Vispo: Heretical / No Room For Squares?

RTomens, 2024

It's so easy to be heretical, these days, isn't it?

I went square to make this piece of Vispo, as you can see. An unusual move for me but I was in a crazy mood, you know, thinking 'What can I do that's different?' Work in square dimensions, that's what. The text is from On Liberty by John Stuart Mill.

Hank Mobley said there was No Room For Squares and in the sense he meant I would usually agree, unless I'm feeling particularly forgiving towards...Taylor Swift fans? An easy target! 

No-one calls anyone 'square' these days, of course. I wonder when it drifted out of usage...the mid-70s? Late-60s? Whatever, it's a real shame...I mean, 'square' was the simplest put-down you could fire at someone who didn't 'get it'. Get what? Anything? Perhaps it wasn't about what they didn't get but what they did, as in did with their hair, clothing, buying power (square books, square music, square art).

We probably revived 'square' in the early 80s during the Jazz Revival because we thought we were the opposite, namely; 'hip'. Being hip entailed listening to Jazz, of course, wearing 'beat' clothes and appreciating John Cassavetes' Shadows and Pull My Daisy and all the other hip films along with the 'right' Art.

Todays it seems there's no 'right' or 'wrong', no 'hip' or 'square'. Perhaps it's hip to be square. If so, blame the post-modernists. It's all their fault with their non-hierarchical jive...their submission to total subjectivity, rejection of societal order (except, perhaps, a post-Marxist one - pah!). So a million university courses on TV soap operas was born...and now there are courses on Taylor Swift.  

Are there any courses on visual poetry? I could look it up but can't be bothered. Art is taught, why not Vispo? Perhaps maintaining the amount of typewriters needed for a class wouldn't be viable (you try finding a typewriter engineer). That would be practice, of course, but I suppose it could be Theory. Visual Poetry and its Meaning in the Age of the Smartphone. Kenneth Goldsmith probably already teaches that.

Over and out for now, hipsters. Stay cool.