The Visitor

Alain Arias-Misson was born in Brussels during the Second World War, whereupon his family became refugees to the U.S.A. and he grew up in New York City and New England. Later, shortly after finishing studies of Greek literature and philosophy at Harvard, he took off for North Africa, next became a refugee from the United States to Spain, refusing to serve in Vietnam, and has since zigzagged between Italy, Belgium, France and the United States again, leaving phosphorescent tracks in his wake, nobody knowing exactly where he was from nor where he was heading : a visitor everywhere.

A nomad of writing, he has been a writer above all, writing everywhere and on everything, from wood and paper, to novels and plexiglass installations and in the city-space.. He has published five novels in the United States in the context of the new American writing (which he coined “Superfiction” in essays on Abish, Federman and others), close in spirit to his friends Walter Abish and Joe McElroy. In his early years in Spain in the sixties he helped to create the new poetic experimentation (the beginning of experimental art in Spain) alongside friends Joan Brossa, the Mage of Barcelona and poet of Dau al Set (Tapies, Artigas, etc.) and ZAJ, then Herminio Molero the pop poet star and Ignacio Gomez de Liano the pre-eminent philosopher of Spain. In Belgium he became co-editor of De Tafelrond with his friend Paul De Vree, and in Italy during the seventies took part in the poetic guerrilla of Lotta Poetica with bandit-poet Sarenco, Miccini and the French poets Blaine and Bory. Marc Dachy, the Dada Doc, and Carlfriedrich Claus the German shamanic poet-scribe were his closest allies in Poetry and Public Poems.. In the United States he worked with the Emily Harvey Gallery and was close to the Fluxus artists.

Arias-Misson is probably best known in Europe for his Public Poem, a form he invented in the sixties in Madrid and has continued ever since in cities throughout Europe and America, often with the collaboration of his friend Marc Dachy. This is a manner of “writing” on the page of street, creating a poetic space outside any artistic context and using the symbols and semantic signs and “grammar” of the city ; utterly outside of the ”performance” art form.. This show will focus, if not exclusively, on the Public Poem.