In this chapter, I undertake a close reading of a cultural artifact: the catalogue from the art show Concrete Poetry (exhibited at the University of British Columbia Fine Arts Gallery in 1969)—a show co-organized by Alvin Balkind (the curator of the UBC Fine Arts Gallery), Michael Morris, and other significant cultural figures from Vancouver and beyond. I elect to do a material reading of the catalogue, meaning that I read the work as both a physical entity and a conceptual entity, pointing to the two levels of signification implied by the term “material.” On the one hand, I examine the tangible components of the text, both as an object of study and as evidence of an event; on the other hand, I explore and discuss the context of this art show as central to a greater politico-cultural movement, taking place at a specific moment in history. These readings are intertwined, and, as such, I present a faceted reading of a heterogeneous text. I also discuss how this event remains paradigmatic in the shaping of Vancouver’s cultural identity, showing how this exhibition partakes of an avant-garde discourse still tangible in the life of the city. By examining debates surrounding renewed attention to the exhibition, I draw attention to how Vancouver’s position within the context of both regional and international art historical movements led to a geographically specific interpretation of text-based art. In this context, according to the avant-garde theories of Peter Bürger and Matei Călinescu, curatorial intention is revealed to be a matter of the institutional politics of art in Vancouver, rather than one of art historical or literary taxonomies. These concerns are the reason this exhibition can be understood as a pivot point for the interrogation of the generative, but oftentimes ambivalent, relationship between Conceptual Art and concrete poetry.
The catalogue’s title, Concrete Poetry: An Exhibition in Four Parts, alludes to the four parts of the exhibition itself as well as the four parts of the accompanying publication (plus one, if we include the portfolio itself in this enumeration). The catalogue comprises three booklets, variously containing textual works and visual essays, a selection of prints of concrete poetry,1 as well as a box-like portfolio upon which is printed a number of lists. The four sections of the exhibition, according to the catalogue, are as follows: nineteen collages by Ray Johnson, twenty-four letter drawings by Michael Morris, a selection of recent concrete poems by international artists, and what the catalogue describes simply as “film, sound poets on tape, and a selection of slides.”
The catalogue correlates to the exhibition insofar as the included booklets provide reproductions of Morris’s twenty-four letter drawings, while the portfolio lists the slides shown during the show, presumably to contextualize concrete poetry in the broader cultural history of art and literature; moreover, the booklet titled “Ray Johnson” includes only three reprints of his collages, while opting to list the titles of the remaining sixteen. Additionally, the catalogue’s format, with its extensive tripartite bibliography and numerous essayistic components, suggests that the catalogue serves as a supplement to, rather than simply a documentation of, the exhibition. The impressive selection of images and their unbound, loose format contributes to this idea, suggesting that this grouping of literary elements and visual components speaks to the philosophy underlying concrete poetry itself: such poetry is not necessarily restrained by the conventions of the book; indeed, it confounds convention in many ways, and, at the very least, it speaks to alternative, emergent traditions of art and writing in the post-industrial, if not postwar, era.2
Understanding that the curator invariably occupies the apex of power inherent to any exhibition remains key to approaching this catalogue. Balkind’s “Acknowledgements” is a seemingly banal document, but in fact, it disseminates a number of significant, contextual cues. In it, Balkind lists the exhibition’s contributors, starting with the members of the exhibition committee: Edwin Varney, Stephen Scobie, Werner Aellen, Ian Wallace, Douglas Eliuk, Michael Rhodes, Illayas Pagonis, and Jeff Wall. Balkind next thanks Michael Findlay (the vice-president of the Feigen Gallery) and Dick Higgins (owner of Something Else Press), both out of New York. Balkind also thanks the following publishers: Very Stone Press, Vancouver, and Coach House Press, in Toronto; the Wild Hawthorn Press in Edinburgh, Scotland; Hansjörg Mayer in Frankfurt, Germany; and the Letter Edged in Black from New York. Last on this list are Blew Ointment Press and Radio Free Rain Forest Press, both in Vancouver. Balkind then acknowledges, without naming, the contributing poets, while naming an individual officer from the Canada Council of the Arts (Mr. Naïm Kattan), along with a variety of specific figures from the University of British Columbia, all of whom have provided support in varying capacities.
