Maintenant #47: Anatol Knotek
I think that visual poetry, after a surge in the 50s and 60s, stagnated somehow (with some exceptions) by the end of the 20th Century. Thanks to the Web a lively community has been formed in recent years. Due to the fact I consider “Visual Poetry” as a hypernym, the styles and expressions of individual artists differ very much, but I believe that all have the common goal to take this art form to the next level. The new chances provided by social networking, the innovative possibilities of computers and the Internet in general open up new dimensions for the artists and especially the visual poets…
I think there could be a new discovery, almost a renaissance, of visual poetry and I am convinced that the potentialities of this movement are far from exhausted.
In the 47th of the Maintenant series SJ Fowler interviews the Austrian poet and artist Anatol Knotek.
Eight Poems
My interest in visual poetry arose relatively late, about ten years ago. In my youth I mainly painted and I was much more interested in fine arts than in literature. My pictures were particularly shaped by influences of late 19th and early 20th century paintings. Subsequently I started with text collages and concrete poetry. After meeting the Austrian poet Peter Daniel, and a trip to Jürgen Blum and his “Open Book” (concrete poetry on more than 100 house facades) in Hünfeld (Germany), I realized the great fascination of visual poetry for myself. From then on I worked primarily in that field and began, still strongly oriented to the visual language of figurative painting, to “write” images… My goal is to express ideas, strongly bound to written, spoken and visual language, and restrict myself as little as possible in “style issues”.
By Anatol Knotek.