"Storage Case" by John Martone: on minimalism and collage

We would speak instead of instances of a poem – think of the poet as writing down the poem again and again. (John Martone)

My art is about paying attention – about the extremely dangerous possibility that you might be art. (Robert Rauschenberg)

I've almost become used to "small books and ephemera" from John Martone, the homemade booklets with wispy labels & leaf-inlaid & papier-mâché covers, each delicate as a "Chinese blade" (such as a passage, a lamp, a new moon, shooting star), as well as the full-size published collections (such as ksana). The text is the shape of minimalist poetry: the energy buried deep inside will only illuminate it. As Martone says in his online article "The NEOLITHIC (re) turn in poetry"),

A Poem is first of all an amulet, an OBJECT bearing energy... The poem is first of all a charm, relic, medicine, compass, key. We are not talking about the poem sitting on a page like a jewel in a ring but the two inseparable... In this context, to “reproduce” (i.e. publish) a poem widely is to pass on as little of it as the “reproduction” of a painting or sculpture. We would speak instead of instances of a poem – think of the poet as writing down the poem again and again

A Martone poems seems to have been made to fit in the palm, "an OBJECT" indeed whose energy-bearing potential is always to be felt in both the exquisitely delicate lettering, space and construction materials and the beautifully spare (sutra-like) language: it's both a haptic and literary artifact, inseparably produced. The ring and jewel both, and the single splendid artifact, the jewelled-ring, that will ornament any hand that wears it.

I've received from John a copy of his latest publication titled Storage Case (Otoliths, 2011), a work of collage art. But being familiar only with the exquisite minimalism John's gift is now a favourable opportunity to reflect on contrasts. If collage replaces the minimalism (as it does here) or provides a different aesthetic space for it, with language reduced to "shreds and patches" and placed languorously beside pictures & illustrations—under this sort of transformed appearance has the unity of poetry and physical text been discarded? Has some principle of continuity been displaced by a coarser method of juxtaposition more suitable to the avant-garde? Is Martone the collagist necessarily at odds now with his Eastern roots and stylistic temperament?

I maintain the collagist preserves here the integrity & clarity of normal minimalist work through the implementation of some simple principles of design: (i) a square grid form (with an alternating notebook binder & green border) meant not as an imprisoning but enframing device; (ii) a collocation of qualitatively real & significant artifacts, all of which converge in a markedly unDadaist world; (iii) a repeatable collage motif in general suited to represented & narrated things everywhere; (v) and the primacy above all of contemplation over sensation. Martone the artist, creating in a markedly different medium & even for a different audience, is writing the same poem "again and again", the haiku poet's way of defending cultural homogeneity (as against the pure disjunctiveness of Schwitters and Rauschenberg) &the almost unlimited potential of a minimalist poetics.

Martone's collage field is, as I've said, not contained by a sum of its disparate parts: rather it's a space for recognizable motif and an homogeneous, well ordered 'lyricism'. It's the presentation of art form almost at odds with itself. In a review of Martone's ksana Marshall Hryciuk says this about the preservation of haiku poetry in the postmodernist age:

"Postmodernist," while being an accurate term for describing artists and writers who feel that modernism and its moral initiatives have had their day, is still a critical and academic term and comes from outside of inspiration. It's a term that seems ill-applied to haiku poets in general and one that does nothing to inform Martone's quiescent approach. He begins in devotion, in meditation, and observation, and his style, so much as he has one, is a surrender to the ebb and flow of living and witness.

I like that "living and witness" rather than the usual postmodernist (especially Language) particling of reality: I particularly appreciate the reference to Martone's quiescence (as opposed to the Silliman denigration of formalist poetry as "quietist"). The first "1965/2010" section of Storage Case, for example, can seem like haiku in terms of its own meditative and quiescent properties. Comprised of the typographical & pictorial, in particular of a fragmented arrangement of Kodak snapshots, incongruously placed colour swaths & landscape aerial shots, & several disparate images of genes and molecules, the "1965/2010" works may certainly give the utter randomness of typical collage. But slapdash creations they're not, the collage elements anchored (not subordinated) to what I consider the work's central "storage case" frame (Consider the cover's own fragmented packing-case image, with ghoulish inscription). There is something that amounts to a haiku "shock" effect when theme and disparate elements appear together in this way.

The poetic "OBJECT", in other words, has turned into a pure visual with its own "kireji" moment. The haiku imprint has been transferred onto the collage page itself, & the effect is not playful juxtaposition for its own sake but a revelation of qualities in things able to create, within a picture space, the "ebb and flow of living and witness" (Hryciuk). It's a kind of Eastern immanence to which the Martone work aspires, the mystery of the world without the chaos, uncommitted as he certainly is to any Dadaist portrayal of wilful randomness & heterogeneity. There's reconciliation of parts where we'd normally expect disintegration. True to its haiku roots the work is 'organic'. The page-9 collage (reproduced here) is the barest of those found in part "i." and probably by that fact alone the purest. It's made up simply of three collage elements within the central notebook binder frame: faint green colour-patches, a sailing boat image and some rather elemental DNA drawings, and yet the noisiness of pieces gratuitously arranged can be stilled in a single pure land meditation, Infinite Life itself being its object.

And part of any significant meditation is text reverence. Passages from Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men encircle, border and overlap the visuals in all but one of the part "i." works, just as commentary might accompany a treatise or sacred text. In the page-10 collage (again here) there's nothing elusive or arbitrary about the images of colliding particles, faint frequencies & scientist by his microscope all resting atop snippets of Steinbeck dialogue. (The bottom lettering is reminiscent of the subscriptio in a John Heartfield photo montage) The dialogue with visuals constitutes a repeatable collage motif that works, just as DNA chromosome bits inhabit almost all of part "ii." The true collage is to be seen, not at some purely aesthetic level as art alone but in quiet observance of life-stillness, at both micro & macro levels. The whirling vortex here catches the wandering eye that's otherwise too distracted by the parts and not attentive enough to the whole: a viewing preparatory to meditation.

There's nothing controversial about this; the two things, in short, that are always said to characterize typical collage, its indeterminability & unrepresentability, simply don't apply here, Martone's Storage Case rather returning the viewers back to something like traditional (perhaps Renaissance) principles of construction. And I've only examined two collages & fragments of a skull packing-case. (The "canoes" section is the place to see a full-blown "storage case" motif) Even a preoccupation with molecules, diodes & wireless telegraphy establishes a relationship to the holy discoverable in "things". It seems even in a work of collage art Martone hasn't strayed at all from the venerable "ephemera" I've grown accustomed to.