Friday, 19 November 2010
Tuesday, 9 November 2010
Rituel somptueux pour la Seclection des Espèces (1965) (2:12) According to Isidore Isou there exists a poetic evolution which, from Baudelaire to Tzara, involves a constant deepening and reduction of the poetic material, from the poem to the phrase, from the phrase to the word, from the word to the phoneme, from the phoneme to the syllable, to the alphabetic letter
The position of the Lettrist International
After our intervention at the press conference held at the Ritz by [Charlie] Chaplin, and the partial reproduction in the newspapers of the tract entitled No More Flat Feet, which revolted against the cult that one communely rendered to this director, Jean-Isidore Isou and two of his followers who grow old underneath the harness have published in Combat a note disapproving of our action in this precise circumstance.
We have appreciated the importance of the works of Chaplin in their time, but we know that today novelty is elsewhere and that "truths that are no longer amusing become lies" (Isou).
We believe that the most urgent exercise of freedom is the destruction of idols, especially when they represent freedom.
The provocative tone of our tract reacts against unanimous and servile enthusiasm. The distance that certain Lettrists, and Isou himself, have been led to take in this case only betrays the always renewed incomprehension between extremists and those who are no longer extremists; between us and those who renounce "the bitterness of their youth" so as to "smile" along with the established glories; between those more than twenty years old and those less than thirty years old.
We only claim responsibility for a text that only we have signed. We have not disavowed anyone.
The diverse expressions of indignation are indifferent to us. There aren't degrees among reactionaries.
We abandon them to the anonymous and shocked crowd.
On 2 November 1952, this text was refused by Combat, in violation of the terms of Article 13 of the Law of 29 July 1881. Eventually published in Internationale Lettriste #1, December 1952
Open letter to Jean-Isidore Isou
Brussels, 3 November 1952.
Our demonstration has only been confused by your ridiculously pragmatic attitude.
Allied to you, as you say, on the basis of new principles of knowledge, I deplore the pettiness and the cowardly puerility that characterize you.
The nullity of your social personality was compensated for by your works, but your discreet route towards an initiate's mysticism and the profound imbecility of certain of your disciplines have a nauseating odor that sickens me.
If you still carry within yourself a message, I will hear it. Because your presence isn't necessary. . . .
Thus please remove me from the list of your friends.
Select feelings,P.S. In your letter to Combat, you say that you were "opposed to our act from the beginning." What then was the meaning of your verbal congratulations, made scarcely an hour after the launching of the tracts?
(Published in Internationale Lettriste #1, December 1952
No More Flat Feet
Sub-Mack Sennett filmmaker,[1] sub-Max Linder actor,[2] Stavisky[3] of weeping unwed mothers and little orphans of Auteil, hail Chaplin, swindler of emotions, master-singer of suffering.
The cinematograph needed its Dellys. You have given it your works -- and your good works.
Since you claimed to stand for the weak and oppressed, attacking you seemed like attacking the weak and oppressed; but some have discerned the cop's nightstick behind the rattan cane.
You are "he who turns the other cheek and the other ass cheek," but we are young and good-looking, and when we hear suffering we reply Revolution.
You are a Max du Veuzit with flat feet, and we don't believe in the "absurd persecutions" you say you are the victim of.[4] The French for immigration service is advertizing agency. The kind of press conference you gave at Cherbourg would turn a complete dud into a sensation, so you needn't worry about the success ofLimelight.[5]
Go to bed, you budding fascist. Make lots of money. Mingle with high society (bravo for the groveling before little [Queen] Elizabeth.) Die soon: we can guarantee you a first-class funeral.
May your latest film be your last.[6]
The footlights have melted the make-up of the supposedly brilliant mime. All we can see now is a lugubrious and mercenary old man.
Go home, Mister Chaplin.
The Lettrist International:
SERGE BERNA
JEAN-L. BRAU
GUY-ERNEST DEBORD
GIL J WOLMAN
The Lettrists disavow the insulters of Chaplin
The members of the Lettrist movement are united on the basis of new principles of knowledge and each keeps his independence as far as the details of the application of these principles. We all know that [Charles] Chaplin was been "a great creator in the history of the cinema" but "the total (and baroque) hysteria" that has surrounded his arrival in France has embarassed us, as does the expression of all mental instability. We are ashamed that the world today lacks more profound values than these, which are secondary and "isolatrous" of the "artist." Only the Lettrists who signed the tract against Chaplin are responsible for the extreme and confused content of their manifesto. As nothing has been resolved in this world, "Charlot" receives, along with applause, the splashes [eclaboussures] of this non-resolution.
