Passionately Cool: Concrete Poetry in Denmark

TY - CHAP

T1 - Passionately Cool

T2 - Concrete Poetry in Denmark

AU - Ørum, Tania

PY - 2019

Y1 - 2019

N2 - The cool minimalism of the 1960s and 1970s was an attempt to democratise art and open the work to the audience. From a general socio-political perspective it was part of the struggle to overturn hierarchies and create a shared activism that would bring about a new society and world order. The cool media of the art scene were thus part of a passionate political movement. Concrete poetry wanted to foster a new corporeal sensibility that would involve readers in the performative completion of the work, as an erotic act of reading as well as a personal act of imagination. But readers were not necessarily willing to step into the “open work” and provide the bodily warmth and mental energy needed to see the “undramatic emptiness” of concrete poetry as “attractive or even beautiful” and to imagine “what sense of life is implied” (Nielsen). Although both writers and theorists imagined the “new cycle of relations between the artist and his audience”, the “new mechanics of aesthetic perception”, and the resulting “different status for the artistic product in contemporary society” (Eco) would happen spontaneously as part of the ongoing social and technological changes, more time and training was needed for such avant-garde practices to become sufficiently familiar for readers to recognise the warmth beneath the cool surface.

AB - The cool minimalism of the 1960s and 1970s was an attempt to democratise art and open the work to the audience. From a general socio-political perspective it was part of the struggle to overturn hierarchies and create a shared activism that would bring about a new society and world order. The cool media of the art scene were thus part of a passionate political movement. Concrete poetry wanted to foster a new corporeal sensibility that would involve readers in the performative completion of the work, as an erotic act of reading as well as a personal act of imagination. But readers were not necessarily willing to step into the “open work” and provide the bodily warmth and mental energy needed to see the “undramatic emptiness” of concrete poetry as “attractive or even beautiful” and to imagine “what sense of life is implied” (Nielsen). Although both writers and theorists imagined the “new cycle of relations between the artist and his audience”, the “new mechanics of aesthetic perception”, and the resulting “different status for the artistic product in contemporary society” (Eco) would happen spontaneously as part of the ongoing social and technological changes, more time and training was needed for such avant-garde practices to become sufficiently familiar for readers to recognise the warmth beneath the cool surface.

KW - Faculty of Humanities

KW - cool

KW - nordic

KW - concrete poetry

KW - Vagn Steen

KW - Hans-Jørgen Nielsen

KW - Per Højholt

M3 - Book chapter

T3 - F I L L M Studies in Languages and Literatures

BT - Cool Nordic

A2 - Hermansson, Gunilla

A2 - Lohfert Jørgensen, Jens

PB - John Benjamins Publishing Company

ER -