Word Squares — Hearth

Excerpt from a manuscript in progress by Richard Tipping,
Word Art Works: visual poetry and textual objects.

Earth Heart

In the late 1970s I first saw the anthology This Book is a Movie (1971), and Alan Riddell’s collection of concrete poems Eclipse (1972).
    
(left) Ronald Johnson, from Songs of the Earth;(right) Alan Riddell, Icon

Earthearthearth (a title given here for convenience, it is not individually titled) by Ronald Johnson is from a set of poems called The Songs of the Earth,18 which is further discussed in Chapter 5, Textual Objects. Johnson comments in his statement19 that: “Earthearthearth is a linkage of ear to hear and heart. Art and hearth are also hid in it.” There is a feeling in Johnson’s simple block of repeated words of the aural mantra, of chanting intonations as if a sacred formula, or a sound object full of resonances, of layered echoes, of shadows and depths - but what does the square signify? Nothing more than its self-reflective and repetitive symmetry. It is not a visual mandala (the word mandala is brilliantly treated in one of Riddell’s concrete poems), but a sound poem. Alan Riddell’s, Icon,20 is not one of his best concrete poems, as its shape – is it a square crucifix? - does not add to the effect of the words, and the addition of ‘birth’ seems clumsy. Arriving at the form of my own Earth Heart as a circlein 1993 was through drawing, creating the effect with uneven letters. I showed them to a colleague21 expert in fonts and page design software (such as Pagemaker) who produced the work using the Lithos font. The circle is symmetrically satisfying but more than that it opens up the interpenetrations with the words HEART and EARTH four times each, and H or A acting as a ‘compass point’ encouraging the sense of natural (innate) structure as the pattern of words and phrases emerge, including HEARTH, the central fire, the warmth and safety of home.

Hear the Art, Screenprint, 1994

Taking the black and white laser print-out of this version as artwork, a colour screenprint was made in 199422 (remembering that computer screens were still all black and white; my first Macintosh dates from the same year). The variegation of colour within letters is produced physically, by placing stripes of different inks onto the screen before each ‘pull’ of the squeegee across the silk screen. Each example of this screenprint varies as a consequence, as does the green and blue of the double-circle print below. This was produced by cutting out the circles of letters from two black and white laser prints, and pasting them together so that in only one instance of each circle is an ‘R’ on its side. These prints allowed for experimentation, and the issuing of prototype versions.

Hear the Art, (double circle) Screenprint, 1994

These two versions (single and double circle) were published in Meanjin magazine in 1996,23 along with a third version which has a five circles of the letters nested inside each other.

Hear the Art, (five circles), 1994, scanned from Meanjin 1996

 

This literary representation was welcome, but as usual in a literary magazine, the works were plain type (able to sneak in as poetry because they had not become objects). In the same year, I won a local sculpture competition with a proposal to make Earth Heart in bricks set into the gardens of the Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery. The resulting installation took weeks of marking out and digging letters, placing tonnes of packing sand, trimming the edges of a lot of bricks and setting them finely and finally into a circle 24 metres in diameter across an uneven sloping lawn.25
 
 Earth Heart, at Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery, photographed in 2000

Ten years later in 2006, a simple flyer arrived in my letterbox offering aerial photographs of ‘your house in your street’. I had wanted to see Earth Heart from the air, and here was the chance.  The Gallery commissioned a photograph of their locale on the shores of Lake Macquarie, a large salt water lake (over 30 kilometres long) which helps to show the scale of the work:

 The grounds of Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery, aerial photograph 2006
This photograph amounts to a reinterpretation of this installation, ten years after it was commissioned. Visitors can now “see” it differently, although the sculpture is designed to walk around and within as a contemplative space, not as a something to be taken in with a glance. The proposal for Earth Heart had included a planting of trees in the centre of the circle, to create in time a shaded grove of interwoven branches. The six trees chosen for planting in 1996 did not thrive (they received virtually no attention or watering) because of the salt spray which blows in from the huge Lake, and were replaced in the year 2002 with four whose small shadows can be seen in the photograph. This change in the specifications of the sculpture (from six trees to four) was supposedly to accommodate the wide canopies of the new species, a kind of fig tree, but it may take fifty years before it will be clear whether this was a good decision. The aerial view can only be imagined until the on-ground view is swept into a new context with the high wide angle view from a plane. This is the case with Robert Smithson’s famous Spiral Jetty (1970) which was scraped into a salt lake to make a ‘land art’ event over 500 metres long and 50 metres wide, “the water between its coils stained red with algae”26

