Edizioni Conz

Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, Robert Lax, Jackson Mac Low, Décio Pignatari, Bernard Harden Porter, Michel Seuphor, Various artists, La Livre VI, La Livre, 1991, Print, marker on paper, paperboard, 35 × 25 × 6 cm

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• Like his late older brother Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos is a Brazilian poet, translator, literary and music critic, and pioneering concrete poet. After completing his law studies at the University of São Paulo, in 1952 he founded—together with his brother and Décio Pignatari—the poets’ group Noigandres, as well as the eponymous magazine. In this context, Augusto de Campos published Poetamenos (1953), a series of color poems, considered to be among the first instances of concrete poetry in Brazil. By experimenting with type and color and studying different typographic arrangements of words and letters on the page, de Campos conveys lyrical meaning by manipulating the position of letters on the paper and their sound rather than syntax. De Campos’s works were included in the prominent First National Exhibition of Concrete Art in 1956, an exhibition at the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art that brought together poets and visual artists from São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. With Plano-piloto para poesia concreta (1958), the Noigandres’s compelling manifesto, the group underscores the importance of vanguardist poets from Mallarmé to Ezra Pound and artists such as Piet Mondrian and Alexander Calder. The trio also published Teoria da Poesia concreta (1975), an anthology of their critical articles and manifestos. First published in 1978 and reissued in 2015, de Campos’s Poesia, antipoesia e antropofagia brings together the innovative critical stances of poets who revolutionized Brazilian and international poetry. From 1980 onwards, de Campos intensified experiments with new media, presenting poems on electric billboards and testing with videotext and computer graphics. The polyvocal poem Cidade/City/Cité, originally from 1963, has been the object of several recreations and material explorations of concrete poetry with new technological media. The de Campos brothers created a visual poem on Francesco Conz’s automobile when visiting him in Como in 1991. In 1991, they took part in the sixth workshop of the project “La Livre,” developed by Conz as a homage to Ezra Pound. Awards include Brazil’s Order of Cultural Merit (2015) and the Hungarian PEN Club’s Janus Pannonius Grand Prize for Poetry (2017). De Campos’s works have been exhibited in numerous museums and institutions, including the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
• Haroldo de Campos (1929, São Paulo, Brazil – 2003, São Paulo) is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in Brazilian literature. In the 1950s, after completing his secondary education, together with his brother Augusto de Campos and Decio Pignatari, he initiated the journal Noigandres, introducing the concept of concrete poetry. His exploration of traditions and his attention to avant-garde movements have made his artistic work fundamental to international verbo-visual explorations. De Campos created what is known as an “object poem,” realized through the valorization of the relationship between the written word and the space of the page. Haroldo de Campos became a significant figure in Brazilian poetry through the decades, regarded as a poet with remarkable intertextual density and complexity. In addition to his own works, he also translated the writings of various other authors into Portuguese, including James Joyce, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Homer. An outstanding connoisseur of The Cantos, de Campos took part in the sixth workshop of the project “La Livre,” developed by Conz as a homage to Ezra Pound. In addition to receiving the Octavio Paz Prize from Mexico and the title of Doctor honoris causa from the University of Montreal in Canada, de Campos received the Prêmio Jabuti in 1991 and the Prêmio da Associação Paulista dos Críticos da Arte in 2009.
• Robert Lax was an American poet who developed a unique minimalist and abstract style. From an early age, he established a strong friendship with the abstract painter Ad Reinhardt. Later, while studying at Columbia University in New York City, he met Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, poet, and acclaimed theologian, who would become a lifelong friend. These and many other friendships, such as those with Ed Rice, Richard Kostelanetz, Mark Van Doren, and Jack Kerouac, were a source of great inspiration. They remember Lax as a pensive mentor and poet of exceptional sensitivity. After graduating in 1938, Lax worked as an editor for magazines such as The New Yorker and Time, later turning to teaching and charity, as well as to the most diverse activities, including the writing of screenplays. Converting from Judaism to Christianity in 1943, Lax began a search for a more authentic and humbler dimension of living. He first moved to Canada, following the Cristiani Brothers circus troupe, often participating as a juggler. The atmosphere of Lax’s surroundings and the places where he worked at the time significantly influenced his work. The cycle of poems titled Circus of the Sun (Journeyman Press, 1959), widely considered his masterpiece, begins with the metaphor of the circus to chronicle an itinerant journey to evoke the Christian story of Creation. Lax then moved around Europe, living in France and Italy and finally arriving in Greece in the 1960s. Here, he eventually settled on the island of Patmos in peaceful solitude and spiritual clarity. Lax’s poetry gradually became more minimal, presenting a few words and their variations in a narrow vertical column down the page, as in 33 Poems (New Directions, 1988). His work was consequently placed alongside concrete poetry, and he subsequently became recognized as one of its leading exponents. Embracing a contemplative life and being uninterested in career and notoriety, most of Lax’s compositions remain unpublished today. In 1969, he received the National Council of the Arts Award and is the main subject of the film Why Should I Buy a Bed When All I Want Is Sleep? (1999) by Nicolas Hubert and Werner Penzel. Archives of his papers are preserved at St. Bonaventure University, Columbia University, and Georgetown University.
