Parra’s proposing the idea of the "visual artifact" consists of a series of poems accompanied by images in which an advertising slogan – symbol of Western culture’s consumerist culture- is slated to its very roots. The origin of this expression can be found at the "practical workshops" that the artist attended Wednesday afternoons at the University of Chile’s Pedagogical Institute. Thus, according to the critics, this type of expression is a subversion of the visual product at a time when the voices of protest rest under the gentle mantle of globalizing docility.


VISUAL ARTIFACTS, A TYPE OF POETIC ANTI-INSTALLATION

Working from the artifact and ad slogan, Nicanor Parra presents a new concept of exhibitory art – the anti-installation. This displays debate around themes of politics, religion, sexuality, and market economy, through bottles, pots and pans, statues, latex phalluses, tea pots, irons, crucifixes, sewing machines, etc. Thus, the visual artifact points directly to a reality that existed before the object it is based on. The product or artifact of "a slew of words" (Parra himself refers to this is as a "nuclear weapon") makes use of a text as hackneyed and common as the object it accompanies, having disappeared its referential function.


"SMALL TRAYS", "PRACTICAL PROJECTS" AND THE "TABLETS OF BLACK ISLAND"

"Small Trays", "Practical Projects", and the "Tablets of Black Island" form the three central pillars of Visual Artifacts. The poet uses these elements to conduct a critical review of Western culture. To do so he uses the language and the image of an object laden with symbolism.

The poet relays the meaning of the object through the title that accompanies the image. The originality of this reading reveals to us a surprising connection between the two elements which seemingly have nothing in common.

This combining makes the poetic image "explode" – thus the sense of a bomb that Parra has when defining his artifacts. It also gives rise to the birth of a new metaphor capable of expressing "the maximum with a minumum" (Nicanor Parra). Through a process of de-contextualizing, the author of Anti-poems resorts to daily language and to familiar images coming from the industrial and commercial world.

THE ANTI-POEM, PREDECESSOR TO THE VISUAL ARTIFACT

These visual artifacts are none less than another variant of the anti-poems, the genre for which Nicanor Parra has gained world renown. The anti-poem is the response to an era in which one can no longer recite the praises of nature, nor celebrate humankind, nor glorify divinity, because everything has become problematic and diffuse, starting with language.

In compensation, the anti-poem attempts to makes an approximation using the theory of relativity: Albeit imperfect, the anti-poem attempts to recuperate the lost subjectivity through the word itself, and make possible the creation of new forms of communication, and new artistic territories yet to be explored. Basically, Nicanor Parra takes a triple death leap into the great metaphoric void, causing an escape of energy from an inert object which explodes. The fuse that is lit is that of the words accompanying the images.


NICANOR PARRA, CHILEAN POET

Nicanor Parra (1914) was born in Chillán, Chile, where he did his elementary and high school education. Later, he graduated as professor of Math in Santiago de Chile. He selected his destiny, from among many: poetry. During this time, while his first books of poems were being published, and owing to the confluence between mathematics and poetry, Parra discovered a manner of interpreting disorder which started at the mind and human action. His poetry would soon attack dilettantes, the doctors of nothing, the so-called progress and the hidden falsity behind the "social morality" group.

In 1943 Parra traveled to the United States with a scholarship from the International Institute of Education. There he studied advanced mechanics at Brown University. He remained there for three years. In 1948 he was named Provisional Director of the School of Engineering at the University of Chile. The following year he traveled to England with a scholarship from the British Council, where he studied cosmology with E.A. Milner. After 1951 he taught math and physics at the University of Chile. Soon the universities of various countries would fight over having him as a speaker. In the U.S., the USSR, China, Cuba, Perú, Panama, and Mexico he has given lectures, organized workshops and attended conferences and round tables (with participants of the caliber of Ezra pound). In 1972 a new scholarship from the Guggenheim took him to the United States once again.

Thus, he abandons the metaphoric style of his first book, Cancionero sin Nombre ("Book of Poems with no Name"), for the sake of exploring with Poemas y Antipoemas ("Poems and Anti-Poems") (1954). Then his books follow one after the next: Versos de Salón (1962), Canciones Rusas (1967), Obra Gruesa (1969), Artefactos (1972), Sermones y Prédicas de Cristo de Elqui (1977), Nuevos sermones y Prédicas del Cristo de Elqui (1979), Chistes para Desorientar a la Policia (1983), Coplas de Navidad (1983), Poesía Política (1983) and Hojas de Parra (1985).

Today, Nicanor Parra is already a name world-renowned. His work has been studied in England, Holland, Romania, the Soviet Union, Finland, Cuba, Switzerland, the United States, Italy, Sweden, the Republic of Georgia, Spain, Argentina, West Germany, etc. In his native Chile he has been recognized with two municipal awards and the National Award for Literature (1969). Patricio Larzundi solicited the Nobel Prize for Parra in Columbia University’s magazine, and the Hispano-American Society of New York, under the presidency of Mario Meza, supported the motion. Subsequent to this, projects on the poet multiplied: Federico Schopf, at the Department of Spanish at the University of Chile, does a study on his poems and anti-poems; José Miguel Ibáñez Langlois dedicates more than sixty pages to "anti-poetry" in his "Seix Barral"; Leónidas Morales, at the University Austral, Chile, publishes "The Poetry of Nicanor Parra"; at New York University professor Edith Grosmann writes "The Anti-poetry of Nicanor Parra"; Mercedes Rein in Uruguay writes on "The Poetry of Nicanor Parra"; Thomas Brons, Nuremberg, publishes "Villón and Parra", and the list goes on.