Concrete Poetry: from the Procedural to the Performative

Published in conjunction with Black Dog Publishing, UK, this richly illustrated book includes critical essays on concrete poetry and Michael Morris, featuring a chronology of Morris’s prolific practice from the mid-1960s onwards. It follows the 2012 exhibition of the same name that was held at the Belkin Art Gallery, which focused on a series of large-scale paintings with inserted mirrors that Morris made in 1969 — his last paintings until the early 1980s — brought together at the Belkin for the first time since then. The Belkin’s show presented the paintings in the context of contemporaneous examples of concrete poetry, a practice that had influenced Morris and catalyzed his move into other forms of art making such as sculpture, photography and performance, examples of which were also represented in the exhibition. This book focuses on Morris’s activity in the late 1960s and his “last paintings,” in an attempt to restore them to an art historical context.