Words and Painting Exchange Roles:

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1 IAB32 Words and Painting Exchange Roles: Concrete Poetry, Experimental Poetry, & Fine Arts in Portugal Eduardo Paz Barroso W hen considering the relations between concrete poetry, experimental poetry, and visual arts in Portugal, we can be informed by the writing around and of surrealism, cubist collage, and action painting. All these aesthetic trends provide the means and contexts for new forms of visual thinking that experimental poetry formulates, questioning and self-questioning with principles that expose poetic creation simultaneously as creation and theoretical enunciation. Several points of contact and aesthetic affinities between these trends are identifiable with some of the most significant moments of Portuguese visual arts. However, any correspondence between the critical analysis of pictures and the concerns of experimental and concrete poetry have not been sufficiently explored. The place of poetry in modern and contemporary Portuguese literature marks a kind of originality without a name. More than a pure purpose of language and its subject, it is an accelerated experimentation. This is due both to the dizzying capacity of the "saying" as to the imagery of the word that breaks through as a "pluri-significant" event full of oniric possibilities. In this context the term Literature has not so much its institutional and ideological meaning which refers to a "theory of literature" but is rather an "archipelago of metaphors" (Lourenço, 1988:205). Each metaphor has its own filament, its demarcation of episodes where language breaks all the rules of grammar, according to the criteria of a solitary poetic authorship that resists the identification with the person of the author. POETIC DEFLAGRATIONS The question of poetic making being simultaneously writing and theorizing is closely connected to the poetic innovations of the 1960s. At that time alignments with social advocacy, militant complaints of the political situation, or humanist concerns were left behind. It was also the turning point of Presencist' conventions in which the new generations could not recognize themselves. Realism and mysticism tend to blur together and, above all, something torrential is sensed in debut books such as Aquete Grande Rio Eufrates (That Great River Euphrates) by Ruy Belo, or the second and third titles by Herberto Helder, "A Colher na Boca" ("The Spoon on the Mouth") (included in 0 Amor em Visita (Love Visiting) and Poemacto (Poemact) (all published in 1961 except O Amor in 1958). In this dynamic of rupture it is also important to note the publication of the series of small books Poesia 61 (Poetry 61) (which brought together poems by Gastâo Cruz, Luiza Neto Jorge, Fiama Hasse Pais Brandào, Casimiro de Brito, and Maria Teresa Horta). Not coincidentally Herberto Helder will appear in various manifestations associated with experimental poetry. Luiza Neto Jorge didn't have the same kind of involvement with experimental poetry, but she develops a written poetry of powerful imagery, where we observe the disfigurement of speech along with an incisive force, able to disrupt the narrative and impose in some texts a kind of erotic cadence of the word. These characteristics explain the publication in 1972 of her bookobject entitled 0 Ciclópico Acto (The Cyclopean Act) in collaboration with the painter Jorge Martins.^ It is a remarkable interpénétration of poetry and visual arts that, although not complying with the codes of poetic experimentation, can be integrated into this critical questioning of the relationship between poetry and the visual arts. In terms of the intertextual possibilities of the poem and its reference to some aspects of experimental poetry, read for example: * Uns: crèmes, espumas, espermas, cuspos outros: mais barato, mais húmido, mais tu-mefac-to comovente a simples confissso: "teu, tua" (Some men: creams, foams, sperm, spits other men: cheaper, more humid, more in-fla-ted ^ moving the simple confession: "he's yours, she's yours.") But Portuguese poetry of the 1960s is also definitely marked by concrete poetry, which according to some critics (Nava, 1988:151) allows us to see an "internationalist vocation, and mainly the Brazilian influence." The two debut publications of this trend or tendency are the two volumes oí Poesia Experimental (Experimental Poetry) (1964 and 1966). Some of the poets included are Antonio Aragào, E. M. de Melo e Castro, Ana Hatherly, Salette Tavares, Alberto Pimenta, and Herberto Helder. It is important to stress that poetic experimentation, in common with other aesthetic manifestations that are also a rupture, turns in on itself and exposes the material that makes it that is language itself. This trend towards a self-rooting of the poem and its writing is compatible with the search for a diction that is beyond all sentences, and corresponds to the attitude that, given the evidence of a constellation of voices, insists on walking on the uneven intersections that exist among all of them. And this way to find out what is said, not in the sense of a search or research of a "recitation," but as a reflection of viscerality and belonging, is also the strange occupation of an unlikely place. A new set of aesthetic values dominated by negativity and fragmentation, a certain wandering of meaning, and a dismemberment of the text all point to other requirements of writing. The instability of the subject, or even its disappearance, is due to a "failure of mimesis" (Pinto do Amaral, 1988:160). In this critical analysis of the poetry of the 1970s and 1980s Pinto do Amaral highlighted the contribution o( Poesia 61 and Poesia Experimental for the autonomy of the poetic text, situated "in a sort of neutral zone of sense," an "almost pure object, at the same time immune and susceptible to all hermeneutics." There were a plurality of ways through which this condition influenced subsequent poetry, and the very evolution of some of the authors situated within this paradigm. An excellent example of this fusion of the poem in a theory of the self (which includes the duplicity of the literary and biographical fiction) is found in A Noçào de Poema (The Concept of Poem) by Nuno Judice (1972:11-12): "I try to express myself in the physical truth of the gesture. There are no sensations irreducible to neither a word or genres incapable of modification. I always resigned myself to the excessive yoke of the poem and never, in assuming the aesthetic materialism, allowed myself to limit the poem or even to work it. What is poetry but the excessive knowledge of the image, the full transfiguration of the rule in horizon, of the plastic in consciousness? What is the word but the prodigious river of the senses, the architectural space of order?" 21

