Dear friends and colleagues
When did you last read a poem?
I have always been interested in visual art, an interest encouraged by an older brother who was an artist and later an art historian, but I studied literature at University and have always seen myself as first and foremost a writer. I gave up writing poetry in my early twenties but have found myself writing it again in recent years. However, poetry is something I have always returned to periodically as a reader. It is language used at its most considered, precise and complex. When I am struggling as a writer I often turn to Yeats, Rilke, Heaney or, of course, Shakespeare. It is not just the imagery, but the cadence and rhythms that matter.
The first two contemporary exhibitions I went to of my own volition were Robert Graham and David Hockney at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1970 – I was living across the street. The same year I met my first wife who was a Fine Art student. Since then most of my friends have been artists. I doubt I will escape the art world now!
The course at university I remembered best, along with Geoffrey Hill on seventeenth century poetry, was a course on my MA on visual art and literature run by my literature tutor John Barnard and an art history lecturer, Diana Douglas. My first real job after university was running a library in an art school and it was there that I started writing about contemporary art. My intention of returning to do my PhD on English poets and their illustrators faded away around that time.
So, you can see why I would be interested in the relationship between poetry and painting – or art generally – and why I should want to curate a show on Filipino artists and poetry later this month. Moreover, there is a strong literature tradition in the Philippines.
Once poetry and painting used to be described as being sister arts. The Roman writer Horace write “ut pictura poesis” – “like painting, so is poetry” and this was often quoted or rewritten as “a painting is a silent poem and a poem is a spoken painting.” Even in the early twentieth century for artists like Picasso or Kandinsky the relationship of painting to poetry was strong.
Not it seems any longer. Why? and what has been lost by this inadvertent family separation?
Though even now we find Hélène Cixious describing the artist Simone Hantai as “a poet in painting,” as being a painter “with a poet’s tattered soul”. She writes that for her the questions “What is painting?” and “What is writing?” are “inseparable”.[1] That is how I feel too.
Last Saturday I did two studio visits to four artists in my exhibition. First, I went to see Mariano Ching and Yasmin Sison in Cavite province. We talked over lunch (kare-kare, bangus, manok, etc.). Yasmin hasn’t read a poem since school when she had to do so for class; Mariano has always been into rock music and he sees no need for poetry beyond their lyrics. Is their work “poetic”? maybe. You could discuss Yasmin’s work as a poetry of absences and see Mariano’s as lyrical and quirky. Yasmin had made two watercolours for the show, Mariano was still working on his piece.
Yasmin Sison. Basketball Shot (after Richard Prince)
Then, before getting the plane back to Singapore, I went to see Mark Justiniani and Joy Mallari. They do read poetry and were more concerned with making works that fit the show. I discussed with Joy her making a work following on from a previous small sculpture where words flow from a figure.
Work by Joy Mallari
Mark was an activist as a student, then a social realist painter and now, though still making paintings, is more focused on complex illusionistic dioramas. As he is moving simultaneously in two directions he wasn’t sure whether to finish a painting he had started or make a word piece along the lines of an earlier (2010) work where a line of poetry is cut into a sheet of metal: Tayo na kinupkop sa sinag ng dilim, meaning “We who are nurtured by the glow of darkness”. (Kinupkop is “nurtured” – he tells me – from the root word Kupkop – whilst Sinag can both be “ray’ or “glow” of light.’) But seen from another angle only a few letters are visible, making the word takipsilim – “twilight”. I suggested he do both as they represent such different ways of working with the poetic: one, to respond to the mood of a poem showing someone in a “poetic” state, sitting on the back of one of the motor tricycles that are used as local taxis; or to play with words, taking apart a stanza of a poem by Bonifacio.
Mark Justiniani
Twilight
Mark Justiniani
Hopefully he will do both!
I will show you their works when the show opens – and maybe carry this way of thinking a bit further. This will be, sadly, the last exhibition at Equator Art Projects in Singapore.
For your information here also are two images of Jai’s exhibition. You may remember I talked of visiting him in his studio a few weeks back.
Have a good Tuesday and I hope wherever you are it isn’t raining as heavily as it is here in Singapore. In the tropics, when it rains it rains with a vengeance!
All best
Tony
Quoted in Hélène Cixious, Poetry in Painting, Edinburgh, 2012, p.2 ↑