Object Poems

Clemente Padin
Montevideo, Uruguay

PAN / PAZ
ay!
CONT(R)ACT
Text XV – 69
Text XVI – 70

Syntax, conjunction, causal expressions, syntagms, bifurcations, redundancy, dictionaries, style, qualification; uniting strophes, determinative semantic groups, the subject, neologisms, the verb, flexive anomalies, the complement, versification; paradigms, pronouns, grammar: all into the trash. No more images induced with elements foreign to their own nature; enough of metaphors, indecisive second term of trivial identifications; enough of duck-faced man's elegiac excretions. Language breaks with the linguistic tradition that has been stubborn in defining it by its function and not by its primary condition as object. The dernier cri snob will be able to rest; her descents into hell in search of the special have ended. The combinatory possibilities of language have been exhausted then by a disproportionate use of more than thirty centuries; who today would dare to continue to mix adjectives and adverbs, looking for the point beyond which Breton articulated? The Sunday constitutionals around the square in the ruins of language have ended, Eliot's tired warfare finally dead. Language refuses to go on being employed and defined by its expressive function; it is, above all, material, first an object of phonic nature, then visual-phonic, and now free of the ballast of signification, an instrument of the localization of poetry.

The New Poetry
1969

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About the Artist

Poet, graphic artist, performer, videomaker, multimedia artist, curator, networker, and art critic Clemente Padin was born in 1939, in Lascano, Rocha, Uruguay. After obtaining a degree in Hispanic Literature from the University of the Republic of Uruguay, he edited the magazines Los Huevos del Plata (Silver’s Eggs), 1965–69; OVUM 10 and OVUM, 1969–75, Participación (Participation) 1984­–86 and Correo del Sur (Southern Post), 2000–02.

He has published many books and chapbooks in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Venezuela, the United States, Holland, and Uruguay, including Los Horizontes Abiertos (two editions); Visual Poems (four editions); Angulos; De la Representation a  l´Action; Omaggio a Beuys and Sign(o)graphics,; Happy Bicentennial; Action-Works (three editions); Peace = Bread; Art & People; Experimental Poetry; La Poesía Experimental Latinoamericana, 1950–2000; La Poesía es la Poesía; PAZ/PAN (interactive CD-R); Poems to Eye; Spam Trashes (CD-R); and Visual Poems; among others. He has appeared in dozens of magazine and journals internationally, with notes translated into English, French, Italian, Portugese, Hungarian, Dutch, German, and Russian, and he has been actively involved in Internet projects since 1992.

Padin’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions in Montevideo (1973); West Berlin (1984); Hyogo, Japan (1986); Buenos Aires (1988); Chester Springs, PA (1989); Edewecht, Germany (1989); Seoul (1996); Hasselt, Belgium (1997); Verona (1998), and Barcelona (1997; 2002), and in more than two hundred group shows and more than fifteen hundred mail art exhibitions between between 1969 and 2002.