We, the Lettrists who were opposed to this tract of our comrades from the beginning, smile at the maladroit expression of the bitterness of their youth.
If "Charlot" must receive mud, it won't be us who throw it at him. There are others, who paid to do it (the Attorney General, for example).
We thus revoke our solidarity from the tract of our friends and we associate ourselves with the homage rendered to Chaplin by the entire populace.
In their turn, the other Lettrists can explain themselves, in their own journals or in the press.
But "Charlot" and all this only constitutes a simple nuance.
JEAN-ISIDORE ISOU, MAURICE LEMAITRE, GABRIEL POMERANDPublished in Combat on 1 November 1952 and reprinted in Internationale Lettriste #1, December 1952
Charles Chaplin in Europe
In 1952 Charlie Chaplin, whose City Lights had been part of Debord's crib-list, visited Europe to promote his new film Limelight. Debord had admired Chaplin for the same reason as Barthes did : because “he shows the public its blindness by presenting at the same time a man who is blind and what is in front of him. To see someone who does not see is the best way to be intensely aware of what he does not see.” Chaplin’s sophisticated portrayal of the pre-proletarian, pre-class-conscious worker had earned him a blacklisting from the United States, where he had recently been denounced as a traitor.But in Europe, Chaplin basked in the glory of still being worshipped. He accepted an audience with the United Kingdom’s new queen, and the prestigious Légion d’Honneur in France. After a press conference in the Paris Ritz on 29 October 1952, Chaplin walked out of the hotel to face an adoring crowd, plus four men called Serge Berna, Jean-Louis Brau, Guy Debord and Gil Wolman, Lettrists all. They hurled abuse at Chaplin and scattered splenetic leaflets which suggested to Chaplin he might not be so welcome among all Parisians :
The point of this stunt was threefold : to turn in an easy target, to destabilise the position of Isou (who played no part in it) as leader of the Lettrists, and to signal the end of Lettrism itsekf. For the Chaplin stunt (and the ICA screening of Hurlements) had both gone beyond Lettrist theories. Isou himself sympathised with his colleagues at the time, but disapproved of attacking Chaplin, who he regarded as untouchable. Debord was unrepentant : “the most compelling exercise of freedom,” he said in the first issue of the Internationale Lettriste, the splinter group formed by Debord after his brutal rupture with Isou, “is the destruction of idols, especially when they speak in the name of freedom.”
Isou and Lettrism were withering, they had become “submissive and graying.” Debord, ever the frosty strategist. was in the ascendant, and the seeds of Situationism had been sown
Slime and eternity / Howls for Sade
Slime and eternity / Howls for Sade
In 1951-52, Isou and Guy Debord, who had recently joined the Lettrist movement (and who would later resign and form his own Lettrist International) made two films which would completely disrupt all classical notions of what a film should include : Traité de bave et d'éternité and Hurlements en faveur de Sade.
The Lettrists recognised that even Dadaist films such as Rene Clair’s Entr’acte, which did away with the demand that cinema should follow a narrative path and somehow “make sense”, had not provoked the kinds of riots that the Dadaists intended, and had become almost reified into the artistic canon – the opposite outcome to the anti-art proposed by the manifesto writers of the movement. If this sort of revolutionary cinema could not be the hammer which would shape a new reality, it was clear that something far more radical had to be done.
The history of cinema in both of its phases is outlined very early in Hurlements, when Debord gives us his cinematic crib sheet :
1902: Voyage dans la lune
1920: Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari
1924: Entr’acte
1926: Battleship Potyomkin
1928: Un chien andalou
1931: City Lights. Birth of Guy-Ernest Debord.
1951: Traité de bave et d'éternité
1952: L’Anticoncept. Hurlements en faveur de Sade.
The films of the very early twentieth century set the template for cinema and Expressionists,. Dadaists, Bolsheviks, surrealists and American social comics have played with the style. Now, in 1951/52, is the time for chiselling to begin. Indeed, the protagonist of Isou’s Traité de bave et d'éternité famously states the Lettrist manifesto :
I believe firstly that the cinema is too rich. It is obese. It's reached its limits, its maximum. With the first movement of widening which it will outline, the cinema will burst! Under the blow of a congestion, this pig filled with grease will tear into a thousand pieces. I announce the destruction of the cinema, the first apocalyptic sign of disjunction, rupture, of this corpulent and bloated organization which is called film.
