Kunsthæfte nr. 8

By Jesper Fabricius

Okay, I guess this is another art book thing, as it has an ISBN and everything, but if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it's probably a zine.

So this is the "visual poetry" zine I mentioned a few entries back. Sure the cover calls it "space poetry", but as it's not actually about meteors or astronauts I'm more comfortable with the term I just invented.

Inside we are presented with full colour pages which present images, or parts of images in new forms. One of the earliest presents a square with a blue design, a horizontal rectangle with a hand, and a vertical rectangle with a different hand holding a bottle of soda that seems to be from an old advertisement. The images are presented more or less in a vertical line, and leave a lot to wonder about. Why these three images? What is the connection between them? Did the creator cut them out specifically, or just find them and combine them? Why do all of my reviews now consist of unanswerable questions?

The rest of the zine is similar, some of the pages have a few more pictures (pretty much all of them are small squares or rectangles), and a few have less (these ones present larger full page images, or at least the borders and outlines of them), but all of it made me wonder what the artist's intentions were.

I've never really been a big poetry fan, but this zine actually made me rethink the entire concept of poetry, both visual and written. I suppose when I'm presented with images I have to think about I realize that poetry is often trying to create the same thing, only with words, and that perhaps I should start reading poems in the same way that I "read" this: studying each image that is presented to me and wondering what the author's intent was. Though usually I'd probably rather make bad puns about "intense intents in tents".