James Fuentes Gallery

This is the realm of poetry and poet: the spirit that rejects explicit meanings and easily defined packages in favor of the lyrical and allusive. To disregard the pressure of commercial spectacle in favor of the quiet and personal is to defy the misconception that resisting market trends is useless. Poetic speech has its roots in humanity’s primordial creative endeavors. Were not the first written words images? I’d say that the preservation and propagation of poetic practice is just as fundamental as that of visual artwork.

The relationship between the visual arts and poetry is long and well established. “Ut pictura poesis”—pictures like poetry, the formula of the Roman poet Horace—is among the most influential directives to artistic expression since the Renaissance. Michelangelo wrote poems. But poetic and artistic influences often wend their ways along circuitous, unexpected, and perverse routes. Gertrude Stein was as famous for her gatherings that brought together artists and writers as she was for her writing. We know her for “Three Lives” and “The Making of Americans,” but Picasso’s looming, totemic portrait intrudes forcefully even for those who haven’t read her recondite prose and star-splattered verse.

Frank O’Hara was not only a poet but also an art critic and curator at the Museum of Modern Art. Marcel Broodthaers was a poet before he embarked on his mission to make “insincere” art objects. Now he’s accounted as the Arethusa of Institutional Critique: muse of the art world compulsively biting its own tail. Brice Marden’s “Cold Mountain” paintings took inspiration from the Tang Dynasty poet Hanshan—minimalism rerouted through a Floating World. While it would be impossible to make one reducible statement about the symbiosis of poets and artists, I would propose that the nurturing of creative community brings forward a collective energy that gives way to innovations in form and approach.

Though predominantly a collection of visual art, this exhibition beats with the heart of a poet. Its ambition is to position a group of artists and writers across generations and locations who are connected by a social and artistic foment. The scene, rather than something frivolous and fashionable, becomes a space where a group fosters collective boldness in stepping outside of accepted convention. This is not a show organized around simple aesthetic or demographic similarities. This show aims for a locus where the divergence of individual efforts finds communal reciprocity and fortification. In a moment when the social and cultural noise may feel deafening—and the artist’s work seems destined for the palette racks of eyeless dream brokers—this exhibition attempts to shift focus to the communal here and now.

—Arden Wohl