2 JAB32 ANA HATHERLY: A HAPPENING OF THE WORD In a 1977 essay for the magazine Coloquio Letras Ana Hatherly refers to the need, in the approach to poetic phenomenon, to establish new semantic relationships that do not require orthodox understandings, while stressing the dependence of the written text on a particular specialization and knowledge on the part of the reader. A quote by Max Bense ( ), one of the theoreticians of concrete poetry, signals an important theoretical change: "with the definition of the visual texts, the general theory of the text goes into a general theory of image" (Hatherly, 1977: 5). The defense of the text as an "art object" helps to explain a certain poetic value of action painting and art informel/ Informal Art, ' which is not alien to the author's own visual practice. Committed to accentuate the "universality of contemporary art," Hatherly implicitly shifts concrete poetry and poetic experimentation to a zone of the dash, drawing, and painting and at the same time she highlights the civilizational value of cinema. Doing this, she reveals an intuition for the growing importance of visual thinking, where the movies occupy a crucial position. The idea of a reconfiguration of the sign is crucial to this aesthetic movement which sees in the written form a kind of a drawing that uses letters and feeds an experience of the world transformed into plastic investment of meaning. The parallelism and similarity of writing and visual image give rise to reversibility the word as painting and painting as word. Naturally, it is also important to take into account the Eastern tradition of Zen philosophy and calligraphic painting that some contemporary artists have adopted as inspiration and working basis, as is the case of Jean Degottex, some works by Tapies, as well as in Portugal with Eurico Gonçalves, Antonio Sena, and some works of Arpad Szenes (a subject which merits further development). For Ana Hatherly this process can also be a form of subversion, specifically the dismantling of the psychological and logical system that underlies the maintenance of society (Hatherly, 1977:14). Personalization, what we might call a refractory dimension of the "I" shaped to drawing as an evidence in itself (evidence of the subject, her/his contradictions, her/his need for protest) is markedly present in concrete and experimental poetry. It is a reaction to the depersonalization brought about by the press, and interpreted in this context as a typical phenomenon of consumer society (Hatherly, 1977: 13). Discussions about the consumer society help us to understand and put in perspective this poetic trend, for which everything contains significance. Concrete poetry is poetry where things simply are. This is in striking contrast with the habits of a consumer society where things simply disappear, or take the spectacular appearance of merchandise (to accommodate the suggestive thesis of Guy Debord, so revisited nowadays). Understanding experimental texts implies some ideological linkages to theory that lead immediately to the work of Adorno. One example is an essay by Alberto Pimenta (1988) who questions the understanding of the poetic act as "an impossible whose only purpose is to deny this logical or pragmatic impossibility." The main function of poetry thus understood is to "deny." Poetry leaves aside subterfuge and magic to focus on itself and explain itself as eviscerated word. Hence the quote from Adorno made by A. Pimenta (1988,146) in his essay: "it is by exposing itself to, or escaping from, the irreconcilable that substantially defines the level of a work of art" (Adorno). To inquire about the challenges faced by the poetic making, therefore, is the next question, based on a critique of Aristotelianism. From it, Alberto Pimenta promotes the "invention of forms" where the visual and the literary meet. One of the most curious aspects of this reaction to the consumer society is a defiation of representation that experimental poetry allowed. In summary, we have to admit the coexistence of two poetics (or rather, two ways of making poetry) that have in common the refusal to name "things as they are." One operates at the level of meaning and the metaphor is its "queen-figure." The other operates at the immanent level 22 r^'^' / y^ ^N.,' ^>--^'" (/,u \.. ir}./ / ^'z- y Ana Hatherly, Dramng (Revolution). 197S, India ink on paper, 27.2 x 25.4 in., Fundaçào de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporánea, Porto Photography by Filipe Braga of the sign and its main figure is the pun (and therefore its use of sound similarities between words and it explanation of differences in meaning). Naturally, it's to the second option that concrete poetry adheres. Alberto Pimenta demonstrates this by relying on one of the theorists of the movement, the Austrian Heinz Gappmayr, when emphasizing the distinction between the empirical character of a sign and its conceptual level, both delivered to an ambivalence that concrete poetry renders "transparent" (Pimenta, 1988:146). Poetry devoid of symbols, of metaphorical dimension, of the abstraction of linguistic formulas, turns easily into the "thing itself," the very same thing that the material and plastic side of painting, in certain circumstances (action painting, abstract expressionism, art informel, tachisme, etc.) also objectifies. The timeline of the concrete perspective in Portugal, as traced by Alberto Pimenta, takes Almada Negreiros ( ) as the main reference, and defines the late 1950s and early 1960s as the most energetic time of the movement. Pimenta distinguishes this from the phase which favors combinatorial games and random permutations in the 1970s, and then considers a period of radicalization when the denial of the "semantic space" is sharper, and sensoriality ceases to be only visual and acoustic and is now also performative in the sense of the happening and performance languages. This dilution of boundaries between art and everyday life finds a theatrical raison d'etre in this other aspect of concrete poetry's relationship with visual arts.

