ART-PRESENTATION: Dom Sylvester Houédard
Dom Sylvester Houédard, (or dsh, as he was known), was a contradictory and elusive figure, Not only was he a pioneer of concrete poetry, in which the typographic style of the letters is as important as the meaning and rhythm of the words, Houédard also wrote extensively on new approaches to art, spirituality and philosophy as well as collaborating with artists including Gustav Metzger and Yoko Ono, and the composer John Cage.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Lisson Gallery Archive
The first solo exhibition for over fifty years by works by Dom Sylvester Houédard is on presentation at Lisson Gallery in New York. Houédard believed in the transformative power of his word-based arrangements to elicit linguistic, visual and spiritual connections, citing previous examples as “texts created for concrete use: amulets talismans grigris mani-walls devil traps kemioth tefillin mezuzahs medals sacred-monograms”. Seen in this light, his use of language is specific, his lexicon a cumulative barrage of marks, matter and meanings, usually without capital letters and only scant regard for grammar. The exhibition centers on a number of these typestracts – usually using red, blue and black ink ribbon, notable for their textual content from minimal word-poems to complex, onomatopoeic scores. Another series represented here are the more spatially fluid ‘laminates’ or ‘glasspages’, made by collaging language cut out from newspapers and colored paper which are then laminated together using transparent vinyl. Born on Guernsey, Dom Sylvester Houédard was educated at Jesus College, Oxford. He served in British Army Intelligence from 1944 to 1947, and in 1949 joined the Benedictine Prinknash Abbey in Gloucestershire, being ordained as a priest in 1959. He is firmly rooted in Lisson Gallery’s early history, with his first solo exhibition held at the gallery during its inaugural year in 1967. In the early 60s, Dom Sylvester Houédard, was writing semi-confessional ‘neo-beat’ free verse. He was inspired by the Brazilian artist E.M de Melo e Castro, who described concrete poetry as “an experiment in ideogrammatic or diagrammatic writing and poetic creation”. Under this influence, Houédard started creating poems in which “words unsay themselves in a performative strategy of dis-ontology”. He quickly opened up the parameters of Concrete Poetry to include mail art, kinetic art, ‘part-art’ and performance art. Towards the mid ‘70s such was his fame that his presence became problematic for his monastery, not least because his connection with the prevailing revolutionary moment meant that he dealt also with politically and sexually explicit subject matter. Gradually, under pressure from the monastery, he turned to matters of theology and ceased his artistic practices.
Info: Curators: Hana Noorali and Matt O’Dell, Lisson Gallery, 138 10th Avenue, New York, Duration: 2/5-16/6/18. Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.lissongallery.com
