Page 25 - Studio International - February 1972

the leading men in this field, including some
very striking alphabets of his own; he had a big
show at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague in
1968. Other Stuttgart contributors have been
the poets Reinhard Döhl and Helmut
Heissenbüttel, the Swiss Claus Bremer who was
for some time working in the theatre at Ulm, and
Klaus Burckhardt who has used photosetting to
make complex designs of letters and printers'
symbols. It is far from being a strictly localized
group, however, since, besides its connections
within Germany itself, Bense maintains close
links with Brazil while Mayer has taught at
Corsham and Watford and cooperates with the
Something Else Press in New York.
Outside Stuttgart a role comparable to
Mayer's has been played by Franz Mon of
Frankfurt, who helped organize the 'Schrift und
Bild' exhibition nine years ago, which was shown
in Amsterdam and Baden-Baden and was the
first real attempt to map out this whole area. He
is a poet whose work includes not only
experiments with sound but also what he calls
`optical parameters', 'text labyrinths' in which
the reader has to find his way among echoes of
words, and 'text surfaces' across which the eye
can skate. He too for a time ran a small
publishing house, Typos-Verlag, which
specialized in this field. Then in Vienna
Gerhard Rühm and Friedrich Achleitner (of the
so-called Wiener Gruppe) produced a number
of concrete poems apparently under Gomringer's
influence, and more recently Ernst Jandl, thanks
to the wit and skill of his platform readings, has
become known far beyond the German-
speaking countries. In Innsbruck Heinz
Gappmayr produces typewriter poems (the
genre practised by Dom Sylvester Houédard in
this country) of great subtlety, though his
sequences need to be read as a whole. In
northern Germany too there are plenty of
concretists, but the only one to match this
standard has been Timm Ulrichs of Hanover,
much of whose energy is diverted into a quite
witty kind of concept art.
Orthodox bibliophiles have so far rather
neglected this type of publication, though it is
usually on show at the Frankfurt Book Fair as
well as in the occasional exhibition of small press
books. The fact is that given the general level of
German book production and illustration—and
this is something which can be found in both
halves of the country, whereas concrete poetry
and the like as yet cannot—there is plenty for the
student of book design to chew on without his
needing to bother with the avant garde. True
enough, there are designers and graphic artists
like the highly original engraver Otto Rohse, or
Imre Reiner, who deserve to be internationally
known; there is competent illustration at all
price-levels by a whole mass of able artists,
even if a bit too much of it seems like an
Expressionist hang-over; there are still limited
edition publishers like Gotthard de Beauclair
and Ernst Hauswedell who maintain the high
national tradition; while even in the East the
state-owned publishers produce small or
51