Andrew Hunt

Artists: Jeremy Adler, Annalisa Alloatti, Max Bense, Mirella Bentivoglio, Alison Bielski, Claus Bremer, Klaus Burkhardt, Bill Butler, Augusto de Campos, Henri Chopin, Paula Claire, Hans Clavin, Bob Cobbing, Kenelm Cox, Siegfried Cremer,Klaus-Peter Dienst, Rolf-Gunter Dienst, Reinhard Döhl, Fria Elfen, Öyvind Fahlström, Peter Finch, Ian Hamilton Finlay, John Furnival, Pierre Garnier, Mathias Goeritz, Lily Greenham, Bohumilá Grögerová, Dick Higgins, Josef Hiršal, Sten Hanson, Ludwig Harig, Lee Harwood, Helmut Heißenbüttel, Åke Hodell, Josef Honys, Dom Sylvester Houédard, Ernst Jandl, Jeff Keen, Günther C. Kirchberger, Ferdinand Kriwet, Liliana Landi, Edward Lucie-Smith, Siegfried Maser, Hansjörg Mayer, Peter Mayer, Franz Mon, Edwin Morgan, Ladislav Nebeský, bpNichol, Seiichi Niikuni, Ladislav Novák, Jeff Nuttall, Charles Olson, P.J. O’Rourke, Michele Perfetti, Helga Philipp, Jennifer Pike, Dieter Roth, Aram Saroyan, Karel Trinkewitz, Jiří Valoch, Paul de Vree, Herman de Vries, Emmett Williams, Edward Wright, Louis Zukofsky 'Concerning Concrete Poetry' presents the unique qualities of archives of concrete poetry as well as the national and international connections between them. The exhibition includes a comprehensive display of British concrete poets Bob Cobbing’s and Peter Mayer’s collections and takes its title and guiding principle from their recently reprinted seminal publication “Concerning Concrete Poetry”. This book contains a compilation of statements and chronologies of concrete, visual, and sound poetries and aims to define an analysis, history, and manifesto for the genre. In a similar manner, the exhibition describes the terms ‘concrete’, ‘semantic poetry’, and ‘concrete renewal’ within a contemporary environment that includes a series of events with artists, writers, and performers. Examples of works by Henri Chopin, Dom Sylvester Houédard, and Emmett Williams from Mayer’s and Cobbing’s collections will be shown alongside selected artefacts and historical material. Importantly, the project also focuses on artists from outside of the UK with a specific accent on concrete poets from Germany, respectively on works by the ‘Stuttgart group/school’, including such prominent artists as Max Bense, Reinhard Döhl, and Helmut Heißenbüttel. These and other seminal works of concrete poetry originate from the collection of Reinhard Döhl, located at ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. Furthermore the exhibition includes prints and portfolios by Hansjörg Mayer, whose early career also took place in Stuttgart before he moved to the UK in the 1960s, with his studio still situated in London. A substantial selection of work by Mayer and the numerous artists that he collaborated with through bookmaking in the late 1960s connect the two contextual and geographical lines of the project. The exhibition “Concerning Concrete Poetry” also presents wider counter-cultural ephemera connected to the concrete poetry movement, such as posters, magazines, and limited edition artworks, and describes the intertwined current double-helix between design, typography, poetry, literature, and the visual arts, as well as the parallel histories of Conceptual Art, Mail Art, and Fluxus in their local and international forms. A comprehensive events programme invites performers and speakers whose activities are closely involved with research into the continued relevance of the medium for all aspects of visual culture. In addition, a vinyl record containing recent sound poetry designed by artist and graphic designer Scott King will be co-published by Badischer Kunstverein and Slimvolume Press. The record’s insert contains recent interviews with Hansjörg Mayer and Peter Mayer, while the former artist has also designed the poster for this exhibition. Curated by Andrew Hunt and Anja Casser 'Concerning Concrete Poetry' was produced with the generous assistance of ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, Peter and Mary Mayer, and the Bob Cobbing family collection. Work from the latter collection has previously been shown in the Bob Jubilé programme, curated by William Cobbing and Rosie Cooper. Supported by The Henry Moore Foundation.

Edited by Andrew Hunt and Cally Spooner with an introduction by Will Holder, this new title contains Cally Spooner’s complete scripts to date. As an artist who writes neither from a confessional standpoint, nor from the position of fragmented ‘art writing’, Spooner’s prose makes the verbal visual, and focuses on a visceral use of text as an invitation to act. Her narratives operate energetically in collective schisms through being performed, and often collapse to attack the spectator, observer or reader. Importantly, the artist appropriates historical voices as a mode of activity, and uses theory to ignite imaginative scenarios. Scripts comprises twelve works produced between 2009 and 2015, including: A Six Stage Manifesto On Action, Collapsing In Parts, and And You Were Wonderful, On Stage. This book is the first in the ‘Slimvolume Synthesis’ series, a sequence of publications that includes texts by artists, critics, curators, poets and theorists to produce new creative disjunctions between art and writing.

Modern epistemology is reluctant to presume the objectivity of a mental event. Because a valid theory of knowledge is subjected to objective standards of rationality, the invocation of a transcendent ground of existence termed ‘god’ is deemed extra‐systematic. This reference lacks warrant because it fails to satisfy the impartial criteria methodologically basic to contemporary paradigms of knowledge. Still the biochemist Arthur Peacocke (1924–2006) claimed defensible public truth for an ultimate reality based on the ‘supremely’ rational nature of existence; it is the further contention of this paper that there are intelligible patterns to the universe whose discovery is incapable of ‘objective’ explanation. By failing to meet these criteria, however, they do not fall into irrationality, still less do they disqualify or exclude themselves from public consideration; quite the opposite. There are perhaps depths to human experience then, including science, to which an existentialist epistemology is appropriate. In this connection the philosophy of Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) provides a compelling account of the transition of scientific research into aesthetics and theological discourse.