3 JAB32 WHEN THE TEXT-IMAGE FRAMES UP THE MEANING In A Reinvençâo da Leitura (The Reinvention of Reading) (1975), Ana Hatherly reminds us that it is impossible to divorce the study of the origin of poetry as a written text from its pictorial aspect. The essay is accompanied by nineteen drawings by the author who calls them "visual texts," as a possible demonstration of her thesis. The text emphasizes the idea that all writing has its origin in painting and thereby generates mental processes of communication in which seeing and thinking are intertwined. Information theory, the theory of Max Bense, various works by visual artists, and the Eastern tradition of Zen, are the four factors on which this conception lies (Hatherly, 1975: 6). Hatherly's essay derived in good measure from the need to justify the importance of the concrete perspective, and to rescue it from its minority status in the Portuguese cultural scene. This concern is based on a strategy of vanguardist affirmation by which experimental poetry is identified. This leads to a need for increasing the status and ambiguities of the concept of the vanguard, its history, and critical recognition. In one respect at least the author is right, given the situation that emerged from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s the difficulty of accepting a poetry that is at all lyrical-discursive. "Nevertheless, after more than a decade of publications and cultural dissemination by the few Portuguese avant-garde authors, in some sectors begins to be drawn a tendency to accept the text-image" (Hatherly, 1975: 17). Alberto Pimenta (1988: ) documents the Portuguese concrete perspective with some examples from the work of seven visual poets: Salette Tavares, Antonio Aragao, Ana Hatherly, E.M. de Melo e Castro, José Abilio dos Santos (Abilio), Fernando Aguiar, and César Figueiredo. Melo e Castro is depicted as "the most active in Portugal and abroad as a theorist and popularizer of the movement." Pimenta also recognizes the vastness of his work and his systematic experimentalism. In Salette Tavares we find form and irony at the service of ambiguity, an enormous capacity to highlight the serious side of the sign, and the transience of the text when viewed in its formal aspect. About A. Aragao, Pimenta highlights the "strong feelings" that his work causes, and the creative processes like the use of grids to draw up the "anatomy of volant words." Fernando Aguiar takes the reader to the heart of the letter ("the most consistent lettrist of the last twenty years"); letters in web (plotting sometimes the direction) are a permanent trap that can be compared to the skill of the magician who manipulates decks of cards and slippery suits. Abilio refers to a theoretically reckless marginality that somehow was also Pimenta's: "for him all the epistemological foundation is repressive" (and Pimenta praises his consequent temper). César Figueiredo seems (at least in several of his works) to break the text, or rather its monumentality ("Camoes tattered by a lieutenant of philology," is how Pimenta characterizes him, after setting him in a tactical and warmongering device where the words are seen as an "army"). Finally Hatherly is "mistress of all aesthetic annunciations" because of the variety and diversity of her production. Her work goes beyond an insistent playfulness of language and becomes transformed into a sinuous drawing a handwriting ripe for all uses and disuses. oriental ideograms that interested him so much). It is a mobilization of senses and capabilities that raises the interaetion of different levels of communication, which can also play an important part in the assimilation of visual art, populated by resonances of writing and sound. Phonic, optical, and language structures all work together simultaneously, interacting with each other in a demonstration against the "perspectival syntactic organization, where words sit like corpses in a banquet" (Hatherly, 1975:19). Painting can also be a way to make readable the subtle shades of writing. To encounter the word and the life it gives is to establish a new route in which these artists are engaged. It is to recognize signs, to follow them according to insights and gestures, building bridges between legibility and illegibility. To scrutinize the meaning for the reader is an activity that Hatherly (1975:22) values, particularly when questioning her own practice as a creator of texts-images, and invokes the need to extend the field of reading out of "literalness." Naturally, this evolution is an ongoing task of literature and art in general. These literal-averse practices cultivate discourses deprived of immediate meaning and make a kind of deferred sense from the communication experience that combines text and interpreter in the same significant space. On the other hand the notion of literariness (created by the Russian formalists) and its discussion (and subsequent refutation by some thinkers as the American theorist and critic Jonathan Culler) helps to clarify this issue, since it deals with the identification of properties that state what makes a text a literary text, and which characteristics may be common among similar works. We can find an element of friction in visual poetry why are these texts literary texts? Concrete poetry gets from everyday life uses of language that, somehow, were already assumed as literary by the formalists. Among many possible examples I cite the poems by Melo e Castro "Nao sim" ("No yes") or "Pendulum" or "Objectotem" ("Objectotem") (Anthology of Concrete Poetry in Portugal, pp.54-56). Concrete poetry is indeed an excellent example of the changes to which literariness is subject. Visual and experimental poetry imply a change in the concept of the literary. I recall the statement by Roman Jakobson in Modern Russian Poetry: "The object of literary science is not literature but literariness." To which B. Eikhenbaum adds "that is, what makes a given work a literary work." And in this context it is also important to note the need expressed by Russian formalism of a confrontation, based on linguistics, between poetic language and current language, according to the idea that you can provide various kinds of series at different historical moments (B. Eikhenbaum, "Theory of the Formal Method", in Theory of Literature: Texts by the Russian Formalists, presented by