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Archive of the Limited Edition of Dante's Inferno: Canto I/1 / Phillips, Tom., 1983

 Item
Identifier: CC-54517-989982

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Scope and Contents

Canto I/1 Phillips comments: The dense, direct and haunting opening to Dante's Comedy: Just halfway through this journey of our life I came awake to find myself inside a dark wood, way off course, the right road lost. shares immediately with the reader that claustrophobia of accumulated habit and error which reveals to human beings in middle life that they have been building a trap around themselves, which, having had no formal entrance, offers no apparent way out. In this image I have further developed a procedure used in several paintings from 1969 on (cf. Works/Texts to 1974 pp 74 & 184) involving stencilled letters. With the title phrase Una Selva Oscura (a Dark Wood) I have made a linguistic thicket by superimposing letters of different height so that this phrase crosses and cancels itself over and over again. Thus the title, moving in and out of phase, becomes the picture, in the manner of a fugue or canon in music. The motif, and variations on it, reappears throughout the work. (cf. Canto XIII/1, XXXIII/1 etc.) -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Dates

  • Creation: 1983

Creator

Extent

0 See container summary (8 prints (silkscreen) in clamshell box (museum board, paper covered, lithograph)) ; box 44 x 35 x 8 cm

Language of Materials

From the Collection: English

Physical Location

1904 shelf Phillips Dante Inferno Archive box 1

Custodial History

The Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, on loan from Ruth and Marvin A. Sackner and the Sackner Family Partnership.

General

Published: London, England : Talfourd Press. Signed by: TP (l.r.- stage 3, 4, 6 proofs) TP (back l.l. stage 4 proof). Nationality of creator: British. General: Proof copy of print, number 2. General: Added by: BARB; updated by: MARVIN.

Repository Details

Part of the The Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry Repository

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