The chiselling techniques of which Isou speaks and which feature prominently in his film - discontinuity of sound and image, the scratching and tearing of celluloid, the use of flicker and negative sequences - are taken to their logical conclusion in Hurlements, a film with no images, no soundtrack, just voices uttering and repeating legal articles, declarations of love, gnomic edicts (“There is no film. Cinema is dead. No more films are possible. If you wish, we can move on to a discussion”) and surrealist elegies (“Death is like steak tartare”), as if from a disordered script. The film concludes with 24 minutes of imageless silence.
Debord had been attracted to Isou in part because of the way he had taken his film to the Cannes Film Festival in 1951and disrupted every board meeting until his film was shown (or rather heard – only the soundtrack to the film, and not the images, were ready for broadcasting). The Lettrists’ troublemaking had angered and excited people in equal measure, but it certainly attracted attention. With the first showing of Hurlements, Debord took this to its logical conclusion.
During a final silence of twenty-four minutes, when the only sound in the room was the turning of the reel, a member of the audience got up, thanked Mrs Dorothy Morland for an interesting evening and apologised for having to leave early. Everyone else stayed to the end, hoping that a sensational tidbit might still be coming. When the lights went up there was an immediate babble of protest. People stood around and some made angry speeches. One man threatened to resign from the ICA unless the money for his ticket was funded. Another complained that he and his wife had come all the way from Wimbledon and had paid for a babysitter, because neither of them wanted to miss the film...
The noise from the lecture room was so loud that it reached the next audience, queueing on the stairs for the second house. Those who had just seen the film came out of the auditorium and tried to persuade their friends on the stairs to go home, instead of wasting their time and money. But the atmosphere was so charged with excitement that this well-intentioned advice had the opposite effect. The newcomers became all the more anxious to see the film, since nobody imagined that the show would be a complete blank!
- Guy Atkins (with Troels Andersen), Asger Jorn : The Crucial Years, 1954-1964
The second film here is the full version of Hurlements. Sit down and watch it now, in its entirety. Unlike the original audience, you will have the option to pause or stop or fast-forward the film on your laptop. Resist this temptation and watch the whole film.
By its very nothingness, Hurlements fixes the audience’s attention onto nothing but the medium itself – the projector, the screen, the monitor. It is awesomely boring and utterly infuriating, and as such represents the last stage of the chiselling phase. It killed off cinema, just as Finnegans Wake had killed off the novel, and in doing so it all but killed off Lettrism.
In 1951-52, Isou and Guy Debord, who had recently joined the Lettrist movement (and who would later resign and form his own Lettrist International) made two films which would completely disrupt all classical notions of what a film should include : Traité de bave et d'éternité and Hurlements en faveur de Sade.
The Lettrists recognised that even Dadaist films such as Rene Clair’s Entr’acte, which did away with the demand that cinema should follow a narrative path and somehow “make sense”, had not provoked the kinds of riots that the Dadaists intended, and had become almost reified into the artistic canon – the opposite outcome to the anti-art proposed by the manifesto writers of the movement. If this sort of revolutionary cinema could not be the hammer which would shape a new reality, it was clear that something far more radical had to be done.
The history of cinema in both of its phases is outlined very early in Hurlements, when Debord gives us his cinematic crib sheet :
1902: Voyage dans la lune
1920: Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari
1924: Entr’acte
1926: Battleship Potyomkin
1928: Un chien andalou
1931: City Lights. Birth of Guy-Ernest Debord.
1951: Traité de bave et d'éternité
1952: L’Anticoncept. Hurlements en faveur de Sade.
The films of the very early twentieth century set the template for cinema and Expressionists,. Dadaists, Bolsheviks, surrealists and American social comics have played with the style. Now, in 1951/52, is the time for chiselling to begin. Indeed, the protagonist of Isou’s Traité de bave et d'éternité famously states the Lettrist manifesto :
I believe firstly that the cinema is too rich. It is obese. It's reached its limits, its maximum. With the first movement of widening which it will outline, the cinema will burst! Under the blow of a congestion, this pig filled with grease will tear into a thousand pieces. I announce the destruction of the cinema, the first apocalyptic sign of disjunction, rupture, of this corpulent and bloated organization which is called film.
