Hear the Art: Visual poetry as sculpture, Richard Tipping, Puncher & Wattman, 2022.

When it comes to collaborative artforms, the marrying of literature and visual art seems an obvious one, however the nicheness of its production proves otherwise. Risk-taking publishers like Upswell have accepted the challenge with books like Ann Shenfield’s A Treatment and Anna Jacobson’s Anxious in a Sweet Store, where the poets include their own illustrations to illuminate a single poem’s meaning or emotional weight. They’re more of a hybrid offering than anything experimental if you consider that children’s picture books have been doing it since 1658, when John Amos Comenius published Orbis Sensualium Pictus (Visible World in Pictures), but given it’s poetry and not children’s literature, these collections of poems embrace something almost folk artsy, which is uniquely pleasing. Puncher & Wattmann, too, welcome visual art in their catalogue, though they’ve taken a more avant-garde approach. Richard Tipping’s Hear the Art is the second book in the Visual Poetics series, and unlike the first – Chris Mansell’s 101 Quads: one poem per page with each poem in perfect blocks of black and red-lettered quatrains laid out staircase-style – his isn’t a collection of concrete poetry where the text relies on its visual form. Hear the Art is the artist’s discussion of his own ‘wordartwork’ amid photographs of it, mostly sign art and sculpture dependent on text. Toby Fitch’s Object Permanence is the third in the series, one of calligrams, which harkens back to concrete poetry but lays weight on uses of varying font. Of the three Visual Poetics books, Tipping’s is the explanatory one, in which he writes about how his practice eventuated then evolved, whereas the others are performance-based: their textual-based art is the art, not the topic. Tipping’s 2008 Subvert I Sing with Redfox Press might’ve fit better with Mansell’s and Fitch’s contributions in terms of what the books are doing, but Hear the Art as one part of a whole brings a daring nuance to the series that reflects on visual-based text and text-based visuals as co-conspirators rather than opposites.

My interest has been to see if some of the innate qualities of poetry (density, potency, poignancy and memorability for example) could be ‘translated”\’ into objects which are accepted as art rather than literature. I say ‘accepted’ because these two worlds are just that: worlds apart. There is little cross-over in institutional support, critical reflection, and attractions of audience.

Author of eight poetry collections and more than thirty solo exhibitions in Australia, New York, London, Munich, Cologne and Berlin under his belt, Tipping is well-suited to this observation. The Art world and the literary scene don’t interact in any culturally productive way, yet any writer would admit to feeding off visual art and any visual artist would say the same of literature. Since Tipping is both writer and visual artist, he must be very well-nourished.

Tipping was a student of drama, English and philosophy at Flinders University where he met the satirical sculptor and performance artist Aleks Danko in 1970, who’d invited him to share his first exhibition at Llewellyn Galleries in Adelaide. Tipping said, ‘But I don’t make art’ to which Danko replied, ‘But you could.’ So he did, and for that exhibition, Tipping contributed four large blocks of wood, the faces of each block imprinted with a word so there are twenty-four words in total, the viewer encouraged to combine the words to make a poem. He also supplied a series of typed and framed poems about a woman named Betty, playing with the Duchamp question: Is anything art if it’s exhibited in a gallery? Around the age of nineteen, Tipping was already considering the ways in which poetry might fit into a visual art consciousness.

From there he built on the block concept by creating large scale public art installations on granite, where words are hidden inside words or, when rearranged, can ask the most esoterically spiritual questions. Other sculptures were built in the earth, killing grass to spell out ‘HEARTH’ in as many ways possible. Not only the name of that fieldwork, if you will, or the name of his latest book, there are many iterations of hearth: in-built brick, neon sign, granite and porcelain tiles, paint, even jewellery. In Tipping presenting these sculptures of the Hearth series – and others artworks – through photographs printed in a book, he’s flipping the literary / visual arts conundrum again and asking what happens when the gallery work is placed in a work of literature? As a book, Hear the Art is as relevant as it was when first conceived of as an installation.

Tipping’s wry humour feels best displayed in his signage, which is sometimes found, sometimes created, and often a work of sabotage. In the early days there was Airpoet, repurposing an ever-informative airport sign, which remained intact in the SA suburb of Mile End for almost a year. Typical of the kind of anecdote you might find in the book pertaining to works of art:

A month or so later I was standing on the footpath photographing the new sign…and a man walking past asked (with some laconic redundancy): ‘Photographing it, are you?’ He seemed to be a worker from a local factory, wearing overalls and a towelling hat and carrying a box of lunches from a nearby shop for his mates. I said: ‘Yes, know anything about it?’ He answered: ‘It’s a worker’s Christmas present!’, smiled and walked on.

When you force art upon unwitting viewers in everyday localities, what does it do for them? How might it change their way of looking and seeing? Similarly Art Freeway in Melbourne and Form One Planet in Port Macquarie had motorists taking-in art and quite possibly carrying the feeling of art within them for the rest of their drives.

Tipping’s love of sign art evolved into the likes of a banner, in which every day a new line of a four-lined poem – ART IS A PANE IN THE GLASS / TIME GOES BY IN GREAT BLASTS / NOW THE PAST IS AHEAD OF YOU / STONE COLD SOBER AT LAST – hung off the Cahill Expressway bridge in Sydney. His signs have spanned the length of art galleries and shown up at beaches and on the front of Australia House in London. Uncommon thinking for common people is his aim.

Hear the Art is an inspiring 175-page paperback book with colour photography, covering more than fifty years of Tipping’s word art. He presents his thinking and making of his art in plain language, how he went from unbooking the book to bringing it back to the book. If you placed it on your coffee table, does it became an entirely new exhibition?

 – Heather Taylor-Johnson

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Heather Taylor-Johnson is a multi-form writer living and working on Kaurna land near Port Adelaide. She’s the author of five poetry collections and a verse novel and has had poems published in various Best of Australian Poetry anthologies. The anthology she edited, Shaping the Fractured Self: Poetry of Chronic Illness and Pain, was the winner of the Mascara Avant Garde Award. Her essays have won Island’s Nonfiction Prize and been shortlisted for ABR’s Calibre Prize, while her novel Jean Harley was Here was shortlisted for the Readings Prize for New Fiction. Her third novel, Little Bit, will be out mid-2024. She’s an arts critic and an honorary title holder at the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide.

Hear the Art: Visual Poetry as Sculpture is available from https://puncherandwattmann.com/product/hear-the-art-visual-poetry-as-sculpture/
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