[D66] AI: Enhanced concrete poetry

[René Oudeweg]

https://www.theartstory.org/movement/concrete-poetry/


1957


      Sem Um Numero

Artist: Augusto de Campos

Augusto de Campos's poem "Sem Um Numero" ("Without a Number" in 
Portuguese) consists of a twisting shape formed from several 
permutations of the title phrase, spelled out in sans serif, 
International Style type. The phrase gradually contracts as the lines 
shift down and inwards. On the fourth line, the only remaining word, 
"numero", is replaced with "zero", which is recreated as a numerical 
symbol, /0/, at the center of the page. Beyond this point the lines 
start to expand, but into a different phrase, "Um Sem Numero" 
("numberless"). As with much of the Noigandres poets' early work, one 
phrase evolves into another which, though grammatically and phonetically 
similar, has a very different meaning, with the zero symbol at the 
center of the page standing by implication both for absence and for the 
idea of infinity as numberlessness.

Augusto de Campos was one of the three founding members of the 
Noigandres poetry group established in São Paulo in 1952, along with his 
brother Haroldo de Campos and their friend Décio Pignatari. The 
Noigandres very earliest Concrete Poems were similar in import to 
Gomringer's, focusing on linguistic reduction and elementary visual 
arrangement, but from an early stage they were more concerned than 
Gomringer with incorporating wordplay and double meanings into their 
poetry. By the late 1950s this had developed into an interest in 
tackling political, social, and cultural themes, often using minute 
shifts in grammatical form to exact radical shifts in meaning which 
relayed polemical messages.

In this case, as the critic Willard Bohn has pointed out, the phrase 
"Without a Number" is not simply an evocation of an abstract quality of 
unknowability, but a reference to the social and cultural exclusion of 
much of Brazil's rural, peasant population from national society. In 
particular, they had been left out of a recent government census and 
were thus excluded from welfare programs. In this context, the phrase 
"Numberless" comes to refer to the size of this dispossessed population. 
Over the coming years, the Noigandres' work would become more and more 
politically engaged and responsive to pop culture, culminating in 
Augusto's case with his "Popcrete" poems of the early 1960s.


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