The chiselling techniques of which Isou speaks and which feature prominently in his film - discontinuity of sound and image, the scratching and tearing of celluloid, the use of flicker and negative sequences - are taken to their logical conclusion in Hurlements, a film with no images, no soundtrack, just voices uttering and repeating legal articles, declarations of love, gnomic edicts (“There is no film. Cinema is dead. No more films are possible. If you wish, we can move on to a discussion”) and surrealist elegies (“Death is like steak tartare”), as if from a disordered script. The film concludes with 24 minutes of imageless silence.
Debord had been attracted to Isou in part because of the way he had taken his film to the Cannes Film Festival in 1951and disrupted every board meeting until his film was shown (or rather heard – only the soundtrack to the film, and not the images, were ready for broadcasting). The Lettrists’ troublemaking had angered and excited people in equal measure, but it certainly attracted attention. With the first showing of Hurlements, Debord took this to its logical conclusion.
During a final silence of twenty-four minutes, when the only sound in the room was the turning of the reel, a member of the audience got up, thanked Mrs Dorothy Morland for an interesting evening and apologised for having to leave early. Everyone else stayed to the end, hoping that a sensational tidbit might still be coming. When the lights went up there was an immediate babble of protest. People stood around and some made angry speeches. One man threatened to resign from the ICA unless the money for his ticket was funded. Another complained that he and his wife had come all the way from Wimbledon and had paid for a babysitter, because neither of them wanted to miss the film...
The noise from the lecture room was so loud that it reached the next audience, queueing on the stairs for the second house. Those who had just seen the film came out of the auditorium and tried to persuade their friends on the stairs to go home, instead of wasting their time and money. But the atmosphere was so charged with excitement that this well-intentioned advice had the opposite effect. The newcomers became all the more anxious to see the film, since nobody imagined that the show would be a complete blank!
- Guy Atkins (with Troels Andersen), Asger Jorn : The Crucial Years, 1954-1964
The second film here is the full version of Hurlements. Sit down and watch it now, in its entirety. Unlike the original audience, you will have the option to pause or stop or fast-forward the film on your laptop. Resist this temptation and watch the whole film.
By its very nothingness, Hurlements fixes the audience’s attention onto nothing but the medium itself – the projector, the screen, the monitor. It is awesomely boring and utterly infuriating, and as such represents the last stage of the chiselling phase. It killed off cinema, just as Finnegans Wake had killed off the novel, and in doing so it all but killed off Lettrism.
Amplification and chiselling
This stripping down of artistic forms came about as part of a natural process, and this became the basis of Isou’s all-encompassing theory of amplitude and chiselling. This theory stated that there are two phases to any development, be it artistic, political, economic or whatever. The first phase is called the Amplified phase, and is the period in which the form is born, acquires its vital characteristics and has its basic parameters set. In the case of poetry, for instance, Isou believes the Amplified phase began with Homer. Homer established what poetry is ; those who followed wrote poems according to the Homeric form. But eventually, it becomes impossible to innovate any further. Everything that can be done within the form has been done – any more additions to the canon from this point on are extraneous, “dead commodities”.
At this point the second stage, called the Chiselling phase, begins, whereupon artists must deconstruct the form. Rather than the poem being used to express subjects outside of it, the poem itself becomes its own subject. During the Chiselling phase, language is whittled down to the letter – the indivisible phoneme. The letter is all that is left after the poetic work is thoroughly deconstructed. Once this deconstructive Chiselling phase has been completed, a new Amplified phase may commence, and poetry can be reborn as the purified letter becomes imbued with new (and perhaps negative) meanings.
Lettrist poetry therefore has no meaning in any classical sense. According to the diagram above, which shows the entire Chiselling phase and how it acts upon poetry, writers from the past 100 or so years (all, save Tzara and Isou himself, French) have reduced poetry to the plastic image, then the sonic image, then the word, and finally the letter. Isou has set language free to “digest” new images and meanings, as in the hypergraphic or “superwriting” of Lettrism.
At this point the second stage, called the Chiselling phase, begins, whereupon artists must deconstruct the form. Rather than the poem being used to express subjects outside of it, the poem itself becomes its own subject. During the Chiselling phase, language is whittled down to the letter – the indivisible phoneme. The letter is all that is left after the poetic work is thoroughly deconstructed. Once this deconstructive Chiselling phase has been completed, a new Amplified phase may commence, and poetry can be reborn as the purified letter becomes imbued with new (and perhaps negative) meanings.
Lettrist poetry therefore has no meaning in any classical sense. According to the diagram above, which shows the entire Chiselling phase and how it acts upon poetry, writers from the past 100 or so years (all, save Tzara and Isou himself, French) have reduced poetry to the plastic image, then the sonic image, then the word, and finally the letter. Isou has set language free to “digest” new images and meanings, as in the hypergraphic or “superwriting” of Lettrism.
