This article reflects on the specifics of the neo-avant-garde and experimental poetry in general, and especially on Slovenian experimental poetry from the 1960s. It is about the literary artistic ...movement known as OHO, which is discussed in the article through the specific case of Geister's poetic manifesto Word and Image (Beseda in slika). It discusses the linguistic, spatial, social, and counter-anthropocentric turn within this poetry. The article shows how this poetry differs from tradition; that is, from the poetry of high modernism and the historical avant-gardes, although it shares many common features only with them. The starting point of the discussion is the belief that the term modernism is an umbrella label for a number of literary approaches and trends that differ considerably, and that historical avant-gardes can undoubtedly be catalogued under this aegis. Nevertheless, the article recommends consistent distinctions between "high modernism," historical avant-gardes, neoavant-gardes, and experimental poetry. From the theoretical point of view, it refers to the work of Marjorie Perloff, an American literary critic and theorist of Austrian origin that developed a thesis on the two traditions: Eliot's (modernism) and Pound's (avant-garde) in contemporary AngloAmerican poetry. From the historical point of view, the article builds on the work of Michel Foucault and his The Order of Things (Les mots et les choses). Hence, it can properly illuminate the complexity of relationships that are woven between words, images, and objects into art in general and poetry in particular. The thesis on the specificity of experimental poetry is derived on the one hand from the reading of Derrida's notion of writing, as developed by the philosopher in his book Writing and Difference (Ecriture et différence)-especially in the chapter "Freud and the Scene of Writing," where the phenomenon of writing is observed and thematized through Freud's work The Interpretation of Dreams ("Traumdeutung). On the other hand, the thesis is developed further by taking into account the comprehension of the phenomenon of avant-gardes by German literary historian and theorist Peter Bürger and by French philosopher Alain Badiou.
Experimental poetry highlights the hidden nihilistic essence of the neoliberal paradigm or modern scientific capitalism "after the end of history." By highlighting the structure of the bare signifier ...(without speech, without meaning) as a spatialization of the fundamental cut of (experimental) poetry and the deconstruction of the trace of the ontoteleological signification of the absent presence, god, the truth, and so on, in the structure of the sign that it performs, the signifier is established as the "space" of the truth of the essence-that is, as a live, creative, and essence-based alternative to the aggressive destruction and exploitation of global mercantilism. The author analyzes in great detail a poem by the founder of the OHO movement, Iztok Geister, and a poem by his close colleague Ales Kermauner, pointing to the fatal historical poetic turn produced by the experimental poetry of both poets in light of the deconstruction of the trace in both the narrow sphere of the literary-history re-memorizing of this poetry and the problematic general devaluation of poetry as the primary, suppressed ethical and sociopolitical abyss of the essence in the communication of the global cybernetic civilization. Both suggest a realistic revolutionary essence of experimental poetry, which academic circles have in vain sought to suppress or erase from the literary-history canon; from a wider perspective, the dominant media are also failing in their engagement to effectively eliminate it from the serious sociopolitical and financial-economic dialogue. Experimental poetry reveals a different and more fatal truth or essence of "literature," the world, and the relations in the world than the one sold by modern scientific and technical neoliberalism. However, the reality of the revolutionary utopia is that experimental poetry has already been created.
This paper discusses the artistic procedure in general and the contemporary artistic procedure with "anti-art works," which opened up conditions for "general skepticism" in the arts. Here, the ...question "Who chooses" concerns art institutions that maintain the reproduction of the art system despite the revolt of "anti-artistic'' production. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Nevromat Neur-O-Matic, Lenka Đorojević & Matej Stupica, produced by Ljudmila Art and Science Laboratory and Projekt Atol Institute, 2014. An OHO Group Award winner.
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