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V i s u a l and L i t e r a r y M a t e r i a l i t y in
M o d e r n Art

Typographic experimentation in early twentieth-centuiy modem art

partakes of two independent and very differently structured disciplines:
the visual arts and literature. The conceptual underpinnings of these two
domains throughout the period from the turn of the century through
to the mid 1920s, in which typographic experimentation flourished so
conspicuously need to be established if the practice of typography is to
be understood. Within the mainstream of what is known as the avant-
garde in this period— Futurism, Dada, Cubism, Vorticism— typographic
experiment was uniquely suited to express the cross-disciplinary ap­
proach to representation which formed one of the central tenets of
much artistic practice. In this burgeoning of cross-disciplinary, some­
times synaesthetic, activity typography participated in the investigation
of both visuality and literariness and in the characteristics attributed to
both the imago and logos as representational modes. An assertion of the
self-sufficiency of both visual arts and literature as nonreferential, re­
plete, and autonomous was dependent on the concept of materiality:
the relations between form and expression, between m atter and con­
tent, were assumed to depend largely on the capacity of the image, the
poem, the word, or the mark to be, to exist in its own right on an equal
stature with the tangible, dimensional objects of the real world.

49
 ■ 2

This insistence on the ontological status of what had been consid­

ered representation as equivalent to the status of real being was theo­
rized in the work of a num ber of artists and writers within the various
groups and circles of avant-garde activity. The aims of these are as varied
as the locations and dispositions of their authors. The concept of mate­
riality which surfaces in the 1912 essay by Kandinsky, “Concerning the
Spiritual in Art, ” is at variance with that proposed by Albert Gleizes and
Jean Metzinger in Paris or Filippo Marinetti in Milan in 1912 as well.
There is no homogeneous synthesis available from these dispersed and
disparate positions. But there is a single common centra] theme of at­
tention to materiality as the basis of autonomous, self-sufficient replete­
ness so that artistic forms are considered to be and not to represent. The
concept of being, in terms of an artistic object, generally depended
upon a belief in the inherent characteristics of the material means of its
production, but the semiotic notion of differential meaning can be lo­
cated within the theoretical discussions as well, though in less clearly
articulated terms.

The Legacy of Mallarmé

The aesthetic legacy of Symbolism played an important part in the de­

velopment of early twentieth-century art, and this is nowhere more true
than in the influence of the prominent Symbolist poet, Stéphane Mal­
larmé. A Throw o f the Dice stands as the single most striking precedent
for avant-garde experiment with the visual form of poetic language. The
radical work was first given a published typographic treatment approx­
imating Mallarmé’s original sketches in 1914. The enigmatic text of the
poem, rendered doubly complex by the graphic, spatial, visual inscrip­
tion, remains a touchstone of both historical and aesthetic reference for
all subsequent twentieth-centuiy typographic experimental poetry.
While the poets to be discussed in depth in the next chapter were less
concerned with the metaphysics of the book, which was central to Mal­
larmé s project, and more interested in the politics of poetic and graphic
form, all of them had aesthetic links to the Symbolist tradition, even if
only as that mode from which they sought to distance themselves. Ma­
rinetti, Apollinaire, and Zdanevich, in particular, were aware of Mal­
larm é’s as the prominent voice of the preceding generation, and they
almost universally owed key features of their own aesthetic practice to
his theoretical vocabulaiy.1 Not surprisingly, the aesthetic premises of

50
V i s u a l a n d L i t e r a r y M a t e r i a l i t y in M o d e m A r t

their approach to materiality are closer in sensibility to that of the Sym­

bolist poet than are those of Tzara. Marinetti and Zdanevich, in particu­
lar, stayed within an intellectual tradition in which the synaesthetic
properties of material form were considered fundamental to poetic
practice.
The late work of Stéphane Mallarmé can be considered the demar­
cating point from which modernity, as a radical rethinking of represen­
tational strategy within the field of poetics, comes into being and comes
before a literary audience, especially within the francophone poetics of
much of Western Europe and Russia.2 Many aspects of Mallarmé’s work
bear directly upon the creation of later avant-garde experiments in ty­
pography in spite of the marked distinctions between his aesthetic in­
tentions and those of the early twentieth-century writers whose work
will be the focus here.
First, and most literally, there is the bold fact of his having made use
of the possibility of visually scoring the poetic page by the use of differ­
ent sizes and fonts of typographic letterforms. Mallarmé’s work in this
regard is unique and without precedent within literature. The literary
form in which visual play with typographic arrangement existed prior to
the sketched out plan for A Throw of the Dice was the pattern poem.3
The reductive iconicity of these works, with their limited pictorial imag­
ery and generally popular or religious tone, was a far cry from the ab­
stract metaphysics of Mallarmé’s work— as indeed were the display
techniques of advertising typography which may have provided the vi­
sual inspiration for the hierarchization of the text in A Throw of the
Dice.4
Second, Mallarmé clearly distinguished his poetic practice from
the quotidian forms of language in use in the mass media of the press, as
did other Symbolists, namely, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud. Lit­
erariness as such began to gain its definition in this period more through
its distinction from pedestrian usage than through prescriptive literary
formulas. Differentiation and negation, a sense that poetry was in part
defined by a contrast with what it was not: this harbingers the typically
m odem definition of artistic practices as self-consciously situated within
cultural contexts \vhere they gain their identity through contrast. Such a
definition marks out the activity of resistance as a fundamental task for
aesthetics. H ere the avant-garde evidences clear dependence upon the
bourgeois culture against which it is defined, functioning as the pro­
tected arena for discourse otherwise lost within the emerging culture of
industrial capitalism. Mallarmé’s disdain for journalistic writing, com­
bined with his ambivalence about the success of newspaper as a popular

