The context winner 

The performance artist and "event" textualist makes poetry happen.
You don't have to get it, but try not to step on it.

by John Moore, (The Vancouver Sun, Mix, June 26, 1999.)

Vancouver International Airport, International Arrivals. A mix of travellers swirls in a cavernous space.
A man wearing white coveralls and an orange vest marked with a fluorescent-yellow X moves purposefully
into the crowd, stops and begins to lay out large white letters on the floor. The shuffling crowd trying to welcome
relatives or friends parts reluctantly, yielding to this anonymous, apparently custodial person. A pre-schooler
recognizes some of the letters and wants to help "spell." His mother stumbles over a letter before she sees it,
then kneels to join them. The crowd gives way, exposing the finished message which reads: mere appearances.

After a minute or so, the man in white coveralls carefully gathers the big letters into a bag and proceeds up
the escalator to International Departures. A digital LED electronic fannypack displays his destination and silent
farewell: "In The Event Of Text: Ephemeralities of Writing. Utrecht, Netherlands, April 28 - May 2, 1999
-- mere appearances is about to become a Trans-Atlantic poetic event.

"I thought I might be arrested and miss my plane,” Vancouver installation poet TS Thomas, admits back in
Vancouver but still high from the five days of performances, workshops, and networking with European artists
and critics. This was the second international symposium on writing and performance, jointly hosted by the
Utrecht School of the Arts and England's Dartington College of Arts. Travelling farther than any other guest
at the conference, Thomas left his LED belt at the gate with his cameraman only to land at Amsterdam's
Schiphol airport and be confronted with artist Jenny Holzer’s large vertical LED sculpture. It was typical of
the coincidental events that enlivened a symposium devoted to non- traditional views of text and its
relationship to literature culture and contemporary life.

That text is an "event" is a crucial postmodern insight. Conventional wisdom holds that the central miracle of
writing is the power to transcend "events," preserving emphemeral language through a system of arbitrary
symbols, and that the book is thus a kind of time-capsule. When text was rare, its preservation and
transmission the specialized hand-labour of sribes, the old mystique was easy to preserve. Once
improvements to Gutenberg's simple press in the late 15th century began making text widely accessible,
literacy became more generally valued, creating a demand for yet more text, and as Marshall McLuhan
observed in the Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man: “Printing from moveable types
created a quite unexpected new environment — it created the PLUBLIC."

We, the public, now live under a constant barrage of text. Neon semiotics illuminate the urban nightscape.
Reading, say, Herodotus on the bus, our eyes also register passing street signage and the monumental texts
of billboards. The bus itself is decked with text inside out, public service messages and advertising. Metro
Transit has begun to quote from Canadian poems in belated recognition of Blaise Cendrars' 1927
announcement in Modernities: "Advertising = Poetry.”

Now, when text is abundant and cheap, we are suspicious of everything we read. In one of his provocative
short fictions, "Pierre Menard, the Author of Don Quixote,” Jorge Luis Borges floats the provocative suggestion
that even a perfect reproduction of a text, by inspiration or the printing press, is not "identical" with the original.
The Herodotus we read on the bus is not “the” Herodotus, not the one read by Greeks in 400 BC, nor the
one read by Renaissance scholars, nor the one drummed into the skulls of 19th- century English collegians.
It's "our" Herodotus. The context changes, making each new reading of “Herodorus" a unique event.

"Without engaging in wild generalities," Thomas says, "I think it's safe to say that context has been the
central concern of most 20th-century art.”

The "unreliable narrator” of modern fiction, who appears in the ironic monologues of Robert Browning, novels
like Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Solddier and the existentialist fiction of Sartre and Camus, evolved into
paranoiac "writing machine," producing'William S. Burroughs' apocalyptic visions ot language as a parasitic virus
and addictive drug, expressed in the insurgent "cut-up" method of radically juxtaposing texts to create
mind-altering works like Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded. Like Burroughs,
post-modern writers often express an aggressive hostility to traditional textual forms, an attitude shared
with contemporary conceptual artists from disciplines of the visual and performing arts where it descends
directly from the Dadaist and Surrealist movements who were already working in Post-modernist terms
when writers were still inventing Modernism.

"In Europe, the term 'avant-garde' still has real meaning," Thomas observes, "We tend to soften the edge.
They're much more aggressive, more true to the 'front line' military overtones of the original concept."

