closing off the historical cycle of verse (formal-rhythmic unity), concrete poetry begins by taking into account graphic space as a structural agent. qualified space: spatio-temporal structure, in place of merely remporistico-linear development; thence the importance of the idea of the ideogram, from its specific sense (fenollosa/pound) of a method of composition based on direct juxtaposition--analogical, not logico- discursive--of elements. "It is necessary that our intellect habituate itself to thinking synthetico-ideogrammatically in place of analytico-discursively" (apollinaire). eisenstein: ideogram and montage.

precursors: mallarmé ("un coup de dés," 1897): the first qualitative leap: "prismatic subdivisions of the idea": space ("whites") and typographic resources as substantive elements of composition. pound (the cantos ): ideogrammatic method. joyce (ulysses and finnegans wake): ideogram word: organic interpenetration of time and space.

cummings: atomization of words, typographic physiognomy: expressionist valorization of space. apollinaire (calligrammes ): as vision more than as realization. futurism, dadaism: contributions to the life of the problem. in brazil: oswald de andrade (1890-1954: "in compressions, minutes of poetry"). joao cabral de melo neto (n. 1920--the engineer and the psychology of anti-ode composition): direct language, functional economy and architecture of verse.

concrete poetry: tension of words-things in space-time. dynamic structure: multiplicity of concomitant movements. also in music by definition an art of time--space intervenes (webern and his followers: boulez and stockhausen: concrete and electronic music); in the visual arts--spatial by definition--space intervenes (mondrian and the boogie-woogie series; max bill; albers and ambivalent perception. concrete art in general).

ideogram: called to non-verbal communication, the concrete poem communicates its own structure: contained structure, the concrete poem is an object in and of itself, not an interpretation of exterior objects and/or sensations more or less subjective. its material, the word (sound, visual form, semantic charge). its problem, functions-relations of this material. factors of proximity and resemblance, gestalt psychology.

rhythm; relational force. the concrete poem, using the phonetic system (digits) and an analogical syntax, creates a specific linguistic area-- "verbivocovisual"--that participates in the advantages of non-verbal communication. without abdicating the virtualities of the word. with the concrete poem the phenomenon of metacommunication occurs:
coincidence and simultaneity of verbal and non-verbal communication, with the added value that it has to do with a communication of forms, a structure-content, not with a usual communication of contents.

concrete poetry tends towards the minimum common denominator of language, from which its tendency to substantialization and verbification: "the concrete coin of speech" (sapir). from there its affinities with the so-called "isolated tongues" (chinese): "the less exterior grammar that the chinese tongue possesses, the more interior grammar is inherent to it" (humboldt via cassirer).

chinese offeres an example of a purely relational syntax based exclusively on word order (see fenollosa, sapir, or cassirer).

to the conflict of content/form in search of identification we call isomorphism. paralleling form/content isomorphism, space/time isomorphism is developed, which generates movement. isomorphism, in the first moment of the concrete poetry pragmatic, tends towards physiognomy, a movement imitative of the real (motion): organic form and the phenomenology of composition predominate. at a more advanced level, isomorphism tends to resolve itself in pure structure movement; in this phase, the geometric form of the composition (sensible rationalism) predominates.

renouncing the dispute over the "absolute," concrete poetry remains in the magnetic field of the relatively perpetual.

chronomicrolength of chance: control, cybernetic, the poem as mechanism, regulating itself: "feed-back."

the quickest communication (an implicit problem of functionality and structure) confers on the poem a positive value and guides its own construction. total realism. against a poetry of expression, subjective and hedonistic. to create exact problems and to resolve them in terms of a sensible language. a general art of the word. the poem-product: object of use. post-script 1961: "without revolutionary form there is not revolutionary art" (mayakovsky).

"Death of painting"

The proposed question obliges us to look back. When the Impressionist painters, leaving the studio for the open air, tried to apprehend the object immersed in its natural luminosity, figurative painting began to die. In the canvases of Monet objects dissolve in color washes, and the usual image of things is pulverized between luminous reflections. Fidelity to the natural world is transferred from objectification to impression. Once the contours that had kept objects isolated in space had been broken, all possibility of control of pictorial expression was limited to the internal coherence of the canvas. A little later, Maurice Denis would say that "a painting--before being a warhorse, a nude woman, or an anecdote--is essentially a surface plane covered with pigments disposed in a certain manner." Abstraction had not even been born but the figurative painters themselves, such as Denis, had already announced it. As the represented object increasingly lost significance in their eyes, in consequence the canvas as object gained in importance.

With Cubism the object is brutally wrenched from its natural condition, transformed into cubes that virtually imprinted upon it an ideal nature: it was emptied of that essential obscurity, of that invincible opacity that characterizes things. However, the cube is three-dimensional, although it possesses a nucleus, an inside that was precisely to be consumed--and this was realized in the phase known as synthetic Cubism. Already then little remained of the object, and it is with Mondrian and Malevich that the elimination of the object coninues. The object that is pulverized in the Cubist painting is the painted object, the represented object. Finally, it is the painting that lies there disarticulated, procuring a new structure, a new mode of being, a new significance. In these canvases (synthetic, hermetic phase), however, there are not only disarticulated cubes, abstract planes; there are also signs, arabesques, papers glued down, numbers, letters, burlap, nails, etc. These elements indicated the presence of two contrary forces: that which implacably tries to strip painting of each and every contamination of the object; the other that restores the object to the sign and thus needs to maintain space, the plastic environment born of the object's representation. So-called abstract painting can be affiliated with this last tendency, the painting of sign and material, which is exacerbated in Tachism.

Mondrian it is who perceives the most revolutionary sense of Cubism and gives it continuity. He understands that the new painting proposed in those pure planes requires a radical attitude, a new beginning. Mondrian cleans the slate, removes all vestiges of the object, not only its figure but also the color, material, and space that had constituted the universe of representation: white canvas remains. On it the painter will no longer represent the object: it is the space in which the world will be harmonized according to the two basic movements of the horizontal and the vertical. With the elimination of the represented object, the canvas-- as material presence--becomes the new object of painting. It falls to the painter to organize it and also to give it a trascendence that would subtract it from the obscurity of the material object. The fight against the object continues. The problem that Mondrian proposed to himself could not be resolved theoretically. If he wanted to destroy the plane with the use of big black lines that cut the canvas from one edge to the other--indicating that they border on exterior space--the object reappears. There begins, then, the destruction of these lines, and the result is his two last works: "Broadway Boogie-Woogie" and "Victory Boogie-Woogie." In fact, however, the contradiction is not resolved, and if Mondrian had lived several more years he would have returned to the white canvas from which he had set out, or he would have set out from the construction in space, as did Malevich, to conclude in a similar experience.

"Work and object"

For the traditional painter, the white canvas was a mere material support upon which he sketched out the suggestion of natural space. Immediately, this space, this metaphor of the world, was surrounded by a frame whose fundamental function was to insert it into the world. The frame was the middle term between fiction and reality, bridge and wall, that, protecting the painting, fictive space, simultaneously made it able to communicate freely with exterior, real space. Thus, when painting radically abandoned representation--in the case of Mondrian, Malevich, and their followers--the frame loses its sense. It does not have to do with raising a metaphoric space in a well protected place of the world, and it does have to do with creating a work in real space and with giving to this space, for the appearance of the special work-object, a signification and a transcendence.

It is a fact that things occur slowly, with inevitable and necessary errors, deviations. The use of glued paper, of sand and other elements taken from the real world and placed within the painting indicates the necessity of substituting fiction for reality. When later the Dadaist Kurt Schwitters constructs his Merzbau--made of objects or fragments of objects found in the street--it is still the same intention that is amplified in real space now already free of the frame. At this height the work of art and objects seem to be confused. A sign of this mutual correlation between the work of art and the object is the celebrated work of Marcel Duchamp sent to the Independents Exhibition in New York (1916), a urinal-fountain, of the type used in public bathrooms in bars. This technique of the ready-made was adopted by the Surrealists. It consists in highlighting an object by dislocating it from its ordinary function, thus establishing new relations among it and other objects. The limitation of this process of transfiguration of the object consists in that it is based less on the formal qualities of the object insofar as its signification, in its relations of use and daily habit. Soon that characteristic obscurity of the object returns to surround the work, reconquering it for common use. In this battle artists were defeated by the object. From this point of view, some extravagances that appear as avant-garde in painting today become clear and, to a certain point, ingenuous. What else are the cut canvases of Fontana exhibited in the V Biennial but a retarded attempt to destroy the fictive character of pictorial space by the introduction into them of a real cut? What are the paintings of Burri with wood, iron, or burlap but a return with the same violence, rather transforming them into fine art, the processes used by the Dadaists? Meanwhile, the problem is that such works only achieve the effect of the first contact and do not achieve permanence in the transcendent condition of the no-object. They are curious, strange, extravagant objects, but objects.

