A Poetics of the Street

ALAIN ARIAS-MISSON, born in Brussels, Belgium and educated in the U.S., is one of a score of innovators around the world who created visual poetry in the early sixties. The Public Poem is an outgrowth of his poetic experimentation, a form of street poetics, which he invented in 1965 and has enacted periodically ever since, sometimes commissioned by a cultural institution—the City of Bonn for the Beethoven Bicentennial (1970); the Beaubourg, La Revue Parlée (1988); the Deutsche Literatur Haus, Hamburg and Berlin (1991)—but more often produced outside any artistic framework, as, for example, the Public Sistine Chapel Shamanic Poem in the Vatican (1994), or the Public Surveillance Poem in the République Metro in Paris (2003). His mental theatres and literal objects have been shown in galleries and museums worldwide. Recent group exhibitions include Word and Image since 1910, Museum of Modern Art of Rovereto; the Biennale de Lyon; the Łódź Biennale, Poland; the 51st Venice Biennale, collateral events; Encuentros de Pamplona, Reina Sofia Museum of Modern Art, Madrid; selected works from the permanent collection at MuKHA, the Contemporary Museum of Antwerp. He is also the author of six novels, including Theatre of Incest, COUNTDOWN! The Return of the Maya to Manhattan, and the forthcoming A Literary Work of Fiction.