Balkind’s list of acknowledgements is not particularly unusual, but, like all such lists, it points to an underlying structure of power and architecture of influence within the framework of the exhibition, while underlining a series of classist, colonial, and gendered dynamics, typical of such a historical, institutional context. These dynamics are particularly relevant to my reading of the catalogue, since the notion of an inherent hierarchy is implicit to much of the political spirit shaping the discourse of the media celebrated in the exhibition: that of a simultaneously anti-institutional (if not non-institutional) politicized art form (occurring mainly at the exhibition’s surface), and the innate recognition that institutional discourse shapes avant-garde rhetoric in the post-industrial age. The overarching, institutional nature of the exhibition creates a generative tension within the context of the catalogue—since the event receives support from a variety of Canadian establishments, but the event also plays host, not only to the counter-institutional gestures of concrete poetry and mail art, but also to the contra-institutional gestures of conceptual movements in the visual arts.
The tension between radical politics and institutional realities features prominently not only in the catalogue, but also in the exhibition itself. Such tension speaks to contradictions generally inherent to the avant-garde (as defined by Peter Bürger in The Theory of the Avant-Garde, in which the theorist argues for a dialectical relationship between radicalism in art and the political, historical conditions of the institution of art). Musing on historical, avant-garde movements, with special consideration of what he identifies as the limitations of Renato Poggioli’s reductive, modernist theory,3 Bürger notes how, previously, the presence of an institutional discourse in art has disrupted or neutralized “the political content of the individual work,”4 whereas more contemporary, late-capitalist emanations enter into a “new relationship to reality”—one that necessarily recognizes how the initial intentions of the avant-garde, constructed according to the false dichotomy of “pure” art, on the one hand, and political art, on the other, are doomed to collapse.5 Bürger deduces that, finally, “it is art as an institution that determines the measure of political effect avant-garde works can have,” and he concludes that “art in bourgeois society continues to be a realm that is distinct from the praxis of life.”6
Such dynamics are representative of the specific historical moment from which the exhibition emerges. According to Stephen Voyce in Poetic Community: Avant-Garde Activism and Cold War Culture, participants in the post-industrial avant-garde have productively joined forces with institutions, reaping the benefits of doing so during the politicized 1960s.7 Indeed, avant-garde artists at this time have frequently co-opted the language of the institution, as evidenced perhaps by Ray Johnson’s deliberate misspelling in his collective mail-art enterprise, the New York Correspondence School,8 suggesting an overarching, reflexive awareness of the institutional roles played by academies within such practice. Building on Bürger’s conceptualization of the avant-garde (and its critical tension with post-industrialism), Matei Călinescu in Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (1987), discusses how, “[c]ompared to the old avant-garde, the new, postmodernist avant-garde seems … more systematically involved in theoretical thinking.”9 Furthermore, he underlines how “the enjoyment offered by postmodern art … comes in the form of a broadly defined, parodic practice, in which some commentators have discerned a more general characteristic of our cultural times.”10 Broadly, he points to the general self-consciousness of position prevalent within the avant-gardes of this period, highlighting how creative praxis is both critical of, and complicit with, institutional dynamics. While the avant-garde often finds itself adopted by the discourse of modernity, the undeniable influence of a figure like John Cage, from the Black Mountain School, within concrete poetry does imply, or at least anticipate, the presence of postmodern ideation within the genre, and certainly within the 1969 show.
In his list, Balkind first names several important figures circulating within the institutional culture of not only Vancouver in particular, but also British Columbia and Canada in general, including the following two artists and scholars: first, Ian Wallace (a professor of art history at the University of British Columbia, and a central figure in the development of Vancouver photoconceptualism); second, Douglas Eliuk of the National Film Board. Balkind then lists the various contributing art galleries and small presses, identifying the nodes of a network for concrete poetry and mail art, both domestic and international. These names, however, do not belie the aforementioned tension in the remainder of the list, and although there is nothing conspicuously aberrant in the conventional format of Balkind’s letter (since the contributing artists are listed elsewhere), the prioritization evident in the explicit naming of institutional figures before all others does speak to the contradictory impulses outlined by Bürger.
