image/poem
(This exhibition was curated by Dóra Maurer and László Beke. The document published here is a five-page stencil in three hundred copies.)
IMAGE/POEM
Information about the Program in FMK [Young Artists' Club] on 22 Feb., 1974.
When hearing the term "experimental poetry" only few people are likely to see its commonly applied and cheap versions every day in placards, shopwindow decorations, the cover and inside pages of books, lit-up advertisements, cross-words and cartoons, on placards of demonstrations or slogans made from flowers and sometimes people.
The various trends within experimental poetry were created on the borderline of traditional literature, art and music; their historical function is to re-arrange the connections between the separated artistic genres and also to map the abilities of the existing art-context as well as set up new purposes. This figure may well illustrate that the target of experimental poetry is the links between elementary human communication-systems.
painting poetry music
image writing speech voice
Let us scrutinize the relation between image and text in this system, which is enough to bring the preliminaries of experimental poetry back to the times of Egyptian hieroglyphs. From the very beginning of writing there were permanent notions according to which punctuation marks did not simply substitute something, i.e. thought or speech but were considered to have a material existence: visual qualities, spatial position and expressive power independent of meaning. The antecedents of experimental poetry are acrostychons, oriental calligraphy, medieval initials, magic squares and Gutenberg-prints.
The visual form of a traditional poem is completely accidental (except for a few exceptions). In Apollinaire's poem "The Tie and the Clock" (1914) the text is set in a manner that outlines of these two objects. This is one of the basic forms of visual poetry: the letters simultaneously have a symbolic and an iconic function, or, in other words, they fulfill the function of substituting concepts and creating descriptive images (being in harmony or contradiction with the concept) at the same time. Simultaneously thought began to destroy the strict poetic structure in free-poems, there was a series of attacks from the visual. Futurists and Dadaists, trusting the autonomy of the verbal form, blurred the meaning behind it and elevated things that were alien to poetry into the body of the poem (Raoul Hausmann and Kurt Schwitters: "The poetry of the PRESENT includes objects and words as factors of the space surrounding us").
Kassák and Moholy-Nagy wrote abstract image-poems.
Mayakovsky and El Lissitzky interpreted typography as an artistic and agitative task. Cubist and later also Dadaist painters integrated printed texts into their images. In the first two decades of the century the major directions of experimental poetry were formed, although they still belonged to different Isms.
Independent experimental poetry (in the modern sense of the term) started in the fifties. According to the historical reconstruction of Emmett Williams it was Eugen Gromringer in 1951 who first used the expression "concrete poetry" and formed a group with this name five years later in Brazil. Öyvind Fahlström published "The Manifesto of Concrete Poetry" in 1953 in Stockholm. The further development was largely promoted by the appearance of Pop Art; the movement often applied letter-motifs in its assemblages or paintings (Johns, Indiana). Fluxus and other artists who were loyal to the mentality of the group (Emmett Williams, Chieko Shiomi, Jackson Mac Low, Tomas Schmit, Dieter Rot, or the founder of the "Darmstadt Circle", Daniel Spoerri), motivated by a broad interest, quite naturally dealt with poetry as well. The influence of concurrent semiotic research is also very important: certain scientists, such as professor Max Bense from Stuttgart was also experimenting with poetry, who cooperated with other German artists (Franz Mon, Hansjörg Mayer, etc.) Finally, we have to mention the experiments going on in the socialist countries, which started quite early and were significant on a global scale as well (Voznjesensky in the Soviet Union; Kolár, Novak and Valoch in Czechoslovakia and a whole group of experimental poets: Carlfriedrich Klaus in the GDR or Todorovich's "signalist" center in Yugoslavia etc.), and the leftist artgroup of the Italian periodical "Lotta Poetica" with Sarenco as their leader.
The Austrian Ernst Jandl remarked once that "There is an infinite number of ways to create experimental poetry and yet I think that the most successful ones can be used only once: in this case the poem is the method itself." Considering this, it is difficult to separate the main types and trends of experimental poetry since each artist defines their activity by different terms often changing the name when arriving at a new cycle/stage of their art. Despite this we think that it might be useful to define the most often used terms at least:
experimental poetry: a summarizing term for all experimental trends
concrete poetry: the primary aesthetic carrier is not the meaning behind the words, but the written or spoken language-material in its directness
visual poetry: "concerns words or their elements as objects or a visual energy-center" (Alfred Pacquement). Its primary element is the typed or printed letter, whose regular form and mechanical replication makes it particularly suitable for creating decorative effects (often reminiscent of op-art). Its special and most well-known version is the image-poem, i.e. a depiction composed of letters and punctuation marks.
spacialism: "poetry in space". The trend is connected to the name of the French artist Pierre Garnier and is often used as an equal term to refer to "experimental poetry". In a broader sense, the name clearly describes the ambition to put down letters on paper or arrange them in another context - in space.
objective poetry: the collective name of painters, sculptors, typographers and musicians' poetic artwork.
letterism: a painterly and graphic trend concerned with letters and calligraphy.
phonetic poetry, phonic poetry: an aesthetic use of linguistic phonemes and any audible effect. Phonic poems are usually composed directly for a record or tape.
serial poetry, permutation poetry (c.f. the similar musical and artistic ambitions): the poem is composed of varied lines of linguistic segments or the systematic change of one particular element repeated until transmitted into another linguistic structure.
cyber-poetry: a collective term for poems made with the computer. The results are often similar to those created with the serial or permutation method.
action-poem: it can be anything that the artist considers to be poetic and wants to emphasize as being a process or "action".
do-it-yourself poetry: the artist provides the reader only with the basic structure or clue of the poem, who then has to fill it with content.
anonym poetry: graffiti, lit-up ads, incidental links between the texts of placards put next to each other, inscriptions from the street, tattoos - anything that can be taken from everyday life and considered to be poetic only later.
The exhibition that is to be organized in the Young Artists' Club [FMK] tries to present on a large scale the relations of experimental poetry and examines the role of writing in art from a general perspective as well as that of the image in poetry. In both cases the interest lies wherein the artist uses the material of a given art "inappropriately" (i.e. not for what it is normally used for) and thus this derivation from the normal is often manifest in a playful form or as a striking idea.
- the pieces (both by Hungarian and foreign artists) exhibited on the wall represent the situation in the seventies. The whole material provides a broad understanding of the notion of "poetry" and the influence of Concept Art. Although the majority of the selection involves original work (i.e. they have the artist's signature) we do not consider this to be an authoritative viewpoint, since consequently deriving from the nature of experimental poetry the author originally plans his work to be an "impersonal" printed typography or a publication with a large volume.
- we will present the historical preliminaries and classical instances of experimental poetry on slides. The used medium has no real significance in this case either (except for a few examples, when the artist exclusively meant their work to be on slides.)
- we will play some of the most prominent instances of phonic poetry from tapes, especially those of Henri Chopin. (Chopin published several issues of the periodical "Cinquieme saison" and "OU" in the form of records.)
- instead of giving a selected bibliography, we will exhibit some of the most important anthologies, periodicals and documents of experimental poetry.