Poetic. And
engineering. Courtesy Orange County Museum of
Art
We’re too
often confronted by misused remnants of our
childhood. You’ve seen them out there, I’m sure,
in wordless snatches of silk-screened innuendo. To
recognize them is to be granted membership to a
Marxian (i.e., Groucho) club borne of shared yet
separate experience. It’s memory as icon, as
kitsch, as inside joke. My blood runs cold; my
memory has just been sold . . . as a T-shirt, bare
across the breast but for a single, jagged Space
Invader. I can’t help but feel a twinge of
proprietary nausea at the ripening of my own into
unabashed, yet wholly ironic, merchandising. Did
our parents ever sport shirts emblazoned with,
say, a Hula-Hoop or an unlabeled, saucer-eyed
Clarabelle the Clown?
Inasmuch as a
reference to an object is not the object itself,
one may wonder what connection actually remains
between my generation and its blighted, beloved
toys. Can we blend and remake our influences,
churning them like so much concrete upon which to
build the next cultural touchstones? Or are we
simply nostalgiacs, no better than those who
swapped their be-ins for Gordon Gekko’s giant
proto cell phone? Yucef Merhi, the Venezuela-born
and NYC-dwelling poet, also cut his teeth in the
digital age, wherein eight (bits) was more than
enough of a spark to develop his nascent interests
in language and technology. His works evince an
eye/ear for a synthesis of the two, something
other, yet something more than the meeting of
simple and old with sample and hold.
In a
certain sense it’s fitting that Merhi’s exhibit,
“Poetic Engineering,” is showing at a
storefront-cum-gallery space located in an upscale
shopping center. The walls of the Orange Lounge at
South Coast Plaza house the artist’s explorations
of “the bond between natural languages . . . and
programming languages.” Each piece in the exhibit
passes Merhi’s necessarily shifting and ephemeral
verses through electronic devices that were each
once a stop on the bullet train route marked
cutting-edge. I can’t help but picture the
exhibit’s component parts in the selfsame
building, but for sale as the latest means of
delivering prepackaged entertainment rather than
for the artist’s sideways purposes.
Far
from imparting a sterility to his poetry, Merhi’s
use of technology allows an element of process to
enter the frame, be it his own or that of the
viewer. Upon entering the gallery, the eye is
immediately drawn to a wall-mounted monitor
displaying three verses—“Adopt my orphan
heart/Filtering death through mirrors of
sand/Destroyed by dangerous words,” for
example—and a digital readout of the current time
to the second. With every click, the third verse
changes to another stored in a database, to
another, to another; the middle verse, every
minute; the first, every hour. According to the
gallery notes (as well as my fading grasp of
simple math), The Poetic Clock
2.0 (2002) generates 86K+ poems per
day. How many of these one can digest in a sitting
is largely a function of attention span; however,
its central presence in both rooms of the gallery
renders it a sort of digital sorbet between the
viewings of other works.
The exhibit also
includes pieces that depend on human interaction
for their realization. Hung from wall hooks are
the surviving four of seven original pieces of
Poetic Words (2002). Grab one by the
handle and activate it according to the
instructions, and a small row of LEDs begins
flashing inscrutably. Now rotate it in your hand
with small, circular motions, like a vertical jump
rope. Suddenly, magically, the diodes spell out an
intriguing, two-headed phrase whose meaning is
best left to personal interpretation. In an
opposite corner of the darkened space lurks the
tripartite Super Atari Poetry
(2005), which includes a trio of beanbag
chairs for the total transplanted basement
simulation, minus the wood paneling. This work is
a development of Merhi’s earliest attempts at
merging programming language with an organic
language, resulting in a viewer-determined
arrangement of his verses.
The Atari 2600,
whose joystick and single button controls feel
both unbelievably quaint and soothingly inviting,
begs you to explore the artist’s words in a
colorful, monospaced font, and the crappy,
Reagan-era televisions only serve to heighten the
experience.
“Poetic
Engineering,” at the OCMA’s Orange Lounge at South
Coast Plaza, 3333 Bear St., #303, Costa Mesa,
(949) 759-1122. Through Aug. 28.
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