T. Todorov, 1978, Lisbon, Ediçôes 70, p. 52). We must also note the proximity, in the period Todorov (op. cit) describes as the first phase of Russian formalism, with futurism and the avant-garde practice that characterizes it, and to which it provides a somewhat theoretical service. Formalism fostered an aesthetic idea about the sign because of an interest in the technical issues of language. Not coincidentally, the claim by visual and concrete poetry of a vanguard position strengthened this modality in the encounter delimited by the triangle literary and current rather than literal. This brief critical overview provides the core data to go from concrete poetry to painting as they intersect and sometimes become indistinguishable. Everything starts with the visual condition of the text. This is also apparent from a recommendation given to inexperienced readers of such texts by a specialized journal initially, don't even try to read the concrete poems, it is preferable instead to observe the spaces, typography, or other variations on the page. ' The most important suggestion was to consider the poem as an image and then observe that from this same image appear ideas associated with letters (Hatherly, 1975:18). Melo e Castro (1973:15) gives emphasis to the idea that we are facing a poetry that "makes people open their eyes." With eyes and senses wide open, the reader gets a new verbal articulation. In this perspective we apply the term "verbivocovisual" (which refers to James Joyce and his questioning of the universe of It is common to find an attitude of incomprehension when faced with strangeness, the unexpected, and the different. These are three attributes of visual poetry that give it, according to Hatherly, an avantgarde status. The concrete poetry of Mallarmé, or the readings of James Joyce and Ezra Pound that their followers promote, extends the theme of literariness. Melo e Castro sees in the work of Pound "our way of being creative and poetic" (1973:51). This involves challenging writing techniques in terms of creative writing and reading because of the importance that Pound in "The Pisan Cantos" ( ) gives to the poem's visual factors and the economy of the condensed text that the visual dimension emphasizes. A common feature of these demonstrations is the will to achieve new areas of signification, exploring the "natural illegibility of writing" (Hatherly, 1975:26). Or maybe to reach the threshold of some rotating words. 23

4 JÄB32 The sequence of drawings, "visual texts" by Hatherly (1975), with titles like "Bruscamente" ("Suddenly"), "Os Cardumes da Palavra" ("The Shoals of the Word") or "Esferas do Ininteligivel" ("Spheres of the Unintelligible") or "Le Plaisir du texte" ("The Pleasure of Text") (an obvious allusion to Barthes) show calligraphic evolutions in circular movements, text columns forming dense patches, jagged lines where the word is drawn more to be guessed than read. In some "visual texts" there appears a constellation where the web of lines closes progressively to form blind spots, or also a kind of word-island in the sea of the blank sheet. KWY, A PLASTIC CONSCIENCE OF THE WORLD A'ff y magazine is another reference when we try to highlight similarities between plastic arts and the imaginary of writing. Founded in Paris by two immigrant Portuguese artists, René Bertholo and Lourdes Castro, it was issued in twelve numbers between 1958 and It was experimental and screenprinted and didn't comply with institutional rules or protocol and had a strong "nomadic" core which defined its collective and adventurous temperament. It was initially conceived with an epistolary attitude, a letter to be sent to friends, an aspect that gives it a performative and participatory dimension. "The concept of privacy that governs the initial conception of/tffy extends immediately to an aesthetic and editorial privacy that removes the magazine from broader normative and rational contingencies" (Candeias, 2001:89). In addition to the founding artists, the magazine relied on the involvement of a number of artists who had as a common affinity emigration or cultural exile to which the policies of "Estado Novo" in Portugal forced them. They are Gonçalo Duarte, José Escada, Costa Pinheiro and Joao Vieira. Jan Voss and Christo were the other two foreign artists also involved in this experience that went beyond the creation of a magazine, which in itself was an important event. We can also speak of a group that gave expression to innovative aesthetic attitudes in the production of KWY. It would be difficult not to recall here afieldwhere approximations are established between different forms of experimentation as well as bridges between the literary and the plastic. From the enormous graphic potential of the title, which consists of three letters that are not used in Portuguese, to the material provided by the support base and its combination with the plastic creations that made KWY, there are multiple reasons that justify the reference to the magazine in this essay. As an autonomous object it is already deeply studied ', and it is important here above all to highlight the side of poetry (for example the participation of Herberto Helder in issue three) and the extension of the plastic on the literary. Above all KWY is willing to experiment, experience, and witness a poetic that answers for itself, and to that extent the magazine responded to a number of concerns where the activated word of the concrete poets and the drawing of the experimental and visual poets was also important as an awareness of the "plasticity of the world." Allied to the experiences of exile and the first steps of internationalization of Portuguese art, there was an eager need to manifest the trends that came to the fore in the cultural capitals such as Paris in the mid-twentieth century. KWY Portuguese artists made the publication an experiential instrument of graphic innovation. In this respect René Bertholo (which we will also find in publications such as Hidra/ Hydra) demonstrated his special talent for the graphic and imaginative capabilities that date back to more modest publications he worked on in Lisbon as a student at the School of Fine Arts (Candeias, 2001:88). The early issues of A^Wy show influences of tachism, including non-figurative language, traces of lyricism, and even action painting. The literary contributions are important in reflecting the same intimate and secret spirit that arise from the artisanal conditions in which the first three numbers were produced. "In these early numbers, the intimate. 