'Robert Zend: Poet Without Borders' Presented by Camille Martin

We're excited to see Camille Martin has launched a new blog project on Rogue Embryo involving the life and writing of Hungarian-Canadian avant-garde writer and artist Robert Zend. Thus far Martin has posted a preface to the series and part one involving Zend's 1983 flip-book Linelife. From Martin's introduction:

Welcome to Robert Zend: Poet without Borders, my illustrated exploration of the life and work of the Hungarian-Canadian avant-garde writer and artist. The slide show above consists of photographs from Zend’s family and creative life as well as artistic portraits and self-portraits.

This project is the result of several months of research, interviews, and writing. It has become very dear to me, and I hope that you will enjoy the results. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to post installments, including biographical sections about Zend’s life in Hungary and Canada, and sections about his Hungarian literary roots, Canadian cross-pollination, and international affinities and influences.

Flip over to check out said slide show here. And while we're talking about flipping, yesterday Martin posted an animated version of Zend's Linelife. Martin describes the book thus:

Although the narrative of Linelife unfolds in a geometrically abstract sequence of creation and disintegration, it also suggests an anthropomorphic trajectory of a life. And in fact, there exists a longer unpublished work entitled The Tense Present (fig. 2), which consists of the sequence of images in Linelife and interpellates text and other images to explore the arc of human life from conception to death.

In the Linelife sequence above, which does not include that programmatic narrative, the gradual creation of a complex pattern of lines and dots could also suggest human creativity at work, and the deflation and ultimate disappearance of that triumphant pattern implies that in the cosmic order of things, art as well as life is short. Yet its very abstraction points to a more universal signification: the drama of development and decline, on microcosmic as well as macrocosmic scales. As well, the mirroring of the opening and closing suggests a cyclical pattern as things arise and fall apart in a continual succession of order and entropy.

Make your way over to Rogue Embryo to read more about the project, and subscribe to future installments of the series.