The straightforwardness of the photos and the easy to grasp recognizability of the subject matter is a prerequisite for their suitability for combination as ‘image building blocks’.²⁸ By joining the individual images into four-part constellations, a ‘fifth image’ appears. This demands a different gaze than the individual photos viewed in isolation, and functions in a different manner.²⁹ Firstly, the picture poems resist a reception aimed at a finalizing definition of meaning: the constellation of identically formatted images in a closed, rectangular block facilitates mutual correspondences in every direction between the four images. It does not give viewers any means of orientation for their task of reading and combining, such as that given by a sequential ordering (in a photo book, for example), in a hierarchical arrangement, or in a traditional compositional organization of the picture.

Secondly, a clearly definable semantic field can also only rarely be deduced by means of content-based and thematic connections or by means of formal relationships between the individual components of a quadripartite picture. Although both are involved in every picture poem, it is rare that all four elements can be ‘read together’ in this way. Thus Cibulka often uses the defining graphic and coloured elements of the images to establish correspondences and connections between neighbouring components. There are also metaphoric and metonymic analogies or threads to be found. Thus the search for interconnections and for meaning is stimulated without resulting in a definitive final outcome.³⁰ In this their potentially unresolvable nature, the picture poems are to be seen as radical, in a literal sense – a radicalness that is quasi hidden in the ‘surface’ of the four components and that only enters the awareness through active (‘creative’) observation.

Assembled into a unit, the individual images function as the active ingredients of a composition that should evoke feelings, empathy, association and memories related to past sensory perceptions. The kinship with poetry, cuisine and other forms of art and productivity reveals itself here – also in regards to the diversity of Cibulka’s own highly varied oeuvre. It is this activity based on the concept of synaesthetic transgressions ‘in the service of a heightening of experience which is an aim symptomatic of the avant-gardes of the twentieth century’ that makes the picture poem paradigmatic for his, from the ‘dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk’ influenced, work.³¹

As has already been mentioned, Cibulka developed his montage idiom by productively exploiting impulses from the writers of the Vienna Group as well as the cinematic avant-garde. Dealing with the Notenbild-Verbarien, a group of literary works, Michael Ponstingl has shown how Cibulka developed a production or note key system from the Schubert song Der Müller und der Bach (The Miller and the Brook) by translating its melody, sequence of notes, repetitions and pauses into a coded ordering scheme.³² Every note that appears is assigned to a particular semantic field (‘crying’, for example). Different semantic units are then developed for each field (lines of poetry, such as ‘suck up snot, sob, grimace’). These finally produce a poetic text in the sequence of Schubert’s notes, for example, Zeilen zu einem Notenbild (1974). In addition to these ‘algorithmically assembled’ poems, there are other groups of texts, such as Freie Reihungen (Free Sequences) and Texturen (Textures), which are in contrast ‘instinctively assembled’.

A comparison with the montage technique that Cibulka applies in the production of the picture poems reveals that it does, in fact, involve the establishment of a structural plan independent of theme – the arrangement of four landscape-format, colour prints, whose print quality is determined by their being commercially processed – which is maintained for many cycles of picture poems. Nonetheless, it includes the step of classifying the accumulated pool of pictures according to specific criteria, which, however, are drawn from the pictorial material itself. Cibulka describes the recollection of the specific, remembered pictorial energies of individual shots as the decisive preparatory phase.³³ Sometimes, he creates lists of themes, according to which he then sorts the photos for a series, an intermediary step not usually made public.³⁴ The concrete form of Cibulka’s work in assembling the individual picture poems remains in the end far more difficult to grasp than in the case of the literary Notenbild-Verbarien, as it is neither predefined nor open retrospectively to reconstruction.

In order to strictly adhere to the concept of ‘methodical inventionism’ (methodischer Inventionismus), the method used to bring those fragments (of reality) collected in the pool into their final constellation has to be independent of both their material source and the subjective decisions by the artist.³⁵ Neither is the case in Cibulka’s production of pictorial constellations. His intention is not an ignoring of the artist-subject, but rather an art production that among other things precisely reveals the difficulty at the heart of the constitution of the subject, the dilemma between conscious decision/action and subjection/surrender. The existential theme of reaction is therefore also central to his artistic practice. In Cibulka’s picture poems, this is addressed equally by means of two different idioms: an empathic, intuitive approach, expressed in a ‘photographic dialect’, as well as also a reflexive handling of the collected material by means of the montage technique.

Even if the circumstances of Cibulka’s life (his conscious choice of the rural area where he lives, his wedding, his children, his dog, his travels) represent important impulses for his artistic production and are implicitly thematized in his picture poems, it is not the case that a biographical or decidedly subjective perspective plays any role. Cibulka neither reveals details of his personal life in his picture poems, nor does he himself (ostentatively) appear as a portrayed person.³⁶ Even in series such as Hochzeit (Wedding) or Gebären (Giving Birth), which obviously derive from personal experiences, the theme is treated in terms of an existential experience and not as a diaristic narrative drawn from an individual biography. In later works, there is a noticeable but not substantial change in this respect.³⁷

As an artist-subject Cibulka acts (and reacts) primarily within the scope of the production process – and as such only indirectly appears in the photographs, picture arrangements and picture cycles. Here he functions, so to speak, as a representative of the subject per se, of humanity in its existential condition, whereby it must be emphasized that Cibulka does not lay any claim to universal validity. In the individual photos, or that is, in the gaze that becomes manifest in them, this is revealed in the manner described above. In the picture poems, the artist-subject manifests itself precisely at that point where Cibulka, in the course of the montage process, while sorting, classifying, and coming to a concrete decision about the combination of four photos, departs from a conceptual rigour (that of ‘methodical inventionism’, for example) and in doing so, generates a semantic openness which analysis cannot eliminate.

