The Ernst Jandl Show

An exhibition of the Wien Museum and the Ludwig Bolzmann Institute for History and Theory of Biography in collaboration with the Austrian National Library.

Ernst Jandl (1925-2000) became famous with his sound and recitative poems. As a brilliant performance artist he made the audience both laugh and think, sometimes even to rave and riot. He crossed the boundaries between poetry, performance, music and the fine arts and moved effortlessly in the world of the international avant-garde. His texts combine wit with existential gravity, delight in language with political commitment. Jandl enthuses – almost like a pop star – a broad public that spans generations and language barriers. Always on the search for new forms of expression, he wrote poems in everyday idiom, experimental prose, radio plays, theatre plays, film screenplays and even a ballet. He translated works by avant-garde artists such as Gertrude Stein and John Cage. Over decades the passionate jazz fan collaborated with musicians, his literature is closely linked to music, Jandl’s voice “is like several instruments yet to be invented” (Jürg Laederach).

The Ernst Jandl Show stages Jandl’s work in all its many voices, its cosmopolitanism and intermediality, with sound and film recordings, photographs and documents from Jandl’s life, some of them unknown, as well as many unpublished texts. Jandl as an artist is revealed, who worked at the interface of text, sound and image, and whose innovative power impacted everyday life. For the first time, besides Jandl’s “Greatest Hits”, fascinating material from his estate – managed by the Literature Archive of the Austrian National Library – is presented to the public. Thereby it becomes clear just how much Jandl’s life and writing are infused into one another. A homage to the most popular Austrian lyricist after 1945, who died ten years ago and would have celebrated his 85th birthday this year.

The exhibition is a joint project of the Wien Museum and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for History and Theory of Biography in collaboration with the Austrian National Library. Yet more Jandl is on offer in the high-quality, comprehensive accompanying programme specially conceived for children and youths. Many of the artists taking part are former associates of Jandl or have studied in depth the writer and his work.