Reading: Vienna Group

The Wiener Gruppe (Vienna Group) — Friedrich Achleitner, H. C. Artmann, Konrad Bayer, Gerhard Rühm, Oswald Wiener — was formed between 1952 and 1955 from a circle of avant-garde artists associated with the Viennese “Art-Club”. Despite all their dissimilarities, they shared a common emancipatory literary concept, engaging in a radical examination of the most diverse areas of language and translating them into aesthetic functions. The texts they produced are correspondingly diverse: sound poetry, text montages, vernacular poems, visual and audio texts, plays, chansons. What gives the group its coherence, though, are its members’ kindred artistic tendencies as well as numerous collaborative works, a specific phenomenon of cooperation that developed, almost perforce, from the particular methods they worked with, such as montage. Even seventy years after the establishment of the Wiener Gruppe, the texts have lost none of their aesthetic radicalism. Gerhard Rühm’s anthology, which was first published in 1967, appears in a new edition for a new generation of readers.
Text: Friedrich Achleitner, H. C. Artmann, Konrad Bayer, Thomas Combrink, Elfriede Jelinek, Gerhard Rühm, Oswald Wiener