Script and Picture, Visual Poetry (1960-1980s)

One of the extraordinary phenomena of the art of the 1960s in the Euro-Atlantic scene was the renewed interest in the avant-garde, which appeared to the theorists of the time as the most radical and still not exhausted source for existing art. Among them was the study of the relationship between the image and the foundation on which Antique-Christian civilization was built. One of its fruits was, besides a number of other innovations, a massive wave of so-called experimental or visual poetry that explored and expanded new forms of relationship between visualization and text, and in the 1970s resulted in various forms of conceptual poetry.

The original concepts of this relationship in the Czech environment include the lattice poems of Jan Wojnar, which visualized the relationship between two structures. An example of this unusual approach in Czech art is the 1976 Spatial Lattice Poem, which we can look at here. Part of this image-poem is the author's attempt to make the passive viewer an active observer, or "co-author" of the work. So a part of Wojnar's "open works" is also the audience, provided they are willing to accept the "rules of the game". The author extended the issue of an "open work" a few years later to the no less original poem-objects collectively called hourglass poems. Wojnar's extraordinarily extensive work is one of the most original expressions of Czech conceptual art.