where the artist would have you see a “TREE” or a “3-YEAR –OLD CAR.”  The artist Carl Fernbach-Flarsheim, of the Tyler School of Art, has filled the spot where he would have painted a church with a legend, “CHURCH IS HERE, THE BELLS SHALL TOLL IN 15 MINUTES.” - The Philadelphia Inquirer 

Benjamin Tammuz wrote: The artist’s studio is the place where the whole fate of Art, its spiritual content, its range, its technique is decided.  He explains, “The studio is not the ivory tower sealed off from the world’s experiences outside, but it is a place of open walls, a lens on the remotest distance and a transparent view of time and space.  These filaments of the imagination are invisible, yet strong in social impact and more vibrant with personal contact. Artists, who are working in what appears to be mute isolation, struggle, yet have the means to understand and make themselves understood.”

There are constant discussions on forms, artistic trends that are on both on a conscious level and the intangible.  The dichotomy about describing trends in the aesthetic is that it is based on looking back.  It can be viewed with more clarity through the years that have gone by, as recognizable monuments emerge.  Ultimately, the artist’s map is of intuition, an expression that directly leads into the ways of genius.  

European artists, Max Bill and Oyving Fhlasrom originated the term Concrete Poetry in the early 1950s and its early methods found in Noigandre’s manifesto “Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry.”  In 1958, they issued a manifesto that said the use of “words as indifferent vehicles were void of life, without personality, without history, taboo-tombs in which convention insists on burying the idea.”

E.E. Cummings and Ezra Pound intended poems to be abstract. Words became a topography of information between the artist and viewer.  Every topo-image became a configuration and identifiable in shape by ideograms, words themselves became typographical innovations. The surroundings or the environment of an image can be an associative context. In the case when the image is forced into the sequence, it is placed in context with the text and intended to be understood in the same way.  The logic of the configuration at a fundamental level was based in part on the psychological way the brain processed sequential modes between the right and left hemispheres organizing and perceiving information and in turn present the structure in terms of sequences.

As the movement spread across the world there would be much debate on the direction that this expression would take.  The popularity began to take hold in the 1960s and adopted by poets and became less abstract.  It became a combination of literature and visual art, the term “poesia visive” became the word to describe the experimental fusion of word and image.  The media began to incorporate photography, film, and soundscapes in combination.  A synthase of literary, visual, kinetic and sound. The typewriter, and the computer were harnessed by artists as they explored the technology that became available.  The “Boolean Typewriter” was coined by Carl Fernbach-Flarsheim to describe his method, “We are surrounded by a causal reality, bordered by our concepts of birth and life. Inside this reality we stabilize ourselves by making decisions.”

It is important to note that there is no single approach to the definition of concrete poetry.  Artists developed their own unique techniques that evolved over time.  Diversity of the three-dimensional, shifting poetry became both wordplay and graphics in space.  Messages over time.  Artists in Europe created important contributions to this movement but equally important are the contributions from Japan, Brazil and the Americans.