Bern Porter - As Artist

As Artist

Porter is best known for his "founds", which he has published in numerous collections including Found Poems, The Wastemaker, The Book of Do's, Dieresis, Here Comes Everybody's Don't Book, and Sweet End. Publishers of these works included Something Else Press, The Village Print Shop, and Tilbury House.

Bern Porter's underground reputation as an artist-writer-philosopher-scientist is well established among visual artists and writers, and his philosophy of dissent is respected. Dick Higgins, the avant-garde writer and publisher/editor of the Something Else Press, was inspired to call Porter the Charles Ives of American letters'. Recognizing Porter as one of the earliest and most prolific practitioners of Found Poetry', Peter Frank (in his book on Something Else Press) has written: "Porter is to the poem what Duchamp was to the art object, a debunker of handiwork fetishism and exemplary artist-as-intercessor between phenomenon and receptor. He rejects the typical artist's role of semi-divine creator. Porter's eye never tires of seeking accidental, unconventional literature in odd pages of textbooks, far corners of advertisements, the verbiage of greeting cards and repair manuals, ad infinitum."

Porter's career is complex and filled with contradictions. He was born in 1911, in Porter Settlement, Maine. All his life Porter had a love for literature, the visual arts and poetry in particular. As a child he created countless scrapbooks filled with collaged cut-outs of texts and images from newspapers. This process, used in the early scrapbooks, would later be developed into his technique of visual collaged poetry that he refers to as "Founds". As a pioneer author of artists, books, experiments in poetry, typography, and collage Porter published his first artist book in 1941. And since then has authored dozens of books and poetry broadsides as well as created paintings, sculpture, prints, and experimented with photography (included photograms in the early 1940s). He was also an early experimenter with alternative publishing, mail art, and performance poetry.

Late in his life a series of short books and pamphlets by Porter were published by Roger Jackson Publishers in Ann Arbor, including The World of Bern, a collaboration with Louise R. Roarty. He wrote a poem called The Last Acts of Saint Fuck You, which were presented in alphabetical order, with the same number of acts for each letter. He also did a recording of this that was full of reiterations.

“Lost and Found: The Work of Bern Porter from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art Library” is on display through July 11, 2010 at MoMA in New York.