Dieter Roth, Gorgona artists group

From 1961 to 1966, Gorgona published eleven issues of the “anti-magazine” Gorgona. Unlike other art periodicals, it did not offer scholarly essays or reproductions of art; instead, each issue was prepared as an original artwork by a single artist. Contributors included members of the core group as well as international artists like Dieter Roth, Harold Pinter, and Victor Vasarely. Josip Vaništa conceived the first issue, which consisted of the same photograph of a shelf in an empty shop window, repeated on every page. Julije Knifer designed the second issue, filling it with what he called a “meander”—a serpentine black line on a white field.

When Roth first started making concrete poetry, in the mid-1950s, he termed his compositions “ideograms.” In them, pictures are formed out of letters, punctuation, or other letterset characters. As the rigor of this exercise began to wear on him, he found release in a visually related but philosophically distinct activity, making what he called “stupidograms.” Working from a grid of printed commas, he used a pen or pencil to coax out looping chains, teacups, toothbrushes, and other forms, mimicking word-search games. As part of his increasing play with verbal-visual equivalency, here the artist circled punctuation to form pictures rather than circling letters to form words.