Dom Sylvester Houedard (1924–92) was an extraordinary British monk, scholar, translator and concr... more Dom Sylvester Houedard (1924–92) was an extraordinary British monk, scholar, translator and concrete poet who has a reputation and legacy as an artist that still rests on the typestracts he meticulously made on his Olivetti 22 typewriter throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s. The art critic Guy Brett has said of him: …a Benedictine monk who spent most of his working life at Prinknash Abbey in Gloucestershire [he was] one of the great unsung intellects and playful creative spirits of twentieth-century Britain. Describing himself as a ‘monk-maker’, Houedard was profoundly interested in the experiential non-conceptual truths at the heart of mystical and contemplative traditions, and he found a ready receptivity for his ideas in the vocabulary of the newly emerging conceptual and performative-based art made by a trans-national network of avant-garde artists and poets. As his correspondence, critical writings, and artworks attest, he was always exploring the ‘coexistence’ between...
There are several important areas where this study makes an original contribution to knowledge. T... more There are several important areas where this study makes an original contribution to knowledge. This is the first substantial study of the work of Dom Sylvester Houedard. Although Houedard features in the recent studies on the contexts of the British concrete poetry movement, no previous research has focused exclusively on his work or foregrounded his spiritual vision as method. The aim of this thesis is therefore to investigate the artistic experimentation and textual practices found in the poemobjects made by Houedard between 1960 and 1975, and to provide a conceptual theoretical framework based on Mahayana Buddhist epistemology, in particular Tibetan Vajrayana Tantric Buddhism and its associated performance rituals. Research to date has primarily focused on the influence of Zen Buddhism on the post-war American avant-garde, and although there is an emerging body of research addressing the influence of Tibetan Buddhism on a few individual American artists, little is known about th...
Widely recognised by his contemporaries as one of the leading theorists and outstanding practitio... more Widely recognised by his contemporaries as one of the leading theorists and outstanding practitioners of concrete poetry, Dom Sylvester Houedard (1924-1992) is an unsung intellect of the twentieth century. The aim of this book is to reinstate the Benedictine monk and artist as an important figure in the countercultural and transnational art movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, especially within kinetic and concrete poetry. This publication also presents an extensive series of Houedard’s highly personal ‘typestracts’ – typewriter works – for the first time. Houedard is deeply relevant to our digital age: we may no longer use an Olivetti Lettera-22 typewriter, as he did, but we all increasingly type rather than handwrite our lives. Houedard would have been delighted by the stochastic possibilities offered by the 140 characters in a tweet, or the visual shorthand of emojis and hashtags. For this monk, everything connected and was interconnected. The opportunity for the individual to...
Dom Sylvester Houedard (1924–92) was an extraordinary British monk, scholar, translator and concr... more Dom Sylvester Houedard (1924–92) was an extraordinary British monk, scholar, translator and concrete poet who has a reputation and legacy as an artist that still rests on the typestracts he meticulously made on his Olivetti 22 typewriter throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s. The art critic Guy Brett has said of him: …a Benedictine monk who spent most of his working life at Prinknash Abbey in Gloucestershire [he was] one of the great unsung intellects and playful creative spirits of twentieth-century Britain. Describing himself as a ‘monk-maker’, Houedard was profoundly interested in the experiential non-conceptual truths at the heart of mystical and contemplative traditions, and he found a ready receptivity for his ideas in the vocabulary of the newly emerging conceptual and performative-based art made by a trans-national network of avant-garde artists and poets. As his correspondence, critical writings, and artworks attest, he was always exploring the ‘coexistence’ between...
There are several important areas where this study makes an original contribution to knowledge. T... more There are several important areas where this study makes an original contribution to knowledge. This is the first substantial study of the work of Dom Sylvester Houedard. Although Houedard features in the recent studies on the contexts of the British concrete poetry movement, no previous research has focused exclusively on his work or foregrounded his spiritual vision as method. The aim of this thesis is therefore to investigate the artistic experimentation and textual practices found in the poemobjects made by Houedard between 1960 and 1975, and to provide a conceptual theoretical framework based on Mahayana Buddhist epistemology, in particular Tibetan Vajrayana Tantric Buddhism and its associated performance rituals. Research to date has primarily focused on the influence of Zen Buddhism on the post-war American avant-garde, and although there is an emerging body of research addressing the influence of Tibetan Buddhism on a few individual American artists, little is known about th...
Widely recognised by his contemporaries as one of the leading theorists and outstanding practitio... more Widely recognised by his contemporaries as one of the leading theorists and outstanding practitioners of concrete poetry, Dom Sylvester Houedard (1924-1992) is an unsung intellect of the twentieth century. The aim of this book is to reinstate the Benedictine monk and artist as an important figure in the countercultural and transnational art movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, especially within kinetic and concrete poetry. This publication also presents an extensive series of Houedard’s highly personal ‘typestracts’ – typewriter works – for the first time. Houedard is deeply relevant to our digital age: we may no longer use an Olivetti Lettera-22 typewriter, as he did, but we all increasingly type rather than handwrite our lives. Houedard would have been delighted by the stochastic possibilities offered by the 140 characters in a tweet, or the visual shorthand of emojis and hashtags. For this monk, everything connected and was interconnected. The opportunity for the individual to...
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