Breaking Lines: Futurism and the Origins of Experimental Poetry review – the beauty of art made by typewriter

Estorick Collection, London
The contemplative ‘typewritings’ of Benedictine monk Dom Sylvester Houédard steal the show in a fascinating two-part survey of 20th-century experimental poetry

The typewriter drawings of a British Benedictine monk in the swinging 60s are so startling they deserve a sheaf of exclamation marks (although he himself barely used them). Dom Sylvester Houédard (1924-92) was always sparing with the punctuation, and so modest of spirit that on his artworks his name invariably appears in lower case. Sometimes it is typed in a vertical configuration – dsh – running down the page like a tiny Japanese inscription. Which is apt, for all of dsh’s “typewritings” amount to a foreign language.

Which is to say that although his works are composed of the letters and punctuation marks of an old manual Olivetti, they are not meant to be read so much as viewed. And what you see, on the framed A4 pages he liked to use, can be almost entirely abstract. A shifting pattern of dots, whirling constellations of commas, a vibration of hyphens that is something like visual interference. There is a beautiful work in the Estorick Collection in which a dense field of oblique strokes is interrupted by a single line of brackets, running diagonally up the sheet, which might be read as a ripple in water or time.