Edition S Press

“Poems that one has to hear”: the Edition S Press was a publisher of experimental literature, Concrete Poetry, Beat Poetry, and Poetry Performance; from 1970 to 2005, it focused on acoustic art. By issuing tape recorders, audio cassettes, video cassettes, and media packages, it opened up new pathways for the dissemination of artists’ publications.

Particular focuses of attention are on series of works by artists from Europe, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Most of them arose in the era of the Cold War, when there was an ongoing confrontation between the great powers and war was in the air. As if beneath a magnifying glass, the story of this publishing enterprise recounts a history of resistance and of subversive strategies realized in poetical and radical acoustic works. The exhibition formulates this narrative in works by more than fifty artists, including John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, John Giorno, Eugen Gomringer, Raoul Hausmann, Ernst Jandl, Friederike Mayröcker, Andrej Monastyrski, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Meret Oppenheim, Dmitri A. Prigrov, Lev Rubinstein, Patti Smith, and Anne Waldman.