Language is at the heart of Katalin Ladik’s practice. Her expansive attitude to poetry materializes on the pages of her books, in music scores, on the wall, through concrete poems, and visual collages, almost all of them accompanied by sonic interpretations that show the artist’s extraordinary vocal range.

All these works speak to Ladik’s process of “logopoiesis”: to bring into existence new registers of language through acts of poetry, utterance, and visualization. Or, to follow the title of her eponymous 1976-album, a process of “phonopoetica”, to understand poetry through the voice.

One of fifteen contributions from the postcard portfolio 15 CARTES POSTALE published by Guy Schraenen.

Henri Chopin was a little-known but significant figure of the French and British concrete poetry and lettrist movements. A curator, editor, musician and poet, he worked in a variety of materials, although his most notable works take the form of typewriter poems, each unique and influenced by the artist’s preoccupation with ideas of order and disorder; a result of his wartime experiences.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and may have some traces of previous ownership.

Delivered at Harvard in 1988–89 as the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, were more like performances, as the audience heard them. Cage calls them “mesostics,” a literary form generated by chance (in this case computerized I-Ching chance) operations. Using the computer as an oracle in conjunction with a large source text, he happens upon ideas, which produce more ideas. Chance, and not Cage, makes the choices and central decisions. Such a form is rooted, Cage tells us in his introduction, in the belief that “all answers answer all questions.”

You can hear an audio recording of the lecture here.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and may have some traces of previous ownership.

John Cage (1912–1992) is routinely hailed as one of the most influential and generative artists of the 20th century, a creator of groundbreaking music compositions, artworks, and works of literature.

Includes two texts by John Cage and the text On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and may have some traces of previous ownership.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Ewa Partum: Retrospektive 1965–2000 at Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, 17 February–16 April, 2021.

In the 1960s and 70s, Ewa Partum was part of the artistic avant-garde in Poland. She sought a new reality in art, considered the possibilities of thought within painting to be exhausted, and championed the new art forms of the time. Starting with the language and concepts that shape our ideas about art as well as our notions of work and practice, Partum focused on semantic material as the “raw material” of art and its visualization. With actions in public space, an understanding of art that referred to active processes in time, and a self-reflexive concept of media, Ewa Partum belonged to the first generation of conceptual artists.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and may have some traces of previous ownership.

Unbidden Tongues #9: Potty Mouth is a collection of what could be described as concrete poetry, written over the past two years by our niece Violet Bartley, now aged five. Typed at a computer and sent exclusively via e-mail, the poems stand as clear evidence of a person in the beginnings of grasping (at) language. Throughout, characters are repeated uninterrupted until margins break them, keys pushed down by a finger not yet strong enough to lift itself up.

Over the years, as her written vocabulary grew and these attempts at communication slowly stacked up into the collection printed here, Violet delivered poem after poem within which different mutations of the word ‘poo’ were uttered in type: poo, poobum, bum poo, ipoo, poop. While simple, often illegible and definitely isolated utterances (she never replies when you send a poem back in turn), they are decipherable examples of someone learning defiance through language.