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Jean-François Bory (1974)

I first noticed Jean-François Bory’s work in the Summer 1967 issue of Chicago Review, which its editors had decided to devote to “concretism,” for Bory’s contribution, entitled “Spot,” was clearly the most distinguished work in an otherwise disappointing anthology. What particularly struck me about Spot was Bory’s sensitivity to the rhythm of turning printed pages, for the difference between one image of Spot and the next duplicated, to my senses at least, the time that the reader takes in moving from one page to another. I later wrote that “Spot” consists of “the same image progressively magnified over seven right-hand pages until the page is all but entirely blackened by just a portion of the middle letter; and this inundating image becomes an ironic inversion of the otherwise progressive process of magnification (a form similar to Eugene Ionesco’s ironically linear The New Tenant, where the room fills up with so many objects that the new occupant is smothered).” “Spot,” like Bory’s later work, was neat and clean (and thus graphic) rather than hand-made (or painterly).

As Bory included my own work in an anthology he compiled, Once Again (1968), we began to correspond. I have since then always treasured his letters, which are written in an idiosyncratic pastiche of French and English. Though Bory’s syntax is as scrambled as his vocabulary, the meaning behind his words is always clear. (Another Parisian visual poet, by contrast, writes me in grammatically proper English sentences, whose meaning I cannot for the life of me comprehend.) I was also gratified to discover, in correspondence (as we still have not met), that Bory shared my own low opinion of most “concrete poetry.” Our mutual judgment led in turn to my own subsequent questioning of the validity, or usefulness, of that once-popular term.

By this time, I regarded Bory as not a “poet” but a “fictioner,” which is to say a teller of stories. For me he discovered that the rectangular page, rather than the sentence or the paragraph, could be the basic unit of fictional discourse. Key to his compositional style lay in combining comprehensible words with visual abstractions in essentially fictional sequences. As he wrote in Once Again, “The page itself can become a material, a statement, the information, the text, progressing or diminishing from page to page. The writer, thus becoming the layout artist of his book, will no longer write stories (or moments), but books.”

In Once Again, Bory included a brilliant sequence that I have not seen reprinted elsewhere, “The world Word is ... “ (It resembles his “Fouilles Anticipes,” which was published in France; but the two are not identical.) In this concise gem, words progressively emerge from the image of a large black circle, which reduces in size, only to enlarge, progressively again, to its original size as the words pass back in to the black ball. Over a succession of only ten images, this work tells a universal story about language and its relationship to man. (This theme reminds me of John Furnival’s monumental panels, Tours de Babel Changés en Ponts [1965], which tells a similarly synoptic story about language—over a series of six wooden doors, each nearly two meters high, the whole being over four meters across.)

The next Bory work that awed me was “Saga,” which initially appeared in the third number of Approches (1968), for Bory successfully extended his interest in sequential word-images into a longer fiction—a novella, if you will—which portrayed a descent followed by a re-emergence. Since “Saga” was the most successful example I had ever “read” of visual fiction, I acknowledged this excellence in an essay written early in 1969, but not published until September, 1970, in Art International. Here I described “Saga” as a “sequence of word-images [in which] the phrase On Va, or ‘One Goes,’ is superimposed over background photographs; and in turning the twenty-eight pages, the reader experiences a descent into a mysterious realm, where images are forbidding and unclear, and vaguely perceptible letters are scrambled. The reader then encounters surreal maps where places are renamed as parts of speech, only to emerge at the conclusion with an image identical to that at the beginning. Within less than thirty pages, in sum, is all the material and linear experience of a silent movie or, perhaps, a novel.”

Soon after this essay appeared, Bory sent me Post-Scriptum (1970), which documents his creative evolution-away from exclusively verbal texts, set in horizontal lines of type (like conventional poetry) and into more experimental, mostly visual work. What distinguishes the book, in my judgment, is the variousness of both the imagery and the syntax—both the material on the page and the ways in which the pages relate to each other. The collection reaffirmed my earlier sense of Bory as a true master—not as just a poet or a story-teller but as a “literary artist” of the first rank. I gather that Post-Scriptum signals Bory’s repudiation of printed media, not only as a predilection of his ironic intelligence but also as a reflection of his assertion that “the end purpose of the book is that there will be an end to books.”

I understand that Bory has since devoted most of his energies to one-of-a-kind visual works, closer to paintings than books, which have been exhibited all over Europe. Since these unique work works-to-display have not yet come to New York (which remains unfortunately ignorant of certain developments in contemporary art), I have not been able to see them. One price of success within the world of visual art is a loss in public communication. The primary reason why this is lamentable is that Bory was a pioneer in a continuing development of the art of international book-making, which is to say bound volumes that need not be translated because their material can be universally understood. It is as a book-artist that I particularly revere Bory.