The three exhibitions – retrospectives of Nanni Balestrini (born 1935), Hansjörg Mayer (born 1943), and Gerhard Rühm (born 1930) – mark the start of the »Poetic Expansions« series of exhibitions, which will continue in the summer with Reinhard Döhl, Helmut Heißenbüttel, and Konrad Balder Schäuffelen.

With a series of selected artistic positions, »Poetic Expansions« presents one of the most important tendencies of art in the twentieth century: the expansion of artistic media. In the 1950s to 1970s, new artistic forms were developed by removing the boundaries between text, image, object, theater and music and releasing art from its conventional materials and production processes, opening it up to technical media.

The aim of the »Poetic Expansions« series of exhibitions is to show that decisive impulses for this development came from poetry and literature. Poets and artists such as Nanni Balestrini, Reinhard Döhl, Helmut Heißenbüttel, Hansjörg Mayer, Gerhard Rühm, and Konrad Balder Schäuffelen accepted the ilegacy of Mallarmé, the Futurists and Dadaists who liberated text from the linearity and constraints of narration. Letters, signs and sounds became material. In the form of objects, actions and performances, the artists conquered space and time, the third and fourth dimensions. »Poetic Expansions« shows the media revolution of the arts, born from the enquiry into linguistic communication at the end of the Gutenberg Galaxy and the beginning of the Turing universe.

Organization / Institution

ZKM | Karlsruhe