[troylloyd]

Optical Poem
from: Anthology of Concretism, ed. by Eugene Wildman
The Swallow Press,1969 (a revised & enlarged version
of the volume 19, number 4 issue of the Chicago Review)

Jiří Valoch is a poet and the author of visual and conceptual poetry, photographic concepts, events, interventions in the natural environment, artists’ books and text installations.

Some of his scores are obviously inspired by the Fluxus artists and their events; he makes minimal interventions in everyday situations, which may be announced as an artistic piece or not. For example:

the room is divided by a diagonal painted on the floor with a white chalk, visitors normally walk around the room, so they gradually disturb this line.
two options:
a) the visitors know about the existence of this piece
b) the visitors are not informed about its existence

He was a member of the Klub konkretistů (Club of Concretists) from 1968 to 1972, and the Klub konkretistů 2 from 1977.His movements are as a systematic, continuous and concentrating art activity, which will be realized in an unexpectedly numerous tiny creations, in large, even monumental realizations, thus in works that have developed since the very contribution to the sphere of Czech concrete and visual poetry, through the radical conceptual realization from the turn on the 1960´s and 1970´s – projects reaching the field of body art, land art and conceptual photography, the problems of verbal and drawing creations, which can be associated with the notion of conceptual poetry.

His installations lie in a solidity of creation, which emphasize the location of a word in a specific space and in a significant possibility of visual qualities of a grapheme.

"The "Optical Poems" presented here represent the developmental "peak" of Valoch's experiments with typographic and mechanical (typewriter) poetry. A poem "freed from semantics appears" that is identical in its visual impact to optical painting--except that it was made on the typewriter and its formal elements (letters) existed ready-made on the machine. The optical poem, according to Valoch, is realized as "pure structure." Aesthetically it depends upon "the visual ( aesthetic ) value of the mechanical (or typewriter) signs used." But not in the static condition in which we are used to observing them. In the optical poem we learn to look at letters horizontally, diagonally, or in some other position, as well as vertically in "shivering microstructures." Valoch states that his typewriter texts present a response to an "active impulse." This impulse seems to be directed toward the creation of a new sphere of communication. For signs "which are losing their importance in terms of their original communicative connections . . . are creating a visual metalanguage as they appear in their relationship to each other." Valoch relates the creation of a "visual metalanguage" to developments in modern linguistic science and defends it on grounds of "pure Iyricism" aimed at "pure aesthetic information."

And he takes the position that so-called "new poetry isn't really new" but merely "an introduction of that which-potentially existed before.... visually or phonetically it existed even in conventional poetry. The new poetry "liberated" certain "compounds," which opened up two major possibilities: "to express what conventional poetry already expressed by new means more applicable to the present time" or "to enrich poetry by the new, by that which was so far unattainable." Put into practice "both of these traits become apparent and often they are unified. In the first example it amounts to no more than putting aside old-fashioned schemes which have lost all function. In the second the frontiers are expanding--penetrating the processes of creation, new elements." On this "second frontier" Valoch seems to be most interested in proving that in forms of language the aesthetic may sometimes be "elevated over the semantic" as it is in art."
http://www.ubu.com/p...solt/czech.html

see also:
http://home.sprynet....whit/valoch.htm

http://www.rediscov....ULL/39649SA.JPG

http://sdrc.lib.uiow...yc2/1valoch.htm