Avant.org / Event / Concrete Poetry of the Noigan­dres, 1958-1975

As part of the A+WS library project initi­ated by AEROMOTO and Wendy’s Subway at the 2015 NADA Art Fair, Avant.​org presented a multi­media program of Brazilian concrete poetry and music from artists affil­i­ated with the Noigan­dres group, ca. 1958-1975. The program was curated by art histo­rian Charles Eppley, editor and programs director for Avant.​org, with assis­tance from Canadian writer Nathaniel Wolfson, who is a Ph.D. candi­date, researching Brazilian concrete art prac­tices at Princeton Univer­sity. Wolfson performed selec­tions of Noigan­dres poetry, a body of work typi­cally under­stood visually rather than soni­cally, so as to empha­size its acoustic poten­tial and perti­nence within the devel­op­ment of modern sonic aesthetics. In addition to this perfor­mance, selected audio was avail­able on-site via a playlist of Noigan­dres record­ings. The playlist is now avail­able, in full, accom­pa­nying this article.

This program was conceived and presented as an accom­pa­ni­ment to A+WS library item #16: Arte Correo (Mexico City: Museo de la Ciudad de Mexico/Edito­rial RM, 2011). Arte Correo is a collec­tion of archival docu­ments from the mail art and concrete poetry scenes that emerged in Mexico in the 1960s and remained active through the 1980s, offering an under-repre­sented perspec­tive on the global devel­op­ment of concep­tual art. Our program seeks to contribute to the research initi­ated by Arte Correo by high­lighting a group of concrete artworks that orig­i­nated in South America.

Below are selec­tions from the program booklet produced by Avant.​org for the event. The booklet was printed by Wendy’s Subway for their site specific micro-library and is now avail­able in their perma­nent book collec­tion. Addi­tion­ally, an excerpt from the Noigan­dres manifesto, Pilot Program for Concrete Poetry (1958), is repub­lished here in English (both English and the original Portuguese versions are published in the A+WS program). Supple­menting these docu­ments are audio record­ings of original and re-performed Noigan­dres poems, avail­able in the streaming playlist below.

About the Noigandres

The Noigan­dres group was one of the earliest artist collec­tives in the concrete movement, which spanned, not only liter­a­ture, but also music, painting, and sculp­ture. Chal­lenging tradi­tions of artistic form and meaning, the concrete movement began in the 1950s by abstracting language, visual form, and their dual compre­hen­sion. The Noigan­dres group, which takes its name from a neol­o­gism found in an Ezra Pound poem, was formed in 1952 by the Sao Paolo poets Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos, and Décio Pigni­tari. The group was later joined by the poets Wlademir Dias Pino, Ronaldo Azeredo, and José Lino Grunewald, among others, culmi­nating in a national exhi­bi­tion of concrete poetry and painting in 1956. In 1958, the group published their concrete manifesto, Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry, reprinted below. The collec­tive effec­tively disbanded following the publi­ca­tion of its final anthology in 1962, thus retiring its name, though the constituent artists would continue to develop their prac­tices individually.

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Augusto de Campos, Cidade-Cite-City, 1963

Instead of focusing on linguistic content and poetic symbolism alone, artists affil­i­ated with the Noigan­dres group inter­ro­gated the visual forms of language, mining the spatial arrange­ments of textual imagery for extra-linguistic meaning. Exper­i­menting with typog­raphy, scale, punc­tu­a­tion, orga­ni­za­tion, and other non-linguistic elements of poetic form, the group synthe­sized visual form and linguistic meaning in a playful, yet ground­breaking destruc­tion of language and literary aesthetics.

The group formed a concrete poetry journal, Noigandres, to publish their own works, as well as the concretist artworks of other groups such as the Grupo Ruptura, which featured the artists Lygia Clark, Helio Oiticica, Franz Weiss­mann, and Lygia Pape. The rise of the concrete movement in Brazil was joined by others across the region, extending north towards Mexico and the United States, and was supple­mented by the post-colonial influ­ences of move­ments in Switzer­land, Germany, Italy, and France, then repre­sented by artists like Mathias Goeritz and Eugen Gomringer.

