Folded Clock, The

Inspired by Kurt Schwitters, Gerhard Rühm has incorporated numerals and digits into his visual and aural poetry since the 1950s. These number poems comprise 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.