Category Archives: theory

Happy birthday Piero Simondo!

Piero Simondo is a founder of the Situationist International. He turns 80 today.

1957 Guy Debord photographed by Ralph Rumney, with Piero Simondo at Cosio d'Arroscia, Italy

1957: Piero Simondo and Guy Debord photographed by Ralph Rumney at Cosio d’Arroscia, Italy. [1]

Situazionisti

The founders of the Situationist International at Cosio d’Arroscia, in April 1957[3]. From left to right; Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, Piero Simondo, Elena Verrone, Michele Bernstein, Guy Debord, Asger Jorn and Walter Olmo.

Sholem Stein has recently noted that Situationist practices continue to influence underground street artists such as gHOSTbOY, Banksy, Borf, and Mudwig, whose artistic interventions and subversive practice can be seen on advertising hoardings, street signs and walls throughout Europe and The United States. The aforementioned use stencil graffiti.

“Carrier/Carrière is surrealist in drowning”

In the history of 20th century subculture, the surreal sensibility, and Surrealism in particular takes center stage.

Surrealism itself deserves a decentralized and regionalized historiography.

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Polish surrealism for example brings the work of latter surrealist Jacek Yerka[1].

More than just a celebration of the new, Surrealism sought to find itself in the past and opened a revisionist approach to historiography. It sought to trace a sensibility in retrospect.

Faustino Bocchi

Faustino Bocchi (ill. above) would have been dubbed surrealist, if Breton had known him.

Arcimboldo

Arcimboldo (ill. above) would have been dubbed surrealist, if Breton had known him

In “What is Surrealism?” Breton defines what we can label proto-Surrealism.

See the insets for the Carrier/Carrière debate

“Young‘s Night Thoughts are surrealist from cover to cover. Unfortunately, it is a priest who speaks; a bad priest, to be sure, yet a priest.
Heraclitus is surrealist in dialectic.
Lully is surrealist in definition.
Flamel is surrealist in the night of gold.
Swift is surrealist in malice.
Sade is surrealist in sadism.
Carrier is surrealist in drowning.
Monk Lewis is surrealist in the beauty of evil.
Achim von Arnim is surrealist absolutely, in space and time
Rabbe is surrealist in death.
Baudelaire is surrealist in morals.
Rimbaud is surrealist in life and elsewhere.
Hervey Saint-Denys is surrealist in the directed dream.
Carroll is surrealist in nonsense.
Huysmans is surrealist in pessimism.
Seurat is surrealist in design.
Picasso is surrealist in cubism.
Vaché is surrealist in me.
Roussel is surrealist in anecdote. Etc.”

This list comes from a lecture given by Breton in Brussels in 1934, either on May 12 or June 1 of that year, and published as a pamphlet immediately afterwards by René Henriquez, with as cover art Magritte‘s The Rape, which was created for that purpose. The enumeration in the lecture harks back to a list published in the first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924.

Other versions exist, one was published in the “Surrealist Number” of This Quarter. Another version was translated to Czech and published as “Co je surrealismus?” (1937), with a cover by Karel Teige. This list reprised the 1924 version.

Many of the names on the list are obscure, but I have managed to track all … but one.

When Breton says “Carrier is surrealist in drowning,” I have no idea who he means. Apparently, I am not the only one.

Marguerite Bonnet says in the 1975 André Breton: naissance de l’aventure surréaliste

… “Nous n’avons pas encore retrouvé le texte français de cet article, dont la version anglaise donne au « nom « Carrière » que Breton a corrigé en Carrier”
… “We have been unable to find the French text of this article, of which the English version gives as name Carrière, which Breton later correct as Carrier”

If Bonnet confesses that she could not find the French text (published by René Henriquez) there is even more room for confusion. The “Surrealist Number” (1932) of Parisian “little magazine” This Quarter‘ (edited by Edward W. Titus)[2]; and André Breton: naissance de l’aventure surréaliste [3] each mention additional names such as Helen Smith (surrealist in tongue), Uccello (in the free for all fight), Radcliffe (in the landscape), Maturin (in despair); and can’t agree on the spelling Carrière/Carrier.

Manny Farber (1917 -2008)

Manny Farber is dead, reports the film blog Elusive Lucidity[1].

Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies (1971) – Manny Farber [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Manny Farber (1917, Douglas, Arizona, United States –August 17, 2008) was an American painter and early nobrow film critic. He taught at the University of California San Diego alongside Raymond Durgnat, Jean-Pierre Gorin and Jonathan Rosenbaum.

