Průřez

Gerhard Rühm (*1930) is one of the key figures of the European literary neo-avant-garde. He studied music, specialised in dodecaphony and oriental musical practices, was a member of the legendary Wiener Gruppe in the 1950s and 1960s, later worked in Berlin and Hamburg, and now lives and works in Cologne. His work is characterised by intermedia between language and music, and between language and image. He writes poetry, prose, dramatic texts, compositions for piano, and has created a number of remarkable radio plays, chansons and musical compositions, visual compositions, collages, and prints. His texts are based on linguistically reflexive movements such as concrete poetry or Dadaism, while influences of surrealism or black romanticism are also evident in the Wiener Gruppe period. Rühm still manages to provoke: among other things, he ingeniously works with pornographic motifs, pokes fun at Christianity, and often invokes the aesthetics of ugliness, vulgarity or banality. However, provocation is never an end in itself in his work; in principle, he points out that there is nothing that cannot become part of the poetic universe. For all the range of media and subject matter, Rühm is paradoxically a minimalist, a creator who can coax poetic effect from a simple pencil stroke or a correctly pasted word. At the centre of his work is always the highest sensuality or sensoriality of aesthetic perception, the maximum contact with language and its planes in time and space.

Czech edition