Debord was directly inspired by Isidore Isou, a Jewish Romanian émigré in Paris, and the founder (and initially the sole member) of the Lettriste movement.
Isou had been inspired by the Italian poet and philosopher Giuseppe Ungaretti, who stated that language is all that stands between mankind and chaos. But in turn, Ungaretti believed (like Debord, and Adorno/Horkheimer, and Derrida later on) that Enlightenment rationalism had turned everyday language into la parola abusata : the deliberate misuse of the word. Writing in the 1930s, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Ungaretti’s apocalyptic message was unmistakable. And Isou, a Jew who had escaped from Nazi-run Romania ten years later at the age of 23, heard it : meaning must be untied from a bastardised language. Poetry must be stripped down to the letter. Only then can a new language be created. Or, as Isou put it, “you couldn’t kill five million Jews and go on living as if nothing had happened.”
Isou had been inspired by the Italian poet and philosopher Giuseppe Ungaretti, who stated that language is all that stands between mankind and chaos. But in turn, Ungaretti believed (like Debord, and Adorno/Horkheimer, and Derrida later on) that Enlightenment rationalism had turned everyday language into la parola abusata : the deliberate misuse of the word. Writing in the 1930s, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Ungaretti’s apocalyptic message was unmistakable. And Isou, a Jew who had escaped from Nazi-run Romania ten years later at the age of 23, heard it : meaning must be untied from a bastardised language. Poetry must be stripped down to the letter. Only then can a new language be created. Or, as Isou put it, “you couldn’t kill five million Jews and go on living as if nothing had happened.”
The Force Fields of Letterist Painting (Excerpts) 1964
I recall quite well this period of experimentation which I passed through in a
special way, thanks to a personal creative method: "doubts," "partial certainties,"
"perplexities," "disenchantments," "discoveries," "assurances;" in
summary all those states of mind defined by an outmoded vocabulary and run
over in a quick new way now come to mind.
I had been wondering how a letter could be just as beautiful as a figurative
or non-figurative object in art, and how a work composed of Roman letters
could touch or even overwhelm an ordinary viewer as much as the mass of
works based on real "things" or qualities conventionally accepted in the minds
of the refined.
For months at the beginning my whole concrete system consisted of the
most banal alphabetic writing. This could naturally be raised up easily in
theory - as was the case later with my first manifesto - by deep, provocative
considerations or by metaphors, but in practice it was nevertheless limited to
being a printer'S specimen book or just pages filled with words - bound together
by some theme, critical or poetic or whatever, which ignored my artistic
efto rt.
No concern for the composition of the line of vowels and consonants, no
care for the arrangement of sentences on the page, and naturally no interest in
color - an easy and underhanded secondary value in my definition of painting
- were present to disrupt my limited task as scribe, my arid research on the
emotive powers of letters, pure letters, letters ripped out of all context, unimproved
by extrinsic values .
For a certain period of time the only innovation came from my poetry, because
instead of transcribing word-texts, I copied phonetic verses, which allowed
me to put my arrangement in the middle of the page instead of filling up
the whole page, isolating certain phonemes or clusters of phonemes according
to the oral impulse, then adding some new signs from the Greek alphabet
or my imagination, which corresponded to sounds that did not exist in the
Roman alphabet.
Naturally when I exhibited these pages and called them "works of art" alii
got was disdainful or knowing smiles, as if I had pulled off a good joke. Not
only in Bucharest, but even in Paris the defenders of "figurative" and "abstract"
modern art always assured me that these creations "were not paintings."
...
Metagraphics or post-writing, encompassing all the means of ideographic,
lexical and phonetic notation, supplements the means of expression based on
sound by adding a specifically plastic dimension, a visual facet which is irreducible
and escapes oral labelling ....
Even from my first metagraphic efforts - because examples can be found in
The Diaries of the Gods and then more conclusively in the self-portrait and
painted photos of Amos - I had noticed that when held up among former
"objective" or "non-objective" forms my original form was stronger, since it
assimilates all the others.
Experiments on "the test of forms" demonstrate that the particles of the
Letterist domain are stronger and more important than the particles of the
figurative and non-figurative domains.