When he describes this phase of his work in metaphors of bodily or organic processes (ingestion, inflammation, excitation...), it becomes clear that it is principally the ‘artist’s body’, in any event the corporeal sensibility of someone who can be said to have achieved artistic maturity through Actionism, which generates that filter that determines the final arrangement of the material. (‘Artist’s body’ is not to be understood as a reduction of the artist to nothing but somatic reactions; instead, it points towards a holistic concept of the subject, which also includes bodily aspects.) Insofar as Cibulka either assumes that the same sensibility is present in the viewer or seeks to activate it by means of the picture poems, one could also speak of his constellations, in a more general sense compositions, as ‘compostings’. The material used is as ‘unpolluted’ as possible (here, in the sense of being free of narrowly defined tendencies in style, pictorial politics and subjectivism); the waste material (not in the pejorative sense, but in the sense of footprints, traces, metonymic signs) of a relevant reality is prepared and arranged (much like a gardener does) in order to initiate productive processes of fermentation and transformation in the viewer.

In the context of an investigation of Cibulka’s montage work, a further point of reference, one already mentioned, needs to be more concretely elaborated: impulses drawn from the cinematic avant-garde as represented by Peter Kubelka. When one thinks of Kubelka’s best-known films, Adebar (1957) and Schwechater (1958), it is difficult to make a connection between the metric montage techniques used and their – eminent – cinematic articulation, and Cibulka’s picture poems. Those characteristics that are most likely to have inspired Cibulka in his conception of the picture poems can be best summarized by referring to an early film that Kubelka and Ferry Radax made together: Mosaik im Vertrauen (1954). Here we find an anti-linear chronological structure, a plot that is of an anti-psychological character and an anti-logical narrative strategy that has been condensed and displaced by means of metaphors and metonymies; we also find a tendency to abstraction, a utilization of found footage and an emphasis on individual elements which seem to be assembled in the manner of a mosaic (and which also make themselves clear in the film through incongruences in picture and sound).³⁸

Specific features that also appear in other avant-garde films are likewise to be found within the universe of Cibulka’s picture poems. These include the incorporation of a crude image quality (e.g., in the form of a lack of focus or imperfect production – or sometimes even bleached colours) that produces semantic gaps, a white noise. Finally, there are iconographic details inside Cibulka’s thematic fields that perhaps do not seem likely, or at least in my perception (which I allow myself, in keeping with Cibulka’s offered of ‘clouds of association’) appear conspicuous: cuts and shots – fresh wounds; the splitting and cutting of animals to be butchered and meat; men aiming weapons; football players shooting goals.

At this point, it can be argued that montage plays a fundamentally different role in film than in work based on the static image. The presentation and reception of films is bound to the conditions of the successive flow of the moving image over a given period of time. In the medium of film, the editing technique of montage plays a constitutive role, inasmuch as it defines the rhythm of the film, the length of the shot and so on. The avant-garde film-makers’ assault on the various kinds of maelstrom effects of traditional narrative cinema develops within this medium-specific framework, also when this is subjected to a (media-) critical analysis.³⁹ For this reason, a comparative analysis of cinematic and pictorial montage is generally only productive to a certain extent, even though it sheds light here on comprehensible propinquities.

Peter Kubelka’s position was a fertile source of inspiration for Cibulka’s conception of the picture poem montage because Kubelka particularly concentrated on the individual image in both his production processes and theoretical discussions. The process of analysing and classifying motifs in preparation for his editing sequences thus played a role similar to that which it later played in the production of Cibulka’s picture poems. Kubelka orientated himself on the montage theories of Sergei Eisenstein and on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. The concept that the construction of meaning finds its source in the confrontation of contrasting elements is of central importance. Meaning does not reside within a semantic (linguistic or cinematic) structure, but appears through the reception of the constellation existing between its components.⁴⁰ Presumably, Kubelka thus also provided Cibulka with the impulse to include that narrow, cruciform gap between every picture poem’s four individual photos through which the white of the mounting board can be seen.

A comparison of Cibulka’s montage work with the photomontages of Gerhard Rühm stands to reason.⁴¹ Rühm combines multiple individual images within each work; these are organized on sheets of paper in constellations that cannot be read linearly and typically display a contrastive, metaphoric, or metonymic arrangement. His pictorial material also often refers back to acoustic and tactile perception. In addition to affinities with Cibulka’s picture poems, there are also striking differences: Rühm uses images cut out of magazines and books, and creates each constellation individually. Various formats, determined by the nature of the cuttings, are employed. Furthermore, Rühm sometimes cuts an image in two or includes the same images in several copies. In terms of motifs, he focuses on pin-ups and often spectacular, even shocking, images, such as those of deformed embryos, accidents, and pornographic fantasies. In this way, the dispositives and the ‘viewing regimes’ of a manifold mediatized reality are thematized, which Rühm elaborates on ad absurdum.

In the seventies and eighties, there was a large number of other Austrian photographers working with tableaus based on the combination of individual images, such as Cora Pongracz, Peter Dressler, Friedl Bondy-Kubelka and Paul Albert Leitner. However, in spite of various specific points of similarity to be found between their work and the picture poems, the independence of Cibulka’s position remains striking in this context as well. As already explained, the picture poems’ distinct structure is primarily the result of Cibulka having developed this form through the influence of Actionism and avant-garde film – and not from the more narrow field of artistic photography. The picture poems’ content-related dimension, as well as Cibulka’s specific interest in reality and his access to it, deserve particular attention.