Page 24 - Studio International - February 1972

Klaus Peter Dienst
Page from the magazine
Rhinozeros 1962
2 Hannah Hoch
Haussprüche 1922
Collage

3 Hansjorg Mayer
12 sheets for alphabet 1962
4 Franz Mon
Page from ainmal nur das alphabet gebrauchen 1967

5 Timm Ulrichs
6 Christoph Meckel
Cover for Der Turm 1961

to come into its own two hundred years later, of random scraps of writing and/or print seems the notion that there is anything particularly
with the drawn or painted lettering of the to anticipate the work of R. B. Kitaj today. discreditable and old-fashioned about the
Jugendstil and the Vienna Secession, again Schwitters, of course, was not exactly a Dadaist, `literary' element in painting, the concrete
something for which there was really no since his one-man Merz movement went on poets, from their end, have been attacking the
parallel in England, despite the influence on long after Dada was apparently dead. But he notion that it is improper to stress literature's
these movements of Morris (a man of two media also practised both typography and poetry, visual aspects. This again is a highly
if ever there was one) and other English and including sound poetry in the style of Marinetti international movement, largely because its
Scottish examples. It survives into the present and Stramm. His rubber-stamp pictures look works need so little translation, but from Eugen
day with the free letter-forms of modern forward to Paolozzi, Tinguely and Dieter Rot; Gomringer to Ernst Jandl the German-language
German calligraphers like Ernst Schneidler and his new alphabet was one of the most original element in it has been the strongest, and often
Hans Schmidt, which can often be seen on of our time. enough it turns out that leading practitioners in
book-jackets from the better publishers; more Schwitters apart, German Dada came to an other countries too have been in some way
experimentally, it led to the quasi-calligraphy end around 1922, just when the movement was tarred with the German brush. Thus Emmett
of Klaus-Peter Dienst and his review Rhinozeros. at its height in France. But Paris Dada, despite Williams in the U.S. spent many years in West
Translate it into terms of the woodcut, however, its absorption of Max Ernst, never seemed to Germany, where he was involved in the neo-
with its sharply angular forms and stronger have the same typographic slant as the German Dada Fluxus movement; Matthias Goeritz the
contrasts, and you get the closely interknit wing; still less did the Surrealism into which it Mexican sculptor-architect was in the first
lettering and illustration of the Expressionists, of soon developed. The very idea of such place a German; while the leading French
which Kirchner's `Heym' poems are perhaps the borderline experiments went into limbo for concretist Pierre Gamier is a specialist in
classic example. Here was a new and personal many years, Dada itself coming to be dismissed German literature, aided by a German wife.
lettering which not only blended with the by serious art historians as a rather bad and silly The great differences between the German
woodcuts proper but happily coincided with a joke, which in France may have justified itself concretists and all others lie on the visual side.
brief boom in avant-garde publishing, whose by producing the Surrealist movement, but in The sophistication of design is much greater,
social ideals often ensured that the books were Germany degenerated obscurely into political Max Bill and the Hochschule für Gestaltung at
sold at a reasonable price. agitation. This relatively enlightened view Ulm having played an influential part early on.
Today's experiments really begin with Dada, combined with the Nazi reaction to bury the And there is a perfectionism about the actual
which is the father (together with Italian movement so deeply that its rediscovery after printing and presentation which is vital to the
Futurism) of concrete poetry. The poet Raoul the Second World War came as a revelation to genre's effectiveness, and all too often lacking
Hausmann, for instance, and the stage designer many younger artists. What Pop art got from elsewhere.
John Heartfield have both been credited with the Dada was not the use of popular and The main centre of concrete poetry in
invention of photomontage, which copied cubist commercial imagery, which was largely new, Germany has been Stuttgart, thanks partly to
collage in its introduction into the synthetic but its technique of montage and its use of the the closeness of Ulm and partly to the stimulus
picture of more or less irrelevant words and letters. written word, above all its interest in provided by two men of quite different
Heartfield was at the same time a typographer, interdisciplinary excursions. German Pop art is generations, Max Bense and Hansjörg Mayer.
applying similar principles to print; the words in a sense an imported affair, since the movement The former is a professor at the Technical
broke out of their regular lines, spilling over the as such originated elsewhere; but its background University who combines a natural interest in
paper in a poetic variety of shapes and sizes, but is a mid-European one and it reached a avant-garde forms of expression with a precisely
he could also do more orthodox work which worldwide audience with Heinz Edelmann's mathematical approach to aesthetic analysis. He
combined originality with accessibility, like the drawings for The Yellow Submarine. When the directs the Rot series of booklets, of which some
splendid Tartarin de Tarascon with illustrations ICA held its comics exhibition last winter much forty-odd have appeared, devoted not only to
by George Grosz—again a cheap book in an of the material may have been American, but concrete poetry but also to other semiological
unlimited edition, intended to be read, not the show itself was based on one held at the works of art. And these are printed by Mayer,
stuck away in some collector's safe. Schwitters Academy in West Berlin. who has furthermore published a number of
and Hannah Höch, too, made collages whose use If the achievement of Pop art has been to kill more ambitious literal-cum-graphic works by
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