Chris Cheek, one of the organizers and major exhibitors at the Utrecht symposium, used an industrial shredder
to create a roomfull of haystacks of shredded versions of world literature, an installation called Things Not Worth
Keeping. "How's the carnage and desecration going?" Thomas enquired when The Shredder stumbled into lunch
and slumped down exhausted. "I shredded The Bible and Hamlet today," Cheek replied wearily. Thomas' own
less destluctive installations around Vancouver have all dealt with the radical juxtaposition of literary text and context, from the giant X he installed at the 1993 Atropolis show, his literal contributions to the 1997 and 1998 Word on the Street festivals, to his collaboration with former TISH poet Jamie Reid in "A Wanton Act of Poetry" at the 1998 Jazz Festival, during which he laid out the final stanza of Reid's homage to sax-master Lester (Prez) Young along English Bay, to saxophone accompaniment.

By installing the oversize letters in the physical environment, Thomas removes text from the" questionably "timeless"
context implied by the book-as-artifact and forces us to interact with it as a concrete, yet impermanent object in the
same immediate way we are routinely compelled to billboards and illuminated signs. He proves Cendrars' Equation
in reverse: if "Advertising = Poetry," ergo "Poetry = Advertising and conventional poets cranking out their slim volumes of verse clearly need some night school classes in marketing and public relations.

"People who say they never read poetry are forced to confront it," Thomas explains about the effect of his installations, "They see huge letters on the sidewalk and it short-circuits all the pre-conceptions they have about the context of literary text. They're used to seeing large words on billboards and signs, but a literary text down the street or on the grass forces them to re-evaluate the way they think about words and poetry.”

"Talk is cheap; poetry economical," is one of Thomas' favourite lines. The mere appearances installation he took to
Utrecht is an inspired marvel of economy whose evocative power, its terse reference to both textual and experiential
ephemerality, needs to be witnessed or at least imagined in its presentational context. He did not present a formal
'paper' to the conference.

Instead, he introduced himself as "a Canadian poet who works with large text installations in public spaces."

In one event, the text  mere appearanceswas laid out in a courtyard shaded by small-leaved trees which
dappled the words with an ever-changing lace of shifting shadows, creating a hypnotic succession of minute
events-within-events; pure visual haiku. At one point, a young Dutch girl sat beside the text, strapped on
her in-lines, then skated in slow circles round it. Later in the same courtyard, as an homage to his Dutch
hosts in whose country he spent his childhood, Thomas laid out letters spelling, "tekst teruggenomen"
(text reclaimed).

Taking the effect further still, Thomas linked the letters with fishing line and floated the text on
Utrecht's Ougegracht, (Old Canal). The filmed result is pure magic; mere appearances drifts on the
sunlit water, amid glittering reflections, a fluid text which retains its semiotic integrity while being
constantly and gently altered at the whim of canal currents, wind, curious ducks, shadows of over
hanging trees and the occasional intrusive canal boat.

At a conference lunch during which videos of the airport and canal installations were to be shown and discussed,
guests arrived to find the large letters of mere appearances gracing their plates and were invited to hold up the
letters and comment. "I call that event Sesame Street Semiotics," Thomas chuckles. The Utrecht symposium
covered the field, from conventional poetry readings to the whooping and grunting of pure abstract
"sound poets," "telematics" involving live video installations in separate cities and silent "body poets"
using only gesture.

For Thomas, Greek-born, raised in Holland until he was 12, the conference was also a pilgrimage to connect with his
roots in one of Europe's most tolerant and cosmopolitan countries, a trip not without its ironies. Last year, as another
alternative to the book, he established a kind of anti-Web site. File Not Found 404, which eschewed the flashy graphics of Internet home-pages and presented a layered series of plain, e-mail formatted pages bearing short thought-provoking questions and messages concerning the meaning, value and future of electronic text. The site generated hundreds of responses, but while “File Not Found” is a phrase all too familiar to computer junkies (doubly ironic because the file is found, but the antithesis of what a Net-crawler or silicon-surfer expects), the 404 designation is an inside joke — the street number of the building he lived in growing up in Holland. When he went looking for his old home, he found a demoliton wasteland, his past deconstructed. A neighour lady told him, "They tore it down last week."

Thomas' work with large re-contextualized text heightens our perception of text itself. It makes us
see words and letters themselves for what they are -- arbitrary, abstract graphic signs to which an
almost unbearable weight of meaning has become attached-- and at the same time re-experience
the simple joy of learning to read as a child, recognizing shapes and making visual, aural and
intellectual connections.

While a number of artists who emerged from the great upsurge in Conceptual Art in the '60s and
'70s, Jenny Holzer, Joseph Kosuth and Giulio Paolini especially, make use of objectified text, their
texts were often 'found' texts, deliberately banal or intentionally vague. What sets T.S. Thomas
uniquely apart is his dramatic use of specifically 'literary' text in public space.

 

 

 

 

 

 

John Moore was the "The Lone Poetry Critic" for the Vancouver Sun's Saturday Review for five years.He's the author of two novels, The Blue Parrot and Three of a Kind, both published by
Ekstasis Editions.