textual vishyuns: image and text in the work of bill bissett by Carl Peters (review)

bill bissett’s writing and visual art appeared through his own blewointment publications during the early part of his career, but under Karl Siegler, Talonbooks published a wide breadth of bissett’s works for several decades. So it is appropriate that Peters’s comprehensive study, textual vishyuns, is published by Talonbooks. It is only possible to gesture briefly to the impressive range of literature, visual art, and theory that Peters deploys to contextualize bissett’s art and writing. The first chapter draws correspondences between bissett’s assemblages to Duchamp, Cage, Rauschenberg, Burroughs, and Gysin, as well as the aesthetics of Walter Benjamin’s ‘colportage,’ Joseph Cornells’s arcade motifs, and Vera Frenkel’s inter-media sense of play.

Chapter 2 identifies articulations of continuity/discontinuity in bissett’s line drawings demonstrating how time and space (re)define presence in accordance with the aesthetics of Gertrude Stein and Charles Olson. Chapter 3 examines the language of dissolution in bissett’s paintings, recalling Matisse and Mondrian. A broad selection of full-colour plates featuring bissett’s assemblages and paintings is followed in the fourth chapter with analyses of bissett’s cinematic poetics, as aligned with Buñuel’s Surrealism, and informed by T.S. Eliot’s doctrine of depersonalization. Peters cites Plato’s allegory of the cave as it illuminates bissett’s deployment of plastic media as an oracular human allegory that forwards a contemporary Divine Comedy. Chapter 5 provides a critical inquiry through an interview with bissett while contextualizing his anarchic vision. For those mapping this critical methodology, a paginated index would have helped. Perhaps more references to Seurat and Wittgenstein would have been of interest, given bissett’s molecularizations in painting and language. And possibly more emphasis might have been granted to physicists such as Hawking who inform us that we truly are composed of subatomic stellar quanta, or ‘stardust’ as bissett maintains.

A portion of this scholarly study is devoted to challenging the views of critics who question bissett’s expression on the basis of his own indifference to intellectualized artistic expression. Peters reminds us that bissett was part of a group of writers in English Canada who pioneered visual, sound, and/or concrete poetry, along with Earle Birney, Joe Rosenblatt, bpNichol, Maxine Gadd, and Judith Copithorne, among others. Some critics wish for further innovations from bissett, but he is not the type of artist who reinvents his ideology or perspective. Instead, he has expanded his vision into a wider range of media. Artists such as Picasso looked outside the traditions of ‘high’ culture for inspiration. For bissett, the difference between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ is arguably a false dialectic. If one regards bissett’s ‘alter-native’ approach (to borrow a term from Nicole Brossard), then, one might recognize how he has placed himself at cultural interstices, neither inside nor outside society. Some controversy over bissett arises over the fact that one branch of contemporary writers/artists situates their aesthetics through re-conceptualizations of the chosen medium itself, and, as such, their sociopolitical positions often arise through rejections of conventional consumer expectations. However, bissett is less interested in purely formal innovations and instead pursues a more direct social engagement. In this sense, he is more Sartrean (sociopolitically engaged) and less McLuhanistic (‘the medium is the message’). Peters confirms that bissett’s visual art is politically charged through its reactions against war and human oppression, naming an aesthetic lineage arising from Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. Similarly, bissett’s poetics, featuring orthographic investigations, a penchant for language play, manipulations of syntax, molecularizations of language, and a ludic involvement with printed page as field of action consistently remain sociopolitically inspired. Peters’s study examines an aesthetic model that rejects conventional linear-logical thought while unswervingly positioning itself against Thanatonic cultural conventions. This holistic study does not hesitate to co-relate the aesthetics of sculpture, visual art, text, and cinema, thereby transcending the confines of genre-based criticism. Peters’s textual...