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Editor's Corner
corner: n. 1. a. The position at which two lines
or surfaces meet. b. The immediate interior or exterior or exterior
region of the angle formed at this position, bounded by the two
lines or surfaces. 2. A vertex, esp. the interior region of a
vertex, formed by the sides of roads or streets that join, meet,
or intersect. 3. A threatening or embarrassing position, esp.
one from which escape is difficult or impossible. 4.a. A part,
quarter or region. b. A remote, secluded, or secret place. 5.
A guard or decoration fitted on a corner, as of a bookbinding.
6. A speculative monopoly of a stock or commodity created by
purchasing all or most of the available supply in order to raise
its price.
(The American Heritage Dictionary)
Addressing all readers who value interdisciplinary work, this
Corner 5 expands our knowledge of the relations between
painting and language as well as our knowledge regarding poetry
and visual poetry in general. In addition, we include insights
into other verbal, philosophical and experimental elements of
writing. As in previous numbers, Corner offers here a
variety of theoretical critical approaches.
Two essays dedicated to artist Gareth Lloyd (1960) discuss how
the Welsh painter through his work and philosophy confronts the
modern crisis of the ruin of language developing an extraordinary
artistic vision that offers to the viewer (and reader) a durable
pattern of universal associations. Jeremy Reed considers in his
"Gareth Lloyd: Leaving the 20th Century" that "The
serene texture of Gareth Lloyd's paintings, conceal the radical
dissent of an artist who refuses to conform to the new media
hegemony. Drawing inspiration from the cinema, his prodigious
reading, the connecting points between mythic and representational
reality and the seething nucleus of West End energies in which
he lives, he is an artist working in his time with an alertness
to creating configurative patterns from emerging contemporary
myths." Maria Esther Maciel considers that Lloyd invents
his now from a gaze in transit. Her essay "Gareth
Lloyd: Towards an Aesthetic of Dissent", written as an introduction
for the artist 2000 catalogue, examines how Lloyd's gaze is "A
gaze that not only sees, but critically reads the time (historical
and personal) in which the artist is inserted, and extracts from
this experience a new horizon for his vision. In other words,
the mobile nature of his work is justified by the attempt not
only to capture, through images, some visual signs of the last
three decades, but also to reconstruct a personal trajectory:
one which he himself as an artist has sought throughout this
period, in his intense but non-complacent dialogue with Pop Art,
media iconography, and the aesthetic legacy of the modernist
tradition."
Gareth Lloyd resides in London. He belongs to a generation of
British Artists that has a critical and creative contact with
the Pop Art, adding to their work some of the aesthetic precedings
of that artistic tendency linking them with many of the principles
that embody Modern and Contemporany Poetics. In his works, Lloyd
dialogues with Mallamé's poetry as well as with the ideas
of the Mexican poet Octavio Paz. Lloyd studied technical and
industrial drawing in Berkshire College of Art and did post-graduated
art studies in St Martin´s School of Art. He had also done
some doctoral research work in Philosophy at the University of
London.
Always faithful to experimental poetry, Corner includes
the valuable and interesting essay "Experimental Poetry
in Spain" by Laura López Fernández. For the
critic "Contemporary experimental poetry, in its various
forms of manifestation --visual poetry, phonetic poetry, sound
poetry, performance poetry, non-object poetry or action art,
video poetry, cyber poetry, computer holopoetry, mail-art, etc
-- is an integrative and interactive art that requires a `reader'
willing to participate in a new configuration of semiotic codes.
Experimental poets in Spain are working with new artistic parameters
and pushing the boundaries of conventional categories of genre."
Among the experimental poets included in this essay, already
present in former issues of Corner, we find Joan Brossa,
Xavier Canals, Juan Eduardo Cirlot, Guillem Viladot, J.M. Calleja,
Carles Hac Mor, Teresa Hereus, Montserrat Felip, and Eugenia
Balcells, among others. We recommend as a complementary reading
for López Fernández essay, in particular, the interview
with Joan Brossa "Reescriure amb llibertat amb el profeta
ateu"/"Reescribirse en libertad con el profeta ateo"
by Xavier Canals (Corner One) as well "La poesie
visual de les dones catalanes, una ab/presència"
another pioneer essay about the Catalan women visual poets by
Canals (Corner Two).
