Postwar Culture

Alain Arias-Misson is an American-Belgian visual poet, artist, writer, and critic, whose multimedia works range from "Public Poems", criticisms, novels, and plexiglass art. Throughout his extensive career, Bory has worked closely with Sarenco, Julien Blaine, Paul de Vree, and Eugenico Miccini, as well as Ignacio Gomez de Liano, Marc Dachy, and Jacques Donguay. In 1967-1968, Arias-Misson conceived of the Public Poem in Brussels  (The Vietnam), through which he sought to create a "city-text" that would open up "unpredictable dimensions of social and material reality." Since then, Arias-Misson has performed Public Poems in cities as varied as Knokke (The Poemx, 1969), Bonn (The Beethoven, 1974), Los Angeles (The Hollywood Monsters, 1991) Berlin (The Teutonic, 1991), and Venice (The Sinking of Venice, 2015), among many other cities. 

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Born in Belgium, Brussels in 1938, Arias-Misson was deeply influenced by World War II and the emigration to the United States. The time in New York and Brussels after the War--and the dual influence of America and Belgium--continued to shape his adolescent years. During his college years at Harvard University, while developing an interest in experimental poetry, Arias-Misson met his future wife Nela Arias, an Abstract painter 21 years his senior; in 1963, Arias-Misson married Arias and chose to take on her last name. They would be married until the 1990's. 

 

Arias-Misson published literary criticism in American magazines until the outbreak of the Vietnam War in 1965, when he moved to Barcelona to avoid the draft. In Spain, Arias-Misson forged a robust international and intergenerational network of poets and artists, such as Joan Brossa, Joan Miro, Herminio Molero, and Ignacio Gomez de Liano, as well as those in the rest of the continent--Marc Dachy and Paul De Vree, among others. In the late 1960's and 1970's, Arias-Misson conceived of plexiglass poems (Theater-Boxes, Mental Theater, and more) alongside the Public Poem, exploring with spatiality, letters, and the word, while contributing for De Tafelronde. Arias-Misson became a member of Lotta Poetica in the mid-1980s and 1990s, collaborating with Sarenco, Eugenico Miccini, Jean-François Bory, and Julien Blaine on Logomotives, among others. 

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Since then, Arias-Misson has continued to create Public Poems around the world, as well as what he deems "Object Poems," novels, and "Immaterial Object of the Holographic Projection" that address the word relative to plasticity, legibility, sociality, visuality and the digital.