The selection of slides identified on the list in the catalogue seems especially relevant to this observation, since the curator has included them to provide an accessible conceptual context for the ideas advanced in the exhibition; the inclusion of these slides speaks to self-reflexivity and a sense of discursive encoding, including that of parody. Among the slides listed are an Egyptian papyrus, a Mongolian manuscript from the eighteenth century, George Herbert’s visual poem “Easter Wings” from the late seventeenth century, and a number of Dadaist, Futurist, and Russian Constructivist typographic works, including selections by Marcel Duchamp (Machine Optique, 1920) and F. T. Marinetti (Les Paroles en Liberté, n.d.). The images, when grouped together, suggest a number of different themes: the visuality of language; the evolution of communication; and the instability of language systems. Moreover, the images collectively suggest concrete poetry’s trajectory of influence, showing slides of such artworks in chronological order so as to demonstrate how written language does, in fact, lend itself to visual interpretation. Again, these references gesture ironically to institutional discourse, while also highlighting the conceptual foundations of the medium: concrete poetry is a hybrid form, borrowing from both the visual realms and the linguistic realms.
In his unconventional review of the exhibition, “Incoherent Thoughts on Concrete Poetry,” John Noel Chandler assembles a variety of textual sources in order to flesh out the definition of the composite medium, citing quotes, for example, by the following two artists: first, John Cage, who defines such poetry as “words without syntax, each word polymorphic”—and second, Ian Hamilton Finlay, who says: “It may be a case of separating the letters of a word in order to disclose new decorative and semantic possibilities.”11 Certainly, the optical aesthetics of language are brought to the forefront in the visual work represented by the catalogue, while the sonic, performative elements are merely listed, and as a result, become secondary.
Jeff Wall’s review of the exhibition offers a more resolute response to the event. Notably, Wall is mentioned in Balkind’s acknowledgements—and for this reason, Wall’s review, although at times polemical, speaks to a specific, nuanced experience of the show. He asserts: “The presence of an extremely intellectualized method of art-making was evident,” explaining that
[t]here is an awareness of the critical or theoretical position of the artist, his public position in regard to the interpretation and historical significance of his work. As well, a general conviction seems to exist among these artists that the poems defy specific interpretation or commentary, and that what can be talked about can include the artists’ intentions, the relation of his activity to the major literary or esthetic traditions, his relation to the system or lack of system he employs in his work, his role as a distinct “presence” in his work—in other words, there is a good deal of discussion “around” the objects themselves.12
Indeed, such reviews, when combined with the essays included in the catalogue by Michael Morris, Ian Wallace, and Michael Rhodes (as well as the reproduction of letters by Ray Johnson) give weight to the broader context of the exhibition.
The essay “Literature—Transparent and Opaque” by Ian Wallace, which concludes the orange, unpaginated booklet, expands upon this discourse of intellectualism, with its theoretical familiarity. He alludes to the apparent constraints of language being challenged by the exhibition and the creative strategies therein, noting how “situated within a literary format and literature as a creative activity, concrete poetry plays a special role in the modernization of literature, a role that becomes more important as the power of rhetoric becomes exhausted.” He advances ideas such as the “material integrity” of the icon and the psychoanalytic potential of the purely visual renderings of concrete poetry. Calling critical attention to the different ways that literature and concrete poetry treat language: “what is said” versus “something to say,” respectively, he revisits the historical context of these distinguishing linguistic features. He points to, what he calls, “the vacuum of experience” resulting from the advent of modernism, and he identifies how the effects intrinsic to developments in electronic media influence the “act of reading” in such a way as to transform the role of the poet. He argues that the poet’s role becomes one of “locating consciousness in space and time” rather than one of mere expression. His erudite, if abstract, response to the exhibition echoes Morris’s more playful contextualizing statements about the show.13
Additional support for these texts is found in the selection of images provided in the catalogue, all of which serve to document works that form the central core of the exhibition, if not the textual documentation in the catalogue itself. The black-and-white photographic reproductions afforded by contemporary technologies work well with the graphic nature of the concrete poems, as well as the documentary photographs of Stephen Scobie’s installation, Computer Poem (n.d.). The concrete poetry included in the catalogue varies in style and form: some works are more recognizably language-based, such as bpNichol’s typewriter poem, dear deanna (n.d.), whereas bill bissett’s Vancouver Mainland Ice and Cold Storage (n.d.) is collage-based and constructed of found materials. Indeed, the diversity of the works included in the show speaks to, and builds upon, early debates that continue to surround the position of concrete poetry within the Canadian avant-garde.14
The works frustrate literary analysis. The semblance of literary form confounds the aesthetic conventions generally applied to a traditional reading of visual art, particularly as these conventions are understood at this moment in Vancouver, in 1969. Wall suggests that these conditions create a new kind of relationship between the pieces and the spectator—a relationship entirely optimistic and intellectual. Wall notes, “the art as a whole displays a clarity of purpose and an understanding of the vital issues inflecting all the arts with which it can be concerned.”15 In this sense, concrete poetry might be conceived as a form of cultural comment grounded in modernism and modernity—a form that speaks not only to a broad range of media, but also to issues of both representation and interpretation (such as those pertaining to language and its complex aesthetic values).
