Art by Matt Chase.
The law of imitative representation, aka mimesis, reigned supreme in Western art for so long that its resistors sometimes found
it hard to stop battling it, even when and where it had lost its grip. Consider, for example, some responses to so-called concrete poetry on the part of advocates of so-called conceptual art. The writer and critic Lucy Lippard differentiates between concrete poetry’s naive strategies of linguistic resemblance “where the words are made to look like something, an image” and conceptualism’s more sophisticated liberty “where the words are used only to
avoid looking like something, where it doesn’t make any difference how the words look on the page or anything.”