Neo-Avant-Gardes Across Borders
Vienna, 26-27 May 2022
Thursday 26 May 2022
14:00-17:30 – presentations, discussion, and coffee break
ENAG
Welcome & opening
Jakub Kornhauser (Jagiellonian University, Krakow)
Between Concept-Shapes and Hyperbooks: Polish Neo-Avant-Garde Literature from Stanisław Dróżdż to Zenon Fajfer
Miško Šuvaković (University of Arts in Belgrade)
Neo-Avant-Garde in Yugoslavia: Between Resistance, Experiment and Alternative Cultures [via Zoom]
József Havasréti (University of Pécs)
The Fölöspéldány group (1979-1982)
Friday 27 May 2022
10:00-12:30 – presentations, discussion, and coffee break
Georg Schöllhammer (Vienna)
U.F.O.
Pavel Novotny (Czech Republic)
Czech Tape-Poetry and Experimental Radio Plays of the 1960s
Erich Klein (Vienna)
“Freedom is freedom is freedom” - Transformations of the Soviet Avant-Garde and the Selective Distortion of the “Canon” of Russian Literature through their Reception
LUNCH
13:30-16:00: ENAG board meeting
The workshop is a collaboration of ENAG, Verein Neugermanistik and the Department for German Studies at the University of Vienna. Funded by Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies of the University of Vienna and Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO)
VENUE
The Jura Soyfer-Saal is located in the Institute for Theatre, Film and Media Studies, Hofburg, Batthyanystiege, 1010 Vienna. If you enter the Michaelerkuppel from Michaelerplatz, Batthyanystiege is on the right. Then go up to the second floor.
Abstracts (in order of appearance)
Jakub Kornhauser (Jagiellonian University, Krakow)
Between Concept-Shapes and Hyperbooks: Polish Neo-Avant-Garde Literature from Stanisław Dróżdż to Zenon Fajfer
Polish neo-avant-garde writer and artist Zenon Fajfer in his essay “Appendix to a Dictionary of Literary Terms” (1999) introduces the notion of “liberature” (pol. liberatura; from lat. liber – book; libertas – freedom). As Fajfer writes, liberature’s roots has to be seen not only within the text, but, above all, in its materiality: the physical structure of the book. The elementary category of liberature is space: a literary piece of work should be claimed a material object rather than a “text-on-the-page”. Another one of Fajfer’s terms, “hyperbook”, describes a special kind of a literary work, created as a fully prepared artifact (Fajfer himself is the author of bottle-book But Eyeing Like Ozone Whole, 2004). One of the main predecessors of Fajfer’s concepts is arguably Stanisław Dróżdż, the Polish pioneer of concrete poetry, author of poem-installations called “concept-shapes”, e.g. in Between (1978; a cubic space filled with letters of the word “between”). I would like to indicate that this haptic, or spatial, perspective can be seen as the crux of the Polish neo-avant-garde from the 1970s until now. I’ll focus on different examples of neo-avant-garde hyperbooks not only to discuss their dissimilarities, but also to emphasize a strong influence between them. Moreover, I’ll use some other Central-European intertexts, like manifesto of “verbo-voco-visual” art movement in Slovenia, Romanian Gellu Naum’s The Advantage of Vertebrae, or Czech Jiří Kolář’s objectivist works, to show how similar concepts developed in the region.
Miško Šuvaković (University of Arts in Belgrade)
Neo-Avant-Garde in Yugoslavia: Between Resistance, Experiment and Alternative Cultures
After the political break with the USSR in socialist Yugoslavia, pro-Western moderate modernism, often called socialist modernism, took over the stylistic dominance of socialist realism. Neo-avant-garde artistic practices emerged as a critique and subversion of the canon of socialist modernism and its aesthetic autonomy. Neo-avant-garde artistic practices, conditionally speaking, operated between 1951 and 1973. The neo-avant-garde was primarily active in Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia and Vojvodina.
Neo-avant-garde art groups operated in Croatia (Exat 51 group); neo-constructivist and technology-oriented neo-avant-garde (the international movement of the New Tendency); neo-Dadaist, flux and proto-conceptual neo-avant-garde (Gorgona group); structural film (cinema clubs and the GEF festival, Mihovil Pansini) and very hybrid literary neo-avant-garde that took place between antiprose, concrete and visual poetry (Vlado Kristl, Josip Stošić).
The OHO group and the OHO-Katalog movement operated in Slovenia. Slovenian neo-avant-garde formed a counter-cultural youth movement in Kranj and Ljubljana. Their experimental work took place in the field of reistic poetry (concrete and visual poetry), process art, experimental film, land art, performance art, new theater, ludism and conceptual art. The Slovenian neo-avant-garde ended its artistic experiment by moving to a commune in the village Šempas near the Italian border.
