27 May 2010 17h00
IMM studio A 2.24
Marc Matter on Concrete Poetry and Sound Poetry
Marc Matter will be using several audio and visual examples in a lecture on visual & sound poetry - sound experiments and abstract graphics of the postwar avant-garde wich takes it raw material from spoken an written language.
Concrete Poetry with its subdivisions Sound poetry (or Poesie Sonore, as Henri Chopin, pioneer of this genre, called it) and Visual Poetry is a radical form of experimental literature in sound and script (or image), which has been practiced since the start of the 20th century at the latest and has flourished in the postwar avant-garde from the end of the 1950s. Various artists and groups, for example in Paris, Stockholm, Cologne, Stuttgart, Brazil, Italy and Eastern Europe, are seizing the avant-garde tradition of Dadaism and Futurism to practise radical abstraction and occasionally complete denial of sense and meaning in language and text under the label of sound poetry. Acoustically the human voice, tape recorders and studio effects play a main role in this form of art. In the visual field single letters and abstract typographical elements become images or are assembled into abstract patterns - the influences are still relevant today in contemporary advanced graphic design and are also picked up in fine arts within periodical cycles.
In his lecture, Marc Matter will cover the range of early examples of sound poetry from the end of the 19th century to its height (end of 1950s to the middle of the 1970s) until the current position of sound poetry - non-linear, subjectivistic and modular. A main focus is on the periodic publication Revue OU, a compilation published between 1964 and 1974 by the French lateral thinker Henri Chopin, which was the culmination of various avant-garde tendencies in the postwar period. These multimedia goodie bags, which in addition to a record also each contained posters, screenprints or other elaborate paper handicrafts, also had contributions from others including the author William S. Burroughs, the musician John Cage and the artist Ben Vautier.
Marc Matter is founding member of the artists group INSTITUT FUER FEINMOTORIK, which appears predominantly with experimental sound performances but also with visual works, curational activities and lectures. With his group, he published the "Feinmotorik Kompendium" an artists book mocking the form of a dictionary. Alongside this he works at the Salon des Amateurs in Duesseldorf, where he organises a part of the programme. He was guest curator in the Shedhalle in Zurich, has produced experimental radio plays, worked for a travelling cinema in Switzerland, has dabbled in experimental films and music clips, has produced esoteric club music and improvised with sound musicians, jobbed as an occasional graphic artist and text producer and also researched all possible peripheral areas of art and culture in the 20th century.