Concrete poetry and its contexts
One individual 's enthusiasm as a scholar and collector of concrete poetry prompted James Baker to stage "a maverick" retrospective at Brisbane's M.O.C.A. last year. Nicholas Zurbrugg curated Visual Poetics on the basis of his encounters over two decades with poets and artists situated in Europe, the United States, South America, Japan and Australia. As the project evolved, his own extensive collection was supplemented by material canvassed especially for the event. The show focussed on that ubiquitous and fascinating traditon of imagery which usually evades easy classification and provides a necessary irritant for established canons of literature and art. Often dismissed as ephemera and bearing a similar marginalised status as artists' books and various forms of multiples, the concrete poetry phenomenon is in fact one of the first truly international avant-garde movements.
Zurbrugg had been interested in beat poetry (Ginsberg and company) as a teenager in England and subsequently at university he commenced correspondence with poets and artists who were breaking old rules and actively exploring the visual potential of language. This led to the establishment of Stereo Headphones (first issued in 1969), a publication which earned the respect and participation of a diverse range of talents, from Dadaist pioneers like Raoul Hausmann to the Argentinian poet Edgardo Antonio Vigo, the inventor of 'typestracts', to Dom Sylvester Houedard and English artists Tom Phillips and Joe Tilson. Published in an ordinary as well as 'de luxe' edition (which had additional signed items) this review traced both the formal evolutions and the continuous solidarity of those concerned with verbal-visual work. Zurbrugg chose themes, energetically argued in his introduction, which were topical and controversial, such as the second issue on Towards the Death