The Aesthetics of Matter: Modernism, the Avant-Garde and Material Exchange 9783110317534, 9783110317374

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The Aesthetics of Matter

European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies Etudes sur l’avant-garde et le modernisme en Europe Studien zur europäischen Avantgarde und Moderne Edited by Sascha Bru and Peter Nicholls Editorial Board Jan Baetens ‧ Benedikt Hjartarson ‧ Tania Ørum ‧ Hubert van den Berg Advisory Board Dawn Ades ‧ Wolfgang Asholt ‧ Karlheinz Barck † ‧ Henri Béhar ‧ Timothy O. Benson ‧ Günter Berghaus ‧ Matei Calinescu † ‧ Claus Clüver ‧ Antoine Compagnon ‧ Eva Forgács ‧ Cornelia Klinger ‧ Rudolf Kuenzli ‧ Bruno Latour ‧ Paul Michael Lützeler ‧ Laura Marcus ‧ Richard Murphy ‧ François Noudelmann ‧ Krisztina Passuth ‧ Marjorie Perloff ‧ Michel Poivert ‧ Susan Rubin-Suleiman ‧ Rainer Rumold ‧ Brandon Taylor ‧ Andrew Webber

Volume 3

The Aesthetics of Matter Modernism, the Avant-Garde and Material Exchange Edited by Sarah Posman, Anne Reverseau, David Ayers, Sascha Bru, Benedikt Hjartarson

ISBN 978-3-11-031737-4 e-ISBN 978-3-11-031753-4 ISSN 1869-3393 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2013 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Michael Peschke, Berlin Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ♾ Printed on acid free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Contents Introduction Matter on the Move 

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Translations Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe Modernism Diffracted Picture Postcards from The Sturm Gallery and Walden Collection in Berlin   17 Magali Nachtergael André Breton’s Autobiographical Cut-Ups Collages, Photographs, and Cinema  Jed Rasula Visual Music, a Missing Link? 

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Lidia Głuchowska From Abstract Film to Op Art and Kinetic Art? Henryk Berlewi’s Mechano-Facture as a Transmedial Adaptation of Viking Eggeling’s Experimental Films   48 Emma West “hap-hap-hap-hap-happy clothes” Avant-Garde Experiments in/with Material(s) 

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Claire Warden The Poetic Materiality of Fascism on the British Stage 

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Vladimir Feshchenko Dematerializing Verbal and Visual Matter Wassily Kandinsky’s Bitextuality   94 Material Memory Andrea Sakoparnig Beyond Matter or Form Invalidating Subliminal Contradictions in the Aesthetics of Matter 

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Eleni Loukopoulou Upon Hearing James Joyce The Anna Livia Plurabelle Gramophone Disc (1929) 

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Lisa Otty Small Press Modernists Collaboration, Experimentation and the Limited Edition Book  Tabea Schindler Plaster as a Matter of Memory Auguste Rodin and George Segal 

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Tomaž Toporišič Deconstructive Readings of the Avant-Garde Tradition in Post-Socialist Retro-Avant-Garde Theatre   158 Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam The Materiality of a Contemporary Avant-Garde? Legacies of Surrealist Collage in Contemporary Art 

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Spaces and Places Lori Cole Reproducing the Avant-Garde The Art of Modernist Magazines 

 183

Gregor Langfeld Bedeutungsveränderung und Kanonisierung des deutschen Expressionismus in den USA   194 Gunilla Hermansson Expressionism, Fiction and Intermediality in Nordic Modernism  Ileana Pintilie Materiality and Dematerialization in Paul Neagu’s Work  Clément Dessy La maison d’artiste en portrait, manifeste et sanctuaire L’exemple de Fernand Khnopff   235 Eveline Kilian Liquid Modernity and the Concrete City Ford Madox Ford and Virginia Woolf 

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Contents 

Bodies and Sensoria Jim Drobnick To “Feel Breathing” Duchamp and the Immaterial Aesthetics of Scent 

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Christiane Heibach Synthesis Instead of Analysis Avant-Garde Eat Art and the Cultural Dimensions of Taste  Susan Best Lygia Clark, the Paris Years The Body as Medium and Material 

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Gaëlle Théval Les matérialités à l’œuvre dans la « poésie élémentaire » de Julien Blaine   302 Pavlos Antoniadis Corps, que me veux-tu? Embodiment and Visuality in Post-1950 Music 

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Subjectivities Agata Jakubowska M/Paternal Meanings in the Neo-Avant-Garde 

 335

Hélène Thiérard Raoul Hausmann et le montage de matériau textuel : Hylé I  Cosana Eram Georges Hugnet’s Surrealist Monsters and Women 

 359

Sami Sjöberg From Material Meaningless to Poetics of Potentiality The Religious Dimension of Lettrist Visual Poetry 

 370

Ariane Mildenberg A “Dance of Gestures” Hyperdialectic in Gertrude Stein’s Compositions 

 380

Tania Ørum Conceptual Frames of Life 

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Claire Leydenbach Passage du sujet dans la « matière mentale » surréaliste 

List of Contributors  Index 

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About the Series – Sur la collection – Zur Buchreihe The avant-garde and modernism take centre-stage within European academia today. The experimental literatures and arts in Europe between ca. 1850 and 1950, and their aftermath, figure prominently on curricula, while modernism and avantgarde studies have come to form distinct yet interlocking disciplines within the humanities in recent years. These disciplines take on various guises on the continent. Within French and German academia, “modernism” remains a term rather alien – “die Moderne” and “modernité” coming perhaps the closest to what is meant by “modernism” within the English context. Here, indeed, modernism has acquired a firm place in research, signaling above all a period in modern poetics and aesthetics, roughly between 1850 and 1950, during which a revolt against prevalent traditions in art, literature and culture took shape. Similarly, the term “avant-garde” comes with an array of often conflicting connotations. For some, the avant-garde marks the most radically experimental arts and literatures in modernism from the nineteenth century onward – the early twentieth-century vanguard movements of Futurism, Expressionism, Dada and Surrealism, among others, coinciding with the avant-garde’s most “heroic” phase. For others, the avant-garde belongs to a cultural or conceptual order differing altogether from that of modernism – the vanguard exploits from the 1950s onward marking that avant-garde arts and literatures can also perfectly abide outside modernism. European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, far from aiming to reduce the complexity of various European research traditions, aspires to embrace the wide linguistic, terminological and methodological variety within both fields. Publishing an anthology of essays in English, French and German every two years, the series wishes to compare and relate French, German and British, but also Northern and Southern as well as Central and Eastern European findings in avant-garde and modernism studies. Collecting essays stemming mainly from the biennial conferences of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM), books in this series do not claim to exhaustiveness. Rather, they aim to raise questions, to provide partial answers, to fill lacunae in the research, and to stir debate about the European avant-garde and modernism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The series attaches great value to interdisciplinary and intermedial research on experimental aesthetics and poetics, and intends to encourage an interest in the cultural dimensions and contexts of the avant-garde and modernism in Europe. A digital addendum to the book series can be found on the website of the EAM: www. eam-europe.be. There, readers can consult and add to an open-source bibliography

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of books in avant-garde and modernism studies, maintained by Gunther Martens (Ghent University). At present the bibliography already counts several thousands of titles in English, French and German, and it is our hope that it can become a vital point of reference in the exchange of expertise. L’avant-garde et le modernisme occupent actuellement une place majeure dans les universités européennes. Les arts et les littératures expérimentaux en Europe de 1850 à 1950 et au-delà font partie intégrante des programmes universitaires, tandis que les recherches sur l’avant-garde et le modernisme sont devenues, à l’intérieur des sciences humaines, des disciplines à part entière mais solidaires les unes des autres. Ces disciplines varient néanmoins à travers le continent. Dans les universités françaises et allemandes, la notion de « modernisme » reste plutôt étrangère : les notions de « modernité » et de « die Moderne » s’utilisent sans doute davantage pour ce que désigne la notion de « modernism » dans le contexte anglophone. Dans la recherche anglophone, en effet, la notion de « modernism » a acquis une certaine stabilité : elle désigne avant tout une période de la modernité poétique et esthétique, approximativement entre 1850 et 1950, au cours de laquelle a pris forme une révolte contre les traditions artistiques, littéraires et culturelles prédominantes. De la même façon, la notion d’ « avant-garde » prend des connotations divergentes, souvent conflictuelles. Pour certains, l’« avantgarde » désigne les arts et les littératures les plus radicalement expérimentaux qui se développent à l’intérieur du modernisme à partir du 19ème siècle. Dans ce cas, les mouvements avant-gardistes du début du 20ème siècle – dont le futurisme, l’expressionisme, le dadaïsme et le surréalisme – correspondent à la phase avant-gardiste la plus « héroïque ». Pour d’autres, l’avant-garde appartient à un ordre culturel et conceptuel entièrement différent du modernisme. Dans cette perspective, l’avant-garde survit au modernisme, comme en témoigne la permanence d’une sensibilité avant-gardiste après 1950. Loin de vouloir réduire la complexité et la variété des traditions de recherche européennes, Etudes sur l’avant-garde et le modernisme en Europe vise à embrasser la grande diversité linguistique, terminologique et méthodologique à l’intérieur de ces deux domaines de recherche. Par la publication d’un volume d’essais en anglais, en français et en allemand tous les deux ans, la collection souhaite comparer et mettre en rapport les résultats issus des traditions de recherche française, anglaise et allemande, mais également d’Europe nordique et méridionale, centrale et orientale. Le premier objectif de cette collection est de rassembler une sélection des textes présentés lors des rencontres bisannuelles du Réseau européen de recherche sur l’avant-garde et le modernisme (EAM). En ce sens, son ambition est moins d’épuiser un sujet que de soulever des questions, de suggérer quelques



About the Series – Sur la collection – Zur Buchreihe  

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réponses provisoires, de combler certaines lacunes dans la recherche et, plus généralement, de maintenir vivant le débat sur l’avant-garde et le modernisme européens au cours des 19ème et 20ème siècles. La collection attache beaucoup d’importance à la recherche interdisciplinaire et intermédiale sur les esthétiques et les poétiques expérimentales et se propose de stimuler l’intérêt pour les dimensions culturelles et contextuelles de l’avant-garde et du modernisme en Europe. Un complément numérique à la collection est offert par le site web de l’EAM  : www.eam-europe.be. En ces pages, les lecteurs trouveront en libre accès, avec la possibilité d’y ajouter de nouvelles références, une bibliographie de livres sur l’avant-garde et le modernisme. La supervision et la mise à jour permanente de ce site sont assurées par Gunther Martens (Université de Gand). Actuellement, cette bibliographie comprend déjà plusieurs milliers d’entrées en anglais, en français et en allemand, et on peut espérer que cette banque de données se développera en un point de rencontre et d’échange de nos expertises. Forschungsinitiativen zum Thema Avantgarde und Moderne nehmen in der europäischen Forschungslandschaft weiterhin zu. Die experimentellen Literaturen und die Künste in Europa zwischen ca. 1850 und 1950 und ihre Nachwirkungen sind als Lehr- und Forschungsbereiche an den europäischen Forschungsinstitutionen und in den Lehrplänen heutzutage nicht mehr wegzudenken. Avantgarde und Moderne haben sich in den letzten Jahrzehnten zu unterschiedlichen, aber mehrfach miteinander verzahnten Forschungsgebieten entwickelt. Innerhalb der französischen und deutschen akademischen Welt bleibt der Sammelbegriff „modernism“ weniger geläufig – „die (klassische) Moderne“ und „modernité“ fungieren hier als nahe liegende Äquivalente zu demjenigen, was im internationalen Kontext als eine zeitliche und räumliche Ko-Okkurenz künstlerischer Ausdrucksformen und ästhetischer Theorien namhaft gemacht werden kann, die ungefähr zwischen 1850 und 1950 angesiedelt werden kann. Auf ähnliche Weise entfaltet die Bezeichnung „Avantgarde“ eine Reihe häufig widersprüchlicher Konnotationen. Für manche kennzeichnet die Avantgarde den radikalsten experimentellen Bruch der Künste und Literaturen mit den Darstellungs- und Erzählkonventionen des 19. Jahrhundert: im frühen zwanzigsten Jahrhundert zeugen davon Avantgardebewegungen wie Futurismus, Expressionismus, Dada und Surrealismus, Strömungen, die als die „heroische“ Phase der Avantgarde bezeichnet werden können. Ab den fünfziger Jahren kommt diese Avantgarde weitgehend ohne modernistische Begleiterscheinung aus. Für andere gehört die Avantgarde zu einem kulturellen Umfeld, das sich, durchaus im Bunde mit der Klassischen Moderne, der Erneuerung ästhetischer Konventionen verschreibt. Die Buchreihe Studien zur europäischen Avantgarde und Moderne möchte der Kompliziertheit der unterschiedlichen europäischen Forschungstraditionen

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gerecht werden und strebt danach, die breite linguistische, terminologische und methodologische Vielfalt abzudecken. Anhand einer zweijährlichen Sammlung von Beiträgen in englischer, französischer und deutscher Sprache möchte die Reihe nicht nur die französisch-, deutsch- und englischsprachigen, sondern auch die nord-, süd-, zentral- und osteuropäischen Ergebnisse der Avantgarde- und Moderne-Forschung einbeziehen. Die Aufsatzsammlungen der Reihe, die größtenteils aus Beiträgen von den zweijährlichen Konferenzen des Europäischen Netzwerks für Studien zu AvantGarde und Moderne (EAM) bestehen, erheben keinen Anspruch auf Vollständigkeit. Ihr Ziel ist es vielmehr, Fragen zu stellen, einige Antworten vorzuschlagen, Forschungslücken zu schließen und Debatten über die europäische Avantgarde und die Moderne im neunzehnten und zwanzigsten Jahrhundert auszulösen. Die Studien zur europäischen Avantgarde und Moderne legen viel Wert auf die interdisziplinäre und intermediale Erforschung experimenteller Ästhetiken/Poetiken und setzen es sich zum Ziel, das Interesse an den kulturellen Zusammenhängen und Kontexten der Avantgarde und der Moderne in Europa anzuregen. Ein digitales Addendum zur Buchreihe befindet sich auf der Internetseite des EAM: www.eameurope.be. Dort können unsere Leser eine frei zugängliche Bibliographie zu Publikationen über Avantgarde und Moderne, die von Gunther Martens (Universität Gent) verwaltet wird, besichtigen und ergänzen. Die Bibliographie enthält derzeit einige Tausend Titel auf Deutsch, Englisch und Französisch und wir hoffen, dass sie ein wichtiges Forum für den Austausch von Fachkenntnissen präsentieren wird. Leuven & New York, 2013

Sascha Bru & Peter Nicholls

Previous books in this series: Europa! Europa? The Avant-Garde, Modernism and the Fate of a Continent, ed. by Sascha Bru, Jan Baetens, Benedikt Hjartarson, Peter Nicholls, Tania Ørum and Hubert van den Berg (2009). Regarding the Popular. Modernism, the Avant-Garde and High and Low Culture, ed. by Sascha Bru, Laurence van Nuijs, Benedikt Hjartarson, Peter Nicholls, Tania Ørum and Hubert van den Berg (2011).

Introduction

Matter on the Move “Modernism”, Mina Loy tells us, has democratized the subject matter and la belle matière of art; through cubism the newspaper has assumed an aesthetic quality, through Cézanne a plate has become more than something to put an apple upon, Brancusi has given an evangelistic import to eggs, and Gertrude Stein has given us the Word, in and for itself.1

In modernism and the avant-garde the very matter of life, rather than the big events structuring histories, enter the spotlight. Where 19th-century realism portrayed the (bourgeois) individual, modernist and avant-garde art and writing often focus on the things that surround people, the houses and cities we live in, the bodies we call ours, the sensations we experience and the words our consciousnesses spill. In addition to a shift in subject matter, these projects implied a change in method. If in Stein, for Loy, the medium becomes the message, then the new painter, in Tristan Tzara’s words, “no longer paints (symbolic and illusionistic reproduction) but creates directly in stone, wood, iron, tin, rocks, or locomotive structures capable of being spun in all directions by the limpid wind of momentary sensation”.2 We could quote many modernist and avant-garde practitioners stressing the importance of matter to their aesthetics, both in terms of how they saw the world and of how they wanted to create. Where those individual projects have received ample critical attention, little effort has been made to extend the scope and explore what an experimental aesthetics of matter, from early twentieth-century modernism and the avant-gardes to the neo-avant-gardes, amounts to. This volume charts the status of matter in a variety of aesthetic projects and shows that while the challenges early 20th-century artists and writers faced in terms of art’s belle matière, materials and media have undergone major changes, our contemporary fascination with “vibrant matter”3 owes to their fascination with chair caning that is oil cloth, a urinal that might really be a fountain, a treacherous pipe, or a spool called Odradek.

1 Mina Loy, The Last Lunar Baedeker, Manchester 1982, 298. 2 Tristan Tzara, from “Dada Manifesto, 1918”, in: Modernism. An Anthology of Sources and Documents, eds. Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, Olga Taxidou, Edinburgh 1998, 276-280, here 276. 3 See for example Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things, Durham and London 2010.

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 Introduction

The early 20th-century avant-garde adieu to “Mythology and the Mystic Ideal”,4 proclaimed in various tones, and its concomitant longing to embrace what’s real has extended into post-WWII aesthetic practice and critical debate. Minimal art echoes Tatlin’s constructivism and William Carlos Williams’s catchphrase “no ideas but in things”. The question of how much ‘literalism’ art can bear was posed by Michael Fried in his seminal 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood”. OULIPO may operate in defiance of surrealism but its foregrounding of the materiality of language descends from experiment à la Stein’s. And the field of cultural materialism has picked up where modernist thinkers such as György Lukács and Walter Benjamin left off. The ongoing search for ways to get the very stuff of life into art and writing indicates that real things prove no less slippery than the endless discourse that, in the words of the first self-declared post-modern poet Charles Olson, has “hugely intermit[ted] our participation in our experience, and so prevent[ed] discovery” since the Greeks.5 Obsessed with the idea of medium, modernist and avant-garde artists and writers wanted the detours of mediation to be kept to a minimum – a goal they either sought to achieve through working with raw or ready-made material or, paradoxically, through elaborate formal experiment. Maybe the 20th-century close attention to things should be seen as an attempt to counter the tendency diagnosed by Georg Simmel at the very start of the century: the more things become available, the more people feel alienated from what makes a thing. Or, as Jane Bennett puts it, taking stock of late capitalist consumer culture: “the sheer volume of commodities, and the hyperconsumptive necessity of junking them to make room for new ones, conceals the vitality of matter”.6 Just how matter escapes our grasp is shown by Virginia Woolf in her short story “Solid Objects” (1920). It presents us with John, a young man “standing for Parliament upon the brink of a brilliant career”, who finds a lump of glass on the beach. The green thing “pleased him; it puzzled him; it was so hard, so concentrated, so definite an object compared with the vague sea and the hazy shore”. John’s fascination with the piece of broken glass triggers an insatiable hunger for bits and pieces that are in one way or another like it, and from a promising politician he turns into an aloof collector of fragments. Instead of finding out about John’s private hopes and despairs we are confronted with his “determination to

4 F. T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism 1909”, in: Modernism. An Anthology of Sources and Documents, eds. Kolocotroni, Goldman, Taxidou, 250-253, here 251. 5 Charles Olson, “Human Universe”, Charles Olson. Collected Prose, eds. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander, Berkeley 1997, 155-166, here 156. 6 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ontology of Things, 5.



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possess objects”.7 Woolf, quite surprisingly, displaces the psychological with the materiological.8 The feat of the story is that it subverts John’s appreciation of the lump of glass as something that is contained. Right from the start John is lost to a web of associations. His habit of looking at the “jewel” on his mantelpiece sets him afloat in a sea of thoughts: “Looked at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain when we least expect it”.9 In Woolf’s story, ‘solid’ matter and “the stuff of thought” don’t belong to strictly separated realms. They rather constitute a web from which there’s no escaping: things may be acquired but, like thoughts and sensations, they can’t be ‘possessed’. Things, therefore, shouldn’t be considered as mere objects framed by subjects but, with Spinoza, as having their own power. The question of how we can grasp thingness continues to stir theoretical discussions. These discussions, from Adorno’s negative dialectics intent on discerning the remainder of matter in conceptualization to a vitalist tradition that affirms the continuity between concept and thing, are the background of this book. What it foregrounds is the postcards, clothes, lines of poetry, gramophone discs, limited edition books and magazines, cities, houses, food, bodies, sound and music that, caught up in politics and history, in desire and belief, make up the pulse of modernist and avant-garde experiment. While there is a clear line from an early 20th-century fascination with matter to a neo-avant-garde interest in things, we see two contradictory tendencies in the century’s approaches to medium. Against a modernist program of medium specificity, we have an avant-garde enterprise of intermediality. Stein, for instance, who made it clear that writing was her business, was abhorred when she found out that Picasso had written poetry – and relieved when she had heard him read it out loud, telling him “you are extraordinary within your limits but your limits are extraordinary there”.10 Pound, granting the arts “some common bond”, held that “certain emotions or subjects find their most appropriate expression in some one particular art”.11 And writing about modernist painting in 1960 Clement Greenberg considered it clear that “the unique and proper area of competence 7 Virginia Woolf, “Solid Objects”, The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction, Oxford 2008, 54-59, here 55, 56, 58. 8 Bill Brown, “The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism)”, Modernism/Modernity, 6, 1999, n°2, 1-28, here 5. 9 Woolf, “Solid Objects”, 56. 10 Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, Cambridge 1993, 38. 11 Ezra Pound, “Vorticism”, , (12.08.2013), originally published in: Fortnightly Review, 1914, n° 96, 461–471.