24 almost romantic, geography of A'f^yis reflected even in the runs that, until number four, do not exceed eighty-five copies, printed in the very room the artists (Lourdes Castro and René Bertholo) shared" (Candeias, 2001:89). In issue four, with a cover designed by Costa Pinheiro, there is a literary contribution by Nuno de Bragança, a novelist and also a significant personality involved in critical activities particularly with regard to thé emerging New Portuguese Cinema. This type of collaboration lies in what may be called "aesthetics of the absurd" (Candeias, 2001:90) associated with a project that was against commitments and editorial statutes, with a favorable climate for the reception of works identified in the neo-dadaist manner. Also because of this attitude, it makes sense to compare KWY with other experimental movements similar to dadaist practices. The demand for the abolition between life and art and the rejection of "analytical (commercial) writing" that we find in concrete poetry inspire a comparison. Issue five of KWY signals the beginning of the participation of Joao Vieira which led to the broadening of the range of literary contributions that include, among others, Herberto Helder (returning) or Mario Cesariny (and poets connected to another type of experience and imaginary, like Pedro Tamen), but always essential names in the renewal of the landscape that marked the 1960s. This change in direction of the magazine shows new interests and an increase in aesthetic complexity that incorporates contributions from leading Spanish painters such as Antonio Saura and Manolo Millares. "The defense of art informel which resumed in ÂTfFy reflected a new understanding, allowing these young Portuguese publishers to broaden their aesthetic horizons hitherto more or less confined to Lyrical Abstraction" (Candeias, 2001:91). Art informel values naturally provide contact with action painting, tachism, the exploitation of signage and a whole range of writing, that place this magazine at the core in the debate on the relations between sign, painting, and poetic landscape. This fifth issue marks a shift both in terms of increased circulation (500 copies) and the loss of the radical autonomy given the responsibility to publish a magazine with a specific cultural purpose. It was letterpress printed but screen printing is not abandoned. An example is the three panel imposing silkscreen print by Saura, Crucificción {Crucifixion), "where the artist explores the raw horror of human disfigurement" (Candeias, 2001:91). The magazine then went through different changes, seeming to compromise its initial urge and to restrict creative diversity (although such values never ceased to be restated). But issue seven (Winter 1960) "rescues" the original purpose and highlights the very original cover in burlap by Christo, denoting the perception of the phenomenology of everyday life, which would evolve later into commitments between the informal and new figuration. Depending on the inclination of each of the later issues, the magazine reflected an interest in social phenomena. The critical perspectives on mass culture also became part of the editorial stance within the magazine. Both in the literary texts and in international collaborations there were above all signs of existentialist reflection. The magazine also welcomed participation connected with the Fluxus movement, namely Robert Filliou, for whom questions of painted poetry and the freedom that allows each human being to become an artist are relevant. These factors made Filliou one of the persons involved in the discussion of the interactions between experimentalism and avant-garde movements that had taken the word, the sign, and graphics as chosen material. Another perspective that clarifies the impact of unintended breaks from ideological militancy is nouveau realism. The French movement emerged in 1960 and showed influences of dadaism by highlighting the banality of everyday art. Yves Klein ( ) was one of its exponents. This determination to discuss "with unusual critical and satirical vivacity the current implications of this aesthetics of the manipulation of the common object," is reflected in issue eleven of KWY (coordinated by Christo and dedicated to the memory of Klein who had recently died unexpectedly).

5 IAB32 Various artists, if MT covers Photography by Filipe Braga Nouveau realism insists on the theme of the emptiness and triviality of consumer society and the absurd condition of contemporary man in view of the "Camusian precept that the absurd man does not explain, describe, converge, and update fully in this phenomenology of the ordinary objects, of the everyday waste, bonded and transferred according to the chance of circumstances" (Candeias, 2001:98). This kind of attention to the critique of everyday life, the use of spare sentences, of collage, and a kind of anti-narrative suspended between waste and the casual side of what one lives, are some of the concerns captured and translated by KWY at this stage, as the contribution by Daniel Spoerri signifies. The decision to explore and use chance as "an organizing principle of significant forms" (Candeias, 2001:99) approaches poetic experimentalism in whose genesis we find principles of this nature. The last published issue of AT WF (number twelve, winter 1963) retained the same "playful matrix" of the first issue of the magazine against the nostalgic idea of end. The end oí KWY came about as the main artists of the project pursued their individual careers rather than submit to the schedule of traditional periodical-type publications. The artists who carried out the magazine and identified themselves with it gained visibility with this important set of publications, defined at the distance of more than four decades as a pleasure for visual formulations that lie beyond the conventional visual arts activity based on the sovereignty of painting. KWY made of its pages a proposal for the acquisition of new visual codes grounded in the enjoyment of printing and dissemination as possible links to an "aesthetic of the absurd." The end of ATWy magazine didn't have a specific editorial justification, "the