D-B Chirot: Logos &/or Logo(s) in Visual Poetry an Essay re Labels & Rebrandings
the question of wine labels and whine labels, of Logo-s and Logos-
arises as often times visual poetry much of it is said to be a lot like advertising by those critics who have some doubts about the "medium"
so it was interesting to me that some visual poets are considering making labels for their own wines
it's not a critique of people doing this, simply that it's always fun and useful to ask questions rather than just accepting things without wondering a bit more about them-
as it helps one think through a lot of things otherwise one might have never thought of and so is a really good learning experience at least for me i hope and hopefully for someone else may of interest and or use--
a big storm here right now!!
to al here--a great evening and week to you!
Tthese are the messages to which , with which, i am responding below:
The wine label idea is lovely. There is a Canadian vineyard that "publishes" a bpNichol concrete poem on its labels...as well as other Canadian writers.
Here's a link:
http://www.southbrook.com/Poetica_thePoetsR.html
Best,
GaryOn Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 9:32 PM, John Moore Williams <jmoorewilliams@yahoo.com> wrote:
Wine labels as a medium for vispo is a fabulous idea, Miekal. Having spent the last weekend in Napa, and perused a book called Icon on the "art" of wine-label making, I come away convinced of the paucity and staidness of said tradition. Bring some life to the blood of the vine!
From: mIEKAL aND <qazingulaza@gmail.com>
To: spidertangle@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, August 6, 2009 4:01:32 PM
Subject: Re: [spidertangle] What Happens when we die? --Planning "Spontaneous" Protests LP
if a USDA loan goes thru for a vineyard we want to start. I'm thinking there is huge potential for using wine / wine labels as a limited edition publishing medium...
back to vispo
~mIEKAL
the wine label would "prove" an oft repeated disparagement ( putting a "whine label" on it, so to speak--) of "visual poetry" by many critics--that is, that it's not "art" but advertising that is the real "look" and "feel" of visual poetry--
(many a wag does not fail to point out that--for themselves and their ilk, their cronies---- a lot of advertising is "superior" to most visual poetry)--
actually if made as a wine label, isn't this no longer "visual poetry" but a --literally--a wine label-- aka a vineyard or vintner's logo?—(although since the label would be chosen and done by mIEKAL, an artist who is also a "business man" of distribution, publishing, performances, the Farm and its products, free lance computer contractor, etc etc-- etc—the label might well participate within a constellation (an early term for a specific Visual Poetry during the founding years of Concretism--) of other mIEKAL labels, and so indicate a "mini-corporation," a "small business," an "entrepreneurship and at times functioning as a collective, a collaboration--—"and, functioning within this constellation of activities already under the sign of an art-production by the owner and others invited to participate—a label associated with the making, advertisement distribution and expenditures of art works as having a value both qualitatively and quantitatively—the label then functioning as both a "personal" and "public' statement in terms of both advertisement and "Visual Poetry" –so that the product is effectively guaranteed by its association with these other mIEKAL activities; meaning that since produced by a Visual Poet, does this automatically make the label no longer a "mere' label but instead, as a product having a built-in surplus value as a "work of art, a Visual Poem by a widely known arts/visual poet/publisher, editor, farmer, computer worker"—that is, does the maker himself of the label being a Visual Poet making an advertisement, a commercial Logo—guarantee that the label is a Visual Poem in its own write/right as well as a Logo—thus performing a hybridization of producer and product under the aegis of Logos as logo--?? Is it not possible that what is for sale in these conditions of hybridization not only the wine—but the artist/Visual poet also, as in an Art gallery just as much if not more than in a Super market of roadside stand???-)
a great example of the play on logos and logo is found in Philadelpho Menezes' famous Brazilian visual poem of a chewing gum box cover--with the Portuguese language's "clichetes"--("Chiclets," "chewing gum", present in the box cover as the Portuguese words "goma de mascarar" , as are its "Sabor mental"--'mental taste" itself becoming "cliche"--the logo as a "cliche-"-"chewing gum" as "the "mental taste'" of chiclets/clichetes/cliches . . . which Menezes calls "masticated consumerism"--
Menezes emphasizes the critique of capitalism present in the poem in both an accompanying written comment on it in his great book Poetics and Visuality and in the Visual Poem itself, as Chicletes' "capital' "C" is literally/visually (or, "literally "figuritely") a stylized Hammer and Sickle--directing one to the "masticated consumerism" of chewing the gum of "mental taste"--
showing language not just as spoken "tongue" but also as the chewing "gum" --
and, at the same time presenting the logo/brand name--and perhaps its critique also-- as just another "cliche" --and in the process "opening up, revitalizing" the sign as an "artillery aimed at the reader's awareness, at the ruling ideological complex. This is the super-sense that should be read into these (Found, Ready-Made) poems."
