July 2001 - Nr. 7
‘Concrete Poet’ Opens Art Museum
TWIG - Experimental poet Eugen Gomringer once shocked the German literary world by blurring the distinction between poetry and graphic design. Now he is the curator of his own avant-garde museum, the institut für konstruktive kunst und konkrete poesie. "Every week I write a catalogue entry or a speech," says Gomringer, who likes to flaunt German capitalization rules.
The 76-year-old "father of concrete poetry" has donated his collection of conceptual art to Rehau (Bavaria), where it has been placed on display in the city’s new art museum. Exhibits include a wide variety of sculptures, installation pieces, and photographic works by Günter Uecker, Hartmut Böhm, and other German conceptual artists. Another floor of the institute houses Gomringer’s still to be catalogued archive of concrete poetry, encompassing some 40,000 items, from first editions of writings by Vassily Kandinsky to experimental pieces by contemporary South American writers. This summer the institute is hosting the special exhibit "the two- and three-dimensional line."
Gomringer made his mark on literary history in the 1950s, when he began positioning words on a page so that, together with the empty space around and between them, they created a pattern or shape that contributed to the poem’s meaning. Gomringer’s poem "schweigen" (silence), for example, was composed of only one word, repeated and clustered on the page to create a tidy, tightly controlled image. It was often what Gomringer’s poems did not say that readers found most provocative.
