Henri Chopin
Typewriter poems
Köln, Germany: Edition Hundertmark, 1982
[16] pp., 20.5 x 14.6 cm., staple-bound
Edition of 500 signed, numbered and dated copies
Part of the legendary Hundertmark series, this slim volume features a series of Dactylopoèmes - a term the artist first coined during the 1960s to refer to a new genre of poetry produced through the meticulous layering of letters, numbers, and signs onto a sheet of paper.
“By manipulating modern-age technology, Chopin seeks to access the primal expanse of communication, the infinity beyond symbolic meaning. The tape recorder makes possible the elongation and elaboration of sound shapes, makes audible the normally inaudible. Similarly, the typewriter, in its perfect repetitious typescript, showcases the “architectural skeleton” or pure form of letters and words. In this way, Chopin simultaneously engages the mysterious archaic and the mechanical state-of-the-art”. Chopin’s innovative sonic compositions range from the vocal incarnation of a rocket flight in 1963, through a composition deploying the sounds of the air in the human body in 1966, to a dark and atmospheric work from 1969 consisting of laughter while his typewriter poems evidence the artist’s interest in performative writing and his preoccupation with a relationship between the order and disorder. For Michel Giroud, Henri Chopin is an explorer of a terra incognita, of an infro- and ultra-poetry of pure energy that goes beyond language: “he introduces the primary poetry, in the sense of Novalis, that is poetry as energy, the primary planetary poetry of the corporal space”.
- Sara Softness
