quarterly journal of poetic and visual art
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Mannequin Envy quarterly journal of poetic and visual art home - submissions - contact |
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Spring 2008
Jennifer VanBuren
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Keith Brighouse
Poetry and Art Presented Summer 2006
Previously pulished in Mannequin Envy Summer 2006
CHERRY You told me For a moment your romance had won me But such notions seemed incongruous Leaning over
AI NO BOREI We sprawled on the futon With Seki's submission to Toyoji's persistence A peasant woman defending her husband's crop From my vantage point I coldly scanned A ghost could not elicit such unflinching horror Her belly quivering and her thighs trembling I brushed the stubble on her mound Her grimace provoking my conceit * Oshima's film, Empire Of Passion Keith Brighouse Artist's Statement There is a theory that I find compelling and that is, cavemen like children drew such vivid imagery because they lacked sophisticated language. The act of depicting their world was a way of internalizing and experiencing it. We however, exist in a culture of sophisticated verbal language and cannot escape it. When I was studying art in Sheffield and Rotterdam, the lecturers would encourage the students to create art intuitively and then ask the students to verbally explain the work or at least explain why a particular piece of art worked or failed. Language and imagery was linked. Again, should we go to an art gallery, we understand the art on display, not because we intuitively understand the visual language but because we have learnt the theories that underpin the art through language, whether that be through formal education or absorbing the information through a cultural grapevine. Again, verbal language and visual language are inextricably linked. For a long time I endeavoured to contrive to separate visual and verbal language, thinking as a good modernist, that the visual exists on its own terms. Picasso was about creating imagery intuitively, yet we had to learn through written language his theories behind this. It is quite ironic that Picasso was one of the artists that popularized collage and written words being incorporated into a visual image. The linkage between the verbal and the visual was there yet again. Where once I saw this linkage of the two forms of language as problematic to my visual work, I am now at ease with it. I have always written poetry, though only recently had the confidence to write it for public consumption. This poetry has always informed my visual work and my visual work, my poetry. I often find myself tackling the same subject matter through the two mediums simultaneously but I’m always conscious that at the same time one should not be subordinate to the other. I am careful that the visual shouldn’t illustrate the written and the written shouldn’t explain the visual, they are created in parallel. Both art forms being primarily concerned with imagery whether through line or words so there is inevitably an intuitive and an intellectual link. Why deny it? My series of work about Yukiko, of which some are here published on Mannequin Envy are created in such a way. Being posted together, it might appear that the prints were made to illustrate the poetry but this is not the case. The Yukiko prints were made independently and to stand on their own, though informed by the same experience as the Yukiko poems. They were created with the purely visual in mind. To me, the prints cover parts of the experience that can’t be covered by written language and vice versa. I do not have a need to create work on a particular subject matter in both art forms. It is that I am usually so consumed by a particular subject matter that I find myself thinking about it both visually and verbally. My ideas in one form of language bounce and ricochet off the other but the visual remains purely visual and the written, written. I have found that being concerned with poetry and language has affected my visual art in ways that being a purely visual artist wouldn’t. Paint and clay etcetera, is very therapeutic when dealing with it purely as a medium, process is the main consideration. A purely visual artist might and some have, accused me of illustration of which I strongly dispute. I do concede however, that being concerned with language does take my visual work in directions that a lack of concern about language wouldn’t. This acknowledgement by me has led me to looking into ways of combining the two art forms into a homogenous whole, where each element is dependent on they other, rather like the cogs and springs in clockwork become a complete and working mechanism.
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