51
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form, embodies the strategic paradox of the avant-garde whose elitist

aesthetics alienated them from the very masses to and for whom they
wished to write.
Third, Mallarmé clearly dissolved and subverted the enunciation of
the individual subject, which had been central to romanticism, thus ren­
dering problematic the relation between individual authorship and sub­
jectivity.5
Many aspects of the poetic activity of the later avant-garde were not
represented in Mallarmé’s work, most particularly the political, anti-
classical and antihistorical tactics of such writers as Wyndham Lewis
and Tristan Tzara, whose aims in the 1910s could not have been further
from the idealist metaphysics of the Symbolist poet. But Mallarmé’s
work laid the foundation for the orchestral verse of the Russian poet Ilia
Zdanevich, for the antisubjective work of Marinetti, and for some (lim­
ited) aspects of the figurative presentations in Apollinaire’s work. Other
aspects of the symbolist aesthetic, especially notions of synaesthesia and
correspondence, had a transformed legacy in the distinctly different
treatments of the Russian and Italian Futurists.
The spatial and visual manipulation of the poetic text desired by
Mallarmé in A Throw o f the Dice embodies a curious paradox.6 On the
one hand this poem, the most hermetic of Mallarmé’s works, was the
expression of his desire to “ . . . break away completely from the phe­
nomenal world and toward a poetry of absolute purity.”7 But on the
other hand, in the process of bringing forth an idea in form in order to
render it perceptible, Mallarmé invested in a highly material practice.
He manipulated the typographic form, paying close attention to its vi­
sual features, spatial distribution, and capacity to organize the text into a
hierarchized figurai order. Antimaterial though he may have been in his
intentions, his means, in this work, suggest the possibilities for a mate­
rially investigative practice.
The typographic features of this work can be readily enumerated,
though the interpretation of their effects remains resistant to any clo­
sure. This is, in part, due to the complexity added to the work by the
manipulation of material means and, in part, owing to the already fully
abstract character of Mallarmé’s language. In fact, Mallarmé chose to
use only one typeface, Didot, a classic and simple face without undue
decoration in the serifs, or extreme thick/thin variations, or oblique an­
gling of the counters (open spaces in letters like “a”) or extreme de­
scenders or ascenders (on “p ” or “d”). The typeface, then, was relatively
neutral— unlike the more fussy appearance of the Elzevir face which
had been used for the first publication of the work— and Mallarmé em­

52
V i s u a l a n d L i t e r a r y M a t e r i a l i t y in M o d e m A r t

ployed it in both roman and italic and in a range of sizes. In spite of his
stated love of poster art, he restrained his choices, keeping to one type­
face and to text sizes, rather than those large letters used for display.
Mallarmé employs the type to separate the text into several regis­
ters, to link elements of the work throughout the entire sequence, across
pages, gutters, and spaces, and to make figures or ideogrammatic con­
stellations of words upon the page. In the process, he allows the roman
face to take advantage of its more strictly vertical form as visually stable
and the italic to use its forward slant for dynamic contrast. The separa­
tion of registers begins immediately, in the first lines of the poem, which
also serve as its title. The words “A throw of the dice” (“Un coup de dés”)
stand alone on the first recto page. The next turning or opening (the
double-page spread in a book is known as an “opening” and includes
the verso on the left and a recto side on the right) only contains type on
the right page (figure 1). This text begins with “never” (“jamais”) in the
same point size as that of the opening words. This opening phrase is
picked up in the fourth and eighth openings, to be completed by the
words “will abolish” and “chance” (figure 2). By visually linking these
elements Mallarmé stretches the sentence across other textual pas­
sages, keeping the syntactic closure suspended. The visual clue allows
the phrase to be read intact, but only in relation to the rest of the poem,
which serves as a field of other figurative elements while also providing a
context for this phrase. While poetiy regularly makes use of recurrent
themes, suspended and fragmented elements which reconnect in asso­
ciative processes, one of Mallarmé s unique contributions is this visual
marking of themes to force the connections.
As the smaller size of roman letters proceeds, the axis of each page
develops as the center of a sequence of dynamics. The words move for­
ward and downward on the page, following conventional reading pat­
terns, but they do so with the effect of creating a central axis on which
they balance or hang, also suspended. This is an effect of graphic design,
as well as a tool, and the layout mockups for even the most banal of com­
mercial printers always attended to the various axes established through
the visual centerpoint, or balance line, of lines of type (figure 3). With
the advent of highly coded rules for asymmetrical typography in the
1920s, this sensibility would be subject to serious discipline. In the
1890s there was more tolerance for the combination of centered and off-
center blocks of type within a single document, and the tensions which
arise from having multiple axes of balance in a piece are made use of in
Mallarmé s arrangements. One of the effects of this is to provide a spatial
illusion, as if the elements of language achieved their relative size on the

