Poética de la firmeza en la obra verbal de Isidoro Valcárcel Medina

The Pamplona Encounters of 1972 meant both the ephemeral culmination of the utopian ideals of experimental art practices and its eclipse as a collective adventure. For Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, however, they were not a dead end, but the beginning of an artistic career based on a conception of art as an everyday activity. This article aims to explain the supposedly paradoxical character of Valcárcel Medina’s work in relation to the “end of the party” for experimental arts, analyzing the transition from a utopian art to an ethically compromised one. This is explained through the comparative analysis of some of Valcárcel Medina’s verbal works with some works of Spanish concrete poetry. La chuleta (1991) is interpreted in relation to concrete manifestos, contrasting its graphic, discursive, and pragmatic differences, Conversaciones telefónicas (1973) is read against the specific phantasy of asupranational language, and, finally, Hombres-anuncio (1976) is studied in relation to the public poems produced by the Cooperativa de Producción Artística y Artesana.