Avant-garde poetics are universally associated with the hybrid and the intermedial, with transgressing artistic and media boundaries, with probing the limits of art and everyday life, with combining materials from different categories, orders (and disorders). Such observations are at the same time cliché and yet still require further clarification. However, it is difficult to make any definite and conclusive statements – avant-garde threads are constantly being woven into new textual and artistic fabrics. In this issue of Forum of Poetics, we reflect on the many different (neo)avant-garde connections and interweavings, pointing to relationality as one of the main features of the (neo)avant-garde.
The articles in this issue analyze artifacts that combine different artistic threads in one “body.” We investigate poetics which combine different media (logovisual, polymedial, intermedial poetics and works of art) and different artistic renditions of the (neo)avant-garde “sister arts,” focusing specifically on images that enter into complex relationships with words. Drawings (Ilse Garnier’s spatial verbal-linear works; Paweł Kłudkiewicz’s logovisual urban story), contemporary poetry book cover ideas, and photographs (including Darek Foks’s multimodal photobooks) are analyzed. Respectively, the relationship between text and body (in Garnier’s works but also in Weronika Lewandowska and Sandra Frydrysiak’s VR art), poetry and matter (seams on the spines of (neo)avant-garde books rich in semantic potential), and prose and its digital media (the still unexplored works of Andrzej Falkiewicz) are also investigated. Last but not least, we also analyze how literature functions on the Internet (Tomasz Pułka’s blogs).
The featured authors also analyze how interwar avant-garde threads are (re)used in contemporary art – they are still incredibly durable, surprisingly strong, and extremely interesting. Asking about the motivation and meaning behind inspirations from more than a century ago, the featured authors reflect on the aesthetic and social impact of contemporary art. They investigate the complicated and multi-faceted relationships with the avant-garde tradition in the works of contemporary writers, poets, and illustrators. They are interested in artists who engage in a creative dialogue with interwar works: some “write” over historical texts (Marcin Mokry, as inspired by the poetics of Tadeusz Peiper) and others play with the key features of avant-garde poetics and visual arts (Kłudkiewicz and his constructivist work). New research discoveries are also made, as scholars return to texts that have been for many years ignored in literary studies. For example, the interwar works of Alicja Stern demonstrate that entering into (parodic) relationships with different threads of avant-garde poetics and using interpersonal relationships as the raw material of art had always been the features of the literary avant-garde.
Finally, the retrogarde, an artistic trend active in the second half of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st century, is also analyzed. In this context, it is interesting to see the surprisingly subversive practices of reproduction, interception, and translation as… a happening (Andrzej Sosnowski and Tadeusz Pióro’s translation of John Ashbery and James Schuyler’s A Nest of Ninnies).
In contemporary readings, (neo)avant-garde threads inevitably intertwine with the most important threads from which the contemporary humanities has been woven. The essays featured in this issue of Forum of Poetics also engage in a dialogue with feminist discourses and make a significant contribution to somatopoetics, intermediality, digital humanities, and transhumanism. They also make contributions to philology (including the “subfield” of digital philology), translation studies, and the field of genetic criticism. The featured articles – and the texts they examine – touch upon poetics and politics, perceptual communities and intimate experiences.
Indeed, the avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde still talk about things that are important to us. They lend themselves to the study of poetics in relation – and in action.
Table of Contents:
Alina Świeściak, Marcin Mokry – a new Peiper?
Agnieszka Karpowicz, Hoża in color: At home in the avant-garde
Jakub Skurtys, What is the little thread doing? On a few (neo-)avant-garde projects
Anna Kałuża, Poetry as mixed media: Darek Foks’s Eurydyka [Eurydice]
Paulina Chorzewska-Rubik, Tomasz Pułka’s personal blogs – concepts and notebooks