As A Journal No 7 2024 Poem

Guest Editor Jean-Max Colard

What sparked off this issue of as a Journal was the clear evidence of poetry’s growing presence in the field of contemporary art. Rather than ‘Poetry’ in general, and even less so the figure of the ‘Poet’, it’s the poem that has our full attention: I find it in the title of an exhibition by Jason Dodge, on the invitation card sent out by artist Ida Ekblad, and then again in the form of an exhibition, in the display and arrangement of works within a space by Ian Kiaer, Elena Narbutaitė or Wolfgang Tillmans. Hence this open-ended question, ‘What is poetry for you today?’, placed like a probe among various art world players, in a sort of vox populi.

And so rises the confirmation of an intuition: in an art field driven by the market, where artworks are becoming luxury accessories for the jet set, poetry, with its poverty and economy of means, appears at the opposite end of the spectrum, as a pole of resistance. What’s more, given the ‘discursive turn’ of contemporary art, which is saturated with ideological and societal messages, and as a way of escaping the empire of communication and its formatted language, poetry offers itself as a different form of communication, enabling artists and curators to reappropriate the exhibition, its form and its language, to ‘sign’ it, to reintroduce an authorial presence: ‘Expositions d’auteur’, to use the word coined by art critic Éric Troncy on the same model as Cinéma d’auteur.

This over-presence of poetry in the field of art is also a symptom of its renewed contemporaneity. More than the full-length novel, the short form of the poem, whether haiku or insta-poem, is particularly suited to moving across our screens and our smartphones, to existing in the short space of time between two emails and three text messages, while reading is inevitably intermittent.

In the name of the magazine as a Journal, I immediately heard the echo of the famous adage of the Latin poet Horace, who likened poetry to an image: ‘Ut pictura poesis’. In the classical age, it was the Ut that ensured the correspondence between the arts, which were comparable to each other: music is like architecture, painting as a poem, poetry ut pictura, and so on. Modernism, on the other hand, sought to break with this comparison and re-establish each art form in the specificity of its medium. But in our age of extreme contemporary cross-media and post-media, this analogical way of thinking is making a comeback. Poetry (like the other arts) is once again becoming ut pictura, ut diary, as sex, ut cinéma, as a journal, in a fluid, reversible and de-gendered ecology of forms