Stelio Maria Martini, ‘Schemi’, and the Po(i)etics of Collage

Abstract

The paper explores the transgressive poetics of collage envisioned by Italian visual poet Stelio Maria Martini in his masterpiece Schemi (1962), one of the most complex artists’ books of the twentieth century: a catalog of composing techniques for a total art, achieved through an aesthetic manipulation of the most diverse materials across different media (newspaper clippings, drawings, photos, cultural debris). An unprecedented close reading of Schemi will prove how collage is for Martini much more than an experimental juxtaposition of signifiers (as in early Avant-Garde artists), or a political subversion of advertising slogans (as in other visual poets of his time). It is, instead, the necessary basis of a futurable poetry: a poietic gesture (from poiéo = to make), in which words, images, and matter drawn from the collective imagery of contemporary society are pulled together to retrieve feeble schemes of an otherwise alienated human sensitivity. The analysis will ultimately bring to light several cornerstones of this original po(i)etics of collage, able to redefine the medium of poetry in its own right: the substitution of the linear deductive logic with a circular one, which accepts contradictions as consubstantial to life and art; the radical subversion of the concepts of Time and History; the transformation of the values and uses of writing, alongside the pivotal distinction between sense and meaning; and the importance of a cosmic vision as a privileged access to the real.