The Folded Clock

by Gerhard Rühm (Author/Artist), Alexander Booth (Translator)

Like Kurt Schwitters before him, Gerhard Rühm has incorporated numerals and digits into his visual and aural poetry since the early days of Wiener Gruppe in the 1950s. The Folded Clock brings together these number poems, comprising typewriter ideograms, typed concrete poetry, collages of everyday paper ephemera and scraps, and a wide variety of literary forms where the visual pattern created on the page underpins the thematic meaning. Blurring the distinction between “counting” and “recounting,” his "recitations" imaginatively translate arithmetic vocabulary into the mundane, the existential, or the cosmic, such as a history of the universe narrated as a solar year, from the Big Bang on January 1 to the moon landing in the last seconds of New Year’s Eve. Rühm's images and texts unleash the sensual qualities of numerals to subvert our digit-filled environment with its pervasive intensification of seamless control.

173 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2023

About the author

Gerhard Rühm (Vienna, 12 February 1930) is a writer, composer and visual artist who was part of the Wiener Gruppe. His radically innovative work is largely intermedial. It moves in the borderland of literature, visual art and music.

Rühm studied the piano and music composition at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. Following his studies he undertook private lessons with the twelve-tone composer Josef Matthias Hauer. Since the beginning of the 1950s Rühm has produced sound poetry, spoken word, visual poetry, photomontages and books. He is a co-founder of the Wiener Gruppe (Vienna Group), with Friedrich Achleitner, Hans Carl Artmann, Konrad Bayer und Oswald Wiener, as well as the publisher of an anthology by the same name. From 1972–1996 Rühm taught as a professor at the University of Fine Arts, Hamburg and from 1978–1982 he acted as president of the Grazer Autorenversammlung.

His artistic production is inspired by August Stramm, Kurt Schwitters, Gertrude Stein, Carl Einstein und Paul Scheerbart. Rühm's works are often located at the border between music, language, gestures and the visual. His audible works are outstanding examples of innovative radio plays and acoustic art. During a sojourn in Lebanon he became interested in eastern musical styles.

In addition to producing his own work, which has been recognized by numerous awards and prizes. Rühm is also the administrator of the estate of Franz Richard Behrens and is the publisher of the works of Konrad Bayer. Since 1978 he has been a member of the Freie Akademie der Künste in Hamburg. In 2009 he was awarded the Alice Salomon Prize for Poetics and on January 25, 2010 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Cologne.

His son is the photographer and director David Rühm