This essay by Bálint Szombathy situates Productive Misunderstanding within the histories of visual poetry, intermedia practice, concrete poetry, and digitally expanded textual forms. Original essay: SZOMBATHY BÁLINT, Termékenység mint egyetértés (Áfra János – Szegedi-Varga Zsuzsanna: Termékeny félreértés), in Alföld, issue 71, 111–112, December, 2020
Fertility as Agreement
János Áfra – Zsuzsanna Szegedi-Varga: Productive Misunderstanding
I had been waiting for this book for a very long time—for a book like this. It had been a long time since I had felt within myself that sense of excitation which appears when one places an artwork before oneself—in this case an artist’s book—and already from the sight of the cover, after the very first turning of pages, becomes certain that one stands before an unparalleled experience, before a defining, even epoch-making discovery. One senses that something is about to appear unlike anything previously encountered. A new, unknown continent reveals itself.
This is especially true in relation to that complex genre we call graphovisual or verbo-voco-visual poetry, within which innumerable individual linguistic offshoots exist. Yet even these definitions are no longer truly stable, because this is precisely the kind of volume that relativizes everything that has existed so far within the orbit of those concepts. It no longer belongs anywhere. It is so self-governing, so internally determined, that previously known genre categories simply no longer encompass it.
Behind the spark of my enthusiasm lies a dissatisfaction that has solidified in me over the past fifteen or twenty years regarding non-linear poetic production: I sensed a stagnation both internationally and within Hungarian practice. The iconographic solutions of twentieth-century picture poetry had already been exhausted by the 1980s. Everything that stubbornly clung to the primordial Kassákian model became mannered and anachronistic; the residues of Gomringer-style concrete poetry and the standards of the Italian visual poetry schools of the 1960s and 70s likewise became rigidified; even the production of hand-made poetic collages began to decline. Evidence of this can be seen in the regularly published collage series of the Irish Redfoxpress, now numbering more than sixty titles. When these otherwise beautifully produced books are placed side by side, they give me the impression that the entire series might just as well have been made by only a handful of authors.
Thus I had long been waiting for a work that would demonstrate an advance toward new linguistic expansions and bring with it the possibility of a shift in perspective. I had no doubt that such a possibility could be found within the linguistic horizons opened by digital art. Now I know that by 2020 this had finally happened—and within Hungarian publishing no less.
In Productive Misunderstanding, many things do not function as one would expect. It is not like the conventional situation in which a traditionally lineated poetic text is handed over to a visual artist to embellish the writing or, if possible, deepen its lyrical effect. Zsuzsanna Szegedi-Varga does not illustrate under any circumstance, just as János Áfra does not merely write poems. Both step outside those familiar protective-role structures that, in a simpler case, would reduce one to the isolated poet and the other to the equally isolated visual artist.
Traditional roles become entirely relative through the fact that the space of the poems unfolds in the form of a particular dialogue—a space we had until now known as white, as the ideal parcel of the paper page. Thanks to the internet, the co-authors work back and forth, step by step, under each other’s hands, searching for new interpretive possibilities within which this already weighty poetry may come to rest. They construct pixel by pixel, as though raising the cathedral of expanded poetry itself, probing one another’s individuality and creative potential.
They demonstrate how poetic material may be visually expanded so that the visual dimension becomes not a detriment but an advantage. Yet my impression remains that the entire work still originates from written poetry; the visual linguistic domain emerges as an extension of its force. (Indirectly, they also remind us how absurd it is that contemporary Hungarian art-literary journals are produced with digital technology while editors fail to exploit all of its possibilities.)
For someone who has not seen the book, it is difficult to explain the kind of symbiosis, the kind of togetherness, that exists here between the materiality of reading and the materiality of vision—how linguistic layers bathe within one another’s reflections, how images and textual fragments project themselves across each other.
We may speak of textual fragments because the creative imagination nevertheless looks back toward certain achievements of the previous century that advocated removing text from the line, rotating it, dispersing it, disintegrating it. Here, at last, the spationist poetic vision realizes itself in ideal form, especially if we imagine how the printed contents of the volume would appear in 3D or animated technique.
For we are moving not only within the “simple” space familiar to us through experience, but simultaneously through outer space as well, within the force-lines of an interstellar linguistic system stretched across cosmic extension. If the proposition is true that space itself is time—and I would not attempt to dispute this—then it follows self-evidently that within the book there comes into being the poetic and conceptual time-network desired by every creator.
The stations of this temporal network are connected by a geometric system of lines, often extending across pages, binding themselves to another page, thereby creating the universal context of the linguistic material: the all-encompassing linguistic “mass,” that network which holds together the wedges of construction.
The authors’ message is unmistakably that the pages embedded within the bound volume may be arranged linearly beside one another like a frieze, unfolded into long visual stations. The work is an image-textual process that may be extended endlessly beyond boundaries; it has no conceptual shackles, only physical ones. The (image-)pages unfold from one another like the “frames” of a motion picture.
The publication sustains visual culture at the highest level. It offers decisive, well-organized, yet subtly varied iconic solutions for written poetry. It provides a model for how a poet not closed off from the digital world and a visual artist sensitive to poetry may work together today—while at the same time making increasingly obvious how untenable the very concept of the “visual artist” has become in the contemporary world, especially in the face of such an achievement.
The authors unfold a metalinguistic structure that slips free from beneath the canon, creating the possibility that a new canon might crystallize through it—one whose points of orientation future generations may grasp onto.
Written poetry will not die, of course. But this mode of thinking will, in the long term, unquestionably prevail, because the dominant logic of digital technology continues to direct art toward precisely this trajectory.
(Alföld Foundation – Péter Méliusz Juhász Library)
— Bálint Szombathy
Original essay: SZOMBATHY BÁLINT, Termékenység mint egyetértés (Áfra János – Szegedi-Varga Zsuzsanna: Termékeny félreértés), in Alföld, issue 71, 111–112, December, 2020