Edwin Torres, the poet and performance artist, has curated his first art show, at the Ann Street Gallery in Newburgh. “(your) body is a porous language” considers poetry as visual art, and visual art as a form of writing. It runs until May 31.
Right above the desk of the gallery attendant is a small framed ballpoint pen, carved from a twig of poison sumac and fitted with a tip, a clip, and a thrust device. (I looked up “parts of a ballpoint pen“ on Google.) This piece is titled Poison (Oak) Pen, and is by Tamalyn Miller, an artist who’s immune to the agonizing itching caused by poison sumac. A poison pen letter is a malicious message, usually sent anonymously, but this object is elegant, both familiar and distinct, a seamless unity of technology and a shrub.
Other artists in the show merge the personal and the technological. Two of them collaborate with AI. This Desire Called Utopia by Matthew Friday is a TV screen turned vertical (suddenly I realize I’ve never seen that before) on which an excerpt of The Communist Manifesto is written. The 128 words are companied by 128 meandering lines—programmed with Java code. The lines have been “trained” to cover any word that refers to the past—words like “ancient” and “earlier”—and avoid words that refer to the future. Perhaps Friday is saying that we should strip away the 19th-century aspects of Marxism, and invent a new techno-communism.
Shadows of the looping lines remain, but every 1848 seconds they are wiped clean. (1848 is the year The Communist Manifesto was published.)
Sasha Stiles has programmed her poem “Heart Mantras” to vary continuously—on another screen, this one horizontal. Words from her poem, and words generated “synthetically,” appear, overlap, disappear, in several fonts, the phrases slowly evolving through the color spectrum. Stiles’ poem begins:
The Internet
loves you back,
if you let it.
And why shouldn’t artists use AI, just as they use palette knives and Sharpies?
Another video work is by Zina Zinchenko, who posts Instagram videos outlining movement techniques to overcome stress and personal crisis. Eighteen examples—from the series “Body Knows“ – were selected for the show. Though the videos are not exactly intended as art, Zinchenko is a dancer, with an intuitive design sense, and large subtitles echo her instructions. When a dancer does spinal twists in a chair, that too is dance; and the big white subtitular words continue the theme of text as visual art.
Slippage: to read with the silent runners, a poem/artwork by Torres, transmutes words into design. To the right of the page is a poem, and beside it a verbal collage—created digitally—in which the words of the poem clash and recombine. The collage looks a bit like a map of Manhattan, and the enigmatic phrases are reminiscent of snatches of overheard conversation on Broadway.
Todd Colby, another New York City spoken word poet, takes a more direct approach. He paints words on colorful patterned paper resembling the tiles of a tin ceiling. For example, “FYI I AM LEAVING MY BODY NOW” is white on royal blue. (But how is one to interpret this phrase? Is Colby dying? Experiencing spiritual ecstasy? Just daydreaming? Is the line a joke—or the most important moment of a human life?)
At one boundary of poetry is drawing. At the other boundary is song. Solo-Duo-Solo Improvisation is a 55-minute sound installation by Charmaine Lee and Gryphon Rue, broadcast from two small globular speakers on a windowsill. Voices and electronic sounds weave a wordless musical conversation, which becomes the soundtrack to one’s gallery visit—until you reach the rear of the room, where the music of Yara Travieso’s videos takes over.
Parallel to Solo-Duo-Solo Improvisation is 49 min body-led movement drawing through 7 layers of my body for 7 min each, a site-specific work by Elizabeth Castagna done on the wall in chalk and charcoal in 49 minutes (on April 1), as the title explains. Castagna has created a series of these pieces, based on the principles of the Alexander Technique, a method of body alignment—but this is the first one on an actual wall. The lines are cyclonic, tangled, and climb around the corner of the wall like a vine: vine-lines.
A drawing has lines, and so does a poem.
One of my favorite pieces is a pile of offbrand and misspelled T-shirts, collected by two artists who call themselves Shanzhai Lyric, as if they were a punk band. They gathered more than 400 garments over a 10-year period, and compiled their kooky slogans into a book titled Endless Garment. Here are some examples from the piece in the show, Incomplete Poem (Heap):
Vetsaci
The Future Is Famale
Forever Whatever
Above the pile of T-shirts, a microphone is suspended from the ceiling, so one can hear every sound the shirts make. (Full disclosure: The microphone is not plugged in.)
“(your) body is a porous language” will be at Ann Street Gallery in Newburgh until May 31.
