Alain Arias-Misson
Alain Arias- Misson was born in Brussels, Belgium in 1936, grew up in New York City, was educated in the U.S. and has lived and worked in Spain, Belgium, the U.S., Italy and France (where he presently resides).
He was one of a score of innovators around the world of ‘visual poetry' in the sixties which broke with the orthodoxy of ‘concretist' poetry to achieve the convergence of image, sound and word on canvas, objects and video.
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| His works have been shown in hundreds of exhibitions and published in scores of anthologies in Europe, the U.S., South America and Japan. Although the principle of language-based visual poetics has remained the matrix of his works, he has gone well beyond its standard tenets in the last twenty years, for example with the construction of a Shamanic Observatory in an eighteenth-century sculpture garden outside Milan (Villa Buttafava Foundation, Gallarate), and with his car installations (Poemobile). Significant recent collective exhibitions include the Lodz Biennial, Poland, 2004, the Lyon Biennial ( Et tous changèrent le monde), Poesure et Peintrie shown at Marseille Museum, the Sao Paulo Biennial, the Venice 2005 Biennial ( a collateral event sponsored by the Artists' Museum, Poland and the White Box, New York), OPEN, the International Open-Air Sculpture and Installation show held at the Lido, September 2004. His works are on display in museums and prestigious private collections around the world such as the Getty Museum, California, Bolzano Museum, Italy, the State Museum, Amsterdam, the Stuttgart State Museum, Germany etc. Recent personal exhibitions include the Emily Harvey Gallery, New York and Venice, 2001-2002, and Galerie Lara Vincy, Paris, 2003. |
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| He is the author of five novels including his latest one, The Return of the Maya to Manhattan, due to be issued in 2005, The Theatre of Incest in 2007, and two already published art books. The Public Poem, an urban poetic form which he invented in 1965, and has been enacted every three or four years ever since, has been commissioned by cultural institutions such as: the City of Bonn for Beethoven Bicentennial, 1970, the Centre Pompidou, La Revue Parlée, Paris, 1988, the Deutsche Literatur Haus, Hamburg and Berlin,1991 etc., but has often been produced outside any exhibition context ( such as the Public Sistine Chapel Shamanic Poem in the Vatican,1994, or the Public Surveillance Poem in the Republique Metro, Paris in June 2003). His Public Poem tears apart the textual fabric of the city at a given site by using specific street elements ( traffic, monuments, commercial and financial institutions, people's movements) as the syntactic and semantic elements of a world ‘dream-text' (from the mass media) emerging from the ‘interruption' (traffic, police) of the city text. |
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