Cirrus@Austlit

'When it comes to collaborative artforms, the marrying of literature and visual art seems an obvious one, however the nicheness of its production proves otherwise. Risk-taking publishers like Upswell have accepted the challenge with books like Ann Shenfield’s A Treatment and Anna Jacobson’s Anxious in a Sweet Store, where the poets include their own illustrations to illuminate a single poem’s meaning or emotional weight. They’re more of a hybrid offering than anything experimental if you consider that children’s picture books have been doing it since 1658, when John Amos Comenius published Orbis Sensualium Pictus (Visible World in Pictures), but given it’s poetry and not children’s literature, these collections of poems embrace something almost folk artsy, which is uniquely pleasing. Puncher & Wattmann, too, welcome visual art in their catalogue, though they’ve taken a more avant-garde approach. Richard Tipping’s Hear the Art is the second book in the Visual Poetics series, and unlike the first – Chris Mansell’s 101 Quads: one poem per page with each poem in perfect blocks of black and red-lettered quatrains laid out staircase-style – his isn’t a collection of concrete poetry where the text relies on its visual form. Hear the Art is the artist’s discussion of his own ‘wordartwork’ amid photographs of it, mostly sign art and sculpture dependent on text. Toby Fitch’s Object Permanence is the third in the series, one of calligrams, which harkens back to concrete poetry but lays weight on uses of varying font. Of the three Visual Poetics books, Tipping’s is the explanatory one, in which he writes about how his practice eventuated then evolved, whereas the others are performance-based: their textual-based art is the art, not the topic. Tipping’s 2008 Subvert I Sing with Redfox Press might’ve fit better with Mansell’s and Fitch’s contributions in terms of what the books are doing, but Hear the Art as one part of a whole brings a daring nuance to the series that reflects on visual-based text and text-based visuals as co-conspirators rather than opposites.'  (Introduction)