53
 JA M A IS
QUAND BIEN MÊKfE LANCÉ DANS DES CIRCONSTANCES
ÉTERNELLES

DU FOND D'UN NAUFRAGE

Figure 1. Page opening from Stéphane Mallarmés Un Coup de dés (Paris: 1914); the 1914
edition in accord with Mallarmé s notes.

ancestralcmcnt à n’ouvrir pas la main

par delà l'inutile tête

legs en la disparition
à quelqu'un
ambigu

l’ultérieur démon immémorial

ayant
d e contrées nulles
induit
le vieillard vers cette conjonction suprême avec la probabilité

celui
son ombre puérile
caressée e t p o lie e t rendue et lavée
assouplie p ar la vague e t soustraite
aux durs os p en h is entre les ais

né
d 'u n ébat
la m er par l'a ïe u l tentant ou V aïeul contre la mer
ur,e chance oiseuse
Fiançailles
dont
le voile d 'illu sio n rejailli leur hantise
ainsi q ue le fantôme d 'u n geste

chancellera
s'affalera

folie
N ’A B O L IR A
Figure 2. Page opening from Un Coup de dés showing the continuation of sentence from
second page opening. (Stéphane Mallarmé, Un Coup de dés, Paris: 1914)
V i s u a l a n d L i t e r a r y M a t e r i a l i t y in M o d e r n A r t

Figure 3. Pages from a journal produced for the advertising and commercial
printing trades showing various “axes” according to which pages may be
structured.

page by a contrast of real, physical weight and the optical effect of dis­
tance. As in the case of a stellar constellation, the appearance of the
words as figures on a flat plane seems to be the result of their having
been schematicized on a single picture plane, rather than of their actu­
ally existing in the same spatial plane. Thus the changes in size create an
illusionistic space as well as a graphic and abstract espace within the
white blankness of the page.
Insofar as figures are created in Mallarme’s poem, they are abstract
and dynamic, registering the movement of the listing ship and the scintil­
lating vibration of stars, rather than charting any literal course through
seas or heavens or providing any iconic point of reference for the text.
Mallarme’s concept of the figure is itself already so abstract that his en­
gagement with the manipulation of material to figurative ends increases
that antimimetic ordering. It is in part for this reason that the work is so
resistant to interpretive closure. The “figures” refuse to be read in terms
which might reduce them to an equivalent either named or sketched.
The textual elements forge links of meaning in their visual and verbal
relations but those relations function as their own gestalt, not as the
trace or image of some other figurative form.

55
 ■ 2

Mallarmé manipulates these typographic elements at every level.

In one annotation of early proofs he requested a substitution for the let­
ter “f ” in a font where the top and bottom curls were not symmetrical.
Line by line he adjusted spacing, as in the second turning where the first
three lines, “SO BE IT / that / the Abyss” (“SOIT / que / lAbyme”)
make a rapid descent, one from the next, emphasizing the downward
fall, and then have that movement slowed in the continual movement of
the next eight lines simply by the closing up of space (figure 4).
In every opening, the shape of the lines as a whole has been care­
fully attended to. In the fifth opening, for instance, the first and last
lines, “as if” in both cases, act as two magnetic poles on the central fig­
ure, pulling equally in opposite directions, while the central axis is, in
this case, the gutter of the page, returning the reader to the physical fact
of the books existence as well as to its literary form (figure 5). A fuller
analysis of the links between page structure, typographic manipulation
and poetic meaning in this work would elaborate the many levels of
these connections.8 But the poem is no more containable within a close
reading than is a constellation available to closure as a figure through
approach— from a distance the stars present the gestalt of a figure. Mov­
ing closer one moves through them, aware that the visual bonds which
forged the figurative image dissolve into illusion. The figurative aspect
of Mallarmé’s work is similarly relational and dynamic, not fixed and
closed.
Mallarmé’s inspiration for the visual appearance of A Throw o f the
Dice derived in part from his negative reaction to the habits of reading
formed in response to the daily press, to the tedious patterns of verbal
presentation. Criticizing the mechanization of reading induced by these
journals, Mallarmé staked out another of the tenets so essential to the
avant-garde: that poetic imagination had to be rescued from the dulling
effects of ordinary graphic arid linguistic practices:
Let us have no more of those successive, incessant, back and forth mo­
tions of our eyes, tracking from one line to the next and beginning all over
again— otherwise we will miss that ecstasy in which we have become im­
mortal for a brief hour, free of all reality, and raise our obsessions to the
level of creation.9

This uncompromising criticism of the newspaper form was modified by

Mallarmé’s enthusiasm for its potential to produce surprise effects when
folded, making unexpected juxtapositions from the conventional spatial
ordering by which its reading was normally bound. Mallarmé’s condem­
nation of the conventional book was no less severe:

