A Visual Pollution was conceived by Mario Diacono in the context of the countercultural movements that defined California in the late 1960s. Presented in poster format, the publication unfolds as a Kodak roll of 36 exposures, taking the reader through a sequence of images that gradually reveals its enigmatic subject. The final two exposures are reserved for the colophon and copy number: “A visual Pollution / pr’hinted in Berkeley on may 1970 / photos by Barry Spinello / 268”.

The book begins with a puzzling title vignette, accompanied by a copyright notice shared between M. Diacono and the Navajo Indian Tribe. From there, the sequence moves into a series of images that is at once cryptic, poetic, and political. The first four frames offer different views of a miniature exhibition maquette, assembled from acetate blocks. Each block carries a statement that operates as a visual poem, recalling the aesthetic of Diacono’s ‘objtexts’ and ‘architexts’, first published in 1968 under the title Objections. Having introduced the installation from a distance, the camera then moves closer: across the following fifteen frames, the individual blocks are shown in increasingly detailed views, allowing their fragmentary texts to come into focus. Their messages remain deliberately elusive, but also reveal a distinctly political charge: “the trail to a prayer of a Navajo medicine man”, “punto d’emergenza dei Kochina dal mondo sotterraneo”, “USA ally dressed in a baby dollar”, “r’apache m’escalation against Viet pueblos”.

The narrative then shifts again. In the final section of the roll, the camera turns from the maquette to a leporello-format publication, shown in thirteen different views and details. This object may be the catalogue of the exhibition suggested by the maquette, although the book leaves the relationship between the two deliberately unresolved. What begins as a photographic record thus folds back upon itself: an exhibition is represented through a model, the model is documented in photographs, and those photographs are gathered into a publication that may itself reproduce another publication.

Through this recursive structure, Diacono unsettles the boundaries between visual poetry, exhibition, catalogue and political statement. A Visual Pollution is not simply a document of an exhibition, nor a collection of visual poems; it is a meta-publication in which the exhibition, the catalogue and the artist’s book become almost indistinguishable. The photographic sequence turns the reader into a viewer moving through an exhibition that exists simultaneously as object, image and printed matter.

A Visual Pollution is the second artist’s book in the JCT serial edition, following A metrica n’aboolira and preceding Book of Eros, both of which are held in the Metabooks collection.