The road taken by the Russian avant-garde was more profound. The contra-reliefs of Tatlin and Rodchenko or the Suprematist architectures of Malevich signal a coherent revolution from represented space to real space, from represented forms to created forms. The same struggle against the object is verified in modern sculpture after Cubism. With Vantongerloo (De Stijl) the figure disappears completely; with the Russian Constructivists (Tatlin, Pevsner, Gabo), mass is eliminated and sculpture stripped of its condition of thing. The phenomenon is similar: if painting that represents nothing is newly attracted towards the domain of objects, with greater cause this attraction is exercised upon non-figurative sculpture. Turned object, sculpture is freed of its most common characteristic: mass. However, this is not enough. The base--which in sculpture is equivalent to the frame in painting--was eliminated. Vantongerloo and Moholy-Nagy tried to create sculptures that maintained themselves in space, without support. They attempted to eliminate weight from sculpture, another of the object's fundamental characteristics. Thus painting, once liberated of its representational drive, tends to abandon surface to realize itself in space, approximating sculpture, and sculpture, liberated of the figure, of the base, and of mass, retains very little affinity with what traditionally was known as sculpture. In truth, there is more affinity between a Tatlin contra-relief and a Pevsner sculpture than between this and a work of Maillol, or Rodin, or Phidias. The same can be said of a painting by Lygia Clark and a sculpture by Amilcar de Castro. Painting and sculpture then converge towards a common point, always removing themselves further from their origins, becoming spatial objects --non-objects--for which the denominations painting and sculpture, perhaps, no longer have any validity.

"First formulation"

The critics had never examined the frame and the base, in painting and sculpture respectively, in their significative, aesthetic implications. The phenomenon was registered, but as a curious detail that escaped the true problematic of art. What they missed was that the work of art itself proposed new problems that it tried to escape, in order to survive, to the closed circle of traditional aesthetics. To break the frame and to eliminate the base are not, in fact, exclusively questions of a technical or physical nature; it has to do with the power of the artist to liberate himself from the conventional frame of culture, in order to reencounter that "desert" about which Malevich speaks in which the work appears for the first time, free of whatever significance which is not of its own appearance. At the beginning of this article, we said that all true work is a non-object and that this name is applied with precision only to those works that are created outside of the conventional limits of art, which carry this necessity of extralimitarse as the fundamental reason for their appearance.

The question put in these terms, Tachist and informal experiences in painting and sculpture show their conservative and reactionary phase. The artists of this tendency continue--although desperately--validating the conventional supports of those artistic genres. In them the process is contradictory: instead of breaking with the frame in order that their work spills over into the world, they keep the frame, the painting, conventional space, and put the world (brute materials) in it. They start with the supposition that what is inside a frame is a painting, a work of art. It is certain that in so doing they also denounce the end of this convention, but without announcing the future direction. This direction can be in the creation of these special objects (non-objects) that are created outside of all artistic convention and that reaffirm art as the first formulation of the world.

(1) At my suggestion the expression "non-object" was adopted by Lygia Clark to name her last works, which are constructions created directly in space. But the sense of such an expression is not limited to being a name for particular works; non-objects are also the sculptures of Amílcar de Castro and Franz Weissmann, the last works of Hélio Oiticica, Aloisio Carvao, and Décio Vieira, as much as the neoconcrete poets' book-poems.

+ "When changes or transformations are given, one says there is a process."