If one places an abstract composition - which is simply a fragmentary
purification of the former object - in (or alongside) a figurative structure, this
second composition digests the first one - transformed into a decorative
motif - and then the whole work becomes figurative. However if one places a
letterist notation on (or beside) a realist "form," it is the first one which assimilates
the second to change the whole thing into a work of hypergraphics or
super-writing.
Pursuing the experiments on the "test of the force of elements" one can
affirm that "a little bit," or "a few drops" of figuration placed anywhere on a
canvas can transform an entire abstract mass into a figurative work and that a
little bit," or "a few drops" of Letterism placed anywhere on any canvas
metamorphose a whole figurative or abstract composition into a Letterist work.
special way, thanks to a personal creative method: "doubts," "partial certainties,"
"perplexities," "disenchantments," "discoveries," "assurances;" in
summary all those states of mind defined by an outmoded vocabulary and run
over in a quick new way now come to mind.
I had been wondering how a letter could be just as beautiful as a figurative
or non-figurative object in art, and how a work composed of Roman letters
could touch or even overwhelm an ordinary viewer as much as the mass of
works based on real "things" or qualities conventionally accepted in the minds
of the refined.
For months at the beginning my whole concrete system consisted of the
most banal alphabetic writing. This could naturally be raised up easily in
theory - as was the case later with my first manifesto - by deep, provocative
considerations or by metaphors, but in practice it was nevertheless limited to
being a printer'S specimen book or just pages filled with words - bound together
by some theme, critical or poetic or whatever, which ignored my artistic
efto rt.
No concern for the composition of the line of vowels and consonants, no
care for the arrangement of sentences on the page, and naturally no interest in
color - an easy and underhanded secondary value in my definition of painting
- were present to disrupt my limited task as scribe, my arid research on the
emotive powers of letters, pure letters, letters ripped out of all context, unimproved
by extrinsic values .
For a certain period of time the only innovation came from my poetry, because
instead of transcribing word-texts, I copied phonetic verses, which allowed
me to put my arrangement in the middle of the page instead of filling up
the whole page, isolating certain phonemes or clusters of phonemes according
to the oral impulse, then adding some new signs from the Greek alphabet
or my imagination, which corresponded to sounds that did not exist in the
Roman alphabet.
Naturally when I exhibited these pages and called them "works of art" alii
got was disdainful or knowing smiles, as if I had pulled off a good joke. Not
only in Bucharest, but even in Paris the defenders of "figurative" and "abstract"
modern art always assured me that these creations "were not paintings."
...
Metagraphics or post-writing, encompassing all the means of ideographic,
lexical and phonetic notation, supplements the means of expression based on
sound by adding a specifically plastic dimension, a visual facet which is irreducible
and escapes oral labelling ....
Even from my first metagraphic efforts - because examples can be found in
The Diaries of the Gods and then more conclusively in the self-portrait and
painted photos of Amos - I had noticed that when held up among former
"objective" or "non-objective" forms my original form was stronger, since it
assimilates all the others.
Experiments on "the test of forms" demonstrate that the particles of the
Letterist domain are stronger and more important than the particles of the
figurative and non-figurative domains.
If one places an abstract composition - which is simply a fragmentary
purification of the former object - in (or alongside) a figurative structure, this
second composition digests the first one - transformed into a decorative
motif - and then the whole work becomes figurative. However if one places a
letterist notation on (or beside) a realist "form," it is the first one which assimilates
the second to change the whole thing into a work of hypergraphics or
super-writing.
Pursuing the experiments on the "test of the force of elements" one can
affirm that "a little bit," or "a few drops" of figuration placed anywhere on a
canvas can transform an entire abstract mass into a figurative work and that a
little bit," or "a few drops" of Letterism placed anywhere on any canvas
metamorphose a whole figurative or abstract composition into a Letterist work.
I've found a bit of Isou's writings in an old art catalogue on Lettrism from the 80's. Isidore Isou wrote:
Characteristics of the New Amplic Phase in Poetry (Excerpt)
By emphasizing again the sound value of poetry, words in their printed form
will not have any meaning that people need to labor over deciphering. Consonants
will become empty, purely auditory, simple lines having physical
meaning only in the listener's ears. By placing value on effects beyond their
usual meaning (in words), poetry will create a new sensitivity. In the place of
the cerebral beauty that was created in the chiseling style of poetry, one responds
simply with direct auditory understanding. It is then a matter of discovering
the unknown abundance of purely oral constructions; of untangling the
intangible accents in vocabulary. Poetry is thus liberated from all prose (reading
for meaning without regard for tones), to become an instrument of lyrical
communication. Poetry realizes its mission which is precisely to broadcast
local imperceptibilities and applied suggestions, because poetry was created
by individuals who wanted to understand each other, sensing the linguistic
vibrations against their palates. Verse is the result of a need to consider the
phonetic effects produced in other people's imaginations.