act of closing KWY would assert itself as free or arbitrary as had been its birth" (Candeias, 2001:99). The artistic success that Lourdes Castro, René Bertholo, Voss, and Christo were achieving internationally also helps to explain this epilogue. "As every absurd work, without past nor future, KWY lived more of contingency and chance circumstances and less of a need for ethical or aesthetic intervention" (Candeias, 2001:101). One result of this uncompromising attitude was a playful space from which we can also find a feast of the word (and its reverse as the effervescence of sense) that some examples of concrete and visual poetry also participate in. JOÂO VIEIRA: SO WE HAVE DOUBTS ON LANGUAGE Painting letters was apparently the plastic purpose of Joâo Vieira whose work, tinted by experimentalism, can be traced back to the group and Parisian experience of the magazine KWY. Any approach to the relationship between painting and concretism would be incomplete without the mention of the role played by a publication (screen printed) and a group of artists who gravitated around it KWY expressed, as we have just seen, a particular way of connecting visual thinking to the world. Viera's contributions to Hidra magazine (organized by E.M. de Melo e Castro) are an indication of his proximity to concrete poetry. He created the cover for the 1966 number from a variation of the letters that make up the spelling of the title, with which he builds a compact but understandable blotch. In the same edition were published works by Eurico, Areal, Manuel Baptista, and René Bertholo (another member of the KWY group). Also in this edition Herberto Helder (whose known forays into experimental poetry were already mentioned in this essay) published a text, laid out in two columns, with title printed in bold capital letters, "An author begins to have doubts about his language and presentiments about one of his languages meanwhile in the middle there are objects, emotions, words and a sketched order of all this author Herberto Helder." ' Doubts about language and presentiments about another language could well be the summary of a whole program of analysis applicable to both visual and concrete poetry, and to the context in which Joâo Vieira researches letters and chromatics, or editing possibilities, always based on the territories of painting. Painting appears through successive zones of usually compact textuality, and words are added according to movements and painting techniques. Also working in the gap and spaces between the signs the words finally assert themselves through the claim of the body, the subject, and ultimately, the letter itself This last point gives a performance character (for the first time in Portugal) to various interventions of the artist. Evidence of Vieira's widespread experimentations can be seen in his use of the letter as absolute raw material. "To Joâo Vieira, the discovery and use of the pictorial possibilities of signs and letters leads to a true reinvention of painting in a particular idiosyncratic code that never stops being iconological to become textual" (Fernandes, 2002: 25

6 IAB32 22). This exploration of the painting gives rise to a "semiotic liberation" in which text codes are transferred to another register and create images of signs (idem, ibid.). This work, developed from gesture and graphic inevitability, creates an autonomous system of representation where it has an unmistakable language. Here the signs are a starting point for organizing the space of the painting where all the letters can be transformed involving themselves in regular patches often in an anagrammatic way. Building a text and giving it plastic visibility is an aesthetic need arising from the generational environment in which Vieira started his cultural activity. This was marked by one of the references of surrealism, the so-called Group of Gelo coffee house, a get-together from the 1950s that brought together poets and painters who made the surrounding environment especially conducive to fruitful interactions. This explains the reference by Melo e Castro to a "literary drawing" that naturally interested him, with the implicit recognition of the possibilities created by Surrealism to the amplification of visual poetry. 'Although this is never noticeable at the level of citation, but is manifested in terms of intention, the artist works with poetic material that becomes plastically recoded, making of this semiotic intervention a re-inscription. To move the poem, or its initial and founding reading, to the pictorial domain amounts to giving letters the status of an abstraction that should not be confused with abstract painting. The artist "escapes the reductive dichotomy between abstraction and figuration that, in the 1950s, still marks the aesthetic discussion in Portugal, proposing and enacting a new kind of gestural abstraction that is not a pure pictorial abstraction." There is a whole universe of concrete things on which this painting depends. The spectator doesn't sense them in the form of figure, but collects all the evidence from the gesture, which makes these concrete things from the alphabet the material of a fertile poern (Fernandes, 2002: 24). WHAT IS REPEATED & REINVENTED IN JOÄO VIEIRA The reversibility that anagrams generate was treated in a set of Veira's paintings from the 1960s and 1970s, where what was repeated was also what was reinvented. The artist draws the means to develop new areas of experimentation from this ability to reinvent, to shape his language, making it sensual and ethically demanding. He's convinced the letter is a body in space. It is, of course, a principle that is shaped by the options of experimental poetry. In addition to his participation in Hidra, Joào Vieira worked on another magazine, Operaçâo (Operation), for whose covers he was also responsible. This publication is an example of the rupture by authors linked to concretism and experimentalism. In 1967 Vieira was responsible for creating a magazine-object, Operaçâo 1 (Operation 1), that stands out for its novelty in the cultural panorama of the time it is a magazine-object where the poetic material acquires a three-dimensionality that reconfigures editorial concepts and opens up new opportunities for the art object. Much more than inventing new media for a poetic speech, Vieira conceives new messages where the