Augusto de Campos und Julio Plaza, Poemobiles, Sâo Paulo, 1974, ASPC/Studienzentrum für Künstlerpublikationen, Foto: Bettina Brach

Exhibition Studienzentrum | 21.05.2011 - 14.04.2011

POETRY GOES ART & vice versa

The Emergence and International Development of Concrete and Visual Poetry from the 1950s Onwards

Working with language as a material unites artists from Latin America to Eastern Europe and from North America to Asia. As the first global literary and art movement based on aesthetic principles, concrete and visual poetry is about artists crossing the boundaries between text, image and music. The period from the 1950s onwards saw the formation of this artistic and literary trend in which, instead of merely “describing” things, the language, as a material, is self-sufficient. Here the public is confronted with the play of words and letters, the interrelationships between sound and form. One-word poems, ideograms, dialect poems, collages and objects based on writing are only some of the forms that have been created in this context.

POETRY GOES ART & vice versa – a comprehensive exhibition about the emergence and development of concrete and visual poetry – presents works by international pioneers of the movement such as Eugen Gomringer, Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, Öyvind Fahlström, Gerhard Rühm and Franz Mon. Uniquely, concrete poetry arose and developed in parallel from the very outset in Switzerland, Brazil, Sweden and Austria, despite their geographical distances and differing cultural and political situations. In the 1960s, Germany became the centre of the development and, as such, a focal point attracting artists of many nationalities. Sound poetry, visual, acoustic, radiophonic and so-called artificial poetry (computer texts) have resulted from this artistic exchange. The exhibition offers visitors in-depth insight into this unusual and remarkable complex. Typewriter works, artists’ books, graphic artworks, films and periodicals, radio and sound art, as well as objects of various kinds bear witness to poetry as an art form capable of addressing aesthetic and social aspects alike.

: Eugen Gomringer: schweigen, 1969

Complementing the exhibition, the symposium Poesie – Konkret – concerned with concrete poetry’s worldwide distribution and diversification – will be held on 17 and 18 June from 11.00 a.m. to 6 p.m. With the participation of art historians and curators, artists and authors from various countries, the contexts of concrete and visual poetry will be studied and discussed.

The exhibition is a cooperation of the Research Centre for Artists' Publications, the International Literary Festival Poetry on the Road, the Institute for Cultural Studies in the Arts of the Zurich University of the Arts, the Research Association Artists' Publications, the University of Bremen, the Instituto Cervantes Bremen and the Museu de Arte Contemporânea of the University São Paulo - MAC USP.

Funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation