&Now 2015: Blast Radius

The techniques of transferring an image to a surface (or an image from one support to another) are part and parcel of the history of art, yet this international panel wishes to concentrate on the interrelations between the arts and poetry today, and namely on how poetry transfers visuality into page-based language. It will seek to discuss the tendencies of conceptual and post-conceptual writing to transfer the language of the arts to the language of poetry and, specifically, to the language of the page. This panel will also be a way to reassess and critique the problematic relationships between the arts and poetry in the most recent poetry: why and how does current poetry need to borrow the categories, the name, and the techniques of preexisting art movements? Questions of interest for this panel will be: how does poetry accommodate visual, definitional and linguistic transfers? How does poetry play with digital material (visual or otherwise) when it seeks to transfer it to the page? What does the visual space of a page mean to a poet today? And how does a book become a grammatical box? 

Frances Richard will revisit Lucy Lippard's essay "Escape Attempts" (1996), her critical look back at Conceptualism. Olivier Brossard will examine Morten Søndergaard's Wordpharmacy, and talk about the transformation of the space of the book into that of the book-object, transferring the poetic consideration of grammar to the language of the box. Vincent Broquawill examine the work of Robert Fitterman, Caroline Bergvall, Ellie Ga and Jena Osman and their many transfers from art shows, multimedia pieces to the page. Martin Glaz Serup will look into how documentary and pseudo-documentary strategies are applied concerning found material and how it is distributed on the page, in the works of Heimrad Bäcker, Åke Hodell and Esther Dischereit.