In Vojvodina - in the cities of Subotica, Novi Sad, Zrenjanin - neo-avant-garde art was primarily created in literary experiments that ranged from visual poetry, concrete poetry and new textualism, through happenings to conceptual art. Important representatives were Katalin Ladik, Judita Šalgo, Bosch + Bosch group, group Kod, Grupa ($, Vujica Rešin Tucić, Bogdanka Poznanović, Želimir Žilnik and others).
In Belgrade, the neo-avant-garde was largely associated with individual experiments in various arts: in film (Dušan Makavejev, Želimir Žilnik), in performance and mulčtimedia art (Vladan Radovanović, Leonid Šejka, Olja Ivanjicki), in visual poetry (Miroljub Todorović and Signalism), in prose mixed media experiments (Bora Ćosić). Art historian and curator Biljana Tomić wrote Typoetry, and promoted the artistic concept of “permanent art” in Gallery 212. A special case of neo-avant-garde institutionalization was BITEF (Belgrade International Theater Festival).
József Havasréti (University of Pécs)
The Fölöspéldány group (1979-1982)
The Fölöspéldány group (Fölöspéldány: roughly translated as Surplus Goods) was a remarkable part of Budapest's neo-avant-garde/underground culture in the Seventies. The group consisted of young writers, poets, sociographers, visual artists and rock musicians. The group performed in the form of so-called “literary concerts”, in which rock music, readings of literary texts and avant-garde performance art were closely united. Sociographic interest played an important role in the group's operation: their efforts were linked to the “csöves” (bums) youth subculture that was attracting a lot of media attention in Hungary at the time. The “bums” were mainly fans of hard rock and early punk bands, genres that were rejected by the communist cultural politics of the time. The hard-core of the “csöves” subculture was made up of unemployed deviant youths who were often former detainees of juvenile detention centres. The Fölöspéldány group's work can be understood as a hybrid of American beat literature, punk aesthetics, experimental poetry, and performance art. The main members of the group were János Kőbányai (writer, social worker, sociologist), Ferenc Temesi (writer), Sándor Bernáthy (painter, musician), Endre Szkárosi (poet, performance artist), Judit Kemenczky (poet), Balázs Györe (writer), Ákos Szilágyi (poet), El Kazovsky (painter), and the punk-rock band Beatrice.
Georg Schöllhammer (Vienna)
U.F.O.
After 1960, the landscapes and cities of former eastern Europe are replete with spirits and forms that transmogrify, transform, and then dissolve into thin air. The star-maps that are used to survey these artificial worlds often serve to navigate the private public. The world is full of eerie displacements, gestures of the uncanny, and the constellation of the real exists in a plethora of doubled forms: one speaks of near-death experiences, and the roaming of subjectivity in 5 dimensions meets noontime fauns. Question marks, meanders, rows of numbers, and persons of the line belong to the inventory at hand. Communication machines emerge and shut themselves up before they have the chance to become immaterial and disappear. Inconspicuously, poses and gestures from private photo albums appear in the photographers’ studios of Vanity Fair. The stories and spirits of a parallel avant-garde, whose silhouettes have yet to be found on the walls of the western canon, exist at the centre of the presentation of Georg Schöllhammer.
Pavel Novotny (Czech Republic)
Czech Tape-Poetry and Experimental Radio Plays of the 1960s
The paper deals with a little-known area of Czech experimental poetry. It presents the sound work of Ladislav Novák, Bohumila Grögerová and Josef Hiršal, also Jiří Valoch or Milan Nápravník, for example. Some of the recordings have been found in achrives and estates and have not yet been relaesed.
Erich Klein (Vienna)
“Freedom is freedom is freedom” - Transformations of the Soviet Avant-Garde and the Selective Distortion of the “Canon” of Russian Literature through their Reception
Decades later, the then thirty-two-year-old poet Jan Satunowski wrote about the liberation of Frankfurt an der Oder in April 1945: “and the city has not yet burned”. Satunowski's poetic beginnings as a “constructivist” in the 1930s left unmistakable traces in the texts of the “Lianosovo Group”, the first unofficial gathering of very different Russian writers after the Second World War. In fact, when delivered in person, manuscripts do not burn. The similarities with efforts by the “Vienna Group” to create a new language and new forms are striking! The legacy of the early Russian and Soviet avant-garde can be found both in the official “literature of the thaw” and in the forbidden samizdat. Their interpretation not only leads to numerous post-Soviet discussions - for example about “Moscow conceptualism” but also to wild polemics about their western reception (“Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin” Boris Groys).