Héctor Mario Cavallari sheds new light on Borges' works
through an in-depth analysis of the aesthetic projections of
the relationships between "language" and "reality".
His "Jorge Luis Borges y la estética del simulacro"
explores a variety of levels and strategies of complex meaning,
offering in a very unique way a connection between artistic and
philosophical ideas. Another outstanding essay is María
Esther Maciel's
"Poéticas de la multiplicidad: Octavio Paz y Haroldo
de Campos." The critic focuses on some theoretical works
of Octavio Paz and Haroldo de Campos, especially those related
to Mexican and Brazilian cultures, to show how both poets have
proposed a paradoxal and prismatic reading of the problem of
Latin American cultural identity. Paz, by discussing the notion
of analogy, and Campos, by converting the modernist metaphor
of antropophagy into a working concept, offer an alternative
and dialogic way for dealing with the national/foreigner, local/global,
colonizer/colonized, identity/alterity play of opposites. Dialogic,
because their approaches are based on a non-Manichean confrontation
between the related elements and because they show the active,
differential, and not merely receptive role of the colonized
in relation to the other, or others.
In his original and necessary "Poesía en ANOLECRAB.
Poetas en la Barcelona de entre siglos", Jaime D. Parra
offers a new critical approach to the work of eleven contemporary
women poets: Carmen Borja, Teresa Shaw, Rosa Lentini, Marga Clark,
Neus Aguado, Concha García, Cinta Montagut, Esther Zarraluki,
and Carlota Caulfield, Nicole d'Amonville, and Gemma Ferrón.
Barcelona in here the shared urban space where all the above-mentioned
poets, in one way or another, created or made their work known.
In their works, we find essentially three poetic directions:
1) introspection and personal search; 2) the poetics of space
and its limits; and 3) intertextuality and its links between
texts and cultures.
Jesús J. Barquet,"Texto y contexto en la recepción
y génesis de Los siete contra Tebas" is an
engaging text dedicated to one of Antón Arrufat's most
important plays. Based on the tragedy of the same title by the
Greek dramatist Aeschylus, Barquet examines how Arrufat modifies
the original Greek text in order to tell the circunstances of
the Cuban reality. The critic also analyses how Los siete
contra Tebas (1968) marked a departure from Arrufat's previous
avant-garde plays like El caso se investiga (1957) and
La zona cero (1961), situating the play in the context
of the Latin American theater during the 1960s and 1970s.
Keeping alive the discussion about Arts and its spaces, Carlos
Barbarito offers a series of reflections about the avant-garde
and its discourses in his short but lucid reflection "La
angustiosa aventura de las vanguardias."
The last piece of this Corner is the amazing surrealist-philosophical-ludic
"Zahorí" by Reynaldo Jiménez. In reading
the text, one is hooked by the extraordinary dynamism and musicality
of Jiménez' language. The text is an avant-garde approach
to the multiple dimensions of the eye: we: view, gaze, glance,
regard, discern, spy, observe, attend, examine, mark, peer, have
an eye on, study, peep, look at. Emulating with the geomantic
zahorí, the reader, now aware of every word, is
able to discover what is hidden into the text.
Corner's Reader offers reviews of Elizabeth Coonrod Martínez,
Before the Boom: Latin American Revolutionary Novels of the
1920s and Jaime D. Parra, El poeta y sus símbolos.
Variaciones sobre José Eduardo Cirlot, two valuable
and well-documented books, which we consider, key works for any
avant-garde lover and researcher.
Before leaving this Corner, I would like to link the reader
with two of the best literary magazines on-line: Agulha
and CiberLetras.
Agulha # 13/14 and CiberLetras 3 offer insightful essays related
to the avant-garde.
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