The Slovenian poetic Neo-avant-garde of the 1960s–1970s as a manifestation of freedom

Abstract

The article deals with the development of the Neo-avant-garde movement within Slovenian poetry during the “Thaw” and the “Lead” decade. The artistic practice of its representatives I. Geister, A. Kermauner, F. Zagoričnik, V. Kovač-Chubby, M. Hanžek, T. Šalamun, based on radical linguistic and visual experiments as a form of aesthetic freethinking, developed in line of the reism (reificationism), freeing an object from its function, a word from the meaning, a person from being limited by social roles. Significant for the Neo-avant-garde was the collective creative activity of the artistic and poetic group OHO, ideologically connected with the student opposition movement. The conceptual foundations of the group’s program were outlined in a manifesto published on the pages of the Tribuna newspaper. It deals with the study and application in art of such innovative components of poetics as line, letter, sound, syllable, word, geometric figure, repeatability, cyclicity. Combining the sound and the visual, the authors of the manifesto —an artist and a poet— emphasized the material and the sensual side of poetry, its embodiment through listening, vision and movement. They also drew attention to a new way of creating a work of art—the principle of verbo-voca-visualization. This principle is at the core of the collective works by “ohoevites” EVA (1966), Katalog I (1968), Katalog II (1969).

Received: 16.02.2023.

Citation
Starikova N. N. The Slovenian poetic Neo-avant-garde of the 1960s–1970s as a manifestation of freedom // Slavic Almanac. 2023. No 1–2. P. 249–267 (in Russian). DOI: 10.31168/2073-5731.2023.1-2.3.01