56
 que

l'A bîm e

sous une inclinaison

plane désespérément

d'aile

la sienne

avance retom bée d ’un m al à dresser le vol

et couvrant les jaillissem ents
coupant au ras les bonds

très à l ’intérieur résume

l'o m b re enfouie dans la profondeur pa r cette voile alternative

jusqu 'adapter
à l'envergure

sa béante p rofondeur en tant que la coque

d 'u n bâtiment

penché d e l'u n ou l ’autre bord

Figure 4. Page opening from Un Coup de dés showing both the use of spacing and the
construction of axes of visual balance. (Stéphane Mallarmé, Un Coup de dés, Paris: 1914)

¡s p n j

11115 i - " *'■

■' .r.Tf '.'C i
. > •* *' ••
î§ ê î ,f j S f i é
••
î , y' ÿ "* ? ? '% Js m m

: .

' C ; :

COMME SI
Une Insinuation
simple
au silence
enroulée avec ironie
ou
le mystère
précipité
hurlé
dans quelque proche ’ -
tourbillon dhilarité et d'horreur
voltige
autour du gouffre
M § ê ê m

- ' ’ '' ' ; sans le joncher

ni fuir

et en berce le vierge indice

COMME SI
■'-’sJ,

1
Figure 5. Page opening from Un Coup de dés with two identical phrases serving as linguistic
and typographic poles of tension and balance on the page. (Stéphane Mallarmé, Un Coup de
dés, Paris: 1914)
 ■ 2

to the question of books which are read in the ordinary way I raise my
knife in protest, like the cook chopping off chickens’ heads . . . 10

Mallarmé’s typographic plan for A Throw of the Dice emphatically un-

, derscored the randomness and inadequacy of human thought and ac­
tion in the face of the Ideal. The constellation of phrases move into
figurai relation to each other as the themes of shipwreck, chance, and
transcendence interweave. The shaped forms of the lines stand out
against the conspicuously marked white space of the page, activating
spatial and temporal relations outside the normal linear sequence of po­
etic lines. This complex format, as Penny Florence neatly states, “moves
thought toward the simultaneity of perception.”11 Designed as much as
an instance of the absolute, of the Idea, to be realized in poetic form for
refractive apprehension rather than reading in any conventional sense,
this work was designed to demonstrate Mallarmé’s conviction that po­
etry was a serious instrument of ascesis through which a transition from
the daily world to the spiritual universe might be achieved.12
Mallarmé’s dedication to the purity of the absolute and to the Idea
bequeathed a legacy to the early twentieth-century avant-garde that was
radically transformed, even among those Russian poets whose debt
to Symbolism' remained so conspicuous. While rejecting the meta­
physics essential to Mallarmé, for instance, the poet and typographer
Zdanevich kept the conviction that there was an Ideal, a beyond-reason
and beyond-logic realm which was apprehendable through poetic expe­
rience. Poetry must, in Zdanevich s view, reject the habitual patterns of
ordinaiy speech, embody essences that are emotional, sexual, and uni­
versal in nature, and be presented in a visual form which reinforced the
effect of their verbal qualities. The concerns Zdanevich expressed the­
matically were of a different order altogether, as were the actual verbal
means he employed in the construction of his' zaum verse. But impor­
tant aspects of the conceptual apparatus of Mallarmé’s work are clearly
present: not the least of which is the conviction that through an inten­
sified attention to the material properties of poetic language a transcen­
dence from logic and the quotidian may be achieved. There are other
manifestations of the Symbolist legacy— the synaesthetie component of
Marinetti’s work, for instance, vulgar though it is by contrast to Mal­
larm é’s metaphysical poetics, is nonetheless derived from the Symbolist
aesthetic theory of correspondences, a theory which also depends upon
investigation of and recognition of the material forms of language.
Marinetti took up another aspect of Mallarmé’s work, also trans­
forming it radically in both formal and conceptual ways— namely,
V i s u a l a n d L i t e r a r y M a t e r i a l i t y in M o d e r n A r t

the repression of the lyrical subject which had been so essential to

nineteenth-centuiy poetics. The speaking author whose personal expe­
rience, inner life, was the source for poetic activity, is utterly absent
from A Throw o f the Dice. The metaphysical agenda precluded the per­
sonal; the realms of the absolute or the idea were without individual
subjective inflection; they were beyond, outside, or so deeply interior to
that subjective mode as to be without qualification by the experience of
a mere poet whose humanity must necessarily pale in contrast to the
enormity of the universal realm.13 The absence of a lyrical subject
within A Throw o f the Dice is a marked one, and though, again, both
motivations and manifestations were radically different, the conspic­
uous repression of the individual author as site of enunciation, as subjec­
tive source for the poetic experience, would be an important element of
the early avant-garde, Marinetti and Tzara in particular, whose prece­
dents are evident in Mallarmé.
The final feature of Mallarmé s work which demands recognition
here is the use of a figurai, visual, mode. This figuration is a kind of
bringing forth, an appearance, that is radically antigrammatical. It does
not derive from syntax or the tropes of speech which normally form a
figure or image within language, but rather from the effect of language
arranged to make a form independent of the grammatical order of the
words. This arrangement is reinforced in the spatial distribution of the
words on the page, but also, against the expectations of normative lin­
guistic order. This concept of figuration belongs properly to the presen­
tational rather than to the representational— to that order of visual and
verbal manifestation which claims to bring something into being in
its making, rather than to serve to represent an already extant idea,
form, thought, or thing. A direct link is established through this be­
tween Mallarmé s poetics and the critical position developed on this
point by Apollinaire, whose rejection of the representational mode
depended upon the figurai as its very foundation. This figure was not
conceived of as something formed outside of language and then repre­
sented by it, but as something formed against and in spite of syntax—
original, linguistic and/or visual, and nonmediate. While this formation
in language works, for Mallarmé, as a means of access to the Ideal, it has
110 pre-existing referent and is not contained within the signifying struc­
tures of ordinary language.
Apollinaire had very different uses for this figurative notion than
what is achieved in Mallarmé s work, where die concept of the figure was
the very symbol of Symbolism— that elusive, hermetic, and ungrasp-
able image which rejected the easy closure of meaning or gestalt. But