Re this "super-sense" Menezes emphasizes how "unusual information, at the limits of the absurd sends us to a non-sense that," for theoretician Guimares Rosa, in his own words, "reflects by the skin of its teeth the coherence of a general mystery which surrounds and creates us. Life also is to be read, not literally, but in its super-sense. And people, for the time being, read life only by distorting the lines."
In emphasizing the "limits of the absurd" and the humor of non-sense and super-sense Menezes underlines how the cliche at the heart of the Chicletes brand name, of the consumer--literally "masticated"—"gummed" ---gum/product is both "exposed' and "over turned" or "upset" by the unexpected arrival of a destabilizing mystery, throwing a monkey wrench artillery assault at the 'sobriety" of the fixed brand name and its "fixed" linguistic system as it becomes cliche. That is, masticated and used up gum ready to meet the fate of consumer products when consumed--the no longer brand new brand name of a planned obsolescence . . .as the "brand new, new bran" ' has to be continually "updated' as the latest cliche in the competitive realm of products and fashions of/for "mental taste."
This is basically what the example of a wine logo/label would be, whether done by bp Nichol or any visual poet whose very name has become in itself a "brand name." That is, the wine label remains as a wine label, rather than becoming "something else" via the doubling and splitting of puns on the sounds, senses and semblances of the original label Clichetes as "chiclets" and "cliches"—In the "competitive bidding" of a "price war" between Logo(s) and logos, eeach aspect leap frogs the other in a continual "game of words" in which "tromper le trompeur est double plaisir" (trumping the trumper is double pleasure"—or—"double your pleasure, double your fun with Wrigley's chewing gum" as the old advertisement/word game advertisement has it--)
The wine lable –and its "mental taste"--as that of a small producer's "Vanity label" product signals a doubling of the vintner's personal, private pleasure and that of the consumer's, rather than a doubling and splitting of a "play on words' which takes apart, unpacks, the Logo as multiple doublings and splittings and muitiplications/multiplicities of logos—as a taking over and undermining of the ownsership of the Logo/logos itself, and recasting it contextually as a cliché, exposing its "stale taste" as the flipside of its advertised "freshness" as "newly minted micro-macro(Vanity) label"—
The "Visual Poem"/label as such functions not "poetically" but as a, as THE, cliché of a process –rebranding--in which the fixity of the article, the product, is retained, while the only change is in the status of "rebranding"—that is, a "vanity" micro-label in place of a corporate label, of a "private" ownership rather than a privatized corporate (ostensibly "public" due to the investments of multiple shareholders in its stocks) one—
Rebranding itself is an operation of concealment, camouflage, for the saying "the names may change, but the game remains the same"—while the "twist" of the punning Clichetes/cliches is an exposure of the multiple senses and sites/sights/cites of logos hidden in plain sight in the Logo—
The "vanity" label Visual Poem is not a change or critique of the brand name but simply its rebranding—its renaming of the very same "product (wine)--
An ironic "demonstration" of this process from " rebranded/new brand name" to 'clichéd logo" is the transformation of visual poetry into a cliché itself, a cliche of the "new' or "experimental" which has become a "mental taste" that is being" chewed up . . . "
The Menezes poem functions then not only as a critique of economic systems and ideological signs, but also of the cliche which the process of critique has become in itself, and through itself as the "masticated consumerism" of "Visual Poetry" itself as a clichéd label, a brand name for the ever increasing and globalized, world-. wide ranging "production line," which is the re-production of a repetitive production line life,"for the time being . . . read only by distorting the lines . . . "
rather than " . . . reflect(ing) by the skin of its teeth the coherence of a general mystery which surrounds and creates us. Life also (is) to be read, not literally, but in its super-sense. "
Re "distorting the lines"--this is much in evidence in a lot of the especially American Visual Poetry of today, in which there seems to be an endlessly recycled little-varying template used to mold the literal (rather than "literary") distortions of letters, of lines of letters and of lines of words, rather than in the super-sense of the multiplicity and density of meanings which Menezes creates within his poem.
