"Das Offene Buch" of the town of Hünfeld

The gateway into the urban museum

Since 1996, Hünfeld has been developing into an open-air museum of the other kind. The “Concrete Poetry”, a stream of literature called into life by Eugen Gomringer, adorns numerous facades in the town. The idea for that came from artist Jürgen Blum, a motor of Concrete Art. In cooperation with the Museum of Modern Art headed up by Blum, he began to realise the “Open Book” in Hünfeld together with Karl Möller and Elmar Wald.

The goal: An immediate, direct encounter with art. The onlooker is confronted by literature in everyday life, when shopping or out for a walk. For the visitor, art means feeling, sensing or positioning themselves. Texts by Eugen Gomringer, Václav Havel, Shalom Sechvi and many others have already been affixed on 86 of a planned 100 facades.

“The Open Book by Jürgen Blum, “Mit dem Offenen Buch”, realises an idea I was confronted with in the 1960s. It was all about creating more attention in public for thoughts in text form. Texts in concrete, visual, experimental and active poetry should be affixed on free facades of a town and accessible to everyone."

(Jürgen Blum)

And that town is Hünfeld, an Open Book one has to walk into. There is no shelf where one could otherwise place it.