X E R O L A G E 3 5
selected works online
INFRAPICS, Xerolage's 35th issue, presents twenty-five visual poems by Irving Weiss, a self-proclaimed "postmodern avant la lettre cultural composite." Weiss’s verbo-visual INFRAPICS are a variety of textual and visual poems, detourned cartoons and drawings, each hemmed by a black frame. The resulting visuo-semantic spaces between content, frame, and title in these pieces calls for a close reading into Weiss's ideas on proximity. 
In “I/T” we see an imposing frame squeezing the title (or reckless content?) out of the poem at large, letter-by-letter. Another piece plays off the formal conventions of the crossword puzzle to engender for a title the list of Across/Down hints that correspond to the puzzle’s empty content. Some of the INFRAPICS are pictographic puns and redundancies while others disorder the supposed purpose of framing and naming by placing both conventional title-language AND lettriste fragments in the space of the title-function via the blade of the frame's cutting. (See "Yes, Beckett", right.) What emerges in reading Weiss's INFRAPICS is not merely language or images that emphasize their verbo-visuality but rather a bird’s eye meta-visual, a theoretic play of schism-gap-and-presence, a seeming lightness that serves as transparency of depth. Check it out. - jUStin!katKO <Xexoxial Intern> Dreamtime Village, July 2005
Weiss on INFRAPICS: "Infrapics ultimately derive from the presentation of any image, icon, or text with identifying or explanatory words. Historically, the infrapic goes back to the emblem poem of the 16th century whose text referred to the picture above it. More immediately, the infrapic is my version of the modern single-panel cartoon or news photograph with legend (now called caption), quote, explanation, or identification below. I keep to the basic form of the single panel but the content or relation of content to form may be inverted, subverted or involuted. In addition, I consider the infrapic to be a visual poem in the way light verse or parody in verse is a poem." - Irving Weiss, introduction to INFRAPICS, Xerolage 35
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