His film criticism has appeared during stints at The New Republic (late 1940s), Time (1949), The Nation (1949-54), New Leader (1958-59), Cavalier (1966), Artforum (1967-71). He has also contributed to Commentary, Film Culture, Film Comment, and City Magazine. He contributed art criticism to The New Republic and The Nation during the 1940s through 1950s.

His 1957 essay “Underground films: a bit of male truth” coined the term underground film.

In his essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” originally published in 1962, he eloquently championed B film and under-appreciated auteurs and coined several terms, such as termite art and monsterpieces.

Postwar film critics and theorists of his stature have included Parker Tyler, Edgar Morin, Amos Vogel, Ado Kyrou and Raymond Durgnat while his closest ally in music criticism was the untimely departed Lester Bangs.

Most of Farber’s film writing has been collected in Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies (depicted above).

Most of the evening was spent on

Most of the evening was spent on researching JRMS interview[1] with Gilbert Alter-Gilbert:

Genealogy of the Cruel Tale by you.

Gilbert Albert-Gilbert’s Genealogy of the Cruel Tale from Bakunin v.6, 1997) [1]

and especially Gilbert‘s intriguing “Genealogy of the Cruel Tale“[2] a perfect example of the kind of thematic literary criticism I’m rather fond of. The chart reminds of the aestheticization of violence and cruelty in general, of which Nietzsche said:

“One ought to learn anew about cruelty,” said Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil, 229), “and open one’s eyes. Almost everything that we call ‘higher culture‘ is based upon the spiritualizing and intensifying of cruelty….”

For your pleasure, here is the wikified version (information is scarce on the 20th century authors mentioned):

Overview

Genealogy of the Cruel Tale is a chart by American intellectual Gilbert Alter-Gilbert documenting the origins of the cruel tale, which begins etymologically with Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam‘s Contes cruels anthology and has content- and style-wise similarities with cult fiction and horror fiction, Dark Romanticism and the roman frénétique, black humor, transgressive fiction, grotesque literature and folk tales. Sholem Stein says that it is a continuation of the research done by Breton in Anthology of Black Humor. Texts such as Walter Scott‘s On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition, Lovecraft‘s Supernatural Horror in Literature, Mario Praz‘s Romantic Agony and Todorov’s The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre also come to mind. Notably absent is Sade.

Taxonomy

Most of the afternoon has been spent on

Charles Nodier. Infernaliana. Ed. Belfond, Coll. Poche-club fantastique n°42, 1966.

Charles Nodier‘s Infernaliana

Most of the afternoon has been spent on literary lunatics and morosophy, inspired by researching Charles Nodier‘s Infernaliana[2], brought to my attention by Au carrefour étrange[3]. One encounters[4] the recently discovered but already inevitable JRMS[5] on the way. Do listen to the latter’s current Studio One muxtape[6].

Les Hétéroclites et les fous littéraires is the subtitle of issue IV of Pauvert's Bizarre (April 1956), is dedicated to literary lunatics.

I’m kind of happy that I managed to dug out the special issue Hétéroclites et fous littéraires[7][8] from Bizarre at L’Alamblog and particularly satisfied with my translation of the French-language Wikipedia article on “literary lunatics“:

Fous littéraires is a French term used to denote outsider writers who have failed to attract any recognition, not by the intellegentiae, not by the public, not by art critics, not by publishers (since they are largely self-published), and which treat subject matter considered – at least by those who qualify these writers as fous littéraires – as offbeat and amusing, without this being the intention of the author. A prime example in this category is Jean-Pierre Brisset, French author of Les dents, la bouche, a poem which is untranslatable due to its reliance on paronymy.

The study of literary fools starts in 1835 with a bibliography compiled by Charles Nodier (Bibliographie des fous : De quelques livres excentriques, published by Techener in 1835) and is continued in 1880 with Gustave Brunet (aka Philomneste Junior) in Les Fous littéraires, essai bibliographique sur la littérature excentrique, les illuminés, visionnaires, etc., published by Gay et Doucé in 1880.

In the 1930s, Raymond Queneau continues the projet by spending years of research at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, fruits of which include Les Enfants du limon[9] (1938) and the posthumously published Aux Confins des Ténèbres, les fous littéraires.

Oulipo's official photo, taken in 1975, Georges Perec occupies the eleventh position from the right (counting the head of André Blavier on the table).