The very “form” of the works included in the exhibition becomes the matter of contemporary debate. The art show includes, for example, specific works of Conceptual Art,16 most notably—and most controversially—Joseph Kosuth’s series of “dictionary photostats,” Titled (Art as Idea as Idea), a work that consists of reproductions of dictionary definitions of banal words such as “Art” and “Idea”;17 moreover, the art show also includes works by Yoko Ono, Dieter Roth, and Bruce Nauman, all of whom have been the topic of critical revision. The “uncritical mixing” of “high conceptualism” and avant-gardes with decidedly more literary concerns provokes an apparent sense of uneasiness within aesthetic criticism, because conceptual artists are themselves the subjects of contemporary derision. Their now historic manifestos—including Kosuth’s “Art After Philosophy”—become objects of contemporary, revisionist praxis. They act as punchlines for projects of cultural sophistry and theoretical experimentation, as seen, for example, in Notes on Conceptualisms by Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman. Texts such as “Art After Philosophy” (and Kosuth’s other militant treatises, written alongside other members of Art & Language) now seem constrained and ambivalent rather than experimental, lending Conceptual Art absolutist undertones that clang dissonantly against the more generative spirit of concrete poetry, which has never been quite endowed with the same timbre of indoctrination and territoriality. In fact, its tone is, by comparison, decidedly emancipatory.18
Artist and critic Jamie Hilder has written an essay in 2014 for the exhibition, LETTERS: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry, a recent restaging of Morris’s Letter Drawings, shown alongside works of concrete poetry at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. Hilder notes how, in contrast to the rigid readings historically assigned to conceptual art of all stripes, the canon of Conceptual Art is actually surprisingly inclusive, given its inherent diversity, and he balks at the historic, mainstream resistance of artists and critics who refuse to examine the extant commonalities between conceptualism and concrete poetry—commonalities that demand a circumvention of the prescriptive, interpretive patterns associated with historic movements in art. Although Conceptual Art has been originally conceived, according to a rather flattened and generalized reading, as a movement that might liberate art from the shackles of the institution, it has become institutionally sanctioned par excellence, whereas the liberatory energies and para-structuralist (if not post-structuralist) experimental techniques inherent to concrete poetry have sidestepped such a fate.19 Against the canon and its discursive weight, he argues for a reexamination of the historic genre, and, quite intriguingly, given the context of my examination of these matters, cites the exhibition Concrete Poetry of 1969, as a site to be critically revisited with this aim.