59
 ■ 2

the concept of figure as that which subverts and problematizes the struc­
ture of representation and its ontological basis is apparent in the constel­
lation of phrases which constitute the complex form of A Throw of the
Dice. That the work had its first typographically complex appearance in
print in 1914 makes its relation to the historical avant-garde all the more
clear. It was published and received in the context of an experimental
avant-garde poetics for which Mallarmé s own theoretical poetics had
provided the fundamental framework.

Materiality and Modernism: The General Problem

Any attem pt to deal with “modem art” or “modem literature” as if the

phrases designated any single or unified area of activity would fall imme­
diately prey to just criticism: the study of materiality within modem art
and literature can only be sustained on the basis of individual artists. But
in spite of the above caveat against just such activity, a few generalities
will be sketched in here with respect to the attitudes toward visual and
literary materiality in m odem art practices.
The critical writing and texts produced in the early twentieth cen­
tury served any num ber of modem artists and writers to articulate a
metacritical understanding of their activity. The modem period may be
characterized as much by the appearance of this superabundance of
metacritical texts as by the innovative forms of its artistic productions.
These critical articulations offer considerable insight into contemporary
attitudes toward the conceptual premises of visual arts and literature.
In the early twentieth century, practitioners of both visual arts and
literature paid unprecedented attention to the specificity and formal
properties of their media. In literature this meant there was an increase
in self-conscious attention to the role of the letter, the sound, the word,
the sentence, the phrase, the form— in short, all of those elements iden­
tifiable as belonging to literature and to nothing else. Likewise, in the
visual arts, there were systematic investigations of color, line, form,
mass, surface, plane, composition, and spatial illusion or lack thereof.
This investigation was not merely a concern with pure formality of
means. Instead, both the artistic work and the critical writing function
as a metacritical investigation of the structure of visual and literary arts
as signifying practices. Underlying the queries into the nature of visual
or literary form was an interrogation of what constituted visuality and
literariness in aesthetic and, later, social terms. In addition, these partic-

60
 V i s u a i a n d L i t e r a r y M a t e r i a l i t y in M o d e r n A r t

ipated in an investigation of the terms of signification, of assumptions

about the nature of presence and absence, of image and word, imago
and logos, as different orders of symbolic activity. The materiality of
presence associated with visual form, which comes to be dogmatically
codified by mid-century, was considerably modified within the early
twentieth centuiy, as was the equally dogmatic concept of an absent sig­
nified within the structure of the linguistic sign. The early twentieth
century investigations of materiality in arts practices refused such re­
ductive oppositions, and the proliferation of the hybrid form of typo­
graphic experiment is a testimonial to this stance.
_ On further examination it becomes evident that formal investiga­
tion of signification within early twentieth-century art frequently fo­
cused upon an inquiry into the effect of the material properties of the
signifier in its relation to the signified. Most specifically, this signals a
shift of emphasis from the plane of reference, meaning or content,
which had previously dominated representational art, to conspicuous
and general attention to the plane of discourse. This new emphasis al­
lowed, encouraged, and depended upon a focus on materiality, though
within each artist’s individual practice these relations were differently
construed.
To chart the role of materiality within modem art practice requires
an initial mapping of certain historical and conceptual territory, and an
accompanying suggestion of alignments and similarities linked certain
groups and individuals and differentiated others. The plurality of fac­
tions, voices, groups which surface in the splintering field of modem art
practice with its proliferation of isms distinguish themselves on the sur­
face by their variety of styles, approaches, and even manifest aesthetic
propositions. Beneath these differences of surface are even more funda­
mentally different aesthetic convictions.14 Making a rather gross model
_ of the major aspects of modem art according to this general teleology
will provide a framework for these individual practices.
Michael Levenson, in his Genealogy o f Modern ism, makes a useful
distinction between two major strains of modem literary activity in E n­
gland.15 His distinction separates those m odem writers, such as George
Moore and H enri Gaudier-Brzeska (who insisted upon the autonomy of
art as a scientific enterprise capable of discovering universal and abso­
lute laws according to a rational logic and denied the ultimacy of the
human subject) from those such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Ford
Maddox Ford who focused upon the subjective vision of the individual
experience as contingent, transient, and particular. These distinctions
are operative within the visual arts as well, and betray strong traces

