German Art World

Concrete poetry arose in four different locations at the same time. Franz Mon was oneof its most significant proponents in Germany. His work continues to influence debates on the artistry of language to this day.

In the artistic-literary flow of concrete poetry, letters, syllables, sounds or words become the material of expression – something is no longer “described”, but rather the language itself suffices as material. The instrument of concrete poets was the typewriter, giving rise to constellations, one-word poems and ideograms.

Concrete poetry emerged almost simultaneously in the late 1950s in four different locations: in Switzerland in the circle around Eugen Gomringer, through the activities of the Noigandres Group in Brazil, as part of the Wiener Gruppe in Austria, and spurred by a manifesto by Öyvind Fahlström in Sweden. It developed in Germany in the 1960s, above all under the auspices of Franz Mon, born in 1926.

The Poetry goes Art & vice versa exhibition, which opened at the Bremer Weserburg in 2011 and travelled to Ingolstadt’s Museum für Konkrete Kunst in spring 2012, focussed on the emergence of concrete and visual poetry in the 1950s and its international development up until the present. For those who missed the exhibit, Poesie – Konkret / Poetry – Concrete, published in German and English by Salon, documents the international symposium that took place alongside the exhibition.

A publishing house as hub

Franz Mon, the most important German representative of this art movement, drafted influential theoretical texts on concrete poetry, among them texte in den zwischenräumen (“interstitial texts”, 1961) and zur poesie der fläche (“on areal poetry”, 1963). His first publication, artikulationen (“articulations”, 1959), was a programmatic treatise on concrete poetry based on the experimental practice of language in the 1950s.

In 1962 he founded the publishing house Typos-Verlag, which lasted until 1971. Mon’s international reputation also rests on his pioneering publications that focussed on script and imagery. Typos-Verlag published books by Dieter Roth and the art journal Dé-coll/age from Wolf Vostell while also acting as the European distributor of publications by Something Else Press, founded in 1966 in New York by Dick Higgins.

The central stylistic device and unifying artistic element in the work of Franz Mon is the collage. He himself characterized his images as strip collages, recycling collages, centred collages, rip collages, verse collages, object images and word images. Mon’s visual text images as well as his literary and radio works are based on this principle.

From concrete to digital poetry

Works that vary in their visual aspects came to be known internationally as “visual poetry”, a term also used by Mon to describe his text images. Concrete and visual poetry continued to exist as an art movement into the 1980s.

Many of the artists who devoted themselves to concrete and visual poetry also dealt intensively with questions of design and form, Eugen Gomringer for example. Furthermore, numerous graphic designers in the advertising world picked up on the artists’ ideas of how script and language can interact. Replicas of concrete and visual poetry are still frequently found in advertisements today.

Concrete and visual poetry was also broadcast over the radio, particularly in the form of experimental radio plays by Franz Mon. Films, such as Paulo Bruscky’s Poema (1979) and Timm Ulrichs‘ The End (1997), as well as performances like Clemente Padín’s Actual are also based on the formal canon of concrete poetry.

Moreover, this formal canon gave rise to sound poetry, as well as to the acoustic and artificial poetry based on computer texts. Since the mid-1990s digital poetry, along with internet texts, internet literature and internet art, has developed based on this same source and inspiration. In a broader sense, even slam poetry can be counted as a legacy of concrete poetry. Incidentally, one of its currently most important proponents in Germany is Eugen Gomringer’s daughter, Nora Gomringer.