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Poor. Old. Tired. Horse

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Worldplay reaches a logical conclusion

 

Ink effect: From the Soul’s Proper Loneliness, 1970, by Alasdair Gray

Numbers game: Sea-Poppy 1, 1968, by Ian Hamilton Finlay

The ICA is upping its game. In a move certain to be copied by other public galleries, it has expanded its exhibition guide into a fanzine with a fashionably “hand-typed” aesthetic and original artistic content; and it is putting on a show which, while obscure and full of gaps, shines a light on an historically important moment with a survey that includes 18 artists.

The exhibition is about concrete poetry, an artistic movement starting in the Sixties, in which the appearance of words and letters on the page became as important as the meanings they conveyed and the sounds they made when spoken.

The title, Poor. Old. Tired. Horse, is taken from the name of artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay’s concrete poetry magazine.

In Scotland, Finlay (1925-2006) created his own masterpiece, a garden, “Little Sparta”, in which he carved his poems on stones amid the shrubbery.

On show, among other things, there’s a page on which the artist has typed the word “ajar”, so the first “a” is not on the same level as the following three letters of the word, so that the word itself looks ajar.

Yes, this is an arcane piece in an exhibition of mostly linguistic doodles, but concrete poetry was one of modern art’s most entertainingly eccentric developments — and one that reflected philosophers’ questions about the power of language.

In following rooms, a Benedictine monk from Gloucestershire, Dom Sylvester Houédard, has used the typewriter like a drawing implement, constructing neat minimalist geometries with dashes and “=” signs.

The movement was all about the new effects that new visual presentations of words could create.

Words float dreamily past on two revolving cones by Liliane Lijn, an American who lived in London.

German sound and visual artist Ferdinand Kriwet made wittily suggestive political works, with spirals of words that merge into each other — among this fusion you will find “interroriot” and “eugeniclean” and “suburbandit”, which are surely just waiting to be put on to a T-shirt and sold in the ICA shop.

Some American minimalist and conceptual artists who dabbled in “typewriter art” are also represented here, and there are works on paper by Carl Andre, Robert Smithson and Vito Acconci.

But where is the Bruce Nauman neon? And Mark Titchener? Upstairs, we are led on an illogical detour into book and literary illustration (there are marvellous ink drawings by American figurative painter Philip Guston and the Scottish poet, playwright and printer Alasdair Gray) before things get back on course with new generation of contemporary artists.

Janice Kerbel wittily plays on the language and look of Victorian fairground posters, while the Swedish poet Karl Holmqvist seems to collide political slogans and ragga rap in a wall of Xeroxed posters.

Here the Olivetti aesthetic has been abandoned in favour of quotation and appropriaton of the typography and turns-of-phrase of other eras and ideologies, an appropriate parallel of the strategy pursued by many contemporary painters.

Until 23 August. Open daily noon-7pm (until 9pm on Thurs). Admission free.
Information: 020 7930 3647, www.ica.org.uk

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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