COLARD, Jean-Max (ed.)
* as a Journal #7: Poem

“What sparked off this issue of as a Journal was the clear evidence of poetry’s growing presence in the field of contemporary art. Rather than ‘Poetry’ in general, and even less so the figure of the ‘Poet’, it’s the poem that has our full attention: I find it in the title of an exhibition by Jason Dodge, on the invitation card sent out by artist Ida Ekblad, and then again in the form of an exhibition, in the display and arrangement of works within a space by Ian Kiaer, Elena Narbutaitė or Wolfgang Tillmans. Hence this open-ended question, ‘What is poetry for you today?’, placed like a probe among various art world players, in a sort of vox populi.
And so rises the confirmation of an intuition: in an art field driven by the market, where artworks are becoming luxury accessories for the jet set, poetry, with its poverty and economy of means, appears at the opposite end of the spectrum, as a pole of resistance. […]”
—Jean-Max Colard

The seventh edition is guest edited by the art critic, curator, literator, and dreamer Jean-Max Colard from Centre Pompidou in Paris. This issue is as a kind of inquiry into the place that poetry occupies today in contemporary creation, and more broadly in our lives. Jean-Max is struck by the presence of poetry, particularly among the younger generation, on social networks, and especially in the art world. With his collaborator Louise Brunner, they played with the title of the magazine to compare the poem form with other fields: poem as a journal, as a movie, as an exhibition, as sex, as itself, but not as war. [publishers’ note]

Contributors include Babi Badalov, Christine Herzer, Cia Rinne, Pedro Barateiro, Liliane Giraudon, Thomas Hirschhorn, Raimundas Malašauskas, Rachel Rose, Elena Narbutaitė, Vaiva Granyte – and essays by Pip Chodorov and Enrico Camporesi on Jonas Mekas!

Published by Lithuanian Cultural Institute, 2024
Design by Miglė Rudaitytė-Černiauskienė, Vita Paulinė
Periodicals / Poetry