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Haroldo de Campos, Nasce Morre, 1958

Although the Noigandres journal was only published between the years of 1952-1962, artists continued devel­oping abstract poetics in following decades. Notably, Augusto de Campos exper­i­mented with several forms of multi­media compo­si­tion and display, including the early use of computers (repre­senting a coun­ter­point to the devel­op­ment of new media art in North America during the 1970s and 1980s, including the exper­i­mental tele­vi­sion operas of the composer/libret­tist Robert Ashley).

The schol­ar­ship on Noigan­dres poetry, where it can be found, has often focused on the visual and literary forms used by the group, and the compo­si­tional methods deployed in constructing rela­tion­ships between text and image (dubbed by the poets as a verbivocovisual language). However, once some concrete poets began collab­o­rating with trop­i­calia musi­cians during the mid-1960s, such as Caetano Veloso and Tom Ze, the sonic dimen­sion of their works became clearer.

This program will call specific atten­tion to the sonic poten­tial of Noigan­dres poetry – and of concrete poetry in general – by performing works that empha­size the complexity of range and tone in the human voice, preceding and following the trop­i­calia influ­ence. In the past, readings of this material have been accom­pa­nied by orches­tral and elec­tronic music (e.g., musique concrete), and several of the poets helped set their texts to abstract sound and/or scored music. A selec­tion of these record­ings are included as an audio playlist avail­able in the A+WS Library, and online at Avant.​org. In addition to the record­ings made by Noigan­dres artists, the playlist includes other inter­pre­ta­tions from the 1970s and beyond.

⸺ Charles Eppley


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Décio Pignatari, Beba Coca Cola, 1957

pilot plan for concrete poetry (1958)1

concrete poetry: product of a critical evolu­tion of forms. assuming that the histor­ical cycle of verse (as formal-rhyth­mical unit) is closed, concrete poetry begins by being aware of graphic space as struc­tural agent. qual­i­fied space: space-time struc­ture instead of mere linear-tempo­ris­tical devel­op­ment. hence the impor­tance of ideogram concept, either in its general sense of spatial or visual syntax, or in its specific sense (fenol­losa/pound) of method of compo­si­tion based on direct – analog­ical, not logical-discur­sive – juxta­po­si­tion of elements. “il faut que notre intel­li­gence s’habitue a comprendre synthetico-ideo­graphique­ment au lieu de analytico-discur­sive­ment” (apol­li­naire). eisen­stein:ideogram and montage.

fore­run­ners: mallarme** (un coup de des, 1897) : the first qual­i­ta­tive jump: “subdi­vi­sions pris­ma­tiques de l’idee”; space (“blancs”) and typo­graph­ical devices as substan­tive elements of compo­si­tion. pound (the cantos): ideogramic method. joyce (ulysses and finnegans wake) : word-ideogram; organic inter­pen­e­tra­tion of time and space. cummings: atom­iza­tion of words, phys­iog­nom­ical typog­raphy; expres­sion­istic emphasis on space. apollinaire (calligrammes) : the vision, rather than the praxis. futurism, dadaism: contri­bu­tions to the life of the problem. in brazil: oswald de andrade 11890-1954) : “in pills, minutes of poetry”. joao cabral de melo neto (born 1920 – the engineer and the psychology of composition plus anti-ode) : direct speech, economy and func­tional archi­tec­ture of verse.

concrete poetry: tension of things-words in space-time. dynamic struc­ture: multi­plicity of concomi­tant move­ments. so in music – by defi­n­i­tion, a time art – space inter­venes (webern and his followers: boulez and stock­hausen; concrete and elec­tronic music); in visual arts – spatial, by defi­n­i­tion – time inter­venes (mondrian and his** boogie-woogie series; max bill; albers and percep­tive ambiva­lence; concrete art in general).