61
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of inheritance from late nineteenth-century Symbolism, Realism, and

Naturalism.16 A third category should be appended to Levensons model:
artists primarily occupied with a political, interventionist agenda who
focused upon the conventions of systems of representation as the site of
their operation. Each of these strains is identified with particular atti­
tudes toward materiality in its crucial role within signification, ranging
from assumptions about the inherent value of form, to form as an ex­
pressive trace of individual consciousness, to an analysis of form as so­
cial, contextual, and historical.
The first of these categories depends upon a rational process legit­
imating what is essentially a spiritual teleology, grounded in a belief in
transcendence. This was the most direct descendent of the aesthetic
positions inherent in Symbolism, with its attention to the particular
phonetic qualities of words, the almost obsessive attention during the
decadent phase of Symbolist art to the surface of the image, to color for
its own sake, jewelled, encrusted, brilliant, excessive— all of this was at
the service of the revelatory potential of material.17 The organization of
material elements in such a practice was grounded upon their faith in a
capacity to reveal, through a set of procedures which they termed ratio­
nal and logical, absolute universal truths. The role of materiality in such
an operation is its capacity to facilitate the revelation of and representa­
tion of that truth, even more, to be that truth, the manifest form and site
in which a truth may be sought. The Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky
articulated his evident concern with such formal values in the visual art:
“Art, in giving birth to material effects, endlessly augments the reserve
of spiritual values.”18 The recognition that the attempted codification of
formal elements into a systematic understanding of their properties, ca­
pacities, and relations is linked to a belief that through Such a visual or
verbal algebra the corresponding logical organization of the universe
was being understood, represented, made evident through material
codes. This spiritual practice, dependent upon notions of transcendent
truth, placed a striking emphasis upon the investigation itself. The al­
most obsessive engagement of Kandinsky, for instance, with the formal
elements of visual art, is not the result of “purely visual” or “purely for­
mal” concern, for the work was conceived of as an agenda of investiga­
tion of a spiritual plane. The rigor and thoroughness with which this
motivates an enumeration of the formal elements of the art practice puts
a conspicuous emphasis upon the material of art itself.
Nowhere within the Symbolist aesthetic is there evidence of the
same degree of organized investigation. That logic and ration are em ­
ployed as the mode of systematizing the investigation on the material

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plane, in combination with a belief that this will lead to the revelation of
truth on the spiritual plane, is the telling point. The link formed be­
tween the practice of art and the self-definition of art as a science in the
early twentieth century displays an attem pt to legitimize its enterprise
in the same fashion as other humanistic endeavors had done in the
course of the nineteenth century. The legitimating aspect of science
was, of course, that it was irrefutably predicated upon a belief in abso­
lutes, in truth. For all its invoking of the notions of “spirituality” as if that
were some mystical realm of occulted or obfuscated knowledge, the fact
is that the methods of logical science and the guarantee of spiritual value
all depended upon this same central notion— truth. Truth, in this sense,
is not a referential value; a signifying practice which guarantees its own
authority by pointing to the link between material investigations and
their correspondence with universal laws is not taking those laws merely
as a referent external to the sign system in which the material represen­
tation takes place. The truth value is assumed to lie within the sign, in
the sense so aptly and exhaustively demonstrated by Jacques Derrida in
his critique of the inherent truth value of the linguistic sign.19 This ap­
plies to both visual and verbal signs since the structure of those internal
relations is the similar— though one could argue that the visual artists
would insist that their “truth” was even more pure for needing less trans­
lation, for being self-evident. The visual representations of “energy,”
“forces,” and “form” in such a teleology would be considered represen­
tations of these truths in themselves, rather than the mere naming of
them or pointing to them.
In the second strain of modernism, identified as subjective, the
construction of art as a signifying practice is completely different. Ac­
cording to the subjective mode there is no possibility of truth or absolute
value since the emphasis is upon the representation of individual knowl­
edge, perception, or experience. Rejection of ultimate law or of its guar­
antee by scientificized practices of art, does not entirely dispose of the
procedures of rational logic, but formulates their application and effect
very differently. The implicit “ultimate” of the subjective position is, nat­
urally, that of the individual subject, that contingent and phenome­
nological entity with its emphasis upon the transient nature of existence
and fleeting sensations of perception of a continually changing world.20
In such a conception, the notion of any fixed absolute was ridiculous,
and the individual experience coded into representation attem pted ac­
curacy in that activity in relation to the processes of knowing, experienc­
ing, rather than to any assumed essence.21
This subjectively oriented modernism contained a split between