 
Robert Smithson, Spiral jetty, 1972

Since 2006, we might expect that such views (at least from directly above, with the perspective of a satellite) would be available on net sites such as Google Earth, where everything seems to be revealed, but surveillance coverage is generally restricted to areas which are strategically or economically significant. There is no such view of Lake Macquarie’s area. The photograph from the air of Earth Heart was mooted to become an illuminated image in a large wall-mounted lightbox, as plain documentation of a perspective otherwise impossible to achieve (the photograph is not the artwork). This hasn’t happened to date, but meanwhile, it has become a bookmark, with a cropped photograph published as a give-away by the Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery. This looping back from a ground installation via the aerial view to a paper work meant to hold a reader’s position in a book is a useful marker in the drifts of materiality and scale of Earth Heart and its variations.

Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery bookmark, 2006 (actual length 20cm)

 

Hear the Art

In late 1994 I had been encouraged27 to make a proposal for a large-scale intervention on the exterior of Australia House in London, to be installed in the following year as a part of a series of events entitled newIMAGES: Australia and Britain into the Twenty First Century.28 At first, in 1995, I imagined placing bright letters on transparent backgrounds into the many semicircular side windows of Australia House, which stretches as a triangular building along both the Strand and Aldwych streets.

Artwork proposal for Australia House, 1996

Charles Levendosky, Keystone, photocopied lettering 1979.

In February 1997 the American avant-garde poet and artist Richard Koselanetz wrote to me after a meeting in New York, sending a photocopy of a work (above) called Keystone  which, he said, Charles Levendosky had sent to him in 1979. “Once a prominent poet, he was recently a prize-winning editorial writer in Wyoming”. It’s interesting that both my initial ‘drawing’ above, and Kostelanetz’s contribution, were made as photocopies. Scanning equipment was relatively difficult to access in those days, and a lot of work was (and for me still is) accomplished with scissors, paper glue and a good photocopier. My own ideas for the Australia House meanwhile had developed past the semicircular to the circular, taking the entire front façade of this huge building as the ‘canvas’ for what I was now calling Hear the Art. The processes of solving technical problems, getting manufacturing quotes to fit budgets, clearing permissions with a mind-numbingly conservative set of government agencies within Westminster Council, and dealing with the Australian High Commission’s own set of obstacles was in all a three-year task of a kind which I’ve often dubbed “bureaucratic mountaineering” as an inevitable aspect in making public art. My own abilities in this work stem from years of working in the film industry, where gumption, audacity and panache are assumed skills for producers and directors. Architects, bridge-builders and anyone else who wants to make new things happen will know the feeling. Unlike buildings and bridges, however, public art such as Hear the Art on Australia House is temporary, with a strictly determined life. The permissions granted were for thirty days. The laser-cut perspex letters, edged with rope-light, were attached to a grid of fine stainless-steel wire which was tensioned between the columns on the façade, thus avoiding any impact on the ‘heritage’ structure. Oil riggers used to working in the North Sea climbed on narrow ladders without safety harnesses, high above the street, while snow drifted in across the balcony. It was getting darker at 3.30pm and the Deputy High Commissioner was fretting, wanting to go home, and asked if we could all come back tomorrow. I checked with the head of company providing the installation crew, and informed her that the crew could return the next day for an extra £3000. We continued into the deepening gloom of a November evening. I fitted a microphone to the controllers of the rope-light, so that the brightness of the lights varied slightly according to the roar of traffic: a big red bus or a lorry swinging around the corner would cause a pulse, a fluttering of the heart (think of Duchamp’s Coeurs Volants which pulses with its red/blue clash) 29