Vizuální poezie a výtvarné umění
Visual Poetry and Fine Art

Summary/Abstract: Bohumila Grögerová and Josef Hiršal, while working in the 1960s on their own experimental poetry and on the exploration of the meaning of words, also focused on their optical side, on the visual poem. The emphasis on the visual side of the text, words and even letters, is often connected in the modern period with efforts to “revise” language, with its liberation from worn-out clichés. Visual poetry endeavours to find its new meaning through an awareness of the optical form of words or of letter order, and pictures in which traditional meaning is suppressed. The methods of visual poetry corresponded to visual art at that time, especially neo-constructive tendencies (for example, those of Zdeňek Sýkora). The two fields made use of mathematical principles of combinatorics, which brought them close from the point of view of form. These parallel paths even led to the involvement of space in poetry and, conversely, temporality in pictures. The order and rational composition of the picture and text were later exchanged for the principle of chance, which helped to relax the strictly mathematical procedures. Bohumila Grögerová and Josef Hiršal subsequently returned to the semantics of words. Despite this return to the communicability of texts, the earlier cleansing of the word by its reduction to its elementary elements was not wasted. It focused on the basic elements and the visual effect each of them made individually; the concentration on their pure existence transformed the way they were perceived. The connection between the word and the image did not remain just a past event even once this programme had been logically exhausted, but returned in new forms, and possibly even for the same reasons.

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