material

Edition MAT was one of a series of projects Daniel Spoerri managed in the late 1950s that straddled the visual arts, poetry, and theater. In 1958, while working as an assistant to the theater director at the Landestheater in Darmstadt, Germany, Spoerri launched the experimental concrete poetry journal material. Although he had hoped to publish it on a bimonthly basis—with contributions by poets, writers, designers, and those active in modern theater, radio, and architecture—only four issues were released. The first issue, coedited with the poet and dramaturge Claus Bremer, was an anthology of concrete poetry―a form of visual poetry concerned with language and sound as well as the graphic layout of linguistic elements. Contributors included Josef Albers, Bremer, Eugen Gomringer, Dieter Roth, Spoerri, and others. The form of the journal encouraged the active involvement of the recipient. “Each of the texts has a different layout,” Spoerri explained. “These are arranged in one of sixteen different directions on square pages and in random order. Therefore, the journal has no beginning and no end, no top and no bottom. The reader’s activity alone is what determines the direction.” The second issue was devoted to the poetry of Dieter Roth, the third to the work of Emmett Williams, and the final issue included poems by Gherasim Luca and an object by Pol Bury. With its international network of contributors and variable, interactive format, material directly anticipates the slightly later Edition MAT. The link between these two projects was made explicit in Spoerri’s choice of the name Edition MAT, which intentionally repeated the first three letters of the title of the journal.

Image credit

material, no. 1, 1957. Journal, 7 7/8 x 8 1/4 in. (20 x 21 cm). Edited and published by Daniel Spoerri, Darmstadt, Germany. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.