Hilder notes how
[c]onceptual art’s approach is different from concrete poetry’s.… But what makes conceptual art a valid and productive counterpart to concrete poetry is the fact that beyond its participants’ and later critics’ near unanimous dismissal of concrete poetry as a significant field, it contains figures who produce work that borrows the techniques of concrete poetry while at the same time denying any line of influence.20
He argues that neither movement references an orthodox, formalist practice, suggesting that both movements respond “to a shift in art production and discourse coming out of the mid-1960s.”21
Perhaps the uneven reception of such a “quixotic” exhibition has merits of another order. Perhaps such criticisms reflect the genealogy of the exhibition (linked predominantly to Morris and his uncommon capacity to forge meaningful networks). Perhaps a careful consideration of the pluralistic narratives inherent to conceptual art (with its ability to assemble such a diverse sample of text-based works) demands a clear acknowledgement of curatorial intention, even from a revisionist, historical standpoint. Consider that Edwin Varney’s playful treatise, which defines concrete poetry as “actual, real, immediate to experience, not abstract, general, or ideal,” appears in one of the essays that preface the catalogue. Varney’s typographic statement, here read alongside, if not informed by, Rhodes’s decidedly more pragmatic analysis of the genre’s history in relation to Dada and its emergence in Brazil, Germany, and elsewhere, speaks specifically to one genre (concrete poetry), but excludes others (conceptual art). This poses problems of congruity. The decision to incorporate works that are categorically “other” than this definition might require an explanation, lest such decisions seem arbitrary or ill-conceived. When reconsidered from a different perspective, however, it is altogether possible that such an oversight relates to the exhibition’s chronological moment and geographical position within Vancouver during the 1960s—a cultural locus markedly in a state of flux. At this time, the city has only begun to develop a cultural identity and a sense of its potential as a centre for cultural production and criticism.22
In Vancouver, in 1969, the notion that both conceptual art and concrete poetry are anything other than authentic avant-gardes is unheard of, and it is altogether likely that the two genres are combined according to a logic grounded in a superficial, uncritical reading of their styles and themes. There is ample anecdotal evidence that this inclusivity and sense of freedom from cultural despotism remains a defining factor in the artworlds of the West Coast. During the 1940s and 1950s, when New York became the global centre of the art market, critics admit that “[i]n Los Angeles and the West Coast in general the artistic and intellectual circles seem to have been relatively open at the time, not dogmatic but inclusive.”23 William Wood posits that Vancouver’s cultural figures of this particular generation (including Ian Wallace, Jeff Wall, and their contemporaries), see themselves working within an institutional counter-narrative that, at the time, might not fit the categories of broader, cultural movements.24 Such a counter-narrative ostensibly extricates the art scene in Vancouver from the self-reflexivity and meta-critical awareness more paradigmatic of a prominent, cultural centre. Indeed, Wood recalls Benjamin Buchloh’s infamous remarks in “Periodizing Critics,” relating them to the realities of Vancouver in the 1980s (although the same paradigm might apply to an earlier period in the city’s art history). Wood notes:
Buchloh’s argument about art being bound by institutional fetters and criticism being disenfranchised by museum and market should be received with ambivalence in British Columbia. All the players he lists—academics, critics, dealers, museums, curators, collectors—are in short supply here, except for deserving artists. The question of who legitimates has only occasionally been asked in a locale where few can make a living or even a career from cultural production. Criticism requires a cultural machinery in order to question and affirm its reason to speak, for its public voice is meaningless unless art is openly acknowledged by institutional bodies as an established discipline.25
Wood then gestures to the unique network of “vehicles for connecting the small groups active in what passes for an art ‘community’— … potentially extending the franchise of these groups” that continue to exist in Vancouver, thereby helping to maintain its particular avant-gardist production,26 despite the notion that such counter-narratives have been “upended.”
Such contextual considerations speak to the cultural developments occurring at the time of the exhibition—developments that reinforce this generalized reading of the works included. The well-documented collaborations of Ray Johnson and Ian Hamilton Finlay, for example, signal the range of sources from which the exhibition draws motivation and inspiration. When considered alongside the postulates of Bürger and Călinescu, both of whom see the institution of art as being bracketed from life, the exhibition, as a whole, becomes a significant node in Vancouver’s evolution toward a creative hub, international in scale.
The exhibition at the University of British Columbia indicates the beginning of a new, often radical, avant-garde culture in Vancouver—almost as if to elucidate the symbiotic relationship that Bürger identifies between the institution of art and the movements of the avant-garde. Michael Morris sees the event as a point of departure, from which his shared endeavour, the Image Bank, is born—an endeavour created in collaboration with Vincent Trasov and Gary-Lee Nova.27 The exhibition, Concrete Poetry, is in part the result of Morris’s early exchanges with Johnson during Morris’s participation in Johnson’s exhibition, New York Correspondence School, at the Whitney Museum in New York. The Image Bank later appropriates the Correspondance School’s mailing list for its own mail-art enterprise, thus acquiring an expansive preexisting network.28 Morris becomes active in the expansion of artist-run, multidisciplinary culture in Vancouver, participating in the activity of Intermedia, spanning the period from 1967 to 1973.29 He also co-founds the internationally renowned artist-run centre The Western Front in 1973, shortly after Intermedia’s dissolution. The influence underlying such cultural phenomena can again be traced to Johnson’s New York Correspondence School, with its collaborative practice intersecting considerably with the Fluxus movement, which in turn speaks to the avant-garde discourse of culture at the time.
Such activity affirms that, while the exhibition Concrete Poetry is likely to be read, as a cultural artifact, according to the genealogy of artist-run culture, this reading is not necessarily appropriate to the discourse of Vancouver’s particular avant-gardes. Such a reading foregrounds the critical divide that typically isolates Conceptual Art from the more grassroots, amorphous, avant-gardist praxis of bill bissett, Ian Hamilton Finlay, bpNichol, and Stephen Scobie, whose work presumably fits more seamlessly within the (albeit flexible) category of “concrete.”30 This reading is notably divorced from Vancouver’s unique history as the site of such generative events as the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, which has brought critical attention not only to Vancouver’s eminent avant-garde literary production, but also to the emergence of localized, institutionally supported, artist-run culture. Vancouver’s cultural schema is by no means singular, and certainly not static—it is polyvocal, striated, and dynamic—but it reflects the city’s uncommon heritage as a peripheral site, as well as the particular, institutional tensions between its academic and para-academic, if not anti-academic, experimental movements. Tensions between particular artist groups and the city’s emergent cultural infrastructure also play into the blurring of such boundaries, making the interpretation of the catalogue surprisingly challenging in the absence of a familiarity with Vancouver’s sociopolitical history. Vancouver, like its province British Columbia, is frequently characterized according to narratives of political radicalism, with a prominent history based in the revolutionary left. These narratives are notably uneven and asynchronous, mainly due to issues of historicization and competing chronologies.31 Its institutional culture is not exempt from this paradigm.
Such dynamics might also find a sense of resolution in Bürger’s contemporary reexamination of the avant-garde. In “Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde,” he fleshes out his arguments, observing how an accurate, perceptive conception of the avant-garde demands that critics take, as a starting point, the very paradox that “confounds” his original text: the idea that “the failure of its project (the sublation of the art institution) coincides with its success within the institution”;32 hence, the avant-garde movements retain not only their intended significance vis-à-vis authenticity but also their identity as the object of institutional co-option.33 After revisiting the exhibition Concrete Poetry, according to this revision, the potential to transcode both Conceptual Art and concrete poetry seems useful, lending the catalogue’s essays increased cultural capital within the contemporary forum of art history.
Keith Wallace notes how the philosophy of such artist-run organizations generated an arts community that “operated independently of the established art system, yet was somehow welcomed by both the art institutions and the public,” although he does hint that this practice would later shift.34 He recounts that later manifestations of artist-run culture have become even more complicit in institutional practice, because more conventional management techniques (along with firmly delineated philosophical projects and controlled access to facilities) help organizations secure funding from the Canada Council.35 This observation recalls aspects of Balkind’s “Acknowledgements”: creative expression in general, and radical, cultural strategy in particular, find themselves defined and delimited by access to resources, but this fact does not create the conditions the “alienated mentality” of the avant-garde as advanced by Poggioli.36 Instead, as Bürger argues, conditions arise that, indeed, confound traditional, aesthetic theory—the conditions of late capitalism, poststructuralism, and postmodernity. Many central figures during this period, including Michael Morris and Ray Johnson, maintain a dual existence, partaking in both avant-garde movements and institutional practices, often at the same time. Such narratives disrupt earlier definitions of avant-gardism, necessitating the reconsidered definitions advanced by Bürger, Călinescu, and many theorists since.
1 Concrete poetry is a form of visual poetry in which the materiality, or physicality, of language is foregrounded. See Mary Ellen Solt, Introduction to Concrete Poetry: A World View (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1968).
2 From a different critical standpoint, we might read the inclusion of a supplementary text to this exhibition as hermeneutically confusing, since the spirit of the art show has to do with the parallels between, and limitations of, linguistic systems and institutional systems.
3 Jochen Schulte-Sasse, “Foreword: Theory and Modernism versus Theory of the Avant Garde,” Theory of the Avant-Garde by Peter Bürger, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xiv–xvi.
4 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 90.
5 Bürger, Theory, 91.
6 Bürger, 92.
7 Stephen Voyce, Poetic Community: Avant-Garde Activism and Cold War Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 20.
