Press Art: Poets and their Printing Machines

Abstract

Inspired by technology, twentieth-century poets have exploited its instruments through a medium which may be called "press art." They have circumvented what Marshall McLuhan perceives to be the inimical influence of the printing press, to retransform mechanical operations into artisanal handwork and thus to restore originality to products of the press. Language, and the process of its use, has been rendered visible through their innovations. This is shown through an examination of esthetic predispositions and procedures that have entered into the creation of the visual poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Albert-Birot, Pierre Garnier, and John Furnival, and through an assessment of these artists’ roles with respect to the secondary production level involving printers or printing machines that enabled the creation and their works’ status as "original" within this context of collaboration and mechanical reproduction.