Category Archives: avant-garde

To Have Done With the Judgment of god

Antonin Artaud’s radiophonic play ‘To Have Done With the Judgment of god‘.

This work was shelved by Wladimir Porché, the director of the French Radio, the day before its scheduled airing on February 2, 1948. The performance was prohibited partially as a result of its scatological, anti-American, and anti-religious references and pronouncements, but also because of its general randomness, with a cacophony of xylophonic sounds mixed with various percussive elements. While remaining true to his Theater of Cruelty and reducing powerful emotions and expressions into audible sounds, Artaud had utilized various, somewhat alarming cries, screams, grunts, onomatopoeia, and glossolalia.

Artaud coined the term body without organs in this radio play.

Two excerpts and the full text here.

“I deny baptism and the mass. There is no human act, on the internal erotic level, more pernicious than the descent of the so-called jesus-christ onto the altars.
No one will believe me and I can see the public shrugging its shoulders but the so-called christ is none other than he who in the presence of the crab louse god consented to live without a body…”
…
All this is very well,
but I didn’t know the Americans were such a warlike people.
In order to fight one must get shot at
and although I have seen many Americans at war
they always had huge armies of tanks, airplanes, battleships
that served as their shield.
I have seen machines fighting a lot
but only infinitely far
behind
them have I seen the men who directed them.
Rather than people who feed their horses, cattle, and mules the
last tons of real morphine they have left and replace it with
substitutes made of smoke,–Artaud via [1]

Icons of erotic art #6

The work I present today is erotic and sad at the same time. Its eroticism is implied by its transgression, most transgressions are erotic by nature. For its sadness, you only need to look at the facial expressions of Valie, the “toucher” and the bystander.

Valie Export‘s Tapp- und Tast-Kino (“Touch Cinema”) a piece of performance “body art”, was performed in ten European cities in 1968-1971.

Valie Export built a tiny “movie theater” around her naked upper body, so that her body could not be seen but could be touched by anyone reaching through the curtained front of the “theater”. She then went into the street and invited men, women, and children to come and touch her.

The context of “Touch Cinema” was the bra burning feminism professed by New York Radical Women and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch.

Free Radicals

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaYi6FlB4cw]

Scrub to 3:30 for immediate access to Free Radicals (an instant dance music classic)

The phrase “free radical” got stuck in my head, and Googling for it brought up a 1958 film by New Zealand experimental filmmaker Len Lye, titled Free Radicals. The film features white ‘chalk’ lines constantly moving on a black background with African drums (‘a field tape of the Bagirmi tribe’) playing throughout. The film won second prize out of 400 entries in an International Experimental Film Competition judged by Man Ray, Norman McLaren, Alexander Alexeieff and others, at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. In 1979 Lye further condensed this already very concentrated film by dropping a minute of footage. Stan Brakhage described the final version as “an almost unbelievably immense masterpiece (a brief epic)’. I could not agree more.

Italian white noise and avant-garde exploitation

“In 1951, the first electronic music studio was conceived from scratch at the WDR Radio of Cologne (Germany) to enable the composition of electronic music sounds. Briefly, the concept of studios evolved up to the 1955 design of the Phonology studio in Milan by Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna. With nine oscillators, various filters and other sophisticated equipment , the presence of a technician/musician (Marino Zuccheri), the studio was the best equipped in the world at that time.” via usoproject

You may also know Bruno Maderna from his work on Death Laid an Egg.

Good night, sleep tight.

La morte ha fatto l’uovo (1968) – Giulio Questi

Cinematic effects in pre-cinema literature

Karl Friedrich Schinkel

Morning (1813) Karl Friedrich Schinkel

Der letzte Mann

The Last Laugh (1924) – Murnau

The link between these two pictures is The Haunted Screen, 1952 a film history book by Lotte H. Eisner, which I acquired over the weekend, and which holds that “it is reasonable to argue that the German cinema is a development of German Romanticism, and that modern technique [cinematography] merely lends visible form to Romantic fancies.”

A revelation to me were Eisner’s reflections on cinematic effects in pre-cinema literature in such romantic novels as Lucinde, Flegeljahre and Heinrich Von Ofterdingen.

Cherchez la femme #1

Colette Peignot

Unidentified photo of Colette Peignot sourced here.

“I believe in our life together . . . I believe in it the way I believe in everything that brought us together: in the most profound depths of your darkness and of mine. I revealed everything about myself to you. Now that it gives you pleasure to laugh at it, to soil it––this leaves me as far away from anger as it is possible to be. Scatter, spoil, destroy, throw to the dogs all that you want: you will never affect me again. I will never be where you think you find me, where you think you’ve finally caught me in a chokehold that makes you come. . . . As for me I am beyond words, I have seen too much, known too much, experienced too much for appearance to take on form. You can do anything you want, I will not be hurt.” Colette Peignot in a letter to Georges Bataille via Laure: The “True Whore” as Muse by Jason DeBoer

Laure [Colette Peignot] began her affair with Bataille in 1934, and it proved to become one of the more tormented love stories of modern letters. Their correspondence reveals a mutually influential sharing of transgressive ideas: she was the woman of action, and he was the man versed in scholarly knowledge. Her uncompromising, anguished lifestyle proved very inspirational to Bataille, especially Laure’s own infatuation with the sacred and communication, two important ideas in Bataille’s later work. —source

Colette was born 104 years ago today.

Everything you know is wrong: uncanny Spoerri

An Anecdoted Topography of Chance

An Anecdoted Topography of Chance by Something Else Press

Perhaps Spoerri‘s fascination with displacing the horizontal with the vertical began when he created the first “tableau-piège” in 1960, “The Resting Place of the Delbeck Family”, by gluing a number of dinner-table objects on a board [1] and then hanging it on a wall. Or it could have begun with “Dylaby” in 1962 [2], in which he turned the orientation of a whole room clockwise. Objects as well as actors were put in a horizontal position whereas the visitors stayed vertically according to gravity. Being the only ones that had this orientation they felt wrong however.

Enrico Baj

What follows are some notes on Baj with pointers to some interesting paintings. I can’t remember when and where I first discovered Baj. Perhaps through Virilio, or by way of Topor or Joe Colombo?

Kitsch by Dorfles

Kitsch (1968) – Gillo Dorfles

Enrico Baj (October 31, 1924 – June 16 2003) was an Italian avant-garde artist and art writer. Baj’s work shows similarities with Jean Dubuffet, Roland Topor and the COBRA group. It has a grotesque quality. Baj has also collaborated with Paul Virilio in a book on art horror, Discourse on the horror of art.

The book on Enrico Baj I bought today is an edition by Ronny van de Velde. Its title is Modifications. It is the catalog of an exhibition which was held in Antwerp in 1998. (détrompe l’oeils or modifications by Daniel Spoerri, Enrico Baj and Asger Jorn). It brings to the fore a to me unknown fascination of Baj with kitsch in his paintings from the 1959-1964 period. One of the paintings shown, the 1968 “Miss Paganini Non Ripete” depicts UFO’s superimposed on the same painting that Gillo Dorfles used on the cover of his 1968 book Kitsch, an anthology of bad taste (shown above). Many paintings in Modifications have this same working method, works of bad taste “detourned” by Baj.