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 Introduction

of each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium”.12 Today, by contrast, it isn’t modernism’s purity but the avant-garde’s hybridity that appeals most strongly to us, in our “post medium condition”.13 New media thinkers defy the medium specificity championed by modernist artists and critics. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, for example, stress that “no medium today, and certainly no single media event, seems to do its cultural work in isolation from other media, any more than it works in isolation from other social and economic forces”.14 And certainly, as this book’s chapters dealing with the neo-avant-gardes show, intermediality has proven a very productive aesthetic issue. The contrast between a modernist call for specificity and recalcitrant (neo-) avant-garde mixing is not an absolute, however. A Greenbergian formalist stance, shouldn’t prevent us from looking into the ways in which contemporary network approaches to medium have developed out of a cluster of avant-garde and modernist aesthetic experiment. The relation between aesthetic modernism and new media is significant.15 The modernist idea that “every medium is a unique art form”16 obviously didn’t preclude writers and artists from feeling challenged by different media, new and old, or from creating new ones. It isn’t surprising that quite a few of this book’s chapters deal with collage since collage, in inviting us to trace multiple relations between media, can be seen to prefigure the rhizomatic constellations that characterize contemporary conversations on aesthetics and neo-avant-garde practices. The challenge, then, is to “push at the limits of modernism’s concept of the medium from within its sometimes tortured logics and contradictory fantasies”.17 In approaching medium as always impure, as “the site of otherness as such”,18 we get to see a media ecology that contributes to our understanding of modernist and avant-garde art and writing in terms of matter, and that helps us grasp the relation between the neo-avant-gardes and their predecessors. The chapters to follow

12 Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting”, The Collected Essays and Criticism: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969, Volume 4, John O’Brien (ed.), Chicago 1993, 85-93, here 86. 13 Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, New York 2000. 14 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, MA 1999, 15. 15 See for example Michael North, Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word, New York, 2005. 16 Marshall McLuhan, Essential McLuhan, Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (eds.), New York 1995, 61. 17 Mark Goble, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life, New York and Chichester 2010, 17. 18 Thierry de Duve, Clement Greenberg Between the Lines, trans. Brian Holmes, Paris 1996, 53.



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take into account the interactions of writing, photography, film, fashion, music and sound, sculpture, painting, drama, performance, installations, eat art and street art, with each other as well as with technological inventions. The advantage that tracing what has affected what holds over teasing out who used what is that it makes us see the potential of matter (rather than the genius of artists). This reversal of the order of things comes with an important ethical dimension; it demands we reconsider the subject/object dualism, that we make strange our own position – an avant-garde challenge we’ve still to meet.

Translations The above call for an impure materialist approach to modernist and avant-garde experiment – a sea of things, a web of media – owes to Bruno Latour’s understanding of the notion ‘network’. When Latour provocatively claims that we have never been modern, he wants us to pause at modernity’s epistemological project: The hypothesis of this essay is that the word ‘modern’ designates two sets of entirely different practices which must remain distinct if they are to remain effective, but have recently begun to be confused. The first set of practices, by ‘translation’, creates mixtures between entirely new types of being, hybrids of nature and culture. The second, by ‘purification’, creates two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other. […] The first set corresponds to what I have called networks; the second to what I shall call the modern critical stance.19

Latour invites us to consider both the complex processes of translation that configure networks and the critical project intent on purification that creates the familiar set of dualisms opposing nature to culture and nonhumans to humans. Such a double vantage not only makes it possible to think of things as both “hard” as well as intangible but also combine a concern for medium specificity with an attention to hybridity. It furthermore makes us reconsider who/what are the ‘actors’ in the vast and intricate networks of modernism and the avant-gardes. The consequences of such an approach are far-reaching, not only for our take on modern art and writing, but also in terms of ethics. The “monsters” need to be given an official existence, democracy may need to be extended to things.20

19 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, MA 1993, 10-11. 20 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 10. See also Jean Baudrillard: “We will not oppose the beautiful to the ugly, but will look for the uglier than ugly: the monstrous” (Fatal Strategies, New York 1990, 7).

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 Introduction

Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe explicitly takes up Latour’s invitation. Elegantly, she argues that the “monsters” that are the picture postcards from The Sturm Gallery and Walden Collection can’t be considered as merely reflecting the art works they reproduce, but need to be seen as enacting variously formatted modernisms. Magali Nachtergael reveals the complex intersecting of various collage traditions for André Breton’s understanding of the surrealist image. Breton’s network, she shows, doesn’t only comprise the usual suspects but also things and media: photomontages, photograms, films and cinema novels. Where Nachtergael has Breton confound our reading/viewing habits, Jed Rasula makes us pause at the fascinating early 1920s experiments with visual music. By zooming in on the clavilux, a device that made it possible to project color in motion and experience, in silence, what music may look like, he addresses pertinent questions concerning the relationship between music, abstract painting and cinema. A key moment in the story of visualising time that Rasula tells is Viking Eggeling’s and Hans Richter’s realization that the painted scrolls they were experimenting with would have to give way to film. Lidia Głuchowska returns our gaze to the canvas when she traces the influence of Eggeling’s abstract films on the work of the PolishJewish painter, graphic designer and art critic Henryk Berlewi. In considering Berlewi, translation is important not only in terms of intermediality. The fact that some of Berlewi’s key texts, written in Yiddish, remain untranslated demonstrates that the connections that make a network are never a matter of aesthetics alone but involve institutions and politics. That the language of the avant-garde, and of its field of studies, is charged with politics is also what the following two chapters highlight. Emma West points to the lack of scholarly attention hitherto devoted to avant-garde fashion. She shows how futurist and constructivist design and rhetoric intersect, and explains the failure of these projected fashion revolutions by the resistance of everyday life to design. Claire Warden takes issue with the reception of W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s On the Frontier and Stephen Spender’s Trial of a Judge. The label ‘poetic drama’ too often causes readers to sidestep the performative aspects of these 1938 pieces – aspects we have to take into account if we want their anti-fascist message to fully materialize. The section closes with Vladimir Feshchenko’s chapter on Kandinsky’s bitextuality. In echo of what Latour has called a “mediator” – “an original event [that] creates what it translates”21 – Feshchenko considers Kandinsky’s quest for the language of art as a process in which verbal and visual content reciprocally recode and transmute.

21 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 78.



Matter on the Move 

 9

Memory Latour’s idea of ‘network’ doesn’t only come with a spatial configuration that jogs us out of critical habits and has us trace lines of translation between various non/ human actors. It also bears on our understanding of time. Latour asks us to work with continuity rather than rupture. Generalizing, his claim that ‘we have never been modern’ implies that there are no clean slates in history, that the proclaimed new beginnings in politics, science and art weren’t isolated and singular new events. Although such a denial of the new sounds very much out of tune with the spirit of the avant-garde, Latour’s intention isn’t to prove that all those championing modernity, in one version or another, got it wrong. That, ironically, would be a very modern project: [b]y proposing to debunk their illusions, to uncover their real practice, to probe their unconscious belief, to reveal their double talk, I would play a very modern role indeed, taking my turn in a long queue of debunkers and critics. But the relation between the work of purification and that of mediation is not that of conscious and unconscious, formal and informal, language and practice, illusion and reality.

If a Latourian reading of modernism and the avant-gardes isn’t about approaching the call to ‘make it new’ as the false slogan for an essentially tradition-struck bunch of artists and writers, then what is it about? In analogy to the double work of purification and hybridization that comes with the idea of the network, it asks us to consider the idea of novelty in relation to the ongoing work of tradition and memory – “Ariadne’s thread”.22 Like the idea of modernity, then, the ‘make it new’ phrase needs to be seen as a “force added to others that […] it had the power to represent, to accelerate, or to summarize” rather than an all-encompassing truth.23 Modernist and avant-garde creators used the idea of novelty (and of autonomy, of formalism, …) to understand what they and the people around them were doing. In reading the pure visions of the new in dialogue with those practices mediating between old and new, this book is in line with the surge of historicized readings that have invigorated modernism and avant-garde studies since the 1990s. The section begins with Andrea Sakoparnig’s appeal to reconsider the opposition between form and matter that characterizes 20th-century aesthetics. She takes us back to Hegel’s revaluation of matter and, via Adorno’s politics of form, drafts the contours of a contemporary aesthetics of matter. Where Sakoparnig points to the pertinence of (Hegelian) dialectics in thinking about avant-garde matter, Eleni Loukopoulou makes us hear echoes of Vico’s Scienza Nuova (1725) 22 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 3. 23 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 40.

10 

 Introduction

in James Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle. She traces the history of the (recorded) text in two directions: back to Vico’s theory of history and into Joyce’s contemporary network in which the Anna Livia Plurabelle gramophone disc came about. Next, Lisa Otty and Tabea Schindler delve into the ‘old’ practices of making books and working with plaster respectively. Otty shows that the charms of the new media and technological inventions hardly stopped the modernists from investing in printing, typography and book design. She maps the ways in which modernist small presses both engage with the 19th-century arts and crafts tradition and interpolate avant-garde ideas and strategies. Schindler concentrates on the anachronisms inherent to plaster. Setting out from the work of Auguste Rodin and George Segal she outlines the ways in which plaster, through the many references it carries, makes memory speak. How we can tally the idea of the avant-garde with that of tradition is the question the two following chapters pose. They shift perspective and consider relationships between the historical avant-gardes and neo-avant-garde experiment. In calling for an open tradition they expose the pitfall in working with the idea of continuity: the danger of it blotting out difference. Tomaž Toporišič deals with the response by Slovenian retro-garda theatre to its historical predecessors. In the post-avant-garde’s very deconstructions of the historical avant-garde, he traces a commitment to a vanguard utopianism that makes the work resound with the avant-garde it wanted to distance itself from. Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam calls for the relevance of surrealist collage practice. She investigates three current tendencies in contemporary art that operate in dialogue with the artistic strategy of collage – a challenge that demands far-reaching inquiry into what artistic media are capable of.

Spaces and Places Matter on the move travels to unforeseen places. It affects the spaces and places it stops in and is changed by them. One way to picture these translation processes that dynamize modernist and (neo-)avant-garde networks is by thinking of “radical vectors” shaking things up, affecting art and society ‘at the roots’. In epidemiology, Mike Sell explains, “vector” refers to “disease agents that don’t cause but spread diseases”.24 The trajectories of these vectors are impossible to predict and therefore hard to control. The fleas that, living on rats, spread the bubonic plague in the 1300s, for example, moved in many different directions and at dif24 Mike Sell (ed.), Avant-Garde Performance and Material Exchange: Vectors of the Radical, Basingstoke 2011, 12.



Matter on the Move 

 11

ferent speeds. Although modernist and avant-garde practices have repeatedly been associated with disease and degeneration – to be put a stop to so as to keep order from collapsing – the vectors we follow in this section don’t pose a major threat to global health. In their complexity and scope of travel media, however, they easily outstrip any vermin. We want to find out not only how modernist and (neo-)avant-garde matter has travelled but also how, in material exchange and translation, the materiological project of the avant-garde has spread. Lori Cole examines the ways in which Camera Work and Revista de Avance disseminated art across national borders. In exploring the art communities represented in these modernist magazines, she shows how the Americas formulated a response to Europe’s dominant cultural position in the first half of the 20th century. Gregor Langfeld’s chapter concentrates on the translations a European cultural product undergoes once it crosses the Atlantic. Langfeld oversees the canonization process of German expressionism in the USA and investigates the fundamental changes this implied to what expressionism meant. Gunilla Hermansson, too, takes into account expressionism but she problematizes the scheme in which translation takes place between clear cultural scenes. The constellation of ideas and prose writings interacting with ‘expressionism’ in the Nordic countries that she studies invites us to reconsider our approach to avant-garde categorizations. The work of neo-avant-garde artist Paul Neagu, discussed by Ileana Pintilie, is another example of the ways in which complex cultural geographies inform artistic practice. Neagu’s work, which combines his Romanian background with an intervention in the British artistic scene he worked in, has come to stand for European cultural synthesis. From cross-Atlantic and trans-European cartographies we move into smaller surroundings. Clément Dessy argues that an exploration of an artist’s material can’t exclude the studio in which he or she worked and takes us on a tour of the (destroyed) house of the Belgian artist Fernand Khnopff, which some considered a “temple of the Self”. Eveline Kilian’s reading of Ford Madox Ford’s The Soul of London: A Survey of a Modern City (1905) and Virginia Woolf’s London essays prepares for the section “Bodies and Sensoria”, as she traces the ways in which material spaces are formed by and form individual bodies.

Bodies and Sensoria If matter, in modernism and the avant-garde, becomes more important than the individual’s well and woe, then what are the consequences for the individual’s body? A turn to the body sounds hardly revolutionary given the fact that the body is a key player in 19th-century realism: portrait painters give us adorned, wistful, conditioned,

12 

 Introduction

political bodies, and the tragedy of an Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina is that they should have bodies to be whisked away. Modernist and (neo-)avant-garde bodies differ from the carefully positioned realist bodies, however, in that it’s no longer clear who owns them and what delineates them. Instead of addressing the issue of what bodies are allowed to do, vanguard artists and writers probe what bodies are capable of. From emotions, and its range of bodily expressions, they shift to affect. With respect to the body, Latour’s network of intersecting human and nonhuman actors finds its correlative in Gilles Deleuze’s Spinozist approach to corporeality. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari redefine the body. No longer determined by a form, a substance (cogito or hierarchy of organs), or a particular function, a body “is defined only by a longitude and a latitude: […] the sum total of the material elements belonging to it under given relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness (longitude); the sum total of the intensive affects it is capable of at a given power or degree of potential (latitude). Nothing but affects and local movements, differential speeds”.25 Deleuze and Guattari advocate the de- and re-organization of the body, which implies we work to delete the body’s inscribed functions and meanings and discover its vitalist potential in relation to its material surroundings. That Deleuze’s understanding of such a decoded body, a Body without Organs, was inspired by Antonin Artaud’s To Have Done with the Judgment of God (1947) is well-known and it’s hardly a coincidence that he taps the avant-gardes for examples. As the chapters in this section make clear, the (neo-)avant-garde has set in motion an exploration of the body and sensorial experience that today, whether we think of ourselves of cyborgs or take stock of the increasing pressure in society to ‘manage’ our bodies, only increases in relevance. For Jim Drobnick, Christiane Heibach and Pavlos Antoniadis a new approach to the body demands a reconsideration of the hierarchy of the senses. They take issue with the long western tradition of ocularcentrism, according to which vision is the highest of the senses, most closely related to intelligence. Intelligence, here, means the ability to distance and differentiate – visual operations that facilitate analysis. Heibach, in focusing on the sense of taste and the issues broached in eat art, argues that the epistemological model of synthesis that comes with the ‘low’ sense of taste and smell is a powerful alternative for the traditional ocularcentric analytical models. Drobnick zooms in on Marcel Duchamp’s fascination with olfaction. Never an “olfactory artist” – a term he reserved for painters whose ‘addiction’ to turpentine blinded them to the new media challenges of the era – Duchamp tried to translate the opportunities to mix media that so excited him into the experience of feeling breathing. Antoniadis problematizes the link 25 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus, Minneapolis 1987, 260.



Matter on the Move 

 13

between visuality and musical corporeality that steers contemporary performance and intermediality-oriented (debate on) music and that leaves little space for absolute music. With reference to Brian Ferneyhough’s project he explores the notion of a music-specific corporeality that transcends visuality. Gaëlle Théval concentrates on the corporeality in experimental poetry. The body she encounters in Julien Blaine’s project of “elementary poetry” contrasts boldly with the corporeal energy that Antoniadis finds in Ferneyhough. For Blaine, the body, prime element in his poetry, is flesh, blood and bone. The section’s chapter on Lygia Clark addresses the question that is implicit in the other corporeal readings: how much room is there for subjectivity in an expanding understanding of corporeality? In anticipation of the book’s final section, Susan Best argues that Clark’s work, with its faith in the transformative power of the body, makes visible the processes of subject-formation and thus relates embodiment to empowerment.

Subjectivities Although ‘network’ or ‘Body without Organs’ are hardly Freudian terms, it is Freud who asked the modernists to think of selves as structured rhizomatically. Together with the other pioneers of psychology, he concentrated on the hordes of connected thoughts and impulses – some of which “monstrous” – that make up subjects, instead of on balanced cogitos. Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams” (1900) invites us to discover a web of intersecting thoughts within ourselves. This thought-web, made up of “dream thoughts”, counts as the “new class of psychical material” he had discovered. The process of discovering this maze of underground thoughts, importantly, takes continuous effort, and problematizes, if not debunks, the idea of completion. Where a dream’s actual content may be summed up in half a page, Freud writes, [t]he analysis setting out the dream-thoughts underlying it may occupy six, eight or a dozen times as much space. […] As a rule one underestimates the amount of compression that has taken place, since one is inclined to regard the dream-thoughts that have been brought to light as the complete material, whereas if the work of interpretation is carried further it may reveal still more thoughts concealed behind the dream.26

Prompted by Freud, the 20th century witnessed a revolution in thinking about the subject – both in terms of what constitutes subjectivity and of who can lay 26 Sigmund Freud, “From The Interpretation of Dreams”, in: Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, eds. Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, Olga Taxidou, 47-51, here 49, 50.

14 

 Introduction

claim on the label subject. Although psychoanalysis has been heavily criticized, the projects of working with that most slippery of materials – thoughts and dreams, memories and desires – and of exploring subject positions have held great appeal. From those enterprises delving into the most personal depths of the self to those that, in echo of Deleuze’s criticism on Freud that “he mistook crowds for a single person”,27 investigate the many voices buzzing in one mind, the question of “mental material” and its politics, the chapters in this section show, has engrossed modernism and the (neo-)avant-gardes. Agata Jakubowska concentrates on parental subjects in the neo-avant-garde work of Günter Brus and the duo KwieKulik, who used their children as artistic material. The artists’ contexts are important – Freudian psychoanalysis, notably, was all but absent in KwieKulik’s post-WWII Poland – but the force of the work, Jakubowska argues, is that it is personal as well as political. Next, Hélène Thiérard outlines the autobiographical project Hylé of Raoul Hausmann. While the narrative form of Hylé seems to contradict his post-dadaist, presentist program, Thiérard shows Hylé I to continue an engagement with the sensory now through its intricate mosaic structure and the practice of “auto-collage”. Cosana Eram, too, tells the story of a private book: Georges Hugnet’s book of erotic collages, La Vie amoureuse des Spumifères. Although the photographs of vintage nude postcards, with added gouaches of monstrous creatures and an accompanying text echo typical surrealist approaches to femininity, the book ultimately defies categorization. The next two chapters move away from private life and into the post- and pre-personal. Both Sami Sjöberg and Ariane Mildenberg deal with artists seeking to make material those parts of subjective experience that are to be situated on the threshold of the phenomenal. Sjöberg looks at the lettrist project of the Romanian Jewish Isidore Isou and outlines the ways in which his hypergraphics incorporates a messianic temporality, thus charging outspoken material poetry with the possibility of transhistorical redemption. Mildenberg foregrounds Gertrude Stein and, from a phenomenological vantage, argues that Stein’s portraits get across the way in which language is grounded in the pre-predicative experience of an embodied consciousness. Tania Ørum’s reading of Scandinavian feminist art of the 1960s and 1970s, made under the banner of “the personal is the political”, makes us see that these artists’ experiments with everyday or ‘personal’ materials should be seen in line with the conceptual art of the 1960s rather than as a reaction against the avant-garde. Claire Leydenbach, finally, reviews the surrealist struggle with the subjective in automatic writing. If, after Freud, subjects are no longer in charge of matter, but part of it, with their very thoughts considered “mental material”, then what can expression amount to? SP, with SB and AR 27 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 30.

