OXOgraphy collective artist hamza bin al-wathan presents a dada-ist vowel poem. october, 2008. video editing by Brandy Glovka.
Artist Statement:
this poem is a continuance of the development of the dada-ist randomization of word, sound and vowel sequence as espoused by tristan tzara, hans arp and (in particular) richard huelsenbeck. whereas huelsenbeck used vowels linked together in short vowel 'word-sounds', i have disjointed those sequences and presented each vowel as a stand-alone.
while the inspiration is clearly dada, i have infused it with my own mark as an artist. the poem is as much about 'distribution' ie. the occurance of each vowel (such as 'a') and the linear distance between their re-occurance. i love humor and symbolism and multiple layers of meaning, and in this piece the addition of 'y' is intended to be humorous, to evoke a chuckle at each occurance since the title of the piece hints that it is elusive and 'y' is really the star of the show.
to reinforce meaning i have taken a slight departure from pure dada practise, rather than randomize the vowel sequence, i used a literal sequence of vowels as found in the most popular english translation (by abdullah yusuf ali) of an important islamic text passage, that of the surah (1) one al-fatiha of the holy quran. in english al-fatiha can be read as 'the opening' and it is with this spirit in mind that this vowel poem is my first contribution to the OXOgraphy Collective.
wtf
livejambands 2 years ago