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CONCEPTUAL AND VISUAL WRITING
Conceptual Writing encompasses a theoretical approach to the production of texts that derives from art-world practices related to Conceptual Art and Dada as well as ’Pataphysics, concrete and sound poetry, and other interdisciplinary experimental practices. Perhaps the most important legacy that Conceptual Writing wrestles with and renews, however, is L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry, a movement that fragments writing and defers denotative reference so as to incorporate the meanings produced by its readers. Conceptual Writing tends to proclaim itself as “uncreative” or even “boring” as a way to challenge creative writing orthodoxy, which Conceptual Writers view as sentimental, suspect, and hackneyed. Conceptual texts may be opaque, simple, illegible, incoherent, flat, too long, fleeting, offensive, mocking, unreadable, plagiarized, or evacuated of any ostensible “meaning.” In doing so, they subvert (or ironically reinforce) the systems of production, consumption, and distribution that coincide with mainstream ideologies of art-making and creative writing, positioning the Conceptual text as a site of institutional and capitalist critique. Conceptual Writing is also heavily invested in pop culture—especially the ways that the internet has transformed not only the culture of reading but uprooted our entire way of life.
Related to Conceptual Writing is OuLiPo and Procedural Writing, movements that have constructed texts based on ad hoc formal constraints, mathematical formulas, algorithms, and methods of combinatorial explosion. Post-conceptual work, newer and even harder to define, tends to be more skeptical of escaping the all-absorbing capitalist maw; embraces new technologies less ironically as its practitioners are “digital natives”; draws less of a distinction between writing and other modes of art or cultural production (including activities such as networking or curating one’s daily life on social media); encourages ambient “reading” methods like doomscrolling, phubbing, and listening to muzak while multitasking; indulges in surplus affect rather than appearing boring, flat, or deadpan; or performatively tropes on the ways that existential sentiments become encoded through material objects that are relatively trivial or banal.
We pair Conceptual Writing with Visual Writing since both genres share considerable intersections; however, the domain of Visual Writing extends much further than Conceptual Writing. Visual Writing includes any type of work in which the alphabetic text has been informed by visual and design elements or is combined with–not merely illustrated by–visual artwork. Thus, Visual Writing includes calligrams, concrete poetry, asemic writing, Lettrism, visual essays, Minimalist art, and fiction employing elements of collage, among other manifestations.
Links
● Guillaume Apollinaire, Calligrammes
● J. H. Prynne, “Rich in Vitamin C”
● Michael Palmer, “Sun”
● Robert Grenier, Sentences Toward Birds
● Nada Gordon, Two Poems
● N. H. Pritchard, EECCHHOOEESS
● Derek Beaulieu, “Seen of the Crime: Essays on Conceptual Writing”
● Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, (ed.) Craig Dworkin & Kenneth Goldsmith
● Vanessa Place and Robert Fritterman, Notes on Conceptualisms
● Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, A Selection of poems
● Derren Wershler-Henry, The Tapeworm Foundry
● Giovanni Singleton, “Last Cucumber from the Garden”
● Orlando White, from Bone Light
● Anselm Berrigan, “Degrets”
● Andrew Zawacki, “Zerogarden”
● OULIPO: A Primer of Potential Literature, (ed.) Warren Motte, Jr.
● Sarah Coolidge, “Who are the Women of OULIPO?”
● Lauren Elkin & Scott Esposito, “The Attempt at Exhausting a Movement”
● An Anthology of Chance Operations, (ed.) Lamonte Young and Jackson Mac Low
● Noah Eli Gordon, “Flag”
● Amelia Ulman’s personal website
● Sophia La Fraga, “Sophia La Fraga is a Poet for the Digital Age” Interview at The Cut
● Felix Bernstein, “That’s Infotainment: Virtual Pedagogy and Instagram Populism in the Museum”
● Trisha Low, “Poetry Is Not the Final Girl: An Introduction”
● Rabih Mroué, “The War Against the Image”
● Fernando Rodríguez Álvarez, “La tipografía y la poesía concreta”
● John Vincler, “Dwelling Places: On Renee Gladman’s Turn to Drawing” (with images from Prose Architectures)
● Henri Michaux “Narration” and other assorted asemic writing
● Niikuni Seiichi (新国誠), Kuchibiru To Shitto (Lips And Jealousy)
● May Swenson, “The Lightning”
● Carl Andre, Untitled (1973)
● Bianca Stone, Poetry Comics
● Donald Barthelme, “The Expedition”
● Penelope Umbrico, All Catalogs
● Sarah Minor, A Visual Writing Resource List
