Scope and Contents Charles Bernstein writes in the introductory essay that "Figuring the Word" is a wide-ranging collections of Drucker's essays in which she "presents herself as a visual artist, a literary writer, a scholar/historian, and an aesthetician. In all these areas, Drucker has made substantial contributions. But it is her synthesis of these fields that is her most extrardinary achievement." Chapters of collected essays in the book include Writing as Artifact, including a section on hypergraphy and Maurice Lemaitre; Visual Poetics; Artists' Books Past and Future; The Future of Writing; Personal Writing. In the section "The Interior Eye: Performing the Visual Text," Drucker traces visual poetry in the perfomance work of Massin & Ionesco's "The Bald Soprano," Tzara's "Boxe," Marinetti's "At Night," Iliazd "Lendentua as Beacon," and Gomringer's "Ping Pong" and other icons of visual poetry.In the section, "Iliazd and the Book as a Form of Art," Drucker discusses and/or illustrates the...

Scope and Contents

The exhibition, subtitled "Text and/as Image and/as Design and/as Meaning," was an interdisciplinary exhibition of visual art, artists' books, graphic design, and visual poetry by artists who were examining the ways that texts and images produced meaning in contemporary society, specifically in the United States in the 1990s. In a detailed essay, the curator, Johanna Drucker writes, "In the late 20th century artists in all areas work with an awareness of the legacy of conceptual art's attention to language and idea, with pop art and postmodernism's interest in appropriating language and image from the realm of popular and consumer culture, and with the ongoing engagement of artists with a commitment to the traditions of innovative expression." The Sackner Archive lent twenty five works to this exhibition and are acknowledged in the curator's note. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.