literary and writing, editing and printing, are incorporated in the plastic creation. The individualization of each copy, its differentiation, the ability to raise the unique in the diversity of the multiple, are important features of this magazine where patterns from the classic letter are reused to create a different cover for each copy. In this context we can invoke the editorial creations for ( etc magazine and books from the publishing house with the same name. Both shared an alternative and dissident spirit and were directed by Vitor Silva Tavares who stamped it with his unmistakable aesthetic personality. As a publishing house ( etc materialized texts by various fundamental poets in the panorama of contemporary Portuguese literature including Herberto Helder, an author with whom Joao Vieira kept a relevant complicity. It's thanks to them that verbal material for new paradigms of plastic realization came about within the book 26 as an autonomous art object despite its condition of being a multiple. Therefore it's no surprise to find Herberto Helder's text "Kodak" (1984) transposed by Joao Vieira where the poem appears printed under a set of patches and signs specific to the painter's vocabulary, who thus gives the literary discourse other meanings. The result is the reconciliation of an action painting universe and a poetic universe, with verses like these: "The lagging profession of suffocated islands," "The light is based on abstract parcels," "Vertiginous children drunken childhood" (Herbert Helder). '" The poem thus acquires a different texture. The reading is divided into several levels of meaning. And because it is specifically the poetry of Helder, the margins between verbal, visual, and text advances and fixes itself in the center of the page which is no longer that of an ordinary book. In the 1970s there was a turning point in the work of Joao Vieira that involved the use of industrial materials (such as polyurethane), while letters remained firmly at the conceptual base. An exhibition titled The Spirit of the Letter at Judite da Cruz Gallery (1970) showed this new strand of work questioning its dadaist inspiration. This work by Vieira knows the ephemeral, but also the festive meaning of creation, understood here as spectacle and happening, thus questioning theatricality." These issues are referred to by Ernesto de Sousa in an article in Coloquio Artes magazine at the end of the decade which questions the letter, text, and context, leading to an approach in this phase of Vieira's work as "the scene of writing" and the correlation of this with the "arts scene." One characteristic of this new direction of Vieira's work requires the participation of the spectator, without a doubt one of the most important aspects of poetic experimentalism and concrete poetry, in their willingness to confront the subject with the possibilities of reading and the mechanisms of learning / unlearning of language. The exhibition The Spirit of the Letter used large format letters in wood with a plan to use them in an entirely different context which would ultimately destroy them. This is the beginning of a phase that involves many different projects some of which were left in the planning stage like M.A.R. (Sea) (1970). The idea was to give back the sea to the sea, or more exactly to throw three large buoys in the sea, each corresponding to one of the letters (M, A, and R). A certain idea of salvation or "survival" can be part of this operation however this is possible only with a performative dimension. This is working the letters to build a personal grammar, but also, according to a resonance of situationism, as a grammar for the use of the living (Raoul Vaneigem). In this perspective Joao Vieira presents a work where the theme of the show denounces social and aesthetic conformism. "Joào Vieira continues to test the infinite possibilities of painting and the infinite possibilities of the alphabet (... ) continues to test the experimental possibilities of the media and support bases he uses" (Fernandes, 2002:30). In this endless desire to experiment, the viewer sees a constant expansion of saying and being. Ernesto de Sousa's article in Coloquio Arteíhñngs together a vast theoretical apparatus which includes references to conceptual art, structuralism, Foucault, Derrida, Umberto Eco, and artists like Donald Judd and Sol Lewitt to inscribe Joào Vieira in a line of provocation, which is mainly a "vocation" and as such "primacy of imagination on the thought and re-thought." The article is, by its deconstructionist style, the assertion of a critical complicity which emphasizes the discovery of matter and an experiential dimension. It is almost inevitable to find Melo e Castro when discussing this period of aesthetic experimentation. It comes as no surprise then to find an allusion to the work of Melo e Castro in a piece by Vieira from the series Mammographies (1977) at the same Belém gallery where Alternativa Zero took place. These concerns are echoed in the conclusion in de Sousa's essay: "The future because now we live the plague: Une interminable défaite '^ but bringing together all the texts and performing them ourselves, we will imagine the

7 IAB32 context with our bodies, our hands, and all the letters as we face the Final Judgment" (Sousa, 1979:38). The essay (namely this quote) is designed using blank spaces, thus creating rhythms in the distribution of phrases, and opening breathing moments and pauses. These are well known features of experimental and visual poetry that in this perspective can be viewed as a meta-language over the meaning of performance in the artist's work. We highlighted Joao Vieira's reasons to select the letter as the profound reason of his painting, making it a mapped writing in the labyrinths of the word. Now we must emphasize the harmony between his work and international art at that time. Both conceptual art and pop art belong to a sensibility the artist brings to production contexts that are unprecedented in the Portuguese scene of the 1960s and 1970s. His relationship with KWY magazine, published with a touch of artistry and elaborate workmanship, illustrates his generation's confluence with the international art scene. On the other hand the work of Joào Vieira has a strong and erudite cultural affinity with art practices such as Kandinsky's treatment of color, Chinese