Alain Arias-Misson (born 1936 in Brussels , Belgium) [1] is an American-Belgian poet, writer, critic and visual artist whose multimedia literary works range from typewriter poetry, sound poetry, concrete and visual poetry to stories and experimental novels. He is particularly known for his three-dimensional poem objects and the so-called public poems - happenings with performers who carry life-sized letters through the streets of various cities.
Born in Brussels to a Belgian father and an American mother, Arias-Misson was influenced by European and American cultures from an early age. In 1940 the family fled the Nazis to New York City, where he grew up. After school, Arias-Misson attended Harvard University, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1959 with a degree in classical Greek literature, philosophy and contemporary French literature . During his studies he developed an interest in experimental poetry . After completing his studies, he first went to North Africa, where he worked as a teacher in Ben Aknoun in the Algiers province after the Algerian War . In 1963 he married the Cuban-Asturian painter Nela Arias, who had studied with the painter Hans Hofmann . The couple settled in New York City. [2]
Until the outbreak of the Vietnam War in 1965, Arias-Misson published literary reviews and stories in American literary magazines such as Chicago Review, The Paris Review , American Book Review , Fiction International , Partisan and OARS . To avoid Arias-Misson's conscription into the army, the couple moved to Barcelona and built an international and cross-generational network of poets and artists that included, among others, Joan Brossa, [3] Herminio Molero and Ignacio Gomez de Liano . He also briefly collaborated with the legendary Spanish avant-garde group Zaj and its members Walter Marchetti, Juan Hidalgo and Esther Ferrer. His artistic contacts also extended to other European countries, with the friendships with the British experimental poet Dom Sylvester Houédard and with Carlfriedrich Claus, who lived in the former GDR , being particularly significant.
Through the Zaj Group and the New York gallerist Emily Harvey [4] ,who organized several exhibitions with Arias-Misson, he came into contact with many Fluxus artists, including Dick Higgins, and with collectors of the Fluxus scene such as Francesco Conz , Luigi Bonotto and Hanns Sohm, who had a great interest in experimental poetry as well as concrete and visual poetry and collected his work.
Together with the poets Jean-François Bory, Julien Blaine, Paul de Vree, [5] Eugenico Miccini and Lucia Marcucci, he was a member of the Lotte Poetica group initiated by the Italian poet Sarenco . He was co-editor of the magazine of the same name, in which he regularly published articles. His work has also been featured in many other important experimental literature magazines: De Tafelronde (by Paul de Vree, also co-published by Arias-Misson) and Phantomas in Belgium, in Henri Chopin's legendary revue OU , Luna Park , Ne coupez pas , Approches and L'Humidité in France, Logomotives in Italy, ASA and Geijutsu Seikatsu in Japan, Ovum in Uruguay, El Urogallo in Spain and Tlaloc in the UK. He compiled the first anthology of concrete poetry in the USA, which was published in 1967 by Eugene Wildman as Anthology of Concretism in the Chicago Review magazine (Volume 19, No. 4).
In terms of literary theory and philosophy, Arias-Misson was inspired by the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein , to whom he explicitly refers in some of his works, but also by Ferdinand de Saussure , Henri Lefebvre , Roland Barthes , Noam Chomsky and Ernst Bloch . The expansion of a traditional understanding of poetry and literature that Arias-Misson practiced since the 1960s can be understood against the background of literary experiments over the course of the 20th century and particularly in the context of concepts of intermedia arts - a term used by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins in the mid-1960s. The aim was to dissolve the boundaries between traditional artistic disciplines and their genres. At that time, Arias-Misson began to experiment with the spatial effect of letters and words by developing three-dimensional poetry objects: Plexiglas boxes in which texts were arranged on transparent plastic forms using Letraset letters. Characteristic of these works is the use of transparency effects, overlays and distortions of letters, words and texts.
