The origins of visual poetry date far back in the past. New experimental practices in painting and in literature, falling into the category of concrete poetry, started emerging simultaneously all over the world. Visual poetry can be nowadays characterized as a form of Neo-Avantgarde, a new experimental art practice, which has been called differently from its beginning to date – i.e. “reism” in correlation with the OHO art movement, and later on montage, as well as topographic, kinetic, material, technological, multidimensional, inventive poetry and many others. In Slovenia, the first concretist attempts at dismantling the language can be observed in works by Zagoričnik, Šalamun and Kermenavner, while the first poetic experiments with clear tendencies towards visual arts can be found in works by Pogačnik, Plamen and Matanovič. The first independent publications leaning towards the concrete and visual started being published in 1966, for instance, the booklet Eva and numerous other catalogues and publications that reached a smaller audience. For many years, the Bežigrad Gallery in Ljubljana has been holding concretist exhibitions that are accompanied by meticulously written exhibition catalogues. However, many work of the visual-concretist character were never published, mainly because they do not have a title or even the author’s signature. At the same time, works differentiate from one another to such extent that they cannot be easily associated with a particular author or a precise period of his or her creative process. Today, visual poetry – as seen in works by Železnikar – has been moving towards the digital art field. More specifically, this phenomenon is called electronic or computer poetry. In a way, the incredibly interactive lingual-visual works of art are an upgrade of previous achievements of visual poetry. In line with this art practice, names such as programmed art and NETART or web art are also used. The last part of the paper is dedicated to my own contributions, their interpretation and discussion with a conclusion, which includes an overview of goals and the purpose of this diploma paper and gives a summary of the research in its total.
|