• Jackson Mac Low was an American performance artist, composer, poet, and playwriter. After completing coursework at the University of Chicago, he moved to New York City, graduating in Ancient Greek at Brooklyn College. Working initially as a recognized etymologist and editor, he soon developed an interest in the possibilities offered by words as units of sound and meaning. Mac Low’s work explores the intersections of language, structure, and music by systematically blending and muting found and fragmented texts. In particular, the works produced between 1954 and 1980, such as 5 Biblical Poems (1954), followed what Mac Low himself described as a “nonintentional” method: Words and lines are arbitrarily rearranged, inspired by systematic chance operations, indeterminacy, and simultaneities. In 1960, Mac Low produced The Marrying Maiden at the Living Theater in New York, directed by Judith Malina, with John Cage composing the score. An early member of Fluxus, Mac Low was active in the events and performances organized by George Maciunas at his AG Gallery, as well as in Charlotte Moorman’s New York Avant Garde Festivals. Mac Low and his wife Anne Tardos worked together in several occasions, participating in festivals in Graz, Cologne, and Heidelberg. With La Monte Young, Mac Low co-edited the notorious Anthology of Chance Operations (1963). In total, Mac Low published more than two dozen volumes of poetry, including Twin Plays (Something Else Press, 1966) with Something Else Press, Asymmetries 1–260 (Printed Editions, 1980), and 20 Forties (Zasterle Press, 1999), beyond being featured in more than ninety anthologies. Mac Low was highly interested in sound poetry and computer technology, both of which he utilized in various performances and artworks. Exemplary in this regard are Twenties: 100 Poems (1991) and 154 Forties (1990–99), as well as Stein (1998–2004) a series of computer-automated poems drawing words and phrases from works by Gertrude Stein. Mac Low was a professor at Mannes College of Music in New York in 1966, the University of California San Diego in 1990, and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1996. His work has been read publicly, exhibited, performed, and broadcast internationally. Among the prestigious awards received are a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1985 and a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship in 1988.
• The naturalized Frenchman Ferdinand Louis Berekelaers—better known by the pseudonym Michel Seuphor, an anagram of Orpheus—was a Belgian-born art critic, historian, painter, and poet. His artistic and critical contributions as an advocate of abstract art made him a leading reference for the artistic literature of his time. He founded the modernist literary magazine Het Overzicht, publishing a total of twenty-four issues between 1921 and 1925. Later settling in Paris, in 1929, he co-founded—together with Joaquín Torres García—the Cercle et Carré movement, bringing together artists from different backgrounds who shared a substantial adherence to abstract-concrete research. More than eighty artists would join the movement, including Jean (Hans) Arp and Sophie Taeuber, Wassily Kandinsky, Le Corbusier, Enrico Prampolini, and Luigi Russolo, to name a few. Together, the group launched an eponymous magazine and organized the landmark exhibition at Galerie 23 in Paris, featuring more than one hundred abstract works. In particular, the Neoplastic De Stijl experiments of Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, both participants in the group, were significant influences on the movement. Seuphor’s high esteem for Mondrian’s work would lead him to publish the artist’s first monograph, Piet Mondrian, Life and Work, as early as 1956 and to supervise the retrospective Mondrian at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris in 1959. During his career, Seuphor worked on several exhibitions devoted to abstract art, publishing exceptional catalogs that are considered today essential sources for understanding and historicizing this visual expression. Examples include the volumes L’Art abstrait, ses origines, ses premiers maîtres (Maeght Editeur, 1949) and the Dictionnaire de la peinture abstraite (Fernand Hazan, 1957), as well as the five-volume collection L’art abstrait, published in 1971. Parallel to his work as a critic, Seuphor produced autograph lacunary ink drawings marked by compositions of abstract geometries and narrow horizontal lines. The production of these pieces, initially in black and white, intensified around the 1950s, gradually incorporating different colors and looser forms. The editions produced with Francesco Conz in 1990 reflect this facet of Seuphor’s overture. In addition to the success of his publications, Seuphor’s works are also included in major collections and have been the focus of comprehensive retrospectives at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (1977), the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague (1977), and the Ludwig Museum in Koblenz (1997), as well as the most recent exhibition at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (2022).

Artworks (2)

• Augusto de Campos
  Quasar, 1975, 1991
• Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, Robert…
  La Livre VI, 1991