The repeated "distorting' of lines, letters, words, functions as a limited rebranding in the sense of rearranging letters, lines, words not as a function of 'exposure/exposition" but instead as simply the reiteration of a limited palette/template as a function of rebrandings in which the order of the elements is changed, without shifting at all their meanings, their functioings, within the limits of an already established and adhered to system—
To create wine labels then is to reiterate the "fixity" of these templates, in which the labeled aspect so to speak of a known quantity with/in the Visual Poem becomes identified with another known quantity endlessly reiterated, that of the Logo, the brand name, the 'slogan-image" of a product for consumption . . .
Visual Poetry then becomes not only a method for selling wine, but for "selling itself/selling out" to the various bidders for "something new in the way of logo-making."
making wine labels in the current economic situation might also be regarded in a sense, in the sense, of its clichéd image as a "mental taste" of the "sophisticated, elite, consumer' who afford not only the wine but also the "artist-produced label, the Visual Poetry of a "higher mental taste" in both wine and the look of a label which is read not in s super-sense but perhaps in a super-market's accompanying liquor store.
In a sense then, the visual poem as wine label manages to combine both a stereotyped, received idea of "sophisticated mental taste," but also becomes a part of the system literally visible as the distorted lines of label designs done "by artists, poets" rather than simply by wine label designers.
In competition for being the bearer of the "distorted lines" of the wine's claim to "metal taste," the visual poem ceases to exist in its possibilities as a super-sense, in order to enter the arena of "dollars and cents."
again, as the critics of Visual Poetry say, it is "nothing more than amateur advertising imagery and letterings
In this sense, the Visual Poem is 'dumbed down" to being yet another cliché being shipped out to join the lines of labeled bottles standing on the shelves of a mass produced marketplace; for even the "small brands, the micro-breweries" are "imitating" the "real" products of the mass produced . . . with Visual poetry being used to distinguish the "distorted lines' of one product, one label, from another.
It is often said--as Brion Gysin said to Wm Burroughs in the 1960's--that poetry lags fifty years behind painting. While the visual Poetry of the Sixties operated often as a super-sense, critical reading of consumer signs and logos, the current aspirations are not to critique, but to imitate, to become yet another cliche within the realm of clichés, a new form of conformity in the vast marketplace of conformities . ... of clichés--
Pop Art of the 1960's was for the most part seen and written about not in terms of critique or super-sense of the advertising imagery and words of he time, but as an "empty ironic reflection" of surfaces. In a way, Visual Poetry as wine labels manages to combine Kitsch, the reflection of the distorted lines of slogans and labels and the safety of a non super-sense Visuality/Poetry which does not critique nor wax ironic re the advertising, the label, of the logo, the brand name, but instead operates ass a form of parasitic entity, in which the visual poetry creates the consumer items, the product, as mental taste, while abandoning its existence as an "independent " mental taste and independent visuality and use of words, letters, signs.
The parasitic aspect of this "scene' is that the Visual Poetry is riding on the coat tails of the wine, of the product, and abandoning its autonomy to the birds. the super-sense becomes a clichéd "pragmatism" whose sinister aspects are denied through the barrage of the distorted lines of an already decayed language of art criticism and visual poetry production qua production.
The "beauty of the wine label Visual Poem" is that it presents an already "acquired mental taste" which is in itself long ago become a cliche as word and image.
The beauty then comes from the conjunction of clichéd forms with clichés of "mental taste" to produce a clichéd sense of the product and its consumer--
that both the product and consumer have a common taste, and that this is "symbolized' by the 'artistry of the label, created by Visual Poetries with the requisite and guaranteed "good mental sate."
The consumer sees not the product nor the visual poem, but herself "through a glass darkly," as she or he observes within the dark reflections that of oneself, so that the label, Visual Poem and the self become united as a "model of mental taste", for the most elegant and conspicuous consumption---
Cheers! Raise the glass –darkly--
To: spidertangle@yahoogroups.com
From: garybarwin@gmail.com
Date: Thu, 6 Aug 2009 22:51:39 -0400
Subject: Re: [spidertangle] What Happens when we die? --Planning "Spontaneous" Protests LP
The wine label idea is lovely. There is a Canadian vineyard that "publishes" a bpNichol concrete poem on its labels...as well as other Canadian writers.
__._,_.___
.
__,_._,___
Post a Comment