Objet Poétique

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Objet Sonique

Objet Poétique and Objet Sonique
by W. Mark Sutherland

The carefully chosen terms “objet poétique” and “object sonique” are intended to frame both the inspirational antecedents of these physical poems and sonic sculptures, and the subsequent hybridization of ideation that takes place in them.

I believe that the “objet trouve” was certainly an important conceptual point of reference for Marcel Duchamp and the Surrealists. Surrealist object making was prevalent throughout the 1930’s (evidenced at the Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme in Paris 1938). Inspired by Duchamp’s “found objects” (called “ready-mades” and “assisted ready-mades”) (1913) and Man Ray’ s early Dada objects (1920s), the Surrealist object-makers took a decidedly literary turn in the 1930s, eschewing the purely formal and visual properties of the found object in favour of the object’s poetic reification. Duchamp’s ready-mades were the manifestations of ideation — they were used to illustrate a concept. Surrealist objects, on the other hand, were to be “the concrete realization and subsequent circulation of numbers of copies of objects perceived only in dreams” (Andre Breton, 1923).

From the more recent past, I have taken further inspiration for my aesthetic practice from Bern Porter’s “found poems” and the Fluxus notion of the “found musical instrument” or “event scores”.

In short, I use the terms “objet poétique” and “objet sonique” to suggest a distillation and hybridization of the history and various critical theories about poetry, sonics, and the object in twentieth-century art. These phrases embody a critique of the cultural past, at the same time offering a foundation or launching pad for twenty-first-century poetics in art.

The text entitled Objet Poétique and Objet Sonique by W. Mark Sutherland was originally published in Musicworks #85, Spring, 2003.

The Surreal Objects of an Unfound Science
By Christian Bök

(…) Just as every object acquires an emotional resonance for the person who possesses it (and thus becomes a metonym for all that is unique about the person, so also do some of these items encapsulate the sensibility of another poetic artist (be it Duchamp, Cage, Beuys, etc.), almost as if the artist has in fact owned the object through some hypothetical circumstances, experiencing the intimacy of its demiurgic formalism. Like memorabilia, each object becomes impregnated with an allegorical connotation. Each object represents a souvenir brought back from some mental domain of lingual enigmas. Each object is in effect an ironic device, whose aesthetic existence is predicated upon a ludic trait within language itself (its uncanny ability, for example to realize an unthought potential through a gag or a pun). The meaning of the object coincides no longer with its intended function, but with its extended allusion. (…)

- Christian Bök, 1999

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