ideogram: appeal to nonverbal commu­ni­ca­tion. concrete poem commu­ni­cates its own struc­ture: struc­ture-content. concrete poem is an object in and by itself, not an inter­preter of exterior objects and/or more or less subjec­tive feelings. its material: word (sound, visual form, seman­tical charge). its problem: a problem of func­tion­sre­la­tions of this material. factors of prox­imity and simil­i­tude, gestalt psychology. rhythm: rela­tional force. concrete poem, by using the phonet­ical system (digits) and analog­ical syntax, creates a specific linguis­tical area –** “verbivo­co­v­i­sual” – which shares the advan­tages of nonverbal commu­ni­ca­tion, without giving up word’s virtu­al­i­ties. with the concrete poem occurs the phenom­enon of meta­com­mu­ni­ca­tion: coin­ci­dence and simul­taneity of verbal and nonverbal commu­ni­ca­tion; only – it must be noted – it deals with a commu­ni­ca­tion of forms, of a struc­ture-content, not with the usual message communication.

concrete poetry aims at the least common multiple of language. hence its tendency to nounising and verb­ifi­ca­tion. “the concrete where­withal of speech” (sapir). hence its affini­ties with the so-called** isolating languages (Chinese): “the less outward grammar the chinese language possesses, the more inner grammar inheres in it” (humboldt via cassirer). chinese offers an example of pure rela­tional syntax, based exclu­sively on word order (see fenol­losa, sapir and cassirer).

the conflict form-subject looking for iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, we call isomor­phism. paralell to form-subject isomor­phism, there is a space-time isomor­phism, which creates movement. in a first moment of concrete poetry prag­matics, isomor­phism tends to phys­iog­nomy, that is a movement imitating natural appearence **(motion) ; organic form and phenom­e­nology of compo­si­tion prevail. in a more advanced stage, isomor­phism tends to resolve itself into pure struc­tural movement (movement properly said); at this phase, geometric form and math­e­matics of compo­si­tion (sensible ratio­nalism) prevail.

renouncing the struggle for “absolute”, concrete poetry remains in the magnetic field of peren­nial rela­tivi­ness. chro­nomi­crom­e­tering of hazard. control. cyber­netics. the poem as a mech­a­nism **regu­lating itself: feed-back. faster commu­ni­ca­tion (problems of func­tion­ality and struc­ture implied) endows the poem with a positive value and guides its own making.

concrete poetry: total respon­s­ability before language, thorough realism. against a poetry of expres­sion, subjec­tive and hedo­nistic. to create precise problems and to solve them in terms of sensible language. a general art of the word. the poem-product: useful object.**

augusto de campos
décio pignatari
haroldo de campos

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Nathaniel Wolfson reading Ronaldo Azeredo’s poem Velocidade (1958) at NADA 2015

The poems inter­spersing this article were performed by Nathaniel Wolfson on May 17, 2015 at the A+WS program at NADA 2015. The poems above are selec­tions from the program, which featured six readings:

Haroldo de Campos, Nasce Morre (1958)
Décio Pignatari, Beba Coca Cola (1957)
Décio Pignitari, Terra (1958)
Augusto de Campos, Cidade-Cite-City (1963)
José Lino Grünewald, Pedra (1957)
Ronaldo Azeredo, Velocidade (1958)

Nathaniel Wolfson reading Décio Pignitari’s Terra (1958)

Concrete Poetry of the Noigandres was produced by Avant.​org in asso­ci­a­tion with AEROMOTO and Wendy’s Subway for NADA New York 2015. Further assis­tance was provided by Sonia Angela De Lafor­cade (Princeton Univer­sity), Rachel Valinsky (Wendy’s Subway), and Sam Hart (Editor-in-Chief, Avant.org).

Thanks to Rachel Valinsky on behalf of AEROMOTO + Wendy’s Subway for the invi­ta­tion to contribute to this wonderful library collection.


  1. English trans­la­tion published as it orig­i­nally appeared in Noigandres, No. 4 (1958)↥

Charles Eppley is an art histo­rian and sound enthu­siast living in Brooklyn, NY. He is a Ph.D. candi­date in art history at Stony Brook Univer­sity, where he researches the history of sound in modern and contem­po­rary art. He currently teaches at Pratt Insti­tute and works as a free­lance writer and curator. Charles is an editor and programs director at Avant.org.

Nathaniel Wolfson is a Canadian writer. He is a Ph.D. candi­date at Princeton Univer­sity researching the tradi­tion of Brazilian concrete art of the 1950s and 1960s with an interest in poetry and the many aesthetic and philo­soph­ical concep­tions of “the concrete” with which it dialogued.