Letterism intends to introduce this beauty, which is limited in the present
system of oral communication by lack of rules and even of letters. This is why
it is necessary to regu late the stabi lity of auditory frequencies by constructing
elements specially designed for the purpose. It is a matter of enriching the
possibilities for denoting the changes that occur between sound values. These
particles of language, still inferior and unexpressed, must acquire proper signs
so that they can develop in their own category, the auditory.
On Recitation and the Reciter
Based on phonetic accents, the poem becomes dependent on the person
recruiting . The return to what was valuable (sound) as compared to what was
fallacious (signs) signals the final poetic route.
The author - or another person in the role of performer, with a suitable
voice - leans on the expression and the linguistic inflections. A new manner
of reading aloud is to be created, putting it in conflict with the reader.
In the chiseling period , the reader tended to meditate on the meaning ,
forced to read internally, focusing on what the author wanted to express. In the
new amplic phase external focus is exalted, relying on the material, conceived
by the voice and vocal interpretation. Poetry receives the stamp of whoever
reads it and that person 's dramatic talent, not of their intellectual
understandng. In Letterism, effects are established by the expression of the
existing verse and by its coloring. This is just as in music, where the symbols
on a score are devoid of meaning. The notes sound false when there is a correct
understanding but an erroneous interpretation. Henceforth the poem remains
in a book only in gloomy inactivity. It acquires its value in performance,
and each repetition imprints its value on it. The written poem - impounded in
words - has no more meaning than a dead letter.
From Claude Debussy to Isidore Isou (Excerpts)
The destruction of musicality by musicians themselves continues up to the
orchestra of pure and monotone sounds created by Russolo. The Italian
futurist no longer seeks to evoke any emotions. His effort was to work with the
huge number of sounds that did not yet exist as music and to make them
musical. It is against music apparently to call on mechanical means. But these
sounds were prior to mechanics, in primitive shouts. His ensemble of
noise-makers is the anti-orchestra. The howlers, groaners, cracklers, shriekers,
buzzers, gurglers, shouters, whistlers, croakers, and rustlers who made up the
rumorharmonium can be classified in the same shrinking pathway that is pushIng
back towards its orig ins: the voice and noise.9
In justifying this work, music today can be said to be in a phase of plodding
in place. Just as with poetry, with music too people no longer know how to go
forward nor what goal to go after in following this golden line which is the line
of progress and artistic revolution. All that is needed now is to take the final
step, which is the most difficult but the most substantial and rich in promise.
Take up the shout and the voice which are at the origins of music as the
primordial elements of art. After Satie, Schoenberg and jazz, 10 the next step is
easy.
By emphasizing again the sound value of poetry, words in their printed form
will not have any meaning that people need to labor over deciphering. Consonants
will become empty, purely auditory, simple lines having physical
meaning only in the listener's ears. By placing value on effects beyond their
usual meaning (in words), poetry will create a new sensitivity. In the place of
the cerebral beauty that was created in the chiseling style of poetry, one responds
simply with direct auditory understanding. It is then a matter of discovering
the unknown abundance of purely oral constructions; of untangling the
intangible accents in vocabulary. Poetry is thus liberated from all prose (reading
for meaning without regard for tones), to become an instrument of lyrical
communication. Poetry realizes its mission which is precisely to broadcast
local imperceptibilities and applied suggestions, because poetry was created
by individuals who wanted to understand each other, sensing the linguistic
vibrations against their palates. Verse is the result of a need to consider the
phonetic effects produced in other people's imaginations.
Letterism intends to introduce this beauty, which is limited in the present
system of oral communication by lack of rules and even of letters. This is why
it is necessary to regu late the stabi lity of auditory frequencies by constructing
elements specially designed for the purpose. It is a matter of enriching the
possibilities for denoting the changes that occur between sound values. These
particles of language, still inferior and unexpressed, must acquire proper signs
so that they can develop in their own category, the auditory.
On Recitation and the Reciter
Based on phonetic accents, the poem becomes dependent on the person
recruiting . The return to what was valuable (sound) as compared to what was
fallacious (signs) signals the final poetic route.
The author - or another person in the role of performer, with a suitable
voice - leans on the expression and the linguistic inflections. A new manner
of reading aloud is to be created, putting it in conflict with the reader.
