Christian Ide Hintze

Biography

Between 1972 and 1974 Christian Ide Hintze worked as a Super-8 filmmaker and street singer in Scandinavia, England, France and Spain, between 1974 and 1978 – in addition to studying theater and communications at the University of Vienna – as a distributor of megaphone, poster and leaflet texts in Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Holland. His actions resulted in numerous charges of "obstructing pedestrian traffic" and "contamination of public buildings". In 1976 he was arrested and interrogated by the police in East Berlin. In 1978 he was expelled from the book fair in Stuttgart and convicted of criminal damage in Vienna (for pasting banners, posters and poems onto the Burgtheater). In 1979 the Austrian filmmaker Alfred Kaiser published a film about his work in public spaces.

In the 1980s Hintze undertook several 'pilgrimages' to the Greek island of Lesbos to celebrate his favourite poet, Sappho, and created a series of multi-media poem cycles ("tetralogies"), using "gestures", "graphemes", "phonemes", "audio", and "video" as elements. The works oscillate between semantic and non-semantic structures and are multilingual. They have been presented at ateliers, festivals and public areas and have led to collaborations with Allen Ginsberg, Henri Chopin, Emil Siemeister and Falco. "What Ide aims at is a poetry to be perceived not only with the brain, but also with the whole body; the sensorial poetry, capable of achieving the 'communication monopoly' he had long pined for."

In 1984 Hintze built a poet's temple near the underground station of Karlsplatz in Vienna. The "LI-TE“, a closed-circuit installation in public space, consisted of 4 letter sculptures, a wooden trumpet cross and a hut where the author lived and worked for three weeks. The temple was sponsored by GRUNDIG-Austria and had 3 live cameras and 11 monitors equipped to run the 16 video loops.

"The golden flood", a volume of written poetry that portraits the conditions of vagrancy, appeared in 1987, was translated into several languages and received comprehensive reviews in Germany, Switzerland, Cuba, Vietnam and Argentina. "His searches have something in common with the best "exteriorismo" of Nicaraguan poetry (Cardenal, Coronel Urtecho) or with the striking uninhibitedness of the American "beatnik" movement." "Pindar, Klopstock, Whitman, Rilke, Eliot, Ginsberg, Brinkmann. It is to this tradition that Hintze’s book "The golden flood" belongs."

In 1993 Hintze undertook, at the invitation of Miguel Barnet and the Cuban writers’ union UNEAC, a reading tour of Cuba. In the same year he taught, as the first Western author, at the Institute of Literature Nguyên Du in Hanoi (Vietnam). In 1995 he was the first German-language author who taught at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado (USA). In 1996, he was the co-initiator of the "escuela de poesía" in Medellín (Colombia)

His project "Writing in Water" was realized in 1998 in the spa Oberlaa, Vienna. Hintze wanted to find out whether the emergence of language and phenomena such as rhyme and refrain have something to do with the phylogenetic origin of man out of water.

In 2004 he took part in the Austrian pre-selection show of the Eurovision Song Contest and reached the third place. His contribution, the song "Link Love!", is a statement against racism and for mutual cultural understanding. The text consists of multilingual versions of "I love you".

In 2008 and 2009 he presented his concept of a "7fold poetics" at the Orivesi college of Art, the University of Barcelona and at the Poetry Festival in Oslo. Hintze considers the genesis of poetry to comprise 3 stages (mythical: oral-performative poetry, historical: literary poetry, digital: multi-media poetry) and introduces 7 categories of creation and communication: acoustic, visual, literary, performative, interactive, infrastructural and instructive. "Hintze's unusual theory holds that only after a long period of domination by writing, with the discovery of new media, audio and video tapes, and subsequently of digital technologies and the internet, did poetry return to its roots."

Christian Ide Hintze engages in language policy, propagates lower case writing, organizes cross-cultural events and has run, since 1992, the vienna poetry school. Those who have taught there include Allen Ginsberg, Humberto Ak'abal, Nick Cave, H. C. Artmann, Anne Waldman, Blixa Bargeld, Falco, Wolfgang Bauer, Fernando Rendón, Henri Chopin, Ed Sanders, Ayu Utami and Inger Christensen.

Hintze's works have been presented at festivals and exhibitions in Hall in Tirol (1974), Esslingen (1976), Vienna (1981), Ljubljana (1983), Turino (1984), The Hague (1985), Tokyo (1986), Bern (1987), Buenos Aires (1993), Stockholm (1993), Medellín (1995/1996/2011), Rosario (1996), Berlin (1998), Barcelona (2000), Jakarta (2001), Milano (2007), Novi Sad (2008) and Oslo (2009).

Selected works

Teachings

Editor (selection)

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