Rosemarie Castoro | Untitled (Concrete Poetry), 1969 | max goelitz

1969

Medium

Prismacolor marker and graphite on graph paper

Dimensions

27 × 21 cm

Status

In Gallery Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-156127

In the series Concrete Poetries (1968-69), Rosemarie Castoro experiments with text, language, writing and the written image as well as with the temporal extension of actions and language by documenting her activities in the form of a diary and reciting these poems aloud and recording them. These works are among the artist’s most conceptual works and show how the topic of time, as well as the reflection on time itself, occupy a major focus in her Oeuvre and how she succeeded in capturing these abstract elements in a pictorial way. Comparable to the Inventory Drawings, created at the same time, Castoro developed a quasi-scientific system in the diary-like poems, with which she structures and records her daily activities in an almost exaggerated way. Untitled (Concrete Poetry) (April 6, 1969) can be interpreted as an enumeration of a to-do list, which Castoro had planned for April 6, 1969 (the sheet was dated in pencil). The terms, which have been inserted letter by letter into the grid structure of the sheet with a felt pen, can be read almost like invitations: "wash, squeeze dry, swaddle, filter, flow, penetrate ..." and are ambiguously chosen, so that the reader and viewer cannot quite get a clear idea of the respective actions. The work Untitled (Concrete Poetry) (May 28 / 29, 1969) can also similarly be read as a call to action, which Castoro apparently set for herself as the task of the day: "Go out, seek a reflection, find someone to discuss". The sheet is divided into a documentation of two days (May 28 and 29, 1969) and has a narrative, recording character, as the fourth section refers back to the first and summarizes what has happened and has been experienced in the meantime: "I will tell you when I return [...] in the morning, I did return from ...". Castoro shared the practice of Concrete Poetry with her former partner and sculptor Carl Andre, who typed stacked letters and words into his minimalist poems with a typewriter and arranged them within the space of a sheet of paper. Andre focuses on the formal image of language and the visual representation of its structure, whereas Castoro - who was also known to recited her works aloud - designed her acoustic poetry according to tonal and subjective rules.