8 Arthur Coleman Danto, “Correspondance School Art,” The Nation (1999): 32.
9 Matei Călinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 144.
10 Călinescu, Five Faces, 285.
11 John Noel Chandler, “Incoherent Thoughts on Concrete Poetry,” Artscanada 26 (1969): 11. Emphasis my own.
12 Jeff Wall, “Vancouver: Concrete Poetry,” Artforum 7 (1969): 70.
13 Ian Wallace, “Literature—Transparent and Opaque,” The Avant-Garde in Literature, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Prometheus Books, 1982), 341–343.
14 As early as 1966, bpNichol calls attention to “two seemingly different directions” prominent within the avant-garde in Canadian poetry: one that pertains to the link between sound and the visual; and the other that pertains to the purely visual. bpNichol, “Last Wall and Test a Minute” (bpNichol Fonds, Notebook 1968, Simon Fraser University Special Collections and Rare Books, Ms.C. 1223, November 1966), quoted in Gregory Betts, “We Stopped at Nothing: Finding Nothing in the Avant-Garde Archive,” Amodern 4, http://amodern.net/article/nothing/.
15 Wall, “Vancouver: Concrete Poetry,” 71.
16 The capitalization of the term “Conceptual Art” identifies the historic movement of the 1960s and 1970s, differentiating it from post-conceptual and neo-conceptual movements, which are also referred to, generally, as “conceptual art.”
17 Vincent Bonin and Grant Arnold, “Conceptual Art in Canada 1965–1980: An Annotated Chronology,” Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965–1980, edited by Grant Arnold and Karen Henry (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2012), 128.
18 While the discourse that underlies the production and criticism of Conceptual Art and concrete poetry might at first seem thematically similar because of their common interest in linguistic representation (as argued, for example, in Ian Wallace’s “Literature—Transparent and Opaque”), these two artistic movements in fact approach their projects from different political positions and with divergent aims.
19 This is not to say that concrete is somehow depoliticized—in fact, it is quite the opposite, but the debates surrounding Conceptual Art have become central to the historical movement’s identity in the popular imagination.
20 Jamie Hilder, “Concrete Poetry and Conceptual Art: A Misunderstanding,” Contemporary Literature 54.3 (2013): 587.
21 Hilder, “Concrete Poetry,” 587–588.
22 For a sense of Vancouver’s early culture identity, see Alan C. Elder, A Modern Life: Art and Design in British Columbia, 1945–1960 (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery/Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004). Like much of Canada in 1969, Vancouver has made only incremental progress in developing a critical forum for the reception of localized, cultural production, and this attitude has permeated the reception of international art shows such as the one examined herein.
23 Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Walter Hops,” A Brief History of Curating (Zurich: JRP Ringier/Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2013), 15.
24 William Wood, “The Insufficiency of the World,” Intertidal: Vancouver Art and Artists (Vancouver: Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, 2005), 68–69.
25 Wood, “Some Are Weather-Wise; Some Are Otherwise: Criticism and Vancouver,” Vancouver Anthology: The Institutional Politics of Art, ed. Stan Douglas (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1991), 138.
26 Wood, “Some Are Weather-Wise,” 138.
27 Nancy Shaw, “Expanded Consciousness and Company Types: Collaboration Since Intermedia and the N. E. Thing Company,” Vancouver Anthology: The Institutional Politics of Art, ed. Stan Douglas (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1991), 87.
28 Vincent Trasov, “An Early History of Image Bank,” Vincent Trasov. http://vincenttrasov.ca/index.cfm?pg=cv-pressdetail&pressID=3.
29 Michael Turner, “An Interview with Michael Turner on Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry,” Here and Elsewhere (31 January 2012): http://hereelsewhere.com/see/letters-michael-morris-and-concrete-poetry/.
30 Conceptual Art is here read according to its conventional—and contested—definition, and the works of Kosuth, Ono, Nauman, and Roth, included in the exhibition, are here categorically defined as such.
31 See Betts in “We Stopped at Nothing” for a case study in how this paradigm is enacted in Vancouver poetry during the early 1960s.
32 Peter Bürger, “Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde: An Attempt to Answer Certain Critics of Theory of the Avant-Garde, New Literary History 4 (2010): 713.
33 Bürger, “Avant-Garde,” 713–714.
34 Keith Wallace, “A Particular History: Artist-run Centres in Vancouver,” Vancouver Anthology: The Institutional Politics of Art, ed. Stan Douglas (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1991), 28.
35 Wallace, “A Particular History,” 29.
36 Schulte-Sasse, “Foreword,” ix.