Official Oulipo photo, André Blavier in cardboard cutout on table

In 1982 Henri Veyrier published Les Fous littéraires, a work of Belgian surrealist André Blavier[10], a continuation of his predecessors (and work he had published in Hétéroclites et fous littéraires in Bizarre of April 1956) with an augmentation by Malombra/Roger Langlais estate. This veritable encyclopedia features more than 1000 pages and 3000 reviewed “auteur“s. It features inventors of perpetual motion, theorists who claim the answer to squaring the circle, the inexistence of hell, universal languages, the structure of the universe, medicine, algebra or human sexuality.

In 2007, a group of French-language writers, found the IIREFL (Institut international de recherches et d’explorations sur les fous littéraires, hétéroclites, excentriques, irréguliers, outsiders, tapés, assimilés, sans oublier tous les autres…) or in English: International Institute for Research on Literary Lunatics, Outsiders, Weirdoes, Assimilated, say nothing of the others….

Proving that I do venture outside at times:

DSC00812

after Sherrie Levine, after Edward Weston

Taking photos of photos seems to be my thing. With my new camera, after Sherrie Levine, after Edward Weston, I took a picture of this polaroid[11] by Guy Bourdin (Bourdin used the pola in [12]) yesterday night (which was museum night) at the Antwerp fotomuseum. There are some more of my snapshots of Bourdin’s polaroids[13].

DSC00816

2008 art intervention at MuHKA

My friend and I also had our picture taken[14] at the Guillaume Bijl installation TV Quiz Decor[15]. We were chased away by a museum attendant, but I managed to soothe her saying it was an art intervention.

Bertrand Russell’s bad breath and Wittgenstein’s repressed sexuality

The Words by Sartre

Les Mots by Sartre

I bought and read Eco’s On Ugliness last Christmas, and a couple of days ago, a Sartre quote collected in that book resurfaced. The quote was taken from Sartre’s autobiography The Words and considers the smells of his childhood; the pleasant odors of women and the unpleasant but more serious odors of men. And then the bad breath of his schoolmaster which Sartre relished as the odor of learning and virtue.

I decided to investigate and Googling for Sartre and bad breath brings up The Great Unwashed[1], an article by Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty:

“…Russell had such bad breath that Lady Ottoline Morrell refused to sleep with him for a while. Sartre was disgustingly dirty, and Connolly, left bathroom detritus in the bottom of his host’s grandfather clock ”

Etymologically attributed to Edmund Burke, the great unwashed is a phrase used to denote the populace, particularly the working class.

But here Doniger refers to the book Intellectuals by Paul Johnson which investigates the personal lives of philosophers and authors such as Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Brecht, Bertrand Russell, Sartre and Edmund Wilson, to name but a few.

Sartre, Connolly and Russell’s peculiarities remind me of toilet philosophy and embodied philosophies, but also calls into question the supposed gap between art and life (i.e. the space where Robert Rauschenberg liked to work) and the conflicting views of the New Critics and later the neoformalists who wish to excise all autobiographical details from philosophical arguments; vs the hermeneutic and Freudian approaches, which dare to augment the text with its paratext.

I am all for the latter interpretive methods (also because of the prevalence of the former in Anglo-American philosophy), a key factor in this conviction was Colin Wilson‘s reading of Wittgenstein‘s philosophy in The Outsider. Conventional sources will point you to the Heidegger / nazism debacle, but the Wittgenstein example is much more enlightening because Wilson links Wittgenstein’s homosexuality with his reluctance to speak the unspeakable and his eventual arrival at the maxim in the Tractatus:

“What can be said at all can be said clearly; and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.”

This phrase rendered Wittgenstein famous but is due to his repressed sexuality argues Wilson via Bartley.

“Bartley‘s comment [on Wittgenstein’s homosexuality] help us to understand Wittgenstein’s attitude to philosophy. Wittgenstein possessed the disposition that is often found in saints and ascetics: a powerful craving for meaning and purpose, and immense self-disgust at his own failure to find them. […] It was this sense of failure, of living on the brink of an abyss, that produced in Wittgenstein the craving for certainty that led him to create the philosophical system of the Tractatus.” —Colin Wilson via The Misfits

and

“[In the Tractatus], Wittgenstein was led to define truth as tautology – a mere repetition of the same meaning. […] Wittgenstein agrees that there is such a thing as religious truth and ethical truth. But he insists that it cannot be put into words, and that any philosopher who thinks he is talking about these great universal truths is merely deceiving himself. —Colin Wilson via The Misfits

Hauntology’s preoccupation with the aesthetics of death in a post-9/11 world

Both Sam Shackleton‘s “Hypno Angel”[1] and Kode9 and Spaceape‘s “9 Samurai”[2] feature references to Chopin‘s Funeral March[3]. The first quite literally at 3:12 in the track, the latter throughout the recording.