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those who attempted to render the experience and sensation of percep­

tion with mimetic accuracy, using that experience as a reference point,
and those who were interested in making the work an actuality capable
of evoking sensation in accurate and effective ways. For the first group,
the work of art still had a representative function, and the “objective cor­
relative” of Pound, with his stress upon correctness (and all that such a
notion is based upon in terms of categories necessary for such corre­
spondence to occur), the direct treatment of the thing, and accuracy to
one’s own perceptions is the striking evidence of this position. “The sign
still pointed, but to this world, not to any other.”22 There is a complete
rejection of a “strain after the ineffable” in this struggle, a total denial of
the necessity for or even the possibility of transcendent truth. There is a
continuum here along which a slippage occurs in moving from the no­
tion of an accurately designating sign, with its capacity to function, as
Pound said himself, as “the adequate symbol,” to the notion of a presen­
tational, creative mode. In characterizing Vorticism, Pound wrote that it
was “the creative faculty as opposed to the mimetic”23 while May Sin­
clair, in her advocacy of the Imagist position, wrote: “The Image is not a
substitute; it does not stand for anything but itself. Presentation not
Representation is the watchword of the school.”24
The parallels to the statements made by Cubist artists and the
writers, such as Reverdy, making contemporary statements about its in­
tentions, are unmistakable, and the implications of the notion of presen­
tation will need to be addressed for its problematizing of signifying
practices and the strong emphasis it placed upon the effective presence
of material form.25 For now, however, the point is to notice the impor­
tance that this places upon the accurate and well-regulated use of the
materials of poetry and painting. N o longer responsible to absolutes, not
serving the cause of universal laws, the material means had no less a job
to do in the service of accuracy and presentation. The bylaws of Imagism
were as dogmatically severe as the tenets of Marinetti’s Futurist Mani­
festos pretended to be. The regulated order of the material plane de­
volved from the belief in its existence as an order of being in itself, in the
presentational mode, and as away of knowing in the subjective mode—
individual, personal, and inflected.
But there is a conflict in the rhetoric of the practitioners of this posi­
tion. On the one hand, the ontological status of the work as being re­
lieves it of designatory functions; it is and produces sensation in equal
measure as the world. On the other hand, it is to be an accurate presen­
tation of (individual and subjective) sensation, mimetic, though non-
figurative, nonimitative in the conventional sense. The extent to which

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such a conflict could be held within a single position is evident in the

paragraph below, where Maurice Raynal seems unaware of the contra­
dictory content of his statement:
But the true picture will constitute an individual object, which will pos­
sess an existence of its own apart from the subject that has inspired it. It
will itself surround everything. In its combination of elements it will be a
work of art, it will be an object, a piece of furniture if you like; better still,
it will be a kind of formula, to put it more strongly, a word. In fact it will
be, to the objects it represents, what a word is to the object it signifies.26
^ That something simultaneously is, in self-sufficiency, and represents, is
clearly contradictory. In both cases, however, the materiality of the signi-
fier, w hether it be word or image, is linked to its capacity to either evoke
or designate sensation as it is transformed into a perception and that it in
no case has a guaranteed truth value, only the relative value of accuracy
within the experience of an individual subject. The emphasis placed
upon materiality in this conception is no less rigorous or formalized than
that of the spiritually oriented modem artists, but there is an evident
tendency to retain certain figurative or referential traces within the im­
age or the word which becomes distilled out, for example, of the Russian
painters as they move toward clearly defined formal visual language or of
Mondrian as he moves into complete geometric abstraction. There is a
referent operative within this construction, that of either sensation, per­
ception, or the world, which constrains the activity of the sign from the
freedom to be the element of free play which a really presentational and
creative mode would seem to both allow and require. It is bound by
rales of designatory accuracy, subject to judgments upon its efficacy.
Materiality becomes important as the arena within which such activity
actually occurs, and the subjective modem practice is predicated upon
the. belief that it is a direct engagement with the matter of word and
image that is the central activity of art.
A third strain of modem art practice was concerned with opposing
the established social order through subverting the dominant conven­
tions of the rules of representation. There was very little clear theoretical
articulation available in the period from 1909 to 1923 of such a social
critique in these artistic practices as there would be with the emergence
of Surrealism and the work of Breton or, in another realm altogether, in
the positions articulated by the Prague School semioticians. The Rus­
sian Constructivists had the most developed theoretical stance with
respect to the possibilities of formal innovation as a political tool, a posi­
tion which comes close to that of certain of the activist Berlin Dadaists in

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properties, remain referential to some or to a great degree, even in the

case of sound poetry or concrete visual works, while visual materials
(color, line, strokes) are more readily freed from referential value and
certainly capable of slipping away from figurative organization or lin­
guistic correlations generally used to pin down their ambiguities.

Attitudes toward Materiality in Modern Literature

In their 1925 Foundations o f Aesthetics, I. A. Richards, C. K. Ogden, and

J. Wood, delimiting the domains to be attended to in aesthetic evalua­
tions, discussed “The M edium.”
Every medium has as a material its own particular efleet upon o.ur im­
pulses. Thus our feelings towards clay and iron, towards the organ and the
piano, towards colloquial and ceremonial speech, are entirely different.28