calligraphy, and the surreal experience enshrined in "cadraves exquis" (Silva, 2002:68-69). These latter aspects also influenced visual poetry. This tie can be emphasized if we consider that the attitude of Vieira coincides with the situation of English and American artists who had a professional relationship with the media and industry and amalgamated "their artistic practice with the challenges of urban life where they found inspiration and the permanent questioning of the challenged autonomy of artistic practice" (Silva, 2002: 70). Where the spirit of the letter becomes matter, irony, and iconographie destiny, we can evoke language games (Wittgenstein) and decline thereafter theoretical questions such as the ones Weitz formulates when he says that "the problem of the nature of art is like the problem of the nature of games." By questioning what are the real functions of writing, "through an unusual multiplication of its supports" (Silva, 2002:71), the artist shares in their own way the concerns radicalized by other plastic experiences, to tell us that there is an ethical requirement where painting and history no longer need to relate in a model of reconciliation. Joào Miguel Fernandes Jorge noticed this apropos the images of Vieira's writing, asking if the painter questioned his memory in relation to some pictures from the collection of the National Museum of Ancient Art and questioned writing as self-image and speech. ''Jorge tried to understand how a work of art concerned with writing and painting, "incorporates and removes the symbolic universe that draws us, because by projecting on the canvas distress, weight, and a sense of seeing the world, it also communicates and reveals the demands of an art that expresses fear (of history), and tells us about the represented objectivity through images of writing "(Jorge, 1990:128). This way of feeling the look, giving it a destination that can be writing (rather than drawing), delimits in Joao Vieira the specificity of an idea of painting that can be accepted as a further contribution to understand the influences and range of concrete and visual poetry events. Melo e Castro took upon himself the charge, with intuition and a sense of opportunity, of recording it properly, recalling the importance of calligraphy and the whole visual training and relationship with school, rooted in biographical circumstances (the artist's parents were teachers in primary school). ' * The rules of good copy and dictation were transmuted into a painting made with its origins in mind this place prior to the letter that was to lead to the thick pleasure of paint and the decision to take the word. Work done under the "PO.EX' Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature" (Ref. PTDC/CLE-LLI/098270/2008) project, financed by European Union FEDER funds through the COMPETE Program and by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) Translation: Catarina Figueiredo Cardoso ENDNOTES 1. From the Presença magazine, founded in 1927 by Branquinho da Fonseca and José Regio, which would become the cornerstone of the second modernism movement in Portugal (Translator's Note, TN). 2. See Eduardo Paz BARROSO, Jorge Martins A Luz e a Pintura (Light and Painting), 2005, Lisbon, Caminho. 3. NETO JORGE, Luiza, Os Sitios Sitiados (The Besieged Sites), 1973, Lisbon, Plátano, p A textual translation would render, for "tu-me-fac-to," "you-to me-fact." The poem revolves around the genre declination of pronouns in Portuguese: alguns is the masculine plural for some, outros is the masculine plural for other, teu is the masculine possessive singular for yours, and tua is the feminine possessive singular for yours (TN). 5. The part of tbe informal art movment which used "signs" rather than "matter," meaning "formless," or "away from form." Informel is related to abstract expressionism, but seeks to strip away all reference to representation, and to become a new kind of international language, using calligraphic marks or signs, (TN). 6. LINK magazine, 1964, "Coma 1er poesia concreta" ("Hovi to read concrete poetry") apud Hatberly, 1975b. 7. The exhibition "KIVY?3ris " at Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, 2001 (curated by Margarida Acciaiuoli) led to a massive catalog with essays on the movement, many texts on the artists participating in the exhibition, with a large reproduction of works and the presentation of the twelve numbers that make up the publication and its chronology (see particularly pp ). See also "Revista KWY-da abstracçâo lírica à novafiguraçào( )/ KIVY Magazine from lyrical abstraction to new figuration ( )" by Ana Filipa Candeias (dissertation, mimeographed edition), 1996, UNL, Lisbon. See also, and specifically about the further development of the work of one of the foreign artists involved in this project, Voss e o Fio Magnético/ Voss and the Magnet Wire by Eduardo Paz Barroso, 2002, published by Fernando Santos Gallery, Porto. 8. Hidra, organization by E.M. de Melo e Castro, layout and graphics by E.M. de Melo e Castro and Eduardo Calvet de Magalhàes, Porto, 1966, n.o 1, p On this see the article by E.M. de Melo e Castro ''Letra a Letra''' ("Letter by Letter") in Coloquio Artes magazine, issue 1, Lisbon, Fundaçào Calouste Gulbenkian, 1971, and the reference by Joào Fernandes (cited, p. 23). Raquel Henriques da Silva (2002: 68) also supports the classification of visual poetry for Joào Vieira's work "in the precise although very fluid terms that the concept then assumed." 10. Some of these works are reproduced in the exhibition catalog J'oào Vieira Bodies of Letters, Porto, Museu de Serralves, 2002, pp At the exhibition Alternativa Zero: Tendencias Polémicas na Arte Portuguesa (see dedicated entry), Joào Vieira, who played a major role, offered an empty space to the public's creativity. 12. Une interminable défaite An interminable defeat. French in the original. (TN) Eduardo Paz Barroso is Cathedratic Professor of Communication Sciences at the Human and Social Sciences Faculty of the Fernando Pessoa University. 13. We refer to the exhibition by Joao Vieira Images of Writing at the National Museum of Ancient Art, Lisbon, E.M. de Melo e Castro, ''Letra a letra"/ "Letter by letter," Coloquio Artes n 1, FCG, Lisboa 1971; and also José Luís Porfirio, injfoào Vieira, catalog of the exhibition KWYPuis ; Lisbon, Centro Cultural de Belém, 2001, p