Both tracks are in the dubstep genre, dubstep is related to hauntology. Both these two recording exemplify hauntology’s preoccupation with the aesthetics of death in a post-9/11 world. Musical hauntologists are advised to read the music sections in the as of yet untranslated French book Principles of an aesthetics of death, with its references to the “Funereal” outings of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin (“Funeral March“) and Schubert (Death and the Maiden [4]).

In the hauntosphere, Esotika has a post on hauntology and John Maus.[5]

Beyond the critical theory babble, “Hypno Angel” and “9 Samurai” are excellent dub music recordings.

I am not a bibliophile

On intertextuality and litblogging


[Amazon.com]
[FR] [DE] [UK]

When I wrote a couple of months ago, echoing Grillet, that I am not a cinephile[2], I meant that I am interested in more than films, but more on the lookout for certain sensibilities which also steer my publication bias. By the same token, I am not a bibliophile. But I love books, and books is mainly what I’ve bought the last couple of years. By books I do not necessarily mean fiction (have you ever noticed how reading has come to equal reading fiction?), I only read fiction when on holiday. When I do read fiction, I love metafiction, which can consist of a number of varieties. One particular variety is fiction steeped in the history of literature. The first one I consciously read of this type was probably Erica Jong‘s Fear of Flying in the summer of 2006.

A book of pure intertextuality has recently been brought to my attention: Montano’s Malady by Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas. On the book’s intertextuality Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading notes that Enrique Vila-Matas is a writer “who entertains the notion that contemporary literature amounts to scribbling in the margins of the great works.”[3] and Melissa McClements in the Financial Times adds:

“Some of the other writers and literary thinkers referred to in just the first 25 pages [of Montano’s Malady by Enrique Vila-Matas] include Spanish poet Justo Navarro, Argentine novelist Ricardo Piglia, Mexican writer Sergio Pitol, French surrealist Jacques Vaché, Italian humorist Achille Campanile, Marxist literary critic Walter Benjamin, New York literary critic Harold Bloom, Chilean poet Gonzalo Rojas, French poet Arthur Rimbaud, Czech writer Franz Kafka, American poet Ezra Pound and, most tellingly, Jorge Luis Borges, the giant of 20th-century Latin American literature, famous for his self-reflexive, labyrinthine fiction.” —Melissa McClements in the Financial Times via This Space[4]

Books such as Montano’s Malady teach you about literature (what I usually expect of non-fiction) while still manage to entertain.

A great way to learn about literature today is to read litblogs (please note how the list of litblogs[5] has defied Wikipedia’s notability criteria). The first litblog I started to frequent was The Reading Experience in May 2006 (when I was researching literary realism).

Other litblogs friendly to Jahsonic (or vice versa) are The Existence Machine [6], This Space[7], The Reading Experience[8], Tales from the Reading Room[9], and the Spanish Portuguese and Spanish language blogs Livros de Areia [10], Pimenta negra[11] and Moleskine Literario[12].

But the blog which informs me most consistently of literature, and in my own tongue, is De Papieren Man[13].

Please forgive me if I’ve left out fellow-traveling litblogs.

Stanley Kubrick @ 80

Kubrick For Look

Stanley Kubrick would have been 80 today if he hadn’t died in 1999, aged 70. So today marks the 10th anniversary of his death.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBT__4ldjAs&]

The dark tower monolith scene, sound: Requiem by György Ligeti

I’ve previously mentioned[1] my disenchantment with Kubrick and “modernist film” in general (an exception needs to be made for its deviant siblings). His work is of course incontournable, as the French say, but 2001 is one of the most boring films I’ve ever seen and only comes close in tediousness to Citizen Kane.

Nevertheless, as all flawed products, 2001 has one or two redeeming elements:

2001′s soundtrack did much to introduce the modern classical composer György Ligeti to a wider public, using extracts from his Requiem (the Kyrie), Atmosphères, Lux Aeterna and (in an altered form) Aventures (though without his permission).

To conclude: a good YouTumentary the significance of 2001[4] by Collective Learning by Rob Ager