This blanket assessment of material, with its characteristically un­

specific attention to either its motivation or actual performance can be
found throughout discussions of art and literature from the early 1900s.
However, defining an attitude toward materiality as it is either implied
or articulated in the'practice of modem poetics against which to exam­
ine the use of typography presents several problems. The mainstream of
modem poetry in English and American writing can be traced to Ezra
Pound and T. S. Eliot and the modernist approach to both writing and
interpretation which descends from them, but the range of typographic
experiment among the pages of any of these modems, even in the pages
of Blast, is limited. This is not to say that there was no such experimenta­
tion within the anglo-american tradition, but simply to note that in the
early twentieth century typographic innovation played a modest role
among anglophone poets.29 The more interesting uses of typography
occur among the Dadaists, and Russian or Italian Futurists, where ef­
forts to clearly articulate a poetics occur chiefly among the various Rus­
sian Futurists and Formalists, who, like the Italian Futurists and French
poets were largely informed by a late Symbolist aesthetic.
There is a certain lack of symmetry, then, between the areas in
which m odem poetics are elaborated and in which a characteristically
modem attitude toward materiality makes its impact felt in the use of
typography. Materiality meant something other than typographic ma­
nipulation to the anglophone poets of the first part of the twentieth cen-

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the 1920s. But the works produced by the Dadaists in both Germany
and Switzerland between 1916 and 1921, as well as some of the Futurists
in both Russia and Italy, gave evidence of these principles in aesthetic
form. The identification of the symbolic orders of language, image pro­
duction, etc. as the primary site for engagement with political critique
was a unique development within the practice of art, even as a mani­
festation of the so-called avant-garde. The use of such an approach cer­
tainly belongs to those artists associated with oppositional positions,
whose rhetoric formulated strategies of attack or intervention consistent
with such a conception. Such an attitude maximizes attention to the ma­
terial properties of the signifier as the first, if not primary, line of attack.
The Dadaist perception of the order of language or image as the site of
the production and reproduction of a social order led these artists to
subvert the normative modes of syntax, of the unified (and unifying) use
of paint, of any of the systems by which a comfortable relation with signi­
fying practice could be assured through familiarity with its formal de­
vices.
There is a subtle line to be drawn here between the Dadaist en­
gagement with the conventional forms of symbolic representation in or­
der to subvert them and the aggressive rejection of aesthetics as such. In
particular, in the work of Heartfield, Tzara and Hausmann, the system­
atic interrogation of the material aspects of convention led to formal in­
novations which in another context could have been considered artistic
first and foremost. The distinguishing characteristic of this approach,
however, is that it has as its primary agenda a political and social critique
rather than having a purely aesthetic motivation. Rethinking the formal
properties of visual and literary modes so that the logics of syntax, signif­
ication, and symbolic form could be subverted required engagement
with material and innovative solutions. The symbolic order was so com-
plicit in the destructive absurdity of so-called rational culture that art­
istic practice remained the one effective instrument for disruption of its
normative practices. Intervention in the symbolic order as such offered
the only possibility for action which could operate both within and
against representational modes. A fracturing, fragmenting atomization
of elements so that they could be recombined in sound poems, collage,
assemblage, and performance was the result. In all of these, obviously,
attention was paid to signifying practices in an attempt to pry'them loose
from their conventional relations or easy recuperation as readily con­
sumable modes. This evident engagement with materiality as the site in
which resistance could be produced characterizes the Dada rejection of
the transparent sign in a practice whose politics are more readily appar­

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ent as an aspect of the stance toward representation than that of either

Cubists or Russian and Italian Futurists. The Dada activity foregrounds
the ways in which value (signification) should be considered a process,
rather than a product, as an ongoing activity of relations rather than an
achieved form, however innovative.
If in the case of the Dada artists this investigation was unrigorous
and unsystematic (almost necessarily, by definition, to continue the re­
jection of systematization in its false representation of rational order),
then nowhere was the realm of materiality more prominently engaged,
more foregrounded by that engagement, than in this realm of politically
motivated art practice.
What becomes clear even in this generalized discussion of these
three conceptual categories, which delineate a certain configuring of
m odem art practice, is that none of them manifest a concern for formal
values for their own sake. The concern for truth, for mimetic accuracy
and effective presentation, for intervention into the symbolic order of
representational norms— none of these divorces the formal investiga­
tion from a motivation which has content or substantive value. It is
therefore all the more astonishing to realize the extent to which general­
izations about m odem art have been manufactured to support its en­
gagement with a supposedly pure formalism.
Modernism turned its back on the traditional idea of art as imitation and
substituted the idea of art as autonomous activity. One of its most charac­
teristic slogans was Walter Pater’s assertion: “All art constantly aspires to
the condition of music,”— music being, of all the arts, the most purely
formal, the least referential, a system of signifiers without signifieds, one
might say.27

Debunking these generalizations and reshifting the terms of the discus­

sion into the structure of relations among elements of signification
within these art practices puts the discussion of materiality into context.
The elaboration of individual artists’ characteristic relation to the ques­
tions of formal manipulation can only be fully appreciated in relation to
the premise that not only were modem artists not concerned with form
for its own sake, as either nonreferential or nonsignifying, but that they
were fundamentally engaged with a persistent investigation of the pro­
cess of signification such that the relations between formal manipulation
and content could not be dissolved. This engagement was manifested
very differently by literary and visual arts, largely because of the in­
herent differences in the two as symbolic systems. The materials of
language, which even at the phonemic level retain some associative

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