Poor.Old.Tired.Horse ICA

This exhibition focused on text based works inspired by the concrete poetry of the 1960's. It's not something I've seen before but there was something about the work there that really held my attention. Concrete poetry places equal importance on the visual of the poem and it's content adding "form to syntax" (Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. Gallery Guide. p.5). It was the illustrations I found particularly interesting. David Hockney's engraved illustrations for the love poems of Conatntine Cavafy were a personal favourite along with Frances Stark's Quantity Effect and Matthew Brannon's Words on a Page. It's the black and white, thin, flat, simplicity of these images I like. They aren't pretentious or unnecessarily mysterious; the images are relevant and timeless as they will always have a context.