++ Process: discovery of reality.

Thus the fundamental relation existing in process or through it consists in that the different elements modify one another; that is, an element is affected by that before it and will affect what follows it. In this connection structural interrelation is differentiated, where all elements are statically integrated.

+++ All process contains a procedure.

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Procedure = act.

Act: formal/progressive variations of the probabilities within the individual (systematic of style).

Process: manipulation + unleashing of inventions (systematic of anti-style).

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2. Process/poem: visualization of (++)/consumption functionality.

There is no process/poetry. What there is is process/poem, because the product is the poem. What contains the process is the poem. Movement or creative participation brings structure (matrix) to the condition of process. The process of the poet is individual; what is of collective interest is the process of the poem.

In each new experience, process/poem inaugurates informational processes. This information can be aesthetic or not: what's important is that it be functional, therefore, consumable.

The poem is resolved in itself, unleashing itself (project), not needing interpretations for its justification. (+)

Process: self-obsolescence of the poem that is exhausted as far as exploring its possibilities, which ages, to be supplanted by another that incorporates and goes beyond it.

Process/poem: consciousness of new languages, creating them, dynamically driving them and founding creative probabilities. Giving major importance to the reading of the project of the poem and no longer to alphabetic reading, the word remaining displaced, creating thus a universal language; although its origin be Brazilian, it stays far from whatever regionalism, pretending to be universal, not in the strictly humanist sense, but in that of functionality. This has nothing to do with a rigid and gratuitous combat for the verbal sign, as some thought, but with a planned exploration of the possibilities locked up in other signs (non-verbal). It is good to recall that even the structures themselves are not translated: they are coded by the processes which govern international communication.

+ Unleashing: what evades redundancy.

++ Functionality: invention of reality.

+++ Creative function of the artist: to work in the processes, reinventing them. Changes of whatever species of structure, response to a social necessity.

++++ Process has distinct planes or levels.

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)=(Process/poem is a radical position within avant-garde poetry. It is precise to frighten for radicalism). ???

Language is understood not as the linguistic phenomenon, that is to say, the spoken language of a people, but that which the cinema employs (visual), or mathematics (technical). In this light the process poem is not interested in "poetic status" as an area of major focus, nor in linguistic research, but wants to be quite clear that this separation unequivocally shows that the poem is physical--and even tactile--in its graphic visuality, insofar as poetry is purely abstract, such that the expression "architectural poetry" is common.

The "poetic world" can be discussed (uselessly) as all abstract speculation, according to the eloquence of each isolated individual; as far as the poem--visual product-- it can be collectively testado from its functionality to its elasticity. This radical position finally transformed the poem into an object as manipulable as an instrument. And even more than an instrument: its own channel.

The process poem already reached an autonomous level at which it can be manipulated and can transmit independent information of the degree of culture of the consumer.

The process poem does not want to do away with the word, just as it does not have the exclusive need to affirm that the book, today, is an obsolete object. What the process poem affirms is that the poem is made with a process and not with words. The project is important, and its visualization; the word can be sidestepped.

Poetry is hardly a word. Nor are we forgetting, in saying this, the value of the word, for example, in the reading of an architectonic plan. The values of interconnection and circulation are not represented by prepositions or grammatical conjunctions, but by simple distribution of spaces; as a consequence this value is more strategic than the functionality of gears.

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//FUNCTIONALITY = use of functions

//STRATEGY = seeing options in advance

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By antedating the recording (specific record of sound), the cinema (projection of the image), and television (immediate capture of the image), the book until then had been able to meet these deficiencies; now, without exaggeration, it can return to its exact function which is to document typographically. We should not forget the origin in sound of alphabetic notation and, as a consequence, of its visual arrangement, central to typographic art.

Today, new ways of writing are sought: in most cases, notations for the use of visual and sound conditions, taking advantage of the physical directions which the poem offers. This autonomy of the poem, no longer a mere support of poetry, transformed the poem into an object: its own channel. The process poem is as much liberty of structure (of the word) as of the author (psychological). The process poem is anti-literature in the sense in which a true mechanism brings about movement without friction, or electricity looks for the perfect conductor.