In the chiseling period , the reader tended to meditate on the meaning ,
forced to read internally, focusing on what the author wanted to express. In the
new amplic phase external focus is exalted, relying on the material, conceived
by the voice and vocal interpretation. Poetry receives the stamp of whoever
reads it and that person 's dramatic talent, not of their intellectual
understandng. In Letterism, effects are established by the expression of the
existing verse and by its coloring. This is just as in music, where the symbols
on a score are devoid of meaning. The notes sound false when there is a correct
understanding but an erroneous interpretation. Henceforth the poem remains
in a book only in gloomy inactivity. It acquires its value in performance,
and each repetition imprints its value on it. The written poem - impounded in
words - has no more meaning than a dead letter.
From Claude Debussy to Isidore Isou (Excerpts)
The destruction of musicality by musicians themselves continues up to the
orchestra of pure and monotone sounds created by Russolo. The Italian
futurist no longer seeks to evoke any emotions. His effort was to work with the
huge number of sounds that did not yet exist as music and to make them
musical. It is against music apparently to call on mechanical means. But these
sounds were prior to mechanics, in primitive shouts. His ensemble of
noise-makers is the anti-orchestra. The howlers, groaners, cracklers, shriekers,
buzzers, gurglers, shouters, whistlers, croakers, and rustlers who made up the
rumorharmonium can be classified in the same shrinking pathway that is pushIng
back towards its orig ins: the voice and noise.9
In justifying this work, music today can be said to be in a phase of plodding
in place. Just as with poetry, with music too people no longer know how to go
forward nor what goal to go after in following this golden line which is the line
of progress and artistic revolution. All that is needed now is to take the final
step, which is the most difficult but the most substantial and rich in promise.
Take up the shout and the voice which are at the origins of music as the
primordial elements of art. After Satie, Schoenberg and jazz, 10 the next step is
easy.
BIO:
Born Isidore Goldstein in Botosani, Romania, on 29 January 1925. He moved to Paris on 23 August 1945, after the liberation of the city from Nazi occupation. Shortly thereafter, he meets Gabriel Pomerand (another Jewish refugee), and founds "lettrisme." The first public manifestation of the new artistic movement takes plaves on 8 January 1946 at the Societes Savantes, where Isou reads his poems aloud. The next year, Gallimard publishes his Introduction to a New Poetry and a New Music, which contains "Manifesto of Lettrist Poetry." He would eventually publish over 200 books, containing his "hypergraphic" writings, "metagraphic" images, plays, theoretical writings, polemics, wall posters, etc. In 1950, the Lettrist group also included Maurice Lemaitre, Jean-Louis Brau, Gil J Wolman, and Francois Dufrene; in 1951, Guy Debord would join. Despite the formation of the Lettrist International in 1952, Isou's lettrist group would continue through the rest of the decade. He died in Paris on 28 July 2007.
Little part form the "Lipstick traces" Greil Marcus
Isidore Isou was born in Romania in 1925. He came from a petit-bourgeois Jewish family and he was raised as a prodigy. He read narly everthing, as he would never cease to tell anyone who read him (citing not only the authors he mastered but how many pages of each he chalked up), and at the age of seventeen, on 19 March 1942, he discoverd a theory of culture and the meaning of life.
Manifesto
Lettrist provocation always serves to pass the time. Revolutionary thought is not elsewhere. We pursue our little uproar in the limited beyond of literature, and it is necessary to do better. Naturally it is to reveal ourselves that we write manifestos. Impertinence is a quite beautiful thing. But our desires are perishable and disappointing. Youth is systematic, as one says. The weeks spread themselves out in straight lines. Our encounters are by chance and our precarious contacts lose themselves behind the fragile defense of words. The earth turns as if nothing exists. To say it all, the human condition doesn't please us. We have dismissed Isou, who believes in the utility of leaving traces. All that maintains something contributes to the work of the police. Because we know that all the ideas and behaviors that already exist are insufficient. Thus, current society divides itself into lettrists and informers, of whom Andre Breton is the most notorious. There are no nihilists, there are only powerless people. Almost everything is off limits to us. The abuse [detournement] of minors and the usage of narcotics, like all of our gestures generally speaking, are pursued to surpass the void. Many of our comrades are in prison for theft. We stand against the pains inflicted upon the people who have become aware that it isn't absolutely necessary to work. We refuse discussion. Human relations must have passion, if not terror, as their foundation.
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