Wonderful Review of The Poetics of Poetry Film in JULIET art magazine by Enzo Minarelli
A great article on The Poetics of Poetry Film by leading experimental Italian poet Enzo Minarelli in longstanding, contemporary art magazine – JULIET. I received a copy of the magazine the other day and it looks beautifully printed in the flesh, with some really interesting observations by Enzo.
The article is in Italian, so for those of you who are able to read it in the original language, it is available in print and here at MINARELLI_j206_prime bozze bis Otherwise the original images and text (slightly out of alignment and with a rough translation in English) are available here at MINARELLI_j206_primebozzebis-en
Incidentally Enzo has an amazing exhibition at the moment, in the Piedmont region of Italy N.E. of Turin – The Enzo Minarelli ‘Triptych of the Sublime’ exhibition, curated by Carlotta Cernigliaro, is part of the program of celebrations for the 60th birthday of the Fluxus movement. Guido Molinari writes:
How to enclose the intensity
The Triptych of the Sublime is made up of separate chapters united by a common thread: an immersion in the flow of life, whether evoked through writing, objects or graphic traces. Enzo Minarelli uses merchandise products invested with traces of experience. He inserts typographical characters and texts, or draws attention to the artist’s sign, whose slight graphic vibration leads back to the exquisite act of man’s manual skills …Overall, the sense of a walk emerges, it presents itself as an ideal path, of growth and development of the person … The statement «Life is a long walking poem», pointed out by a white and red chromatic highlight, is made with the characters found, for example, on wooden crates for heavy transport, to underline a raw and direct impact of the lettering that clashes with the intense and engaging charm of the sentence.
schematic order which, however, does not renounce the slight vibration of the hand in the act of drawing the sign. To be removed is the standard impersonality of the movable typeface in favour of manual intervention, which favours an emotional transport. The poet therefore forges, like a medieval decorator, an organic and complex system in which the visual arts meet language.
The third instalment of the trilogy, Yahoo Gulliver’s travels leads us to the freedom and joy of childhood. An arrangement of small used toys, spaced apart, creates a kind of fun, motley and colourful parade. Behind them a used and black painted car roof rack forms the grid on which to line up and display all the objects. Once installed, the work rises above the viewer, hung high, placed to animate the space like medieval wooden crucifixes suspended near the altar. The fact that these are used games suggests that they are not exhibited by the artist as mere examples of products of the industry but that they were chosen because they were previously used by children, who, most likely, enjoyed using them. The discarded, abandoned object, the object trouvé, once isolated and proposed as a work of art, sometimes brings with it an intense evocation of the context to which it belonged. It is no longer a question of considering only a consumer product as such but of perceiving it as a testimony of the context of which it was part and from which it was subsequently subtracted, specifically a portion of the infantile imagination. In this case, the delicacy of the sample stands out a playful spirit that must be given back to the adult man. The work manages to bring out from the dimension of memory an evocation of pleasure and fantasy that all of us, once we become mature, tend to forget, or are forced to remove for utilitarian purposes, subject to social rules and work obligations that divide and they limit our originally extremely broad and unsegmented psychic life. On the other hand, artists, from the historical avant-gardes onwards, have dedicated themselves to seek and explore these free instinctual sources, whether they are to be found in dreams, in primitivism, in art brut or as happens in this seductive composition by Minarelli, in the imaginific area of the playful spirit. The works of the Triptych of the Sublime affirm on the whole the complete freedom of invention on the part of the author, ready to avoid homologating choices of alignment with the dominant trends. The sense of craftsmanship in the workmanship, expressed with direct expressive force and without mediations, constitutes the value that distinguishes the works, rich in references to writing, to that literature and poetry that can ignite the soul.
Enzo Minarelli (b: 1951) is an Italian poet, performer, researcher in the field of sound poetry, electronics and video poetry.