 Translations

Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe

Modernism Diffracted Picture Postcards from The Sturm Gallery and Walden Collection in Berlin In a world of objects and egotism, Expressionism sought spirit, depth and community. […] But the unity of such a ‘spiritual’ style was achieved through the agency of dealers, newspapers and magazines. One of the most violently anti-bourgeois and anti-materialist art movements of the early twentieth century owed its success to the market conditions that its artists openly reviled. Thus it is important to stress that Expressionism was not a creation of the artists but of the dealers and critics who promoted them. The most significant of these figures was the Berlin writer, editor and dealer, Herwarth Walden.1

Shearer West’s opening observation reminds us that diverse practices of establishing relations, including technologies of reproduction, distribution and communication were imperative for the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century. Implicitly, her remark opens up for a discussion on modernist aesthetics as a broader process of discursive and material relations. Indeed, it also draws attention to the aesthetics of matter of an art critic and dealer such as Herwarth Walden, founder of the art magazine Der Sturm (1910-32) and its adherent publishing house and gallery.2 The manifold strategies Herwarth Walden employed in order to promote artists of the international modernist and avant-garde movements included the production of picture postcards that reproduced artworks by artists affiliated with Sturm. This chapter discusses the picture postcards produced by Sturm as material translations of artworks and examines their discursive and material meanings in relation to the creation and promotion of modernist art within the Sturm enterprise and beyond. The visual and material translation of artworks – many of which were painted in bright colours on canvases – into black and white pictures of an often strikingly smaller size, did not merely multiply singular originals into manifold copies. Discussing the reproduction of artworks in terms of translation rather than dissemination is a way of drawing attention to reciprocal processes within the visual and 1 Shearer West, The Visual Arts in Germany 1890-1937. Utopia and Despair, Manchester 2000, 84. 2 The first issue of Der Sturm was published in 1910. For comprehensive descriptions of the wide range of Sturm activities – magazine, gallery, travelling exhibitions, publishing house, Kunstabende, art school, theatre etc. – see Georg Brühl, Herwarth Walden und “Der Sturm”, Köln 1983, and Volker Pirsisch, Der Sturm. Eine Monographie, Herzberg 1985. In the following, “Sturm” refers to this broader enterprise of Sturm, “Der Sturm” refers to the magazine only.

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 Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe

material culture that constituted and circulated the pictorial language of modernism. The concept of translation employed here refers to a procedure that performs diversity rather than (re)presents similarity. The point of departure for the following discussion is the insight from actor-network theory that “the movement of adoption is a movement of adaption”.3 Hence, the discursive and material relation between artworks and postcards as well as their interdependence and reciprocal definitions within Sturm will be the centre of attention.4

Sturm’s Künstlerpostkarten From the 1880s onwards photographic postcards were produced in large numbers and collected and distributed in a similar manner as the cartes-de-visite – calling cards which featured portrait photographs and other images – in the middle of the 19th century.5 Pictorial postcards achieved an enormous popularity and the practices of collecting mass-reproduced images grew into a popular obsession. By the turn of the 20th century, the cartomania had been replaced by a postcard craze.6 From its foundation in 1912, Herwarth Walden’s Sturm gallery in Berlin had marketed picture-postcards, Künstlerpostkarten, reproducing artworks by the artists displayed in and promoted by the gallery. In Sturm, Künstlerpostkarten referred to picture-postcards that reproduced artworks by Sturm artists. However, the notion of Künstlerpostkarten eventually became reserved for an exclusive range of objects, namely picture-postcards denominated as “original” and/or “authorized” by an artist.7 Mass-produced objects like the Sturm postcards have 3 Madeleine Akrich, Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, “The Key to Success in Innovation Part II”, in: International Journal of Innovation Management, 6, 2002, n° 2, 208-209. 4 This line of thought is in line with Donna Haraway’s argument that the “relationships are the smallest possible patterns of analysis” (Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, Minneapolis 2008, 25-26). Actor-network theory (ANT) has established the importance of reciprocal definitions and relational processes since the 1980s, see for example Michel Callon’s seminal essay “The Sociology of an Actor-Network: The Case of the Electric Vehicle”, in: Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology: Sociology of Science in the Real World, eds. Michel Callon, John Law and Arie Rip, London 1986, 19-34. 5 Mary Warner Marien, Photography. A Cultural History, London 2002, 170 ff. 6 In fact, the picture postcard was one of the factors that contributed to the decline of the cartede-visite (William C. Darrah, Cartes de Visite in Nineteenth Century Photography, Gettysburg, PA 1981, 10). 7 Bärbel Hedinger, “Künstler, Post, Karte – eine Einleitung”, in: Die Künstlerpostkarte. Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Bärbel Hedinger, München 1992, 226, note 3. On “proper” Künst-



Modernism Diffracted 

 19

been disqualified as they translated original artworks into commonplace objects of everyday life, a process of translation that turned the singular fetish into multiple commodities. Arguably, this categorization misrecognizes the meaning of the material translation that was spurred by contemporary technologies of communication and distribution. The first series of Sturm-Künstlerpostkarten was Gemälde der Futuristen (Futurist Paintings). The postcards were put on sale for 20 Pfenning apiece in September 1912, following an exhibition at the emerging Sturm gallery in April that same year with the Italian futurists Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini. Gemälde der Futuristen reproduced artworks shown in the exhibition including Russolo’s Train at Full Speed and Severini’s The Milliner.8 Accompanying each reproduced image on the other side of the card was a short text identical with the captions published in the exhibition catalogue. The description of The Milliner was: “An arabesque of the movement produced by the twinkling colours and iridescence of the frills and furbelows on show: the electric light divides the scene into defined zones. A study of simultaneous penetration”.9 Another series of Sturm postcards followed the “Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon”, the seminal exhibition of mainly European modernist art organised by Sturm and opened in September 1913. The illustrated exhibition catalogue contained 366 works of art.10 Several artworks were both printed in the catalogue and reproduced as postcards, including Natalia Goncharova’s Landscape and Gabriele Münter’s Black Mask with Roses. Generally, Sturm’s postcard production followed the exhibition practices of the gallery and not all postcards were produced as part of a series. In 1917, two new editions of Sturm postcards with a slightly different character were announced.11 One reproduced portrait photographs of Sturm artists. This Sturm-Künstler series comprised portraits of eleven Sturm artists and writers such as August Stramm, Jacoba van Heemskerck, Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Kokoschka and Paul Klee. The lerpostkarten by Sturm artists, see for instance Peter-Klaus Schuster, “Nachricht von den Tieren. Zu den Postkarten von Franz Marc”, in: Die Künstlerpostkarte, ed. Hedinger, 19-23; Gerhard Wietek, Gemalte Künstlerpost. Karten und Briefe deutscher Künstler aus dem 20. Jahrhundert, München 1977. 8 Compare the advertisement in Der Sturm, 1912, n° 127/128. Reproductions of the postcards are at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Nachlass Nell Walden, Handschrift 125. There was an announcement of the postcards (and of Sonderdrucke, special editions) on the inside back cover of the exhibition catalogue (Herwarth Walden (ed.), Die Futuristen. Umberto Boccioni, Carlo D. Carra, Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini, Berlin 1912). 9 Walden (ed.), Die Futuristen, 22, my translation. 10 Herwarth Walden (ed.), Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon, Berlin 1913. 11 Both series were announced in Der Sturm, 8, 1917, n° 1, 15-16.

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series was expanded and altered over the following years. In 1920 the number of portraits had doubled.12 The production of such an edition related to popular practices of collecting cartes-de-visites and picture postcards, not least to their function as social self-promotion. Pictures in the Sturm archive in Berlin exemplify these common practices of exchanging picture cards within the Sturm circle. In 1916, following the exhibition “Schwedische Expressionisten” in the Sturm gallery, Isaac Grünewald sent two portrait photographs with his dedication to Herwarth and Nell Walden respectively.13 The other series introduced in 1917, Sammlung Walden, reproduced 24 artworks from Nell Walden ’s collection of Sturm art.14 Nell Walden, b. Roslund, was Herwarth Walden’s closest collaborator and wife. She trained as an artist in the Sturm art school and was one of the first major collectors of Sturm art.15 The images reproduced included Marc Chagall’s I and the Village, Franz Marc’s The Yellow Cow, Jacoba van Heemskerck’s Drawing LV and Wassily Kandinsky’s Drawing.16 Eventually, the series was enlarged with a picture-postcard showing a photograph of Herwarth and Nell Walden in the dining room of their private apartment located at the same address as the gallery, Potsdamerstrasse 134a in the western part of Berlin. The new postcard series clearly had been part of an extension of the Sturm enterprise. In 1917, the gallery business expanded and reopened in larger rooms. In addition, the opening of a Sturm bookshop confirmed the commercial aspect of Sturm’s development.

Marketing Modernism Judging from Herwarth Walden’s alleged talent for propaganda, the postcards were intended as commercial advertising for the modernist artists represented 12 See announcement in Der Sturm, 10, 1920, n° 12, 175. 13 Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschrift 125, “STURM”-Künstler: Postkarten, Photos u.a. The exhibition displayed 41 works by Swedish artists Gösta Adrian-Nilsson, Isaac Grünewald, Edward Hald, Sigrid Hjertén and Einar Jolin. See further, Jan Torsten Ahlstrand, et al. (eds), Schwedische Avantgarde und Der Sturm in Berlin, Osnabrück and Lund 2000. 14 For a brief description of Nell Walden’s art collection, see Karla Bilang, “Nell Walden”, in: Sammeln nur um zu besitzen? Berühmte Kunstsammlerinnen von Isabella d’Este bis Peggy Guggenheim, ed. Britta Jürgs, Berlin 2000, 229-255. 15 Herwarth and Nell Walden’s partnership within the Sturm enterprise, is discussed in more length in Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe, Collaborations. Herwarth and Nell Walden’s Sturm (forthcoming). 16 A set of the series is at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Nachlass Nell Walden, Handschrift 124.



Modernism Diffracted 

 21

by Sturm. Indeed, the decision to produce several Sturm postcard series was a promotion strategy very much in accordance with contemporary marketing practices. At the beginning of the 20th century, postcards were used as an advertising medium on a large scale by all types of businesses.17 Hence, picture postcards produced by Sturm were part of a popular visual and material culture, employed for both social self-promotion and commercial advertising in the middle class. Sturm’s diverse forms of visual and verbal propaganda for modernist art – the distribution of Der Sturm, books, postcards, art prints, flyers, posters and other products – all point to a skilful adaptation of practices in mass media and popular commodity culture. Most probably, this material process of translation and circulation of a modernist pictorial language contributed to the popularization of Sturm art and artists. At the outset, Der Sturm appeared weekly with an alleged edition of 30,000 copies – most certainly a gross exaggeration – and at a low price, 10 Pfennig, in order to appeal to a large public.18 In addition, Der Sturm was illustrated and printed in the large format of a daily newspaper, which distinguished it from comparable magazines, notably those edited by Herwarth Walden before 1910. The advertisements on the inside of the back cover of Der Sturm reinforced the formal similarities to contemporary daily newspapers.19 Thus, the concept and format of Der Sturm was in itself a statement that situated the magazine between mass and elite culture. Hence, even if Der Sturm published fierce criticism and polemical attacks against popular and commercial culture, the operations of the Sturm enterprise itself never were restricted to the art field in a narrow sense.20 Indeed, the translation from modernist artworks to Sturm postcards materialized an intimate con17 David M. Williams, “A New Medium for Advertising: The Postcard, 1900-1920”, in: European Journal of Marketing 22, 1993, n° 8, 17-34. 18 Lilian Schacherl, Die Zeitschriften des Expressionismus. Versuch einer zeitungswissenschaftlichen Strukturanalyse, PhD dissertation, München 1957, 23. The first number of Der Sturm in 1910 states an edition of 30,000 on the front page. See also Brühl, Herwarth Walden, 210. 19 Until September 1912 Der Sturm published a diverse range of advertisements, thereafter only “Anzeigen tatsächlichen Inhalts”, which comprised mainly information on Sturm’s activities and products (prints, postcards, books). See also Helen Boorman, Herwarth Walden and Der Sturm 1910-1930: German Culture Idealism and the Commercialization of Art, PhD dissertation, University of East Anglia 1987, 219, note 35. 20 In his account on Sturm and the press, Volker Pirsisch mainly repeats Sturm’s rhetorical arguments and hence confirms Sturm’s self-image (Pirsisch, Der Sturm, 605-617). Helen Boorman has a more nuanced approach and discusses Herwarth Walden’s and Sturm’s ambivalent position between avant-garde art and commercial culture. She emphasizes “his own active involvement in the late Wilhemine culture industry” (Boorman, Herwarth Walden and Der Sturm, 183-223, quotation from 183).

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 Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe

nection between modernist aesthetics, the art market and the commercial culture industry. Importantly, the transformation process brought with it changes in both directions. Due to their function as advertisements, reproductions of artworks on postcards did not only represent a certain pictorial language but referred back to the materiality of the works of art and reminded people of their status as commodities in a steadily growing transnational art market.

Materializing Transnational Networks The postcard series of Sturm, as well as programmatic books, prints and texts in Der Sturm, regular exhibitions in the Berlin gallery and a wide scope of travelling exhibitions in Germany and abroad, demonstrations of Nell Walden ’s collection of Sturm art, talks and lectures et cetera, all contributed in different ways to Herwarth Walden’s “Expressionist megalomania”.21 To put it in a more sympathetic way, Herwarth Walden’s clever adaptation of a wide range of strategies and technologies for mediating and promoting art and artists represented by Sturm highlights his success in establishing himself as the obligatory point of passage in a transnational network of material and discursive relations, which displayed, promoted and circulated modernist art in Berlin and beyond.22 Not least the extensive travelling across the European continent by Herwarth and Nell Walden which preceded Sturm’s organisation of “Erster Deustcher Herbstsalon” indicate the importance of a transnational art community and market.23 In her diary of 1913, Nell Walden made notes on these travels. The rapid transportation between European art centres stretching from Paris to Vienna and from Munich to Copenhagen illustrates a modern time-space compression crucial for Sturm’s international pretentions. The texts on the postcard series Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon were in German, indicating that the cards were intended for a German-speaking market only or possibly including the educated middle

21 West, The Visual Arts in Germany, 89. 22 On the constitution of obligatory points of passage as a way of securing power and making an actor in a network indispensable, see Callon, “The Sociology of an Actor-Network”, 25 ff. 23 Besides the dominance of Impressionism on the Berlin art market at the time, another reason for Herwarth Walden’s operations in the national and transnational art market might have been his polemics in Der Sturm which “kept him in a position of embattled isolation, without the network of contacts necessary to gain a foothold in the mainstream art market”. Robin Lenman, “The Internationalisation of the Berlin Art Market 1910-1920 and the Role of Herwarth Walden”, in: Künstlerischer Austauch. Akten des XXVIII. Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte, Berlin, 15-20 Juli 1992, Band III, ed. Thomas W. Gaehtgens, Berlin 1993, 538.



Modernism Diffracted 

 23

class beyond central Europe. The texts in the exhibition catalogue, though, were translated into English and Danish as well. Obviously, the Sturm enterprise benefitted immensely from the technologies and developments – for example, transportation infrastructure, rapid urbanization, postal service, and diverse print technologies – that made this material translocation possible but also effected and enabled new ways of communication on art within the art world and beyond. However, any discursive and/or material alteration of communication inevitably changes the relation of those communicating.24 In this context, it is worth emphasizing that picture postcards were intimately connected to an individual and sometimes ritualized usage of material popular culture that exceeded the habitual behaviour of encountering artworks in a gallery room or in a private collection.

Experiences Extended and Displaced Postcards were part of modern tourism. Travel journals used them as illustrations and hotels employed them for advertising.25 As tokens of tourism, they illuminated Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that the souvenir in modern society was “the relic secularized”.26 This had bearing on the picture postcards of Sturm as well. Not only the exhibition catalogues but also the postcards metaphorically allowed the visitors to the Sturm gallery to take along a part of the event. As tokens from a specific occasion, postcards and catalogues offered a material ground for the memories of experience of the artworks. The postcards – and particularly those assembled into series such as Gemälde der Futuristen, Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon and Sammlung Walden – documented and materialized a temporary visual context that would travel through time and space and thus offer a point of access to the event even to those who did not in fact see the exhibitions or the display of Nell Walden’s collection. Again, the postcards’ material meaning as documents, and possibly also as souvenirs or relics in a transferred sense of the word, extended and displaced the experience of encoun-tering modernist aesthetics in time and place. Sturm’s activities also expanded into the city and became part of the urban fabric. According to Nell Walden, posters that announced the futurist show in 24 See Haraway, When Species Meet, 26-27. 25 Edward Heron-Allen, “First picture postcard”, in: Notes and Queries, 2 October 1926, n° 151, 248. 26 Walter Benjamin, “Central Park”, trans. Lloyd Spencer and Mark Harrington, in: New German Critique, Winter 1985, n° 34, 48.

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1912 were stuck on advertising pillars every night during the exhibition.27 The futurists returned to Berlin to attend the opening of the “Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon” where they exhibited 12 works. On this occasion, the “Futurist Manifesto”, which had been published in Der Sturm in connection with their first exhibition in the Sturm gallery, was distributed to the public at Potsdamer Platz.28 The futurist artists thus extended the exhibition as event into urban space in a manner that must have appealed to Herwarth Walden. Indeed, when “Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon” was condemned by art critics, part of Walden’s counterattack was to distribute a flyer, “Aufruf gegen Kunstkritiker”, in the public space.29 Reports from visits to the Sturm gallery and/or the Walden private collection are scarce and there is little knowledge of the habitual social behaviour of beholding Sturm art.30 Among the few documented visits to the gallery are the accounts of Swedish journalist Ellen Rydelius and her husband, the author Harald Wägner. The former’s account of a visit to the Sturm gallery in spring 1918 – probably during the Nell Walden exhibition in May, as Harald Wägner reported from this exhibition to a Swedish newspaper in 1918 – indicates the diversity of visual impressions in the Sturm headquarters. Rydelius not only studied the artworks on show in the gallery and in the private collection, but also noticed the social and visual front of the Walden couple in terms that were more general.31 She thus described an embodied reception of artworks situated and enacted in a discursive, social and material context, which also included the Walden couple’s postures, social rituals and sartorial signs. Nell Walden ’s fashionable accessories, Herwarth Walden’s dedicated piano performance and the modernist artworks packed together at the walls were simultaneously observed and later described in the same tone. If the reception of modernist art in the gallery and in the private collection was part of a social enactment, the postcards made possible an encounter with

27 Nell Walden, Der Sturm: ein Erinnerungsbuch an Herwarth Walden und die Künstler aus dem Sturmkreis, eds. Nell Walden and Lothar Schreyer, Baden-Baden 1954, 27. 28 Ursula Prinz, “Futuristen in Berlin”, in: Die Sprachen des Futurismus: Literatur, Malerei, Skulptur, Musik, Theater, Fotografie, Berlin 2009, 47. 29 See Der Sturm, 19, 1928, 7, 3 and Peter Sprengel, Literatur im Kaiserreich. Studien zur Moderne, Berlin 1993, 169-170. 30 The social constitution of the public visiting Sturm is better documented through Nell Walden’s guest books. Every visit to the gallery was not recorded, but the list gives a fair picture of the public visiting the openings. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Nachlass Nell Walden. 31 Ellen Rydelius, Leva randigt, Stockholm 1951, 116-118. On social fronts and performances in human interaction, see Erwing Goffmann, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Stockholm 1951.



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 25

the pictorial language of modernism that was personal and tactile in character. More importantly, it made possible a reception of inherent volatility. Principally, reproductions of artworks promoted by Sturm could turn up everywhere. Put differently, the size and materiality of the postcard opened up for a more intimate, but also more mundane bodily experience of the pictorial language of the art object through its reproduction.

Images and Texts The Sturm postcards did not only represent modernist art, but offered interpretative frameworks too, established through short texts on the back of the card. These captions stated the artist’s name and the title of the work, but usually subordinated this information under the primary heading of Sturm and Herwarth Walden.32 The principal function of this kind of text was to anchor the denotations and connotations of the image and thus to direct the interpretation and understanding of the card towards meanings chosen in advance. In short, it caused the beholder to receive a certain apprehension and to avoid others.33 Obviously, the postcards supported the promotion of individual artworks or artists thus represented. In addition, the texts on the cards anchored the denotations and connotations of the modernist imagery and served the discursive and material (re)production of a pictorial language understood as Sturm art. Similarly, the Sturm-Künstler series promoted and directed attention to a social and cultural context denominating individual artists and authors as Sturm-Künstler. The metaphorical presence of an artist through his or her portrait on the postcard simultaneously visualized and materialized this relation. If and when the picture postcards were used by Nell and Herwarth Walden and artists affiliated with Sturm, they would have strengthened the corporate identity of the Sturm enterprise.34 As 32 The first series had the heading Gemälde der Futuristen and contained a wider interpretative frame as there were short texts commenting on the reproduced artworks. On other occasions the principal heading was Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon or Sammlung Walden. The latter heading concealed, possibly deliberately so, the fact that the Walden collection belonged to Nell Walden. 33 Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image”, in: Image–Music–Text (1977), New York 1999, 40. 34 A rare example of a message from Herwarth Walden to Karl Kraus, written on a Sturm postcard (Gino Severini’s The Milliner), is in the Karl-Kraus-Archiv in the Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek. See also George C. Avery, Feinde in Scharen. Ein wahres Vergnügen dazusein. Karl Kraus – Herwarth Walden Briefwechsel 1909-1912, Göttingen 2002, 413. On Herwarth Walden as entrepreneur and Sturm as corporate identity, see Barbara Alms, “Der Sturm – Corporate Identity für die internationale Avantgarde” in: Der Sturm im Berlin der zehner Jahre, eds. Barbara Alms and Wiebke Steinmetz, Delmenhorst 2000, 15-34; Andrea von Hülsen-Esch, “Das Unternehmen

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it turned out though, the Sturm picture postcards were also employed for conflicting agendas. In the 1920s, Raoul Hausmann appropriated a Sturm postcard with Herwarth Walden’s portrait in order to discredit him and the Sturm enterprise. All over Walden’s face, Hausmann wrote “section du merde allemande”, “l’oeil mal”, “point du cul”, “l’oeil bourgeois hausse d’expressionisme”, “vulgaire=va-gine”, “caca” and “Jésus capitaliste”. Thereafter he sent the postcard with cordial salutations to Theo van Doesburg.35 This transformation must have been particularly insulting to Herwarth Walden, as it attacked his portrait, which materialized his apparition and thus metaphorically made him present and personally subjected to verbal and material violence. Moreover, the abusive language emphasized the Sturm postcard as a mass-produced object and commercial advertising and used it as material grounds for harsh criticism against Herwarth Walden’s capitalist enterprise. Indeed, it implied that his commercial agenda made him incompatible with the avant-garde art field.36

Visual Histories Cartes-de-visite had been collected in albums. One common type of album was the topical or subject album that included collections of reproduced works of art.37 The majority of these cartes-de-visite represented old master paintings and sculptures, whereas reproductions of contemporary artworks seem to have been less common.38 The usage of picture postcards followed the practises established in relation to cartes-de-visite. Thus, also picture postcards were categorized and assembled in albums. Sturm postcards probably were no exception. Indeed, Nell Walden’s postcard album, now in the Sturm-Archiv, Berlin, confirms a connection between popular practices of collecting and the Sturm postcards.39

der Sturm und Herwarth Walden als Unternehmer”, in: Der Sturm, Band II: Aufsätze, eds. Andrea von Hülsen-Esch and Gerhard Finckh, Wuppertal 2012, 201-225. 35 See Craig Eliason, “Manifestos by Mail: Postcards in the Theo van Doesburg Correspondence”, in: Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation, 17, 2001, n° 4, 449-458. 36 Obviously, this is one of the key conflicts in the art field as described by Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1992), Cambridge 1996. 37 Darrah, Cartes de Visite, 9. 38 William C. Darrah mentions the German company F. & O. Brockmann which issued a series of cartes-de-visite with reproductions of classical paintings as well as contemporary artworks (Darrah, Cartes de Visite, 109). 39 Nachlass Nell Walden, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz.



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During the second half of the 19th century, cartes-de-visite, picture postcards and other photomechanical reproductions – eventually followed by illustrated art books – expanded knowledge of classical artworks in the collections of western museums to millions of people. Undoubtedly, this was part of a commercialization and commodification of (reproduced) art images. It did however encompass educational ambitions as well.40 Hence, the appropriation and popularization of high art by the culture industry arguably contributed to the democratization of elite culture. The reproduction of art was – and indeed continues to be – foundational for the scholarly work of art historians as well. Aby Warburg’s Mnesomyne Atlas is a well-known example.41 Unlike reproductions in illustrated books that emanated from the scholarly field of art history, postcards reproducing artworks left the construction of taxonomies and narratives completely open. With a postcard collection, potentially everyone could compile her own Mnemosyne Atlas and create myriad discursive and material versions of visual history. Artworks reproduced as postcards thus facilitated an open-ended dialogue between art and other visual material. Indeed, Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas included not only reproductions of art but other visual material too.

Modernism Diffracted In their seminal essay on “Semiotics and Art History”, Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson paid attention to the fact that “the text or artwork cannot exist outside the circumstance in which the reader reads the text or the viewer views the image, and […] the work of art cannot fix in advance the outcome of any of its encounters with contextual plurality”.42 The Sturm postcards were indeed a means of extending and materializing encounters between modernist aesthetics and contextual plurality. However, the notion of plurality indicates parallel but separate perspectives. If the material meanings of the Sturm postcards were intimately connected to reciprocal processes of translation, as argued above, then we would need to exchange the notion of contextual plurality with relational multiplicity. The latter refers to performative interventions, rather than interpretative perspectives, and allows for an understanding of the postcards as a discursive and material phe-

40 Darrah, Cartes de Visite, 107-111. 41 See Martin Warnke and Claudia Brink (eds.), Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, Berlin 2000. 42 Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, “Semiotics and Art History”, in: The Art Bulletin, 73, 1991, n° 2, 179.

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nomenon that enacted multiple versions of modernist aesthetics.43 In light of this, we would also need to abandon the common metaphor that defines reproduced images as indexical reflections of the artworks represented, and describe instead the picture postcards of Sturm as modernism diffracted.44 I would like to thank archivist Annelie Ingvarsson at Landskrona Museum who offered prompt assistance with archival material when I was finalizing this chapter. Thanks to Anna Radford for English language editing.

43 See also Annemarie Mol, “Ontological Politics: a Word and Some Questions”, in: Actor Network Theory and After, eds. John Law and John Hassard, Oxford 1999, 74-89. 44 On diffraction as epistemological metaphor, see Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter”, in: Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28, Spring 2003, n° 3, 801-831.

Magali Nachtergael

André Breton’s Autobiographical Cut-Ups Collages, Photographs, and Cinema In 1924, after the cubist pictorial revolution, the First World War, the discovery of psychoanalysis and Dada’s anti-art, André Breton decided that the time had come to set up a new aesthetic, freed from the constraints of realism. His renewed aesthetic system would unveil a new face of life and incite people to liberate themselves from their mediocre, meaningless everyday lives. As such, his project was directed against realistic narrative and bourgeois mythology. According to Breton, narrative mimesis and the arrière-garde paradigms needed to be dismantled in order to overcome a devastated collective and individual imaginary. In redrafting the preface to Poisson Soluble as the Manifeste du surréalisme, Breton radically favoured subjectivity against the so-called objective realism of the traditional novel, which had dominated narrative production during the 19th century. Paradoxically, the anti-realism proclaimed by surrealism appears outdated, as the challenge to mimesis had ceased to be a prime issue for the literary avantgardes. The practice of stream of consciousness writing had shifted the narrative focus onto the intimate depths of the thinking subject well before Breton’s surrealist manifesto. One could nevertheless argue that this still represented a mimetic account of psychic operations. For Breton, in regard to method, “the case against the realistic attitude demand[ed] to be examined”.1 His program encompassed a scientific exploration of the unconscious, a revalorization of the “marvellous” and a definition of practices linked to the neologism “surrealism”, a term that he uses for the first time in his article “Pour Dada” in the August 1, 1920 issue of La Nouvelle Revue française. He calls for an intimate exploration of the mechanisms of subjectivity, or the inner space that houses one’s fantasy: ENCYCL. Philos. “Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of the dream, and in the disinterested play of thought. It leads to the permanent destruction of all other psychic mechanisms and to its substitution for them in the solution of the principal problems of life”.2

1 “le procès de l’attitude réaliste demande à être instruit” (André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor 1972, 313). 2 “Le surréalisme repose sur la croyance à la réalité supérieure de certaines formes d’associations négligées jusqu’à lui, à la toute-puissance du rêve, au jeu désintéressé de la pensée. Il tend à ruiner définitivement tous les autres mécanismes psychiques et à se substituer à eux dans la résolution des principaux problèmes de la vie” (Manifestoes of Surrealism, 328).

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Breton’s ambition was to gain access to the most intimate zones of life, at the deepest level of the human mind, and produce empirical reports with scientific value. Still under the influence of his internship in psychiatry, he searched for signs (or symptoms) of another reality. Knowledge of this reality held the potential to deeply transform everyone’s lives. Breton’s attempt to create objective reports of inner experience becomes a systematic project in the review La Révolution surréaliste and in what he called his “illustrated trilogy”, Nadja (1928), L’Amour fou (Mad Love, 1937) and Les Vases communicants (The Communicating Vessels, 1932), each written in the first person. The autobiographical narrative then becomes the privileged experimental field for the narrative dismantling which Breton envisioned from the early 1920s onwards. Significantly this deconstruction of the narrative attests to the profound mutation of a writer’s imaginary, in that it associates an aesthetic of the heteroclite with the representation of an interior text cut into pieces by images. In spite of its statement of principle, surrealism’s intention to nail “real life” can still be considered in relation to the realism that it condemns. Importantly, however, the conception of “real life” had changed considerably at the turn of the 20th century. Breton takes inspiration from the latest breakthroughs in the domains of science, philosophy and art. Major figures like Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Henri Bergson and Pablo Picasso each, in different ways, played a part in the reconceptualization of reality and inspired the avant-gardes to an exploration of new dimensions in art and literature. Building on these explorations, Breton tries to establish a system for our knowledge of the real, which echoes philosophical models by Berkeley, Hegel and, around 1929, also by Engels. In a dialectical perspective, he turns the aesthetic of collage into the keystone of surrealist imaginary. For a couple of years and under the influence of Dada, all Breton’s work of poetical deconstruction is related to playful, visual and physical enjoyment. Dawn Ades, a photomontage specialist, draws attention to the close link between cubism and “the surrealist aesthetic”, reminding us that, according to Breton, there is no rupture between “cubism, futurism and Dada”.3 Working with this perspective of continuity, but focusing particularly on photo and cine-collages, we will see how collage in its various guises enacts a fragmentation of mimetic narrative that inspires Breton to formalize an aesthetic of the surrealist image. The latter is at once inherently linked to photography and to an objective study of the psyche or self.

3 Dawn Ades, “Visions de la matière”, in: “Lire le regard : André Breton et la peinture”, Pleine Marge (Louvain and Arles), ed. Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron, 1993, n° 2, 63.



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Collage as a Philosophical Operation In 1928, when Breton published his first “autobiographical” narrative Nadja, in which text and photographs combine, his eye had been trained not only through the illustrated press, but also via the cinema and the cubist and poetical compositions of the avant-gardes. Avant-garde examples of crossovers between the space of the canvas and that of the page show the intense circulation of two main aesthetic tendencies during this period: one is a poetic dynamic of narrative deconstruction, directly descending from Mallarmé, and the other is a visual dynamic of mimetic deconstruction. Together these dynamics give Breton the main elements for the intersecting syntheses that he will develop in 1924 in the Manifeste du surréalisme. Almost ten years before defining the surrealist image, in a 1916 letter to Théodore Fraenkel, Breton wrote on a superimposed self-portrait, which shows that he was already attuned to the rise of the visual in the textual.4 The Dada artists, followed by the surrealists, were very aware of what literary production owes to the visual avant-gardes, mainly cubism and futurism. The appearance of texts in pictures and vice-versa inaugurates an era of montage that we can describe as trans-artistic, an era that began with Picasso’s papiers collés in 1911.5 Although the surrealists, and especially Breton, conceptualize their link to the image independently from Picasso, they are indebted to the technique of collage. Their representation of “reality” tries to reproduce tel quel what the mind has experienced, even if it seems chaotic and pointless. Collage, just like the mixedmedia productions, functions like a report constituted by a collection of “indexical objects”, to borrow Rosalind Krauss’s expression.6 While collage had been known in Paris since the 1911 cubist experiments, the new technique of photomontage first reached Breton via the dadaists, and especially Max Ernst.7 Ernst had begun to work in Cologne on random combinations called Fatagaga with Hans Arp and Johannes Theodor Baargeld, who were more politically committed than the other Berlin dadaists. In April 1920, Breton started corresponding with Ernst, who was immediately adopted by the Parisian group, which at that time included Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret and Louis Aragon. The following year, the review Littérature published a reproduction of the Relief tricoté with a short text of the artist. His works were exhibited in May 4 André Breton, Je vois, j’imagine. Poèmes-objets, reproduced in Octavio Paz, Paris 1991, 143. 5 See the historical survey lead on this topic by Michael North, Camera Works. Photography and the Twentieth Century Word, Oxford 2005. 6 Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge MA 1989, 203. 7 Littérature, May 1921, n° 19, 4 and 5.

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1921 at the bookstore Au Sans Pareil in Paris. The exhibition presented photomontages like La Santé par le sport, Here Everything is Still Floating or Anatomie d’un marié – works in which the title plays a vital role. When Ernst arrived in Paris during the summer of 1922, Breton immediately praised his latest collages. His following illustrated publications, Répétitions and Le Malheur des immortels, composed with Paul Éluard in 1922, set the tone for the future verbi-visual creation amongst the surrealists. For the record, it is in the preface of Ernst’s first exhibition in 1921 (republished in Les Pas perdus in 1924) that Breton presents his definition of the “surrealist image” in regard to Ernst’s collages for the first time. By his account, they have: “the marvellous capacity to grasp two mutually distant realities without going beyond the field of our experience and to draw a spark from their juxtaposition”.8 This definition makes another appearance, in a slightly different form, in the Manifeste: “It is, as it were, from the fortuitous juxtaposition of the two terms that a particular light has sprung, the light of the image […]. The value of the image depends on the beauty of the spark obtained”.9 The discovery of Ernst’s compositions completed a process in Breton’s mind that had been in progress for several years. On the one hand, he acknowledges in the operation of cutting-pasting a similar approach to his own poetical practice already used in Mont-de-Piété (1911-1919). On the other, however, he notes that the residual figurative traces of the cubist collages are left behind. Ernst may assemble realistic elements, but he generates disorder, making cracks in the representation and triggering unseen associations that have nothing to do with the standard depiction of reality. Besides this practice of collage, in which photographs, texts and drawings combine, another technique resulting from direct luminous exposure of objects on bromide paper is also considered as a form of collage: photograms. These artefacts are given a variety of names depending on their author. The pictures made by Christian Schad in 1919 were called “schadographs” by Tristan Tzara, while Man Ray’s images were designated “rayographs” in 1921. Although the technique was simultaneously developed on both sides of the Atlantic, Man Ray’s became its most famous practitioner. Louis Aragon, in his preface “La Peinture au défi” (Painting Challenged), declares that the “rayographs should be linked to collage

8 “la faculté merveilleuse, sans sortir du champ de notre expérience, d’atteindre deux réalités distantes et de leur rapprochement tirer une étincelle” (André Breton, The Lost Steps, trans. Mark Polizzotti, Lincoln 1996, 246). 9 “C’est du rapprochement en quelque sorte fortuit des deux termes qu’a jailli une lumière particulière, lumière de l’image […]. La valeur de l’image dépend de la beauté de l’étincelle obtenue” (Manifestoes of Surrealism, 337).



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 33

as a philosophical operation”.10 This not only draws a clear continuity between the papiers collés, the photomontages and the photograms, but also establishes a link with the Poem-Object that Breton will develop later on.11 A similar point is made by the contemporary critic Olivier Quintyn when he explores the notion of dispositif as a deconstructive operation of references. His analysis suggests that the dispositif leads to a “restatement of mediations” (retraitement des mediations)12 and to a reconfiguration of our perception of reality. But this process of reshaping reality into heterogeneous media is not only limited to an aesthetic or phenomenological perception of the outside world surrounding the subject. It also implies moral and ethic postures. This is underlined by Georges Didi-Huberman in his series of books L’œil de l’histoire13 in which he acknowledges the deep power of the photomontage on minds throughout the 20th century. For Didi-Huberman, collage and photomontage reconfigure our vision of the historical course of time, and therefore, use the effect of estrangement to set a critical distance between the subject and his perceptions.14 That explains why high regard for Man Ray was not limited to his dadaist experiment. More than anyone else he contributed to the changing understanding of photography. His work shows that photography cannot be considered a pure mimetic window on reality, but instead adds new meaning to reality. A wide and entangled understanding of the notion of collage sheds new light on the artistic and poetic activity of the Parisian avant-gardes. It enables us to move from Marcel Duchamp’s first ready-made Roue de bicyclette (1913) to Ernst’s Fatagaga and Hannah Höch’s photomontages. In each, the artist takes part in the very same “art of conception” that Pierre Reverdy perceived in the poetry of the day.15 In his Art of Poetry, Horace, eerily anticipating surrealism, denounced precisely this art of assembling because “such pictures would be a book whose idle fancies shall be shaped like a sick man’s dreams”.16 Max Ernst’s works correspond exactly to what Horace presents as the antithesis of poetical arrangement. Aragon and Breton quickly become aware of this reversal of values. This brings 10 Les “rayographes devraient être reliés au collage en tant qu’opération philosophique”, Louis Aragon, “La Peinture au défi”, in: Exposition de collages  : Arp, Braque, Dali, Duchamp, Ernst, Miro, Magritte, Man Ray, Picabia, Picasso, Tanguy, exh. cat., Paris, Galerie Goemans, 29 March-12 April 1930, 1930, our translation. 11 Aragon, “La Peinture au défi”, n.p. 12 Olivier Quintyn, Dispositifs/dislocations, Paris 2009, 55. 13 Georges Didi-Huberman, Quand les images prennent position. L’œil de l’histoire 1, Paris 2009. 14 Didi-Huberman, Quand les images prennent position, 69. 15 Brandon Taylor, Collage. The Making of Modern Art, London 2004, 67-69. 16 Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough and William Heinemann, Cambridge and London 1929, 451.

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 Magali Nachtergael

Breton to make the radical assertion in the incipit of his first article on Ernst that “[t]he invention of photography dealt a mortal blow to old means of expression, as much in painting as in poetry”.17 At this time, Breton commits himself to a sort of all-encompassing experimentation, which combines poetical, visual and personal creation. He seeks to push the concept of collage beyond its aesthetic limits in order to turn it into a genuine philosophy of existence. As a young artist, in the period that leads to the definition of the image and of surrealism, Breton is introduced to visual experimentation and performances that, to a greater or lesser extent, enact the deconstruction of narrative mimesis. The role of Man Ray and his “photograms” is decisive in Breton’s questioning of the representation of what is “real” insofar as they convey an obscure aspect of reality and reveal an apparent and disturbing non-sense in representation. The photographic technique is no longer considered as a purely mimetic medium. Quite to the contrary, photography as practiced by Man Ray and others challenges the representation of the “real” through visual distortions and ruptures. For the surrealists, and especially for Breton, these photographic manipulations are manifestations of a wide iconoclasm, which involves a philosophical dimension capable of directing life itself.

Cinematographic Cuts Eager for the latest amusements, Breton, like many of his young fellow poets and artists, loved to go to the cinema. He particularly appreciated popular films, and scrupulously followed the episodes of serials such as Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas (1913-14) or Les Vampires starring the demonic character Irma Vep (1915-16), who wore a tight black whole body suit that contributed to her rapid fame. Breton especially appreciated glamorous actresses such as the acrobat Musidora, the American Phyllis Haver, whose photographs appears in the third issue of La Révolution surréaliste,18 and Alla Nazimova, whose name Breton cited during a séance of hypnotic-sleep.19 Nadja, his first illustrated narrative, includes the poster and the summary of an episode of L’Étreinte de la pieuvre, a serial he followed during the war.20 Robert Desnos’s posthumous book Cinéma, which contains early 20thcentury texts on Picabia’s Entr’acte, Fantômas, Battleship Potemkine and script projects, sheds light on the taste and the mind set of the surrealist group in terms 17 “L’invention de la photographie a porté un coup mortel aux vieux modes d’expression, tant en peinture qu’en poésie” (Breton, The Lost Steps, 245). 18 La Révolution surréaliste, 15 April 1925, 12. 19 Breton, The Lost Steps, 277. 20 André Breton, Œuvres complètes, I, ed. Marguerite Bonnet, Paris 1988, 1533.



André Breton’s Autobiographical Cut-Ups 

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of these contemporary cinematographic productions. In Breton the cinematic experience triggers more than just passive admiration. In 1951, in the context of an article published in L’Âge du cinéma, he returned to a practice he and Jacques Vaché had come up with. Mentioned in Nadja, it consisted of moving from one film theatre to another, “at the first sign of boredom – of satisfaction”21, sometimes without even knowing the title of the film. This playful activity – zapping – had a “mesmerizing” effect on him and reloaded his own creative energy: “the important thing was that one went out from there ‘loaded’ for a couple of days”.22 According to Breton this cinematographic viewing technique is akin to the random cut-and-paste that foreshadowed the automatic writing experiments. Going from one dark room to another, he was in effect editing a non-existent movie, aimlessly composing a cinematographic “exquisite corpse”. This experimentation with the cinematographic dark room, which also hints at Plato’s cave, needs to be considered in relation to the two major figures for Breton at this time: Sigmund Freud and Guillaume Apollinaire. During his internship in a psychiatric hospital, Breton became acquainted with Freud’s writings and with his theory of an unconscious inhabited by images. Even if the French audience had to wait until 1922 for a translation of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) by Samuel Jankélévitch and 1926 for The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Breton made the trip to Vienna on October 10, 1921 to meet with Freud.23 Théodore Fraenkel tells us that it is during this internship that Breton experienced a radical change in his understanding of poetry, to which his discovery of Dada and of Apollinaire’s visual poetry was pivotal. In his lecture “L’Esprit nouveau et les poètes”, given on November 26, 1917, Apollinaire declared that it was time to “prepare oneself for this new art” (se préparer à cet art nouveau)24 which was proceding from cinema and other modern recording media. 21 “à la première approche d’ennui – de satiété” (Breton, Nadja, 663). 22 “L’important est qu’on sortait de là ‘chargé’ pour quelques jours” (Breton, “Comme dans un bois”, 27). Our translation. 23 “Interview du Professeur Freud à Vienne”, Littérature, 1922, n° 1, republished in: Les Pas perdus, 255. 24 “Il eut été étrange qu’à une époque où l’art populaire par excellence, le cinéma, est un livre d’images, les poètes n’eussent pas essayé de composer des images pour les esprits méditatifs et les plus raffinés qui ne se contentent point des imaginations grossières des fabricants de films. Ceux-ci se raffineront, et l’on peut prévoir le jour où le phonographe et le cinéma étant devenus les seules formes d’impression en usage, les poètes auront une liberté inconnue jusqu’à présent. Qu’on ne s’étonne point si, avec les seuls moyens dont ils disposent encore, ils s’efforcent de se préparer à cet art nouveau […]” (Guillaume Apollinaire, “L’Esprit nouveau et les poètes” (26 Nov. 1917), in: Le Mercure de France, Nov.-Dec. 1918, n° 130, 387.) “It would have been strange if in an epoch when the popular art par excellence, the cinema, is a book of pictures, the poets had not tried to compose pictures for meditative and refined minds which are not content with crude

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While it was clear that the cinematograph opened the door to both a new mode of narration and to new kinds of books, these proved hardly easy challenges. High-quality reproductions of pictures in books remained expensive before 1925, the year when the offset technique led to a massive wave of photography prints in bookstores. Nevertheless photographs, or to be more accurate “film stills”, make an appearance in the form of a new kind of book in France around the early 1920s: cinema novels. They consist of leaflets of a dozen of illustrated pages that show stills or lith-prints after photographs. The titles speak for themselves and show us which type of movies were chosen for this second life: Soyez une femme! (Be a Woman!, 1922), Le Traquenard (The Trap, 1922-23), La Vénus de Montmartre (Montmartre’s Venus, 1926) or Les Vagabonds du désert (The Vagrants of the Desert, 1926). Classical movies such as Abel Gance’s La Roue (The Wheel, 1923) were also re-written for weekly cine-novels published in Le Film complet du jeudi or Le Film complet du dimanche (1922-1933). The stills illustrating the screenplay are usually of no relevance to the understanding of the plot. They show the main characters deep in conversation or lovers hugging each other, desperately, passionately or tenderly. The accompanying text merely relates the basic events of the story through the transcription of the key dialogues. Although the format reduces the narrative to a minimum, these books are, on a technical and formal level, the exact equivalent of what Nadja appears to be in 1928. Put the other way round, Breton’s narrative takes his inspiration from a widespread popular model that is in the 1920s just a by-product of the film industry. While cinematographic display, a magnified projection on screen, and his own habit of cutting up movies “mesmerize” Breton, he also received a specific initiation into the first experimental movies screened during the Dada festivals. The famous Soirée du Cœur à barbe on 6 July, 1923 is one example that illustrates the eclecticism of these poetical and visual medleys. According to Man Ray’s autobiography, at some point during that chaotic show, Tristan Tzara announced the movie Retour à la raison, “shot by the famous artist Man Ray, in a moment of lucidity”.25 Man Ray explains that he hadn’t had the time to check the film made during the night from shortcuts previously shot and rayographs composed in a rush with nails, salt and pepper. In the morning, he had just taped the pieces together. If the film had seemed to be a technical success seen in the spotlight of imaginings of the makers of films. These last will become more perceptive, and one can predict the day when, the phonograph and the cinema having become the only form of publication in use, the poet will have a freedom heretofor unknown” (Guillaume Apollinaire, “The New Spirit and the Poets”, in: Selected Writings, trans. Roger Shattuck, London 1950, 228.) 25 “tourné par le fameux artiste Man Ray, dans un moment de lucidité” (Man Ray, Autoportrait, (1963), trans. Anne Guérin, Paris 1998, 342).



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the dark room, Man Ray had no idea of the visual effect that these images would produce once screened afterwards. The editing had been done blindly and randomly. The result is a movie that deconstructs the cinematographic continuum and that shows a total absence of narrative coherence.26 The two other movies that were shown during this evening were Charles Sheeler’s Fumées de New York (Smoke of New York) and the abstract movie Rythmus 21 by Hans Richter. Movies, like canvasses or photomontages, use technical features as instruments to deconstruct visual meaning and narrative mimesis. Although in the 1920s quite a few artists experimented with cinematographic cut-up techniques, including Francis Picabia, Fernand Léger, and Marcel Duchamp, it is Man Ray who stayed close to Breton and helped shape the aesthetic identity of the surrealist group. Breton, during his years of visual education, adopted this deconstructed scheme in order to reorganize the traditional narration of facts and events that leave a specific mark on subjectivity. In a sense, as Stanley Cavell explains in the preface to his collected essays on cinema, The World Viewed, the modern subject’s history is tightly bound up with the experience of the projection room. In Cavell’s account, his memory of movies is made up of layers that have superimposed themselves along with personal memories. He states that he has seen so many movies and spent so much time in movie theatres that writing his autobiography would necessarily imply writing a book on cinema. He writes: “Memories of movies are strand over strand with memories of my life. During the quarter of a century (roughly from 1935 to 1960) in which going to the movies was a normal part of my week, it would no more have occurred to me to write a study of movies than to write my autobiography”.27 Films, photographs and collages are part of this narrative and imaginary display that Breton develops especially in Nadja and that have set the model for telling a life story right up to the present day.

An Autobiographical News Report To read Nadja as a cinema novel, or a giant cut-up, pulls this inaugural autobiographical story into the sphere of the cinematographic experience. The book resembles an extensive collage, drawing on two traditions. The first is a cinematographic one, echoing Man Ray’s experimental movies or the serials shown in popular theatres. Here, a general written plot subsists. The other deconstructs narration and 26 See Kim Knowles, A Cinematic Artist: The Films of Man Ray, Bern and Oxford 2009. 27 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed. Reflections on the Ontology of Film, New York 1971, ix. See chapter « An Autobiography of Companions », 3-15.

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artificially reconstitutes a global and mysterious heterogeneous representation, in the spirit of Max Ernst’s collages or dadaist photomontages. Adopting the poetic and visual codes of the avant-gardes, Nadja borrows the philosophy of collage as it appeared to Breton as a “fortuitous juxtaposition of two terms”, casting a new light on the continuity of images and narrative fragments. In Nadja, Breton sketches a very short episode in his life. The story of the encounter with the young Nadja, too short to occupy an entire novel, is added to other details. The book creates a kaleidoscopic décor for this strange meeting during an afternoon of October 1926 on Lafayette Street in Paris. The narrative turns into a representation very close to the emerging genre of illustrated news reports – and one must bear in mind that movie theatres screened the news. Photographs and the associated documentation (Nadja’s drawings, for example, are part of the display) transform the book into a complete collection made up of various reviews: a literary review, a review of the surrealist group, a theatre review, a review of events and a review of an interior landscape. All of these combine into a fragmented and incomplete autobiography. In 1928 the media model of the illustrated review was becoming more and more familiar to the main audience. In France, Lucien Vogel launches the first issue of the magazine Vu, direct predecessor of the American magazine Life. In Germany Siegfried Kracauer notices the important “expansion of illustrated newspapers” in his 1927 text entitled “Photography”.28 Kracauer analyses this proliferation as an “intention to restitute in his totality the world accessible to the photographic camera”,29 a venture in which the surrealists participate, since they claim that they have a taste for popular contemporary media and entertainment. Nadja comprises reviews, an excerpt from Breton’s diary, and documentation, just as if it were a personal magazine. In addition, at the end of the book, Breton mentions a piece of information found in the newspapers, which reports the loss of a plane over the Atlantic. He connects the writing of a diary or of an autobiographical text to another type of news reporting, the illustrated newspapers, which unload dispatches and pictures on a daily basis. Nadja doesn’t mimic the newspapers, however. The singularity of Breton’s life report lies in the diverse influences that shape his conception of narration. The result is a fragmented narrative, cut into pieces and cracked by photographs, echoing popular movie stills or unreal visions. In drawing a “mental landscape”,30 left in the state of a “sketch”, Nadja can be considered the first real modern autobiography, showing the interior images of an episode lived as a cinematographic scene. 28 Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography” (Frankfurter Zeitung, 1927), in: The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays, trans. T. Y. Levin, Cambridge and London 1995, 57. 29 Kracauer, “Photography”, 58. 30 Breton, Œuvres complètes, I, 749.

Jed Rasula

Visual Music, a Missing Link? In his prescient book of film theory, Visible Man (1924), Béla Balázs draws on a musical metaphor when evoking the film close-up: “Through its close-ups a good film will teach you to read the score of the polyphony of life, the individual voices of all things which go to make up the great symphony”. Musical analogies like this had been pervasive by then for over half a century, a tribute to the melomania driven along by the international phenomenon of Wagnerism and the prestige of outsize personalities like Liszt and Paganini. But analogy didn’t require literal realization, at least for Balázs. Wondering why music was routinely played during film screenings, he deplores the predictable fit between musical type and scripted scene. “I expect much more from the reverse procedure”, he speculates, “one that to my mind has never been attempted. I am thinking of the filming of pieces of music. […] Who knows, perhaps this will develop into an entirely novel branch of art?”1 A few years earlier, unbeknownst to Balázs, several rapt encounters with an enchanting and ambiguous new medium were reported in Vanity Fair, The New Republic, and similar American publications. The intake of breath is almost audible. “What is this power possessed by changing pictures of nothing in particular, to inspire or depress us, to infect us with nameless dread, to thrill us with pantheistic ecstasy?” asked one critic.2 “It is, in fact, a peculiar characteristic of these images that they cannot well be compared to anything”, another observed. Were they even “images”, he wondered. “It is the aim of Expressionistic art to widen the range of painting in order to make it co-extensive with music”; but, he argued, the liberation of painterly means from mimetic criteria was impeded by the static nature of the medium. “Emotions being illusive and volatile, are best expressed by a medium which is mobile and flowing”.3 The authors of these and other accounts unanimously attest to the futility of verbal descriptions of a

1 Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory, ed. Erica Carter, trans. Rodney Livingstone, New York 2010, 38 and 79. “Der gute Film wird dich aber durch seine Großaufnahmen lehren, die einzelnen Lebensstimmen aller Dinge zu merken, aus denen sich die große Symphonie zusammensetzt”. “Viel mehr erwarte ich darum von dem umgekehrten Verfahren, das meines Wissens überhaupt noch nicht versucht worden ist. Ich denke an die Verfilmung von Musikstücken. [...] Vielleicht wird das noch eine eigene, neue Kunstgattung werden?” (Der sichtbare Mensch, order Die Kultur des Films, Vienna 1924, 74 and 144). 2 George Vail, “Visible Music: The Birth of a New Art”, in: The Nation, 115, 1922, n° 2978, 121. 3 Roderick Seidenberg, “Mobile Painting: Art’s Newest Expression”, in: International Studio, 75, March 1922, n° 299, 86.

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phenomenon that, as journalists, they feel obliged to provide; they concur that what they have witnessed is an entirely new art form; and, although what they experienced was presented in complete silence, they invariably have recourse to musical analogies in their accounts. Accounts of what? The terms vary: Mobile Color, Mobile Painting, Visible Music, and The Color Organ. In fact, the device in question had a name, the clavilux, chosen by its inventor, Thomas Wilfred, precisely to avoid musical associations. Those who saw the clavilux couldn’t help but note its resemblance to an organ with its multitude of stops and its keyboard. But for those who attended public performances (the first was in New York in January 1922), the instrument wasn’t visible, so viewers were privy to an experience that struck them with the magnitude of the unmediated. Although they’d been prepared by recent artistic currents to recognize, in abstract or non-objective art, a similar effort to mobilize pure color forms, witnesses resorted to lists of verbs to evoke the experience of a primal pulsation that could not be objectified: “swirling and whirling and curling, twisting and untwisting, folding and unfolding, gliding, approaching and retreating, in that haunted and inexplicable space”, wrote one critic,4 while another recalled “vivid impressions of abstract or generic movements, as reaching, sinking, fading, rising – movements that might indicate release, grasp, dissolution, involution, evolution, enveloping, revealing, turning, winding, seeking, floating”.5 These lists of verbs share a striking terminological overlap with Rudolf Laban’s vocabulary for dance choreography: wring, press, glide, float, flick, slash, punch and dab were his terms for the “basic efforts” of gesture. Laban was as determined to emancipate dance from music as Wilfred was to shed the musical analogies from mobile color. Thomas Wilfred spent the rest of his life refining what he called lumia, “the Art of Light”, and some of his later creations have a cycle that lasts for more than a year. The overall effect during the several hours I spent absorbed in one on display (at the “Visual Music” exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum in 2005), it proved eerily somatic. Shapes glowed, dripped, refracted, melted, intensified and faded in an intra-uterine luminosity. I occasionally surmised figments of bone and muscle fibers, though nothing quite managed to coalesce into the network of arteries and veins that seems to be the next biological step. These cloudy phantoms evoked the operatic grandeur of a stage-crafted womb; but like some prenatal state, the effects of lumia turned out not to be cumulative. Yes, you do get wrapped up in following the life span of this blob or that vapor, but it’s ultimately like an hallucinatory encounter with mathematical infinity. Curiously, given the 4 Virginia Farmer, “Mobile Color: A New Art”, in: Vanity Fair, Dec. 1920, n° 53. 5 Seidenberg, “Mobile Painting”, 85.



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 41

fact that this enterprise was called “visual music” (however misleadingly), what struck me most was the profound silence in which the moving lights swarmed through their metamorphoses. Despite his lifelong conviction that silence was a precondition of his feast for the eyes, Wilfred himself perpetuated the musical association by assigning opus numbers to his compositions for the clavilux and even, on occasion, performing with music (accompanying Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade at Carnegie Hall in January 1926, with Stokowski conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra, and in 1941 accompanying Sibelius’s tone poem The Swan of Tuonela). But these were exceptions, and in any case Wilfred was hardly averse to music; in fact, he earned his living as a minstrel, playing lute in medieval apparel. By 1948 he felt sufficiently confident in the clavilux and its artistic integrity to broach the possibility “that lumia may help to bring about a new art of sound”, insinuating a striking reversal after a century of ut pictura musica.6 Presumably, he meant that composers would provide scores to the panoramic unfurling of lumia. Certainly the musical outlook and practice of Edgard Varèse suggests an actual musical parallel to Wilfred’s lumia. Based on “the motion of unrelated sound-masses”, as the composer put it, he provided a visual analogy (“for the eye is more rapid and more disciplined than the ear”): “consider the changing projection of a geometric figure on a plane, with the figure and the plane moving in space, both of them, yet each at its own varying and changing speed of translation and rotation”. The swirling masses generated by the clavilux far exceed what Varèse describes, of course, but his geometric figure suggests why he resisted being identified as a musician: “Call me rather a worker in intensities, frequencies and rhythms”.7 The implications for the visual arts of Wilfred’s achievement were soon recognized. In the 1924 edition of his Primer of Modern Art, Seldon Cheney acknowledged the historical singularity of this new medium.8 Cheney wasn’t whistling in 6 Thomas Wilfred, “Letter to the Editor”, in: Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism, 6, Mar. 1948, n° 3, 274. 7 Edgard Varèse quoted in Klaus Kropfinger, “‘You Never Took the Simple Path’: Varèse’s Liberation of Sound and the Delimitation of the Arts”, in: Edgard Varèse: Composer, Sound Sculptor, Visionary, eds. Felix Meyer and Heidy Zimmermann, Woodbridge, Suffolk 2006, 159, 160, 156. 8 “One cannot properly speak of a modernist movement in the art of mobile color”, Cheney wrote. “The whole art as we have it is practically a development of the last decade: all there is of it is modern. But since my interpretation of typical modernism is built largely on the hypothesis that there is an epochal shift from obsession with representation to the search for expressive qualities, there is a special appropriateness in the inclusion of a chapter about this new and purely abstract art of light. It answers, moreover, the ultimate question which must be asked by those modernist painters who are tempted to abandon the anchor in objectivity and ‘compose absolutely’. Every one of them has found that when he gave up the materials for structure and organization in his canvases, there was need for some other element beyond color harmonies and

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the dark, ten years earlier, in Cubists and Post-Impressionism, Chicago lawyer and art collector Arthur Jerome Eddy included an entire chapter on the achievements and prospects of “color music”. Subsequent art historians have generally shown no interest in visual music, a phenomenon that has fitfully persisted mainly as an esoteric subject in film studies, while Wilfred’s clavilux subsided into little more than a footnote in the history of electrical en-gineering. Nonetheless, Eddy and Cheney did in fact have the pulse of the moment. As English composer Cyril Scott suggested in The Philosophy of Modernism (1917): “The modern tendency is to invent new forms or structural designs, more subtle, more mystical, more flowing than heretofore”9; and, not surprisingly, Scott’s constant point of reference for modernism is Richard Wagner. Ricciotto Canudo, riding the high tide of Wagnerism at the turn of the century, had no sooner published Music as the Religion of the Future than he decided to place his bets on cinema instead, “the new dance of manifestations”, he called it, “Painting in motion”. A decade later, in 1923, he admitted: “we wait for the screen’s Wagner […] to construct the synthesis-temple of our intense inner life”.10 The case of Canudo suggests why the phenomenon of visual music has gone missing from art history: the impetus that gave rise to it was a Wagnerian melomania that convulsed all the arts before it settled into the new visual medium of film. Although melomania stimulated artists for decades, and contributed much to the advent of abstract painting, its culmination in visual music seems to have exempted it from consideration by art historians ‒ who, knowingly or not, tend towards Clement Greenberg’s influential model of medium-specific de-velopments. Despite obvious affinities, the projection of free flowing colors on a screen or wall is not the medium of the painted surface. As cinematic possibilities emerged, however, the interplay between painting and music persisted. “I am still groping in the dark”, wrote Czech painter František Kupka in 1913, “but I believe I can find something between sight and hearing and I can produce structureless color-form. The answer is that he then needs movement –movement in time. And when he has gained that, his art has ceased to be painting, has become mobile color” (Seldon Cheney, Primer of Modern Art, New York 1924, 177). Cheney was prone to tracking interaction among the arts: he wrote numerous books on theatre, and in 1928 edited Isadora Duncan’s The Art of Dance. 9 Cyril Scott, The Philosophy of Modernism – Its Connection with Music, London ca. 1917, 67. 10 Ricciotto Canudo, “The Birth of a Sixth Art”, in: Richard Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology 1907-1939, Volume I: 1907-1929, Princeton 1988, 61; and “Reflections on the Seventh Art”, in: Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism, 293. The original reads: “Le cinématographe […] est consacré à la Peinture en mouvement […] une nouvelle danse de l’expression”; “en attendant le Wagner de l’Ecran […] de construire le temple-synthèse de sa vie intense.” (L’Usine aux images, ed. Jean-Paul Morel, Paris 1995, 35, 122-123).



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 43

a fugue in colors”. It was as “color symphonist” that Kupka signed his letters to a friend; and to another he wrote in 1905, “I paint only the conception, the synthesis; if you like, the chords”.11 In 1907 he began work on The Bather, in which the submerged body of the woman is foreshortened under the water and further distorted by the ripples concentrically emanating from her figure. Within a few years this concentric pattern took the form of vertical bars of color, as in Piano Keys ‒ The Lake (1909), in which the keyboard at the bottom of the composition begins to migrate into the watery circles precipitated by a boat. In Ma-dame Kupka Among the Verticals (1910-11) his wife’s face is nearly swallowed up altogether by the colorful cascade of verticals. In these and other works, Kup-ka’s dedication to a musical impulse led directly to visual pulsations bordering on the cinematic, as he struggled to relieve his canvases from the static medium of paint by way of music’s temporality. The fugal propensity of color rhythms was fixed on canvas after canvas by Kupka, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, and the American Synchromists Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, extending into the domain of abstraction the atmospheric and dynamic reverberations pioneered by the Italian futurists and rendered most famously by Duchamp with his Nude Descending a Staircase. In all these instances, whether figurative or abstract, the striations of form and color suggested movement. Music, being by definition a temporal art, was a natural comparison ‒ that is, until cinema suggested a non-acoustic medium for seeing in time. Although it was not the aim of these artists, their works could be plausibly called motion pictures. The motion in these pictures was provided by the animation of the observing eye. This factor was at the time more prominently attributed to cubism. Sadakichi Hartmann discerned an affinity of cubism with music, while noting its paradoxical attempt “to fix in pictorial visions the development of a thought or actual motion, by a medium that bars motion”.12 He was hardly alone in recognizing that the multi-perspectival implants in a cubist work bore demonstrable traces of temporality, like a line of footprints on a beach. A cubist work presents a collection of traces, not a rendering of objects. The difference is clarified by Carl Einstein’s observation that the analytic phase of cubism presented “a way of seeing that’s not interrupted by objects”. This in turn presages a brave new

11 Judith Zilczer, “Music for the Eyes: Abstract Painting and Light Art”, in: Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900, organized by Kerry Brougher, et al., London 2005, 38; Simon Shaw-Miller, Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage, New Haven 2002, 124; Virginia Spate, Orphism: The Evolution of Non-Figurative Painting in Paris 1910-1914, Oxford 1979, 142. 12 Sadakichi Hartmann, Buddha, Confucius, Christ: Three Prophetic Plays, eds. Harry Lawton and George Knox, New York 1971, 116.

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world of “the human possessed of active visual agency, creating his own universe by refusing to be enslaved to given forms”.13 It’s hard to imagine a more precise evocation of visual music, although Einstein like nearly everyone else then was either unaware of, or indifferent to, this proto-cinematic adventure that was on the verge of overtaking easel art. For a few years before the Great War, Leopold Survage pursued this phantom invitation, laboring over his sequence of “Colored Rhythm” paintings as preparatory sketches for a film that was never realized. Writing in Soirée de Paris in 1914, Survage insisted that his work was not an accessory of music but, rather, “an autonomous art, though based on the same psychological aptitudes as music”. Temporal succession, he says, is “what establishes the analogy with music ‒ between sonorous rhythm and colored rhythm ‒ which realization I suggest by way of the cinematograph”.14 A revealing vignette clarifies the tensions burrowing into the visual arts at the advent of abstraction. The young Michel Seuphor ‒ who would play a formative role as advocate of abstraction ‒ attended a lecture by Marinetti in 1922, in which the futurist leader extolled the perpetual agitation of the ocean as a model for artistic vitality and “universal combat”. “After his lecture”, Seuphor reports, “I asked him if he had ever noticed the horizon line: always the same, always untroubled, perfectly immutable. Being and Becoming were confronting each other, two facets of a single image”.15 The futurist stresses conflict, while the future biographer of Mondrian stresses equilibrium; but Seuphor’s paradigm deftly encompasses the initiative behind visual music, which was to orchestrate momentum for the eyes while pursuing intelligible patterns corresponding to the “ground bass” sought by Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling as a foundation for all the arts. The horizon line is “perfectly immutable” only from a distance: zoom in to the precise spot the eye seizes as horizon, and the mobile strife favored by Marinetti will be evident in the agitated waves. For painters, the equilibrium between near and far was locked in by perspective; abstract art threatened to abolish perspective altogether. In the case of Mondrian, what replaced depth perception was the geometrically ordered modeling of Theosophical faith; but with a slight nudge in another medium, the Theosophy could dissolve into the panpipe configurations of Eggeling’s Diagonal Symphony, 13 Carl Einstein, “Notes sur le Cubisme”, in: Documents, 1929, n° 3, 153, 155, my translation. “Au lieu de donner le résultat d’une observation on donne le résultat d’une vision que les objets n’interrompent pas” (153). “[L]es signes d’un homme visuellement actif agençant lui-même son univers et refusant d’être l’esclave des formes données” (155). 14 Leopold Survage as quoted in Javier Arnaldo, Analogías Musicales: Kandinsky y sus Contemporáneos, Madrid 2003, 399. 15 Michel Seuphor, Abstract Painting: Fifty Years of Accomplishment from Kandinsky to the Present, New York 1962, 92 and 96.



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with this difference: it was on the move. In her study On Abstract Art, Briony Fer resists the purist model of artistic progress. “Rather than seek to secure the work within the boundaries of purely formal categories, structurally designed to render a tradition homogeneous”, she advocates finding those “points at which there is evidence of a heterogeneous element or a breach in the system”. Although she, like so many others, does not address visual music, she offers the forceful judgment that “Modernism’s optical field is like a protective shield which seeks to cover those gaps”.16 This protective optical shield has consistently diverted attention from the way in which abstraction insisted on a painterly surface at the expense of the flowing forms its initiative promised. By the early 20th century, painters seemed oddly intent on inventing cinema as if it hadn’t already happened. In 1913, the year Roger Fry declared Kandinsky’s work to be “pure visual music”,17 Morgan Russell identified in Synchromism certain “‘color rhythms’ [that] lend a painting a temporal dimension; they create the illusion of the painting developing over a period of time, just like a piece of music”.18 Russell and Macdonald-Wright were then working on a kinetic light machine, though not practically realized until the Synchrome Kineidoscope nearly fifty years later. The color wheels that pervade the Synchromist canvases, like those of Delaunay’s Orphism, suggest the temporality of expanding aquatic ripples. Russian artist Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné advocated a similar kinetic chromaticism. “Like music, a painting should always be in motion”, he thought (and true to his word Rossiné would go on to invent an optophone with which he had some success in 1923-24, with performances involving an orchestra, folk singers and dancers ‒ to say nothing of his optophonetic light show).19 This device, along with the sonchromatoscope of Alexander László, the spectrophone of Zdeněk Pešánek, the chromatophone of Baron Anatol Vietinghoff-Scheel, and countless other contrivances of the time, have succumbed to footnotes at best, lost in the waste spaces between the histories of theater, art, music, and dance.20 16 Briony Fer, On Abstract Art, New Haven 1997, 5. 17 Roger Fry as quoted in Arthur Jerome Eddy, Cubists and Post-Impressionism, Chicago 1919, 117. 18 Morgan Russell quoted in Gail Levin, Synchromism and American Color Abstraction, 19101925, New York 1978, 130. 19 Baranoff-Rossiné, Moscow 2002, 17. 20 Lost they may be to art history, but there’s abundant documentation of these and other devices in exhibition catalogues: Vom Klang der Bilder: Die Musik in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Karvin von Maur, Munich 1985, Sons et Lumières: Une histoire du son dans l’art du XXe siècle, Paris 2004, and Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900 organized by Kerry Brougher, et al., London 2005. The great historian of visual music, William Moritz, died before completing a monograph on the subject, but many of his articles are available on the internet, as well as

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In the end, film became the means ‒ though hardly privileged, given the industrial scale of the medium ‒ in which visual music staked its fleeting claim. When Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter exhausted themselves trying to work out a universal language of primary signs by means of painted scrolls, based on analogy with music, it got to the point where they realized the scroll would have to go. Film was the answer. Before launching into actual film production, both Richter and Eggeling had called their preparatory sketches “orchestrations”. Richter’s outlook was patently derived from musical composition, having consulted the composer Busoni on his desire to develop precise notations for art along the lines of a musical score. Richter referred the use of the term “orchestration” back to Gauguin.21 Of his flamboyant color intensities, Gauguin exclaimed as if to explain the effect, “It’s music, if you like!” Later he was more specific: “One does not use color to draw but always to give the musical sensations”.22 Richter’s series of “Rhythm” films and Eggeling’s Diagonal Symphony were animated drawings (“somewhere between a pocket comb and panpipes”, one reviewer called Eggeling’s film, “warped around for ten minutes in a melee of lines”23). The limits of their approach became evident in 1925 when an evening of “Absolute Film” in Berlin included not only these and similar works by Hirschfeld-Mack and Walter Ruttmann, but Entr’acte by René Clair (based on Picabia’s scenario) and “Mobile images” by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, preparatory to Ballet mécanique, which revealed a more expansive zone of cinematic “experiment” than the drafting board geometries of the dadaists. By then, Eggeling was dead, but Richter embraced the newly disclosed cinematic prospects and never went back to the rudimentary animation inspired by musical analogies. In a 1906 issue of Camera Work, Charles Caffin complained that painting was “cluttered with the obvious”, and that “to keep itself in living competition with the superior impressiveness of modern music […] it must take on something of

Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger, Bloomington 2004. More generally, on the interplay between music and visual art, see: Peter Vergo, The Music of Painting: Music, Modernism and the Visual Arts from the Romantics to John Cage, London 2010; Simon Shaw-Miller, Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage, New Haven 2002; François Sabatier, Miroirs de la musique: la musique et ses correspondances avec la littérature et les beaux-arts 1800-1950, Paris 1995; Jean-Yves Bosseur, Musique et arts plastiques: Interactions au XXe siècle, Paris 2006. 21 Hans Richter, Dada, Art and Anti-Art, trans. David Britt, New York 1965, 63. 22 Paul Gauguin quoted in Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, ed. Hershel B. Chipp, Berkeley 1968, 66. 23 Walter Schobert, “‘Painting in time’ and ‘visual music’: On German Avant-Garde Films of the 1920s”, in: Expressionist Film – New Perspectives, ed. Dietrich Scheunemann, Rochester 2003, 241.



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the quality which is the essence of music – the abstract”.24 To pass “from absorption in the concrete to some companionship with the Universal and the Abstract”, Caffin supposed, was the future of art.25 Abstraction was just over the horizon, and it would play a dominant role in painting during the next three decades. The simultaneous preoccupation of artists with so-called visual music, along with notable successes like Wilfred’s lumia, raises a perplexing question: why did abstract painting not come to be regarded as a still in the cinematic sense? As a companion in the turn to abstraction, visual music offered an incomparably rich visual field, in which the musical analogy persisted as analogy. The question was then: how could a constantly changing surface compare or compete with the static abstract painting? The trump of painting was autonomy. The musical analogy was an impediment to the potential independence of mobile color, as its temporal aspect made it seem subordinate to a musical stimulus, even if not actually audible. The other tendency of visual music was even more emphatically linked to music, as in the short films by Oskar Fischinger or Mary Ellen Bute, who offered cunning visual animations of specific pieces of music. This prospect, however, left visual music subservient to the illustrative and anecdotal practices that painters were eagerly abandoning. So it seemed visually regressive despite its formal innovation. Visual music may well be regarded as a missing link in the development of pictorial abstraction, but as the analogy with the chain implies, you can remove a link and it will never be noticed.

24 Charles Caffin, “Of Verities and Illusions – Part II”, Camera Work, Jan. 1906, n° 13, 43-44. 25 Charles Caffin, “Of Verities and Illusions, III: Self-Expression”, Camera Work, April 1906, n° 14, 27.

Lidia Głuchowska

From Abstract Film to Op Art and Kinetic Art? Henryk Berlewi’s Mechano-Facture as a Transmedial Adaptation of Viking Eggeling’s Experimental Films

Berlewi’s Mechano-Facture and International SelfPromotion Strategies Material meanings were the permanent subject of the theoretical reflection and artistic praxis of the Polish-Jewish painter, graphic designer and art critic Henryk Berlewi (1894 Warsaw – 1967 Paris) during his long career before and after World War II. Looking at the so far neglected reception of Viking Eggeling’s abstract film in Berlewi’s painting, typography and design, this chapter aims to add to the discussions about interdisciplinary transformation of new forms and media and their impact on the artistic practice and theory of the international avant-garde. Berlewi, who started to articulate his views on art in Polish and Yiddish in 1919 and subsequently in German and French, soon became an influential advocate of the Yiddish avant-garde and of international constructivism. His first individual show in Warsaw (in 1924) already demonstrated his awareness of the power of new media and (self-)advertisement. For this short-lasting show,1 Berlewi converted an automobile salon from a commercial to an artistic space, while at the same time integrating both space’s functions. A performance avant-la-lettre, Berlewi’s show attempted to remove the border between the aesthetic and utilitarian meanings of his work by combining an exhibition with a display of luxurious automobiles in an installation. Thus placing his avant-garde works alongside luxury cars, he also made the spectators aware of the synergy between advertisements for commercial products and modern aesthetics, design as well as theoretical art concepts inspired by mechanical technologies. Because he believed himself to have been excluded from the editorial board of Warsaw’s Blok art magazine and to have been robbed of ideas and artistic concepts by the group’s members, Teresa Żarnower and Mieczysław Szczuka, he deliberately opened this individual exposition at the Austro-Daimler car salon on the eve of the group’s first exhibition at Laurin & Klement’s on 15 March. Together with Aleksander Wat and Stanisław Brucz, he also planned to publish the peri1 Henryk Berlewi, “Funktionelle Grafik der zwanziger Jahre in Polen”, in: Neue Grafik, 14, 1962, n° 9, 23.



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 49

odical Jazz, intended as a counterpart of Blok. In his memoirs, Berlewi mentioned that the first issue of this magazine, prepared as a manuscript, included Eggeling’s theoretical statements on abstract film and El Lissitzky’s article about the elektro-mechanical theatre of the future.2 Berlewi’s installation in the Austro-Daimler salon was a manifestation of the aesthetic project set out in his theoretical manifesto Mechano-Facture, first published in Polish in Warsaw shortly before the aforementioned show, which almost coincided with the publication of the first issue of Blok. Six months later, the manifesto also appeared in German, in Berlin, where according to Berlewi it had been written a year or even two years before.3 Mechano-Facture promoted pictorial two-dimensionality (see fig. 1). It attempted to use mechanical means to create texture and rejected the illusion of three-dimensional space. The reduction of colours to black and white, sometimes red, occasionally gray or blue, and the use of visual ‘equivalents’ of material expression such as wood, metal, sand or newspaper collages in the form of rhythmical geometrical shapes and raster compositions – evoking the effect of perforation – aimed at creating optical arrangements which reflected the spirit of modernity. In his works, multi-layered systems of homogeneous surfaces resemble screen printing or a network of parallel lines complemented with circles, squares and other simple forms. A specific hint at the principles of typography in De Stijl is expressed by using a limited colour palette, which he intended to ‘asceticise’– in other words, he set out to limit the repertoire of artistic means employed.4 The reduction of the later works to basic geometrical and chromatic forms was accompanied here by a seriality of analogous forms in variable layouts creating a pulsation effect. Berlewi’s manifesto explaining his anti-individualist and mechanical expression was enthusiastically prefaced by his friend and Dada-futurist, Andrzej Wat, who located Berlewi’s aesthetic in the sphere of the modern reform of life, technology and science.5 However, Mechano-Facture was received in Poland with scepticism and sparked a polemic debate. It was criticized as epigonal mechano-nonsense

2 Henryk Berlewi, Wspomnienia z lat 20-tych, manuscript, Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, 11; Henryk Berlewi, Mechanofaktura, Warszawa 1924, 16; Andrzej Turowski, Budowniczowie świata, Kraków 2000, 67. 3 Berlewi, Mechanofaktura; Henryk Berlewi, “Mechano-Faktur”, in: Der Sturm, 15, 1924, n°  3, 155-159; Berlewi, “Funktionelle Grafik”, 6, 23. 4 Henryk Berlewi, “Konstruktivismus, Neoplastizismus und Mechano-Faktur”, in: Henryk Berlewi. Galerie Rewolle (exh. cat.), Bremen 1967, n.p. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are the author’s. 5 Andrzej Wat, Preface, in: Berlewi, Mechanofaktura, 3-4.

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Fig. 1: Henryk Berlewi, “Mechano-Faktur”, in: Der Sturm, 15, 1924, n° 3, 157.



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 51

by Antoni Słonimski, a poet from the moderate classicist group Skamander,6 and defended in an article by another follower of Berlewi, Brucz.7 The debate was heated enough to trigger a demonstration of solidarity with Berlewi by Szczuka, his main competitor from the Blok group. In a dandy-like gesture, Szczuka challenged Słonimski to a duel and became wounded.8 Szczuka defended MechanoFacture as pars pro toto of the constructivist program in Poland. His gesture, and the subsequent circumstances of the socio-critical reception of Blok and Mechano-Facture, contributed to the succès de scandale, which further resulted from a spectacular photo, capturing Berlewi at his solo exhibition, and from a clever self-advertising campaign including the aforementioned article by his close collaborator Stanisław Brucz, most of which Berlewi probably organized himself.9 In addition, he designed a poster to illustrate both his theoretical and artistic work. This poster was one of the first examples of functional graphics in the Polish context.10

Mechano-Facture as a Manifesto of Economical Standardization in Lieu of Beauty Following its introduction in Warsaw, Mechano-Facture was presented in Berlin, the “capital of the United States of Europe”11 and of the avant-garde. In September 1924, Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm journal published Berlewi’s theory along with a display of his works. The catalogue documented eleven art pieces, among them seven Mechano-Facture-Constructions.12 Forty years later Berlewi claimed: “Mechano-Facture enters time [...], is taking a leap from two-dimensionality to the fourth dimension through the kinetic vibration of two-dimensional structures”.13 Yet the novelty of his ideas had already been recorded in reviews of his contemporaries Ludwig Hilberseimer and Rachel Wischnitzer-Bernstein.14 6 Antoni Słonimski, “Mechano-Bzdura”, in: Wiadomości Literackie, 1924, n° 13, 7. 7 Stanisław Brucz, “Mechano-faktura (i wystawa prac) Henryka Berlewiego”, in: Almanach Nowej Sztuki, 1924, n° 2, 59. 8 Berlewi, “Nieco...”, 5; Paweł Majerski, Anarchia i formuły, Katowice 2001, 177-178. 9 Turowski, Budowniczowie, 69, 82. 10 Rudziński, “Awangardowa twórczość”, 376. 11 Lidia Głuchowska, “Polish and Polish-Jewish Modern and Avant-Garde artists in the ‘Capital of the United States of Europe’, ca. 1910-1930”, in: Centropa, 12, 2012, n° 3, 217. 12 Der Sturm. Henryk Berlewi. 132 Ausstellung, 3-17 Juli 1924, Berlin 1924. 13 Henryk Berlewi, “Manufaktura i unizm”, in: Henryk Berlewi, Łódź 1966, 6, my translation. 14 Ludwig Hilberseimer, “Bildende Kunst. Polen”, in: Sozialistische Monatshefte, 30, 1924, n°

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In other reviews, Hilberseimer commented on Viking Eggeling’s and Hans Richter’s abstract film, as well as on Vilmos Huszár’s space installations,15 which together with works by El Lissitzky and László Moholy-Nagy, inspired Berlewi’s thought. Hilberseimer also had some other links to Polish artists: he belonged to an ephemeral anarchist group Die Kommune (1922, including Margarete and Stanisław Kubicki),16 and contributed to the first issue of Blok.17 He counted Berlewi’s ideas, besides those of Strzemiński (Malevich’s student), as the most progressive in comparison to the traditional mainstream of Polish art of that time, and claimed: “With a minimum of media Henryk Berlewi attempts to achieve a maximum development of energy”.18 He underlined that Berlewi was the first to discover the application of the cross-line screen principle in graphic form and sumarized his manifesto as follows: “He develops five essential points in support of the idea of Mechano-faktura: first, the method of mechanizing the plastic and graphic media of expression; second, the idea of constructive abstraction; third, mechanization: in complete harmony with the demands of our age and society and economic life and general industrialization; fourth, the theory of reproductive equivalence; and fifth, the removal of the third dimension and the foundation of a two-dimensional system in painting”.19 Rachel Wischnitzer’s critique in the Judische Rundschau, in turn, aimed to explain Berlewi’s thought, and change of aesthetic, to a wider audience. She understood Mechano-Facture as being in opposition to manufacture, given Berlewi’s use of sharp and dynamic futuro-expressionist forms cut out of wood and metal. However, Berlewi’s forms, while mechanically created with the aid of a stencil, were still hand-painted.20 Wischnitzer was above all troubled by the radical turn Berlewi took with Mechano-Facture. She knew Berlewi’s earlier Jewish expressionist works, such as the Dibbuk poster designed in 1920 which had gained him wide recognition.21 She could not believe that he had rejected 9, 599-600. Rachel Wischnitzer-Bernstein, “Mechanofaktur. Henryk Berlewis Ausstellung im ‘Sturm’”, in: Jüdische Rundschau, 8 Aug. 1924, 452; Lidia Głuchowska, “Polnische Künstler und Der Sturm”, in: Der Sturm – Zentrum der Avantgarde, II, eds. Andrea von Hülsen-Esch and Gerhard Finckh, Wuppertal 2012. 15 Ludwig Hilberseimer, “Raumgestaltung”, in: Sozialistische Monatshefte, 30, 1924, n°  2, 6566; Ludwig Hilberseimer, “Raumkonstruktion”, in: Sozialistische Monatshefte, 30, 1924, n° 3, 200. 16 Lidia Głuchowska, Avantgarde und Liebe, Berlin 2007, 121-123. 17 Ludwig Hilberseimer, Drapacz nieba, Chicago Tribune, Blok, 1, 1924, n° 1, 4. 18 Hilberseimer, “Bildende Kunst”; trans. in: Eckhard Neumann, “Henryk Berlewi and Mechano-Facture”, in: Typographica. New Series, 1964, n° 9, 25. 19 Hilberseimer, “Bildende Kunst”, 26. 20 Wischnitzer-Bernstein, “Mechanofaktur”, 452. 21 Henryk Berlewi, “El Lissitzky in Warschau”, in: El Lissitzky, eds. Jean Leering and Wienand Schmied, Eindhoven, Basel and Hannover 1965, 61.



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this type of figurative, symbolical painting with a folkloristic touch in favour of the more universal and impersonal abstract art with standardized forms, nor that he had abandoned his spiritual artistic mission for an experiment for the sake of experiment itself. She asked in astonishment: “What will be the result of that in a year or two? […] – an ornament for a poster, […] a pattern for wallpaper, [...] a fascinating pattern on a textile for a blouse”.22 Admittedly, as we will see, this was exactly what would happen forty years later, as the early avant-garde concepts, including Berlewi’s Mechano-Facture, were integrated into Pop Art after their successful revival. But most significant here is Rachel Wischnitzer’s amazement over Berlewi’s seemingly sudden change of aesthetic. For, indeed, up to this point Berlewi had mainly occupied himself with emotional works in the spirit of Jewish expressionism, a spiritual, narrative and national art. This was now replaced by the cosmopolitan, objective and impersonal idiom of international constructivism. Ignoring such puzzled critics, throughout the mid-1920s Berlewi quite consistently followed the utilitarian course he had initiated with his Mechano-Facture paintings. His pragmatic attitude to artistic production culminated in setting up the Mechano-Reklama (Mechano-Advert) agency together with Wat and Brucz – similar to those initiated by Alexander Rodchenko and Vladimir Mayakovsky.23 The theoretical statements of this agency and its visual realisations corresponded with each other. The agency carried out commercial projects such as accordion booklets using dynamic, diagonal compositions and Dada-like texts as well as exhibition stands.24

Dynamic Abstraction and its First Theoretical Justification in Berlewi’s Work Berlewi’s change of aesthetic had been announced earlier, though. The first evidence of his stylistic turn was in fact the result of his collaboration with the Yiddish avant-garde: a cover design for the last double issue (n° 3/4) of the art magazine Albatross (1922-1923, edited first in Warsaw and then in Berlin). By transforming the Hebrew letters into a diagonal abstract composition, Berlewi here already displayed his mastery of impersonal expression and utilitarian 22 Wischnitzer-Bernstein, “Mechanofaktur”, 452, my translation. 23 Krisztina Passuth, Treffpunkte der Avantgarden Ostmitteleuropa 1907-1930, Budapest and Dresden 2003, 213. 24 Rudziński, “Awangardowa twórczość”, 377.

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typography.25 Abandoning traditional illustration, he came to create a specific idiom for the corporate identity26 of international constructivism. Equally important for Berlewi’s change of aesthetic had been his meeting with El Lissitzky in 1921, whose lecture he attended in September that year at the Warsaw assembly of the Kultur-League. Berlewi hosted several discussions between himself and Polish artists in his studio. Participants probably included the main editors of Blok, Szczuka and Żarnower.27 Berlewi concluded Lissitzky’s lecture, which was the first introduction of suprematism and Proun outside Russia28 together with subsequent discussions in the same year in his article Struggle for a New Form.29 For Berlewi, his meeting with the ‘Apostle of the Suprematism’, Lissitzky, became the initial impulse to move to Berlin, where he joined the Novembergruppe and took part in their two exhibitions, one in 1922 and in the “Great Berlin Art Exhibition” in 1923, where he started presenting prototypes of his MechanoFacture.30 The first of these was supposed to be the figurative Mechano-Facture with Bottles, according to him especially admired by Lissitzky and Eggeling.31 In 1922, together with Jankel Adler from the Young Yiddish group from Łódź, Berlewi represented Jewish Artists from Eastern Europe at the Congress of the International Union of Progressive Artists in Düsseldorf, where again he met El Lissitzky and many others, including ‘cosmic Communist’ Stanisław Kubicki and the ‘Dadasoph’, Raoul Hausmann, as well as Theo van Doesburg, László MoholyNagy, Hans Richter and Mies van der Rohe and – last but not least – Viking Eggeling, who represented the politically involved groups Artistes Radicaux and the already mentioned Die Kommune. The latter tended to see the whole event as a commercial one.32 25 Lidia Głuchowska, “From Transfer to Transgression. Yiddish Avant-Garde – a Network within the Universal Network of the International Movement or a Complementary One?”, in: Transferts, appropriations et fonctions de l’avant-garde dans l’Europe intermédiaire et du Nord, ed. Harri Veivo, Paris 2012, 158-160. 26 Lidia Głuchowska, “The ‘New world’ of the avant-garde and the ‘new states’ in Central Europe and Peripheries”, in: Transnationality, Internationalism and Nationhood. European Avant-Garde in the First Half of the Twentieth Century, eds. Hubert van den Berg and Lidia Głuchowska, Leuven, Paris and Walpole, MA 2013, 195, 202-204. 27 Berlewi, “El Lissitzky in Warschau”, 60-61. 28 El Lissitzky, “Das goywer zayn di kunst”, in: Ringen, 1921/22, n° 10, 32-33; trans. in: Benson, Between Worlds, 184-186. 29 Henryk Berlewi, “In kampf far der nayer forem”, in: Ringen, 1921, n° 1-4, 31-33; trans. in: Benson, Between Worlds, 182-183. 30 Henryk Berlewi, Mechano-Fakturen. Situationen 60 Galerie, Berlin 1963, n.p. 31 Berlewi, “Funktionelle Grafik”, 23-24. 32 Głuchowska, Avantgarde und Liebe, 59-61, 130-131, 163, 238.



From Abstract Film to Op Art and Kinetic Art?  

Fig. 2: Viking Eggeling, “Diagonal-Symphonie” (1920-1924) and Hans Richter, “Rhytmus 1” (1924), in: El Lissitzky and Hans Arp, Die Kunstismen, Zürich, München, Leipzig 1925, 2.

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 Lidia Głuchowska

Berlewi, however, did not see the opposition between art and commerce. This became clear in his theoretical statements published at that time. In his review of the “Great Russian Exhibition” he claimed that suprematism was an example of l’art pour l’art and, as such, of the suicide of art – which stands in contrast to his statements published only two years earlier in his article “The Struggle for New Form”. And in his report about the Congress in Düsseldorf, he for the first time mentioned Eggeling’s abstract film as an example of “the positive, material-constructive tendency, opposed to the individual-destructive (self-reflexive and metaphysical) one, which emerged from this exhibition, which is, after all, a reflection of almost all the tendencies in the art of the last fifteen years”. 33 Following this course, he devoted a whole article to the Swedish filmmaker – “Viking Eggeling and his Abstract Dynamic Film” – which appeared also in the first issue of Albatross in September 1922.34 It has never been translated from Yiddish into English or other ‘universal’ languages, thus it requires closer attention.

The Hidden Inspiration of the Mechano-Facture – Abstract Film by Eggeling In his Mechano-Facture manifesto, Berlewi mentioned several inspirations of his concept, including futurism, suprematism and neoplasticism, which he tried to overcome. Yet, he did not mention how important the impulse given to him by Viking Eggeling was. Nevertheless, fascinated by the abstract film experiments of Eggeling, Richter, and Huszár, Berlewi was among the first critics, along with van Doesburg and Hilberseimer, to introduce Eggeling’s experiments and theory to the general public.35 The choice of Yiddish – the alternative lingua franca of a great part of the avant-garde36 – as a medium of communication made his publication accessible to a wide public in Central Eastern Europe. 33 Henryk Berlewi, “Międzynarodowa wystawa sztuki w Düsseldorfie”, in: Nasz Kurier, 1922, n° 209, 2; trans. in: Benson, Between Worlds, 399. 34 Henryk Berlewi, “Viking Eggeling und zayn abstrakt-dinamisher film”, Albatross, 1922, n° 1, 17-18; Pol. trans. in: Warszawska awangarda jidysz, ed. Karolina Szymaniak, Gdańsk 2005, 244250, my translation. 35 Berlewi, “Viking Eggeling”, 18; Ludwig Hilberseimer, “Bewegungskunst”, in: MA, 8, 1923, n°  5/6, n.p.; Ludwig Hilberseimer, “Bewegungskunst”, in: Sozialistische Monatshefte, 27, 1921, n° 5, 312; Hilberseimer, “Dynamičeskaja Živopis´”, in: Vešč, 1922, n° 3, 17-19; Theo van Doesburg, “Abstrakte Filmbeelding”, in: De Stijl, 4, 1921, n° 5, 72; Theo van Doesburg, “Der Wille zum Stil (Schluß)”, in: De Stijl, 5, 1922, n° 3, 40. 36 Głuchowska, “From Transfer to Transgression”, 155-157.



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Berlewi referred to the picture rolls, which Eggeling started to produce in 1915-1917. These sketches on scrolls became prototypes of his abstract films Horizontal-Vertikal Mass (1919, later called Orchester) and Diagonal-Symphonie (1924, see fig. 2). In 1920, following his stay in Berlin, Eggeling moved to Klein-Kölzig together with Hans Richter, where he continued his experiments with picture rolls – sequences of images painted on long rolls of paper which investigated the transformation of geometrical forms and could measure up to 15 metres. As these were to be read from left to right, they soon evolved into cinematographic experimentation on film stock. In 1920, Eggeling began producing his first film, Horizontal-Vertikal-Mass, based on a picture roll containing – according to some reports – approximately 5,000 images.37 However, Eggeling had started his work on the abstract film and theory long before his cooperation with Richter, whom he met via Tristan Tzara.38 Marcel Janco, whom he also encountered in Zürich, mentioned that Eggeling as early as 1919 had showed him his animations obtained by flipping notebook pages containing simple geometrical figures, today common in children’s games,39 which later inspired Lissitzky’s famous suprematist fable On Two Squares (1922).40 In the same period, Eggeling formulated the first version of his theory of art, ‘Kinorfisme’, which he also called ‘Eidodynamik’ (visual dynamics), after the Greek word eidos, meaning appearance, shape (that is, form in contrast to material or shaped materia); in other words, a form in movement or an animated form.41 The first published theoretical statement by Eggeling on abstract film appeared in the Hungarian magazine MA and – in a slightly longer German version edited by Richter – in De Stijl.42 Eggeling situated his own experiments in the context of non-individual art and language tending to express the universal order of the oppositions and tensions in the world, and explained them to be far from purely aesthetic and formal play.

37 van Doesburg, “Abstrakte Filmbeelding”, 72; Hans Richter, “Viking Eggeling”, Studio International, 183, 1972, n° 942, 99; Luise O’Konor, Viking Eggeling 1880-1925. Artist and Filmmaker, Stockholm 1971, 46-47, 59-72. 38 Richter, “Viking Eggeling”, 97. 39 Jeanpaul Goergen, “Viking Eggeling’s Kinophism: Zurich Dada and the Film”, in: Dada Zurich: a Clown’s Game from Nothing, eds. Brigitte Pichon and Karl Riha, New York 1996, 170-171; O’Konor, Viking Eggeling, 46. 40 Steven A. Mansbach, Visions of Totality. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Theo Van Doesburg, and El Lissitzky, Ann Arbor 1980, 55. 41 Goergen, “Viking Eggeling’s Kinophism”, 172. 42 Viking Eggeling, “Elvi fejtegetések a mozgómüvészeströl”, in: MA, 6, 1921, n°  8, 105-107; Hans Richter, “Prinzipielles zur Bewegungskunst”, in: De Stijl, 4, 1921, n°  7, 109-112; O’Konor, Viking Eggeling, 26, 52.

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In 1921, he ended his collaboration with Richter and postponed his work on Horizontal-Vertikal-Mass. Instead, in 1923 he started to collaborate with Erna Niemeyer and worked on Diagonal-Symphonie, a synthesis of image, rhythm, movement and music, created from a series of black sheets of paper with cut-out geometrical shapes.43 This film was shown for the first time in November 1924. Its first public screening took place in Berlin, in May 1925, at the film program Der absolute Film, arranged by the Novembergruppe.44 Echoes of Eggeling’s theoretical statements published in MA can be found in Vešč.45 This publication appeared on Lissitzky’s initiative, who afterwards commented on Eggeling’s project in the Russian magazine Asnowa: “There is no doubt that Eggeling’s work is the most important innovation in Western art since the cubist period”.46 In his article on Eggeling in Albatross, Berlewi, in a similar fashion to Doesburg and Hilberseimer, repeats some of the elements of Eggeling’s self-presentation in MA. He concentrates on the problem of movement, which first appeared in the works of the futurists. According to him, they were the first to break the rules of conventional optical rationalism and perspective, but they were only able to create a kind of movement mystification in art, while Eggeling managed to solve the movement problem by combining several principles of contemporary art such as simultaneity, constructivism and rhythm. Using the film scrolls, he invented a new repertoire of forms, which divided the static construction of painting in several phases of ‘dynamic transformations’ and created “music of abstract painterly forms in their biological development, in their tension and appeasement, in their cosmic harmony and rhythm”.47 Berlewi particularly pointed out that: “Eggeling’s film is a new creative language. It has both educational and social significance, too. A closer fusion of painting and film, displayed on screen […] in a constant dynamic transformation, will enable the introduction of artistic and rational optical education. Also, the curtain behind which the artist’s creative lab has been hidden by now will disappear. A more intimate contact between the producer-creator and consumer-spectator will occur”.48 Berlewi repeated this argument, used also by van Doesburg and Eggeling himself, as a commentary on his idea of producing his own abstract film in the 1950s and 1960s. 43 O’Konor, Viking Eggeling, 51, 58. 44 Malte Hagener, “Turnstile Berlin: The Film Avant-garde, the City, and the Birth of Film Culture”, in: Centropa, 12, 2012, n° 3, 319. 45 Hilberseimer, “Dynamičeskaja”, 18-19. 46 El Lissitzky, “Vicking [sic] Eggeling”, in: El Lissitzky, Proun und Wolkenbügel, eds. Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers and Jen Lissitzky, Dresden 1977, 205, my translation. 47 Berlewi, “Viking Eggeling”. 48 Berlewi, “Viking Eggeling”.



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Echoes of Eggeling’s Thought in Polish Art The dynamic transformations of forms, which Berlewi referred to in his text on Eggeling, enriched by a utilitarian approach, became the basis of his own art concept. He put these ideas to practice already during the period when he knew the Swedish filmmaker. His reception of experimental film later went on to inspire the Polish constructivist artists Teresa Żarnower and Mieczysław Szczuka. They all published conceptual works related to this topic as well.49

Fig. 3: Teresa Żarnower, “Konstrukcja filmowa” (Film Construction), Blok, 1924, n° 8/9, n.p.

Berlewi’s Mechano-Facture was to some extent an adaptation of the cascade of triangles and squares from Eggeling’s abstract films. The same influences can also be observed in the remains of a clip of an abstract film by Szczuka. Even his “telegraphic” manifesto titled Photomontage, which includes nine short sentences, is an overview of this technique and was used to facilitate the achievement of a 49 Matthew S. Witkovsky (ed.), Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945, Washington 2007, 41.

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three-dimensional effect, and to give an impression of simultaneity.50 Żarnower, on the other hand, had already anticipated the cine-theatrical character of the new art in the catalogue of the Vilnius “New Art Exhibition” in 1923.51 In Szczuka’s and Żarnower’s experiments, the photomontage technique became in a way a synonym of experimental film. Both editors of Blok also reproduced in these magazines other art pieces of theirs, depicting their interest in filmmaking (see fig. 3).

Fig. 4: Marcin Giżycki, “Henryk Berlewi – Kinefaktura” (Henryk Berlewi – Cinematographic Texture), 2012, reconstruction of the film project based on the gouache by Henryk Berlewi, “Kontrasty dynamiczne” (Dynamical Constrasts), 1924, in: , (30.04.2013) © Marcin Giżycki.

In Berlewi’s conception, mechanical expression resulted in the textural differentiation of the space without transferring its bi-dimensionality. The movement resulting from the rhythmical character of the image characterised by him in a manner resembling a description of the film, was an inspiration for Marcin Giżycki’s moving reconstruction of this idea entitled Kinefaktura (Cinematographic Texture, 2012, see fig. 4).52 This animation of Berlewi’s Dynamical Contrasts (1924) is based on the observation that his innovative image-building solution used the replacements of varied canvas textures (as well as textures of other materials like wood, sand, and metal) with two-dimensional equivalents such as the rhythm of lines and planes, schematic combination of geometrical forms, and colour range reduced to black and white (and, rarely, other colours): “The move-

50 Mieczysław Szczuka, “Fotomontaż”, in: Blok, 1924, n° 8-9, n.p.; trans. in: Benson, Between Worlds, 503. 51 Teresa Żarnower, “Chęć zbadania niezbadanego”, in: Katalog Wystawy Nowej Sztuki, Vilnius 1923, 22-23. 52 Aleksandra Kędziorek, Marcin Giżycki. Henryk Berlewi – Kinefaktura, , (30.04.2013).



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ment generated by adding rhythm to the image was described by Berlewi as if he was describing a film”. 53 Similarly, as he had previously done in his reconstruction of Berlewi’s filmlike conceptual movie Kinefaktura, Giżycki analysed one of Szczuka’s drawings, published in the first issue of Blok, and entitled 5 Moments of an Abstract Film.54 It belonged to Szczuka’s two designs of this kind, the other one being Some Essential Elements of an Abstract Film.55 In 1927, the artist also started to produce his own experimental film, He killed, you killed, I killed, but this project was never completed due to his death.

Fig. 5: Mieczysław Szczuka, Pięć momentów filmu abstrakcyjnego (5 Moments of an Abstract Film), Blok, 1924, n° 1, 2.

Szczuka’s drawing 5 Moments of an Abstract Film (1924, see fig. 5) depicts a sequence of geometric figures located on one axis and separated by vertical lines. Observing the similarities between the figures and their transformations in the subsequent sections, Giżycki concluded that it presented subsequent frames of a never-accomplished motion picture, which would have been the first study for an abstract film ever made in Poland. In his reconstruction of the project, the images are put into motion and each frame is assigned to five different sounds, combined to produce a simple musical motif (see fig. 6).56

53 Kędziorek, Marcin Giżycki. 54 Mieczysław Szczuka, “Pięć momentów filmu abstrakcyjnego”, in: Blok, 1924, n° 1, 2. 55 Mieczysław Szczuka, “Parę zasadniczych elementów filmu abstrakcyjnego”, in: Blok, 1924, n° 8/9, n.p. 56 Aleksandra Kędziorek and Marcin Giżycki, Mieczysław Szczuka – 5 Moments of an Abstract Film, , (30.04.2013).

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Fig. 6: Marcin Giżycki, Mieczysław Szczuka – 5 Moments of an Abstract Film, 2006, reconstruction of the film project, in: , (30.04.2013) © Marcin Giżycki.

Giżycki’s reconstructions give an insight into how the experiments performed by Berlewi and Szczuka transferred their inspiration drawn from Eggeling and the oeuvre of other pioneers of absolute film. The latter was subsequently discussed by other Polish art critics in an ambiguous way,57 yet the enthusiastic attitude to experiments of this kind is displayed by the lesser known fact that a Cracow artist, Felix Kuczkowski, must have made attempts to produce an abstract film in colour already before the end of the World War I.58 According to Lissitzky, Eggeling mentioned in his last letter to him a similar project, which he never completed.59

“Quelque chose entre algèbre et musique”. Between Abstract Film, Mechano-Facture and Op-Art After 1928, Berlewi abandoned his research in abstract art and returned to figurative painting. In 1947, he turned to the ‘reintroduction of the object’, which he understood as a synthesis of all modern styles. Rediscovered by French art critics, he took part in several exhibitions. A show at the Denise René and Creuse galleries in Paris in 1957 initiated the reception of the abstract art pioneer’s works, including his Mechano-Facture experiments in Poland. They were followed by 57 Marcin Giżycki (ed.), Walka o film artystyczny w międzywojennej Polsce, Warszawa 1989, 89, 102, 156. 58 Marcin Giżycki, “‘Polski film dobry’”, in: Wyprawa w Dwudziestolecie, ed. Katarzyna Nowakowska-Sito, Warszawa 2008, 291. 59 Lissitzky, Proun und Wolkenbügel, 206.



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numerous exhibitions, in Paris, Warsaw, Zurich (1916-1967) and various places in Germany, Poland and other countries (1961-1967), including the shows “Der Sturm” in Berlin (1961) and “Responsive Eye” in New York (1965). Berlewi also stimulated the rediscovery of his own work and the reservetion of the heritage of the avant-garde as a whole. Not only did he produce his Neo-Mechano-Factures, but he also intensively promoted them in his theoretical and art-historical writings.60 In the epoch of rediscovery of the avant-garde, Rachel Wischnitzer’s prophecy came true: Mechano-Facture inspired Pop Art and Op Art design and fashion. On the one hand, Berlewi commented on the whole process as the vulgarisation of his thought in the decorative arts.61 On the other hand, he arranged a spectacular photo session with professional models and a well-known artist-photographer, Edward Hartwig, and placed his own art pieces in the background of the photo compositions (see fig. 7),62 which effectively contributed to the idea that he was the precursor of these styles. In the reviews and catalogues published for his post-war exhibitions, Ber-lewi often referred to his efforts of producing an abstract film, which he understood as the best, didactic illustration of his ideas as well as an abstract art piece in its own right. In the last years of his creative life he also emphasised the transmedial character of Mechano-Facture.63 His last project was a set of illustrations for a poetry book by Anatol Stern, his friend from the Warsaw futuro-dadaist circles. It was to become a revolutionary typographical design (see fig. 8), but was not completed because of Berlewi’s death.64 Interestingly, the only existing part of this work bears resemblance to the culminative motif of Eggeling’s Vertikal-Horizontal Mass (see fig. 9). Significant thing here is also that the artistic ideas of both Eggeling and Berlewi were based on an economy of expression, optical motion and an “Elementary Syntax of Painting”.65 They were both recognized as “quelque chose entre algèbre et musique” and both their work was considered to be a kind of visual synthesis of the universe, a Gesamtkunstwerk.66 However, Berlewi himself hardly ever situated his art in a metaphysical context.

