Scope and Contents

This well illustrated exhibition catalogue provides a broad view of contemporary concrete and visual poetry. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents This exhibition aimed to document the aesthetic shift that took place in the 1960's and 70's in Czech concrete poetry, art, letters and images. Josef Hlavacek writes in his introduction, ''The relationship between the image and the letter could be called mutual initiation. It became evident that the letter as an object not only of literary but also of artistic interest has a long history with particular accents in classical antiquity, the era of the Baroque and the avant-garde of the 1910s and '20s...The experiment in poetry was brought about by what was essentially a direct reaction to the problematic line of civic poetry...[Then] attention became focused on the word as an independent phenomenon and language...A third stimulus stemmed from a strong interest in how art mediates information about the outer world through artistic signs, doing so in a much more direct way than the spoken or written word." The exhibition featured small magazines, exhibition catalogues and books of the...