In 1967, Arias-Misson conceived the first of his performative-actionist poems in public space entitled The Vietnam Public Poem , which he understood as a poetic protest against the Vietnam War. Performers carried the human-sized white letters V, I, E, T, N, A, M splattered with red paint through the streets of Brussels. With this mixture of artistic happening and political demonstration, he created a poetic form that enabled him to inscribe texts into the social context of a city. To date, 28 such public poems have taken place in Madrid, Paris, Berlin, Venice, Los Angeles and New York, among others. [6]
During his life, Arias-Misson changed his place of residence several times and lived in different countries. In 1970 he and Nela moved from Spain to Antwerp for a few months and then to Brussels. In 1973 they returned to New York City. In 1983, after separating from Nela, Arias-Misson returned to Brussels to work for the European Community , which became the European Union in 1992 . From 1991 to 2021 he lived in Paris and Venice with his second partner, the textile designer and author Karen Moller. Arias-Misson currently lives in Madrid and Miami. He is married to the novelist Edith Monge, who is originally from Colombia.
The works in the Compositions series (approx. 1968–1979) consist of 5 to 7 transparent Plexiglas panes arranged one behind the other , which are decorated with letters, words or sentences from Letraset. While a sheet of paper only offers a two-dimensional surface to stage syntactic and semantic relationships between linguistic elements, the layering of transparent Plexiglas levels enables the use of spatial depth as an artistic element of poetic text conception. There are two different models of compositions : In one, the transparent Plexiglas surfaces are attached one behind the other in a wooden frame so that they can be hung on the wall. In the other model, the transparent Plexiglas surfaces are attached one behind the other in a wooden base, so that they become free-standing objects. This unconventional sculptural (text) form became known through John Cage's multiples Not wanting to say anything about Marcel (1969). It has been used previously by other artists, including by the British visual poet Tom Edmonds in 1966, [7] Arias-Misson's first work of this type dates from 1968.
Along with the Public Poems and the Compositions , the Object Poems (approx. 1966–1982) are among Arias-Misson's best-known works. They were shown in some of the first exhibitions dedicated to experimental poetry and are documented in their catalogs and in various avant-garde literary magazines of the late 1960s and 1970s. The Object Poems consist of Plexiglas boxes with integrated transparent plastic elements on which words or sentences made from Letraset letters are distributed. The poem in the sense of a printed text becomes a sculptural object that must be viewed from different perspectives - whereby the viewing angles change the visual appearance of the text elements and they look very different from different directions. By making reflections, superimpositions and distortions of letters integral aesthetic qualities of these works, Arias-Misson expands the traditional rhetorical stylistic devices of poetic work. Accordingly, the texts cannot be written and printed on paper, but must be designed in three dimensions.
The Photo Poems consist of sequential sequences of photographs of varying length. Arias-Misson posed in front of the camera and in many cases supplemented the photographic prints with handwritten texts. In 2021, the Galeria Estampa in Madrid dedicated an extensive exhibition to this cycle of works and published the portfolio El autor.... casi / The author... almost (30 copies), which includes reproductions of the Photo Poems Merde (1973), Raincoat day ( 1973), Punctuation (1973/74), Uncovering... it (1973/74), I'm in, inner, into! (1973/1974), Then... (1973/1974) and Fire (1974). [8]
In 1967, Arias-Misson realized the first of his public poems , entitled The Vietnam Public Poem , in Brussels, where he was living at the time . To protest the war in Vietnam, he had several friends carry the human-sized white letters V, I, E, T, N, A, M splattered with red paint through the streets of the city. The Public Poem G D followed in 1968 , which was also performed in Brussels. The Public Poem A Madrid , performed in Madrid in 1969 , proved to be influential in the development of this series of works in that he had the performers form new words from the letters of the title as the action progressed. Following an anagrammatic poetic principle, various words from the pool of letters were put together at central locations in Madrid's urban space: In front of Parliament, the word ARMA (weapon) was formed and transformed into AMAR (love) when the Guardia Civil approached . In 1972, The Public Punctuation Poem was realized in Pamplona as part of the Encuentras de Pamplona festival , the first avant-garde art festival in Spain, which at the time was still under the rule of the fascist dictator Francisco Franco. Even though in later years Arias-Misson was occasionally invited by public institutions to realize public poems , he usually refrained from obtaining the necessary official permits to be able to hold such events in public spaces. In this sense, the actions bear characteristics of artistic guerrilla tactics . Arias-Misson sees the fact that the ephemeral text inscribed in the city can provoke unpredictable reactions and set incalculable processes in motion as a poetic challenge. Over the years, numerous poetological texts have been written on the theory of the public poem as a literary form. [9] The first public poems were documented with photos, which Arias-Misson often provided with handwritten comments. He later also resorted to film and video for the documentation.
Between 1975 and the early 1990s, Arias-Misson worked on various series of works that he referred to as Theater Boxes . These include the Minimal Theaters (1976) [24] , the Black Box Theaters (1981–1982), the Mental Theaters (1987–1988), and the Floating Mind Theaters (1987–1989). These often black boxes with a transparent front are reminiscent of dioramas or display cases in ethnographic museums, in which landscapes or urban scenes from the past are depicted with model figures against a painted background. In contrast, the 'Theater Boxes' do not represent realistic scenarios, but rather imaginary settings in which various materials are brought into an associative connection. They often contain images from the mass media such as photographs of television screens or clippings from magazines, as well as personal photographs, figures and handwritten elements.
Around 2015, Arias-Misson began experimenting with the possibilities of 3D laser engraving - a process that is otherwise used primarily for advertising and other commercial purposes. Three-dimensional images can be engraved into transparent acrylic glass blocks. This technique enabled him to arrange free-floating letters inside the solid material without having to integrate transparent plastic forms as supports for texts in the interiors of boxes, as was the case with the Object Poems of the 1960s and 1970s. In the Sculpture Poems , too , the spatial staging of the texts is in a semantic tension with their content. Arias-Misson uses both figurative arrangements and mathematically complex shapes, such as Archimedean spirals or torus knots, which he develops using the virtual 3D design software Blender and Maya.
Inspired by the work with 3D virtual design software that Arias-Misson used for the Sculpture Poems , he developed a series of 3D video poems . Accompanied by soundtracks consisting of spoken words, sounds or musical elements, the three-dimensionally rendered text animations are projected as films onto upright panes of glass so that the poems appear to move through the air. [25] [26] [27]
Arias-Misson’s works are included in the earliest anthologies of experimental, visual and concrete poetry, like Emmett Williams’ Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967) [28] and Jean-François Bory’s Bientôt (1967). [29] [30] His work was shown in exhibitions in this field and is documented in their catalogues, such as Mostra de Poesia Concreta (Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy, 1969), [31] Klankteksten – Konkrete Poëzie – Visuele Teksten (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1970), [32] Buchstäblich wörtlich, wörtlich buchstäblich (Nationalgalerie Berlin, 1987), [33] Poésure et Peintrie (Musées de Marseille, France, 1998), [34] and La parola nell’arte (MART – Museo di Arte Contemporaneo di Rovereto e Trento, Rovereto, Italy, 2008). [35]
In 2018, Arias-Misson received the Prix international de littérature Bernard Heidsieck Mention spéciale Fondazione Bonotto awarded by Centre Pompidou. [36]
In 2020, Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library acquired Arias-Misson's extensive archive. The institution's website states: “The Alain Arias-Misson Papers contain an extensive collection of correspondence; writings, visual poetry, and notes by Arias-Misson as well as works by Jean-François Bory and Ugo Carrega, among others; printed material including cards, pamphlets, ephemera, exhibition catalogs, serials, and books; and born-digital audiovisual materials. The extensive collection of correspondences, which spans generations and are international in scope, includes deep exchanges with Carlfriedrich Claus, Ignacio Gomez de Liano, Joan Brossa , Paul De Vree , in addition to briefs with François Dufrêne , Jacques Donguy , Dick Higgins , Mark Rothko , and Carolee Schneemann , among others. Complementing the correspondences are notes and writings pertaining to poems ranging from 1962 to 2017, such as Vietnam Superfiction (1967–1968), Cat and Mouse Public Poem (1974), and The Public Surveillance Poem (2003); writings and visual poetry published in Logomotives (1984), Poesia Vixual (1994), and Art in America (2004); sketches, photographs, and paste-ups for plexiglass projects.” [37]
Extensive holdings of works and documents can also be found in the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry , which is part of the special collections of the libraries of the University of Iowa, [38] in the Archivio Nuova Scrittura (Bozen) and in the Fondazione Bonotto (Colceresa).
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