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Cube tranceplant

  • Object:

    Print

  • Date:

    1969 (designed)
    1970 (produced)

  • Artist/Maker:

    Dom Sylvester Houedard, born 1924 - died 1992 (artist)

  • Materials and Techniques:

    Colour lithograph

  • Museum number:

    CIRC.49-1971

  • Gallery location:

    Prints & Drawings Study Room, level D, case LP, shelf 2

  • Image unavailable

Dom Sylvester Houedard was a Benedictine monk and eminent theologian, but also a pioneer, in Britain, of concrete poetry, a poetic form in which the arrangement of words and letters in a pattern on the page relates to the meaning or emotional impact of the poem. Using concrete poetry as a kind of springboard Houedard developed a way of making more purely abstract or pictorial images with the typewriter keys. He wrote that "During 1945 I realised the typewriter's control of verticals and horizontals, balancing its mechanism for release from its own imposed grid, (and) offered possibilities that suggested (I was in India at the time) the grading of Islamic calligraphy from cursive (naskhi) writing through cufic to the abstract formal arabesque, that 'wise modulation between being and not being'”.
This particular image was first conceived as a 'typestract' using the typewriter to create visual patterns on the page, but was later transferred to a more conventional print medium and thus has a different kind of visual impact from the works Houedard made directly as sheets of typed-on paper.

Physical description

The words 'successful cube tranceplant / in honour/of / chairman mao' at the top of the sheet. The rest of the image is a cube shape made up of interlocking planes. At the six visible corners of the cube are 'tassles' made up of overtyped red to form red disks and falling '|' marks. The overall shape suggesta a Chinese box kite.

Date

1969 (designed)
1970 (produced)

Artist/maker

Dom Sylvester Houedard, born 1924 - died 1992 (artist)

Materials and Techniques

Colour lithograph

Marks and inscriptions

dsh 040369
dSh 70 5/75
75/13

Dimensions

Height: 78.3 cm sheet, Width: 57.8 cm sheet

Descriptive line

Dom Sylvester Houedard: cube tranceplant. Colour lithograph. 1969/70

Production Note

The double signature indicates that this is a lithograph made in 1970 from an original. 'typestract' made in 1969

Subjects depicted

Concrete poetry; Zedong, Mao

Categories

Prints

Collection code

PDP

Qr_O169801
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