60 Andrzej K. Olszewski, Henryk Berlewi, Warszawa 1968, n.p. 61 Henryk Berlewi, “Anhang zum Katalog”, in: Henryk Berlewi. Galerie Rewolle, n.p. 62 Sebastian Gaiser and Karoline von Roques (eds), Edward Hartwig. Poetic Rebel, Frankfurt/ Main 2011, 7, 118. 63 Henryk Berlewi, “Post scriptum”, in: Poezja, 1966, n° 11, 12. 64 Anatol Stern, Legendy naszych dni, Kraków 1969, 87-100, esp. 91. 65 Richter, “Viking Eggeling”, 97. 66 Raoul Hausmann, “Viking Eggeling”, in: a bis z, 2, 1930, n° 9, 33.

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Fig. 7: Edward Hartwig, Henryk Berlewi – Models, one of the photographs with Mechano-Factures and Neo-Mechano-Factures by Henryk Berlewi, Warsaw’s Hotel Europa, 1962. Courtesy of Gaiser & Cie/Henryk Berlewi Archive.





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Fig. 8: Henryk Berlewi’s design for the poetry book Dom Apollinaire’a (Apollinaire’s House) by Anatol Stern, 1967, in: Anatol Stern, Wiersze zebrane, vol. 2, Kraków 1986, 53.

Fig. 9: Viking Eggeling, “Vertical-Horizontal Orchester” (Vertical-Horizontal Mass), fragment of the “film scroll”, 1919, in: Viking Eggeling, “Elvi fejtegetések a mozgómüvészeströl”, MA, vol. VI, 1921, n° 8, 105.

Berlewi’s painterly-(typo)graphical notion of Mechano-Facture belongs to the most significant artistic and theoretical achievements of the avant-garde. It shaped many discussions in constructivist circles during the interwar period and influenced the revaluation of the avant-garde in post-war times. Therefore, it is commonly considered to be an anticipation of Op Art, and French critics in the 1950s and 1960s would often write about the debt which Victor Vasarely owed to Berlewi.67 What has never been highlighted before, however, is that also Ré 67 Henryk Berlewi. Témoignages, Paris 1965, n.p.; Heinz Ohff, “Unbehagen und schöpferische

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Soupault herself68 (earlier known as Erna Niemeyer, one of Eggeling’s closest collaborators) supported these views. She most probably knew Berlewi already from his Berlin years and her view became most popular, no doubt because Berlewi had successfully managed to promote himself and convince her with his personal charisma and significant networks. The exhibitions and publications on Berlewi of the 1960s not only established his reputation as the precursor of Op Art, but also to some extent – along with László Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers and El Lissitzky – of kinetic art. My reconstruction of the genesis of his Mechano-Facture presented above shows that future research should take the importance of Eggeling for these movements more seriously.

Breite. Visuelle Konstruktivisten in Berlin”, in: Visuell Konstruktiv, Berlin 1968, for instance; Frank Popper, Naissance de l’art cibernétique, Paris 1967, 66, 91; Cyril Barret, Op-art, London 1970, 12; Olszewski, Henryk Berlewi; Passuth, Treffpunkte, 194, 212; Stern, Legendy, 90, 100. 68 Henryk Berlewi. Témoignages.

Emma West

“hap-hap-hap-hap-happy clothes” Avant-Garde Experiments in/with Material(s) We must invent Futurist clothes, hap-hap-hap-hap-happy clothes, daring clothes with brilliant colours and dynamic lines.1

Critics have long tended to overlook avant-garde experiments in fashion. Yet these experiments in dress were a crucial part of many European avant-gardes’ praxis, from the bright, contrasting colours of Sonia Delaunay’s simultaneist designs to Elsa Schiaparelli’s outlandish surrealist creations and the Bauhaus’s rationalised geometrics. What unites such diverse movements is their belief in clothing as art: fashion presented not just an opportunity to explore ideas in a new, more physical medium but also a chance to engage with “the masses” – to determine the way they moved through and experienced the modern world. As a product of modernity, both in terms of its industrial origins and its obsession with the new, fashion was the perfect medium for making a direct intervention into modern life. It represented a “privileged field” in which artists could revolutionise society,2 uniting art and life, fine and applied art, aesthetics and ethics. If, after Peter Bürger, we characterise the historical avant-garde by its attempts to “reintegrate art into the praxis of life”, then such experiments in fashion – as a vernacular art form – are quintessentially avant-garde. Arguably, it is these material experiments in the public sphere that are the essence of the avant-garde. This chapter contests that fashion must be considered if we are to fully understand the aims and ideologies of the historical avant-garde. In particular, fashion experiments illuminate the role of politics in – and the effect of politics on – the avant-garde. At once private and public, clothing occupies a liminal position between the singular and universal. Clothes are inseparable from the self: aside from their physical proximity to the wearer, they perform the dual role of concealing the body while revealing its “inner identity”, constructing and projecting selfhood. Yet clothing is never wholly personal. As Georg Simmel observed in 1904, fashion is a “product of class distinction”, a marker of wealth and affiliation.3 Thus, with its intimate ties to the personal and the socio1 Giacomo Balla, “Futurist Manifesto of Men’s Clothing” (Manifesto futurista del vestito da uomo, 1913), in: Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio, trans. Robert Brain, Boston, MA 1973, 132-134, here 132. 2 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw, Minneapolis 1984, 22. 3 Georg Simmel, “Fashion”, in: International Quarterly, 1904, n° 10, 130-155, here 133.

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political, fashion gave the avant-garde an opportunity to transform both individual subjecthood and collective consciousness. Nonetheless, as both the futurist and the constructivist dress manifestos and designs show, it was difficult to reconcile these often contradictory aims. Despite residing at opposite ends of the political spectrum, both movements grappled with how to use dress to liberate and interpellate the individual. Intriguingly, both movements drew on the discourse of slavery and emancipation to argue the need for dress reform. In “Futurist Men’s Clothing: A Manifesto” (20 May 1914), Giacomo Balla argued that past and contemporary fashions were “expressions of melancholy, slavery or terror”, a “negation of muscular life” which “enchain [the] muscles”.4 Where the male body has been “imprisoned with belts, or stifled with draperies”, the futurists wanted to “free humanity from slow romantic nostalgia and the weight of life”, to “rejuvenate the masses” through “beautiful”, “festive”, “Joyful” clothes.5 Similarly, in her constructivist-inspired fashion treatise, “Concerning Contemporary Dress” (1923), the Russian designer Nadezhda Lamanova depicted contemporary (western) fashion as a “dry and monotonous” “tyranny”, a “false idea that has, until now, forced working women to submit” to principles imposed upon them.6 Constructivist fashion, on the other hand, with its “comfortable, harmonious, and functional clothing” will liberate the Russian woman, giving “more importance” to her “frail, or even meagre, body”.7 For both writers, then, contemporary fashion was not just physically and emotionally stultifying; it was a despotic means of social control and subjection. In some ways the similarities between Balla and Lamanova’s rhetoric is unsurprising – the correlation between slavery and fashion had been drawn a decade earlier by Simmel in “Fashion”, in which he argued that “fashion represents a tremendous subjugation of the individual”, a subjugation so great it was tantamount to “enslavement”.8 Where the Italian and Russian avant-gardes differed, however, was in the ways in which they attempted to enact their clothing revolutions, emancipating the shackled individual by integrating him or her into their own ideology. These divergent approaches to reform were heavily influ-

4 Giacomo Balla, “Futurist Men’s Clothing: A Manifesto” (20 May 1914), in: Futurism: An Anthology, eds. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman, trans. Lawrence Rainey, New Haven and London 2009, 194-195, here 194. 5 Balla, “Futurist Men’s Clothing”, 194-195. 6 Nadezhda Lamanova, “Concerning Contemporary Dress” (O sovremenem kostiume, 1923), in: Against Fashion: Clothing as Art, 1850-1930, ed. Radu Stern, Cambridge, MA and London 2004, 174-176. 7 Lamanova, “Concerning Contemporary Dress”, 174. 8 Simmel, “Fashion”, 151, 147.



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enced by the socio-political context, as can be seen most notably in Balla’s three fashion manifestos from 1913 and 1914.

Fashion and Fascism Upon first glance, Balla’s three manifestos, the first of which was never published, appear to be variations upon the same theme. The same adjectives occur in all three texts: contemporary fashion is “funereal”, “heavy”, “boring” and “antihygienic”. Futurist fashion will be “dynamic”, “asymmetrical”, “violent” and “aggressive”.9 Yet a change in tone occurs between Balla’s second and third manifesto. In his first two texts, Balla focuses on the opportunity to revolutionise the physical and aesthetic properties of dress. Fashion presents an opportunity to sweep away the dullness of the past, replacing it with vibrant clothes and, by extension, people: in both texts, he draws a direct correlation between a garment’s physical qualities and the wearer’s emotions and actions. Futurist clothes will “renew the pleasure and animation of our bodies”, increasing their “suppleness” and “spread[ing] the kind of good humour aimed at by my great friend Palazzeschi in his manifesto against sadness”.10 This final reference to Palazzeschi’s “Sadness: A Manifesto” is crucial. In his early manifestos, Balla’s enthusiasm for dress design stems largely from this possibility of enacting ideas only previously theorised or gestured towards in his art. In works such as Rhythm of Violinist (1912) and Velocity of an Automobile (1913), Balla tried to exceed the limits of painting, attempting to “reproduce” not just a “moment in the universal dynamism which has been stopped, but the dynamic sensation itself”.11 As he later admitted, however, such paintings “wouldn’t enable one to give the depth necessary to capture the dynamic volume of speed”12. While he initially turned to sculpture in order to reproduce this “dynamic volume”, arguably it is his fashion designs that represent the fullest realisation of this futurist “style of motion”.13 9 See Balla, “Futurist Manifesto of Men’s Clothing”; “Futurist Men’s Clothing”; and Giacomo Balla, “Antineutral Clothing. Futurist Manifesto” (Il Vestito Antineutrale. Manifesto futurista, 11 Sept. 1914), in: Rainey, Poggi, Wittman, Futurism, 202-204. 10 Balla, “Futurist Men’s Clothing”, 195; Balla, “Futurist Manifesto of Men’s Clothing”, 133. 11 Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini, “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto” (Manifesto tecnico della pittura futurista, 11 April 1910), in: Rainey, Poggi, Wittman, Futurism, 64-67, here 64. 12 Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero, “Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe” (Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo, 11 March 1915), in: Rainey, Poggi, Wittman, Futurism, 209-21, here 209-210. 13 Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carla Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini, “The Exhibitors

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Fig. 10: Giacomo Balla, Il vestito antineutrale: manifesto futurista. Manifesti del Movemento futurista (1914). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University © DACS 2013.

With fashion, Balla is able to perform his ideas, working with and through, not in spite of, materiality. His 1913 and 1914 designs for futurist fabrics, ties and suits, in addition to those featured in “Antineutral Clothing. Futurist Manifesto” (Il Vestito to the Public” (Les exposants au public, February 1912), in: Rainey, Poggi, Wittman, Futurism, 105-109, here 105.



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Antineutrale. Manifesto futurista, 11 September 1914, fig. 10), radically “destroy the cult of the past”,14 reimagining the traditional suit as something new, thrilling and shocking. Their asymmetrical sleeves, trousers and jackets create the impression of movement and dynamism, an impression which would have only been heightened when worn: folds and twists in the fabric would have created unexpected new combinations and juxtapositions of colour akin to the overlapping planes of light gestured towards in Balla’s Iridescent Interpenetration Series (1912-1913). Although reproduced in the manifesto in black and white, earlier sketches show that such designs were incredibly vibrant, mixing jarring tones of vermillion, cerulean blue, emerald green, yellow, white and black in compositions that resemble optical illusions. While these designs recall his earlier paintings, these suits are not just transcriptions or transfers of painted imagery. In them, Balla hoped to create not art but “art-action”;15 dynamic, shifting, changeable works that transformed the wearer’s body and mood. To this end, Balla invented “modifiers” (fig. 10, bottom left), pieces of fabric in varying shapes, sizes and colours which could be attached to the suit “by means of pneumatic buttons”.16 “That way”, Balla proclaimed, “anyone can not just modify, but at any moment invent a new suit that corresponds to his newest mood”.17 Available modifications ranged from physical qualities such as “Multitonal”, “Perfumed” or “monotone” to the abstract “diplomatic”, “decisive” or “Arrogant”.18 Exactly which shapes inspired which moods is unclear. Perhaps Balla thought the connection between material and emotion was self-evident. Either way, Balla’s extraordinary belief in the transformative potential of material characterises the wider utopian naïveté that spoke from the futurist approach to dress design. By empowering individuals through unconventional and adaptable dress, they believed that they could “reconstruct the universe, cheering it up, i.e. recreating it entirely”.19 If, as Simmel argued a decade previously, “similarly dressed persons exhibit relative similarity in their actions”,20 then Balla’s highly individual incursions into dress would enact collective change, “brighten[ing] the streets with gaiety” and “awakening the expanding Futurist sensibility of countless new abstractions and dynamic rhythms”.21 These suits might have been idi14 Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo, Balla, Severini, “Futurist Painting”, 63. 15 Balla, Depero, “Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe”, 210. 16 Balla, “Futurist Men’s Clothing”, 195. 17 Balla, “Futurist Men’s Clothing”, 195. 18 See Balla, “Futurist Manifesto of Men’s Clothing”, 133; “Futurist Men’s Clothing”, 195; “Antineutral Clothing”, 203. 19 Balla, Depero, “Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe”, 209. 20 Simmel, “Fashion”, 138. 21 Balla, “Futurist Men’s Clothing”, 195.

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osyncratic, but it was this very idiosyncrasy that would lead to wider social and political change. Indeed, as Balla’s third fashion manifesto demonstrates, dress was of immense political significance, especially during war. While the aims and designs in “Antineutral Clothing” are similar to the previous manifestos, the focus shifts from the aesthetic to the political.22 In it, Balla rewrites the eleven characteristics of futurist clothing he had outlined in “Futurist Men’s Clothing” four months earlier, demoting aesthetic concerns such as asymmetry and promoting practical qualities like streamlining and comfort instead. These material considerations would not only work to increase the “suppleness of the body”, helping the wearer to “struggle, stride” and “charge”, but also to “intensify courage” and aggressiveness, facilitating and inspiring violence against pro-German sympathisers and neutralists.23 This rhetoric translates into the designs too. All of the suits pictured are designed using a palette of red, green and white; the “pairing of yellow and black” has been “vehemently prohibited”. Even the modifiers pictured are “warlike”: pointed, angular and knife- or propeller-like.24 Thus, perhaps under Marinetti’s influence, Balla’s aims – and designs – become more militaristic. His suits are more than individual outfits; they are “feisty Futurist banners”,25 living and walking flags for the glory of Italy and its coming war. In this later manifesto, then, clothes become a barometer not just of aesthetic taste but of the wider socio-political context. Balla and his fellow futurists seized upon fashion as an ideological weapon, a means of interpellating apathetic individuals. Similarly, for constructivist, productivist and other vanguard Russian artists and designers fashion also played a key political role; namely, to help create a classless Russia.

Fashion and Communism Although designers such as Varvara Stepanova, Liubov Popova, Alexandra Exter and Lamanova, came from different movements and backgrounds, they shared a common goal: to design and produce functional clothing for the masses. Whereas Balla’s designs attempted to revolutionise society through individual variation, 22 This marked shift in tone has led some commentators to suggest that F. T. Marinetti had a heavy influence or – or perhaps even wrote – this later manifesto. See Stern, “Against Fashion”, 32-34, here 73, note 25; and Emily Braun, “Futurist Fashion: Three Manifestos”, in: Art Journal, 54, 1995, n° 1, 34-41, here 35. 23 Balla, “Antineutral Clothing”, 203. 24 Balla, “Antineutral Clothing”, 203. 25 Balla, “Antineutral Clothing”, 204.



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the Soviet vanguard wanted to efface difference altogether, liberating Russians from the elitist “tyranny” of western capitalist fashions. Writing in 1928, the revolutionary art critic Aleksei Fedorov-Davydov argued that under capitalism fashions “play a specific class role. Expensive clothes and the latest fashions indicate that whoever is wearing them is distinguished and well-to-do, and this creates an aesthetic barrier between different classes in society”.26 For the Communist state, then, fashion, or rather the eradication of fashion, was a crucial ideological battleground. Dress needed to be divorced from aspiration, taste and privilege and transformed into something more egalitarian. The new Russian dress had to not only reflect but also help reinforce and manifest social equality. Individual signifiers of distinction and hierarchy had to be replaced by unifying, standardised uniforms. As Simmel observed, “Fashion raises even the unimportant individual by making him the representative of a class, the embodiment of a joint spirit”.27 Thus, standardised clothing would play a key role in fostering a collective Communist consciousness. Standardised clothing should not be confused with universal clothing, however. For constructivists such as Stepanova and Popova, clothes had to be both diverse and identical, with different (standardised) outfits for different jobs, activities and occasions. In her de-facto constructivist clothing manifesto, “Present Day Dress – Production Clothing”, published in the journal Lef in 1923, Stepanova divided contemporary clothing into three distinct categories: everyday prozodezhda (production dress), spetsodezhda (special dress) for specialised professions such as firefighters and explorers, and sportodezhda (sport clothes).28 Austerely functional, the overall look, shape and structure of such garments was dictated entirely by practical concerns, such as the properties of the material, the tasks the wearer would perform and the constraints of mass production. Aesthetic considerations were all but irrelevant. According to Stepanova, a garment’s “cut must be chosen in accordance with the specific nature of the work for which it is intended”.29 Consequently, while the “general design” of prozodezhda would remain unchanged, individual variations were permitted according to contextual considerations, such as the use of machinery, or the need to store tools or equipment.30 26 Aleksei Fedorov-Davydov, “An Introduction to the First Soviet Exhibition of National Textiles, Moscow, 1928”, in: Costume Revolution: Textiles, Clothing and Costume of the Soviet Union in the Twenties, eds. Lidya Zaletova, Fabio Ciofi degli Atti, Franco Panzini, et al., London 1989, 181-183, here 181. 27 Simmel, “Fashion”, 140. 28 Varvara Stepanova, “Present Day Dress – Production Clothing” (Kostium segodniashnego dnia – prozodezhda, 1923), in: Stern, Against Fashion, 172-173. 29 Stepanova, “Present Day Dress”, 172. 30 Stepanova, “Present Day Dress”, 172.

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Fig. 11: Varvara Fedorovna Stepanova, Design for Sportswear (1923). Reproduced in Lef, 2, 1923 © Rodchenko & Stepanova Archive, DACS, RAO, 2013.



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Such utilitarian designs ran counter to the very idea of (western) fashion: fashion as novelty, frivolity and luxury. Even Stepanova’s Design for Sportswear (sportodezhda, fig. 11) created for the worker’s (proscribed) leisure time, was functional to the point of being unflattering. Although strikingly simple and geometric, the uniforms conform to the “fundamental principle” of “maximum practicality, simplicity, ease of wear”.31 Aside from the substitution of a skirt for shorts, Stepanova makes no concession to body shape or gender, creating the same, shapeless clothes for everyone. When considered in relation to parallel developments in sportswear by Coco Chanel or Jean Patou, whose elegant white pleated tennis dresses were wowing audiences at Wimbledon, Stepanova’s severe designs appear even less desirable. In them, she rejects traditional conceptions of softness or femininity, focusing instead on a genderless practicality. Pattern and colour are permitted only where necessary – sports uniforms, for instance, required bright colours and bold motifs to demarcate different teams. Extraneous decoration or adornment ran counter to constructivist ideology. Even for leisure wear, “the ‘look’ of clothing” had to be “designed in accordance with the requirements of the work for which it is intended and with the properties of the material it is made from”.32 This emphasis on materiality is crucial. In 1921 construction was itself defined as “the effective organisation of material elements”.33 Such “organisation” rested on the two-fold principle of the “best use of the materials” and the “absence of any superfluous elements”.34 Material could not be moulded to the designer’s will; rather, it was the material that guided the designer. As Exter wrote in 1923, “Every object is submitted to the laws imposed by its material”. 35 This was especially true of dress design: above all else, it was the fabric’s “density, weight, width and colour” that determined both the design and function of a garment.36 Such concerns echo those of the futurists. Balla also focused on the physical properties of material, arguing that it needed to “increase the flexibility of the body” and allow “every pore of the skin [to] easily breathe”.37 Functionality, practicality and hygiene were common features of both futurist and constructivist design, and yet Balla gave little consideration to which fabrics could be used to 31 Stepanova, “Present Day Dress”, 173. 32 Stepanova, “Present Day Dress”, 172. 33 “Protokol zasedaniya INKhUKa” (4 March 1921), quoted in Christine Lodder, Russian Constructivism, New Haven and London 1983, 84. 34 “Protokol zasedaniya INKhUKa”, quoted in Lodder, Russian Constructivism, 84. 35 Alexandra Exter, “The Constructivist Dress” (O konstruktivnoi odezhde, 1923), in: Stern, Against Fashion, 178-180, here 178. 36 Exter, “The Constructivist Dress”, 178. 37 Balla, “Futurist Men’s Clothing”, 195.

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create the effects he sought. His only specific reference to material was that his suits should be made from “Phosphorescent fabrics” that “spread light all around when it rains”.38 This fantastical idea demonstrates Balla’s detachment from the practicalities of production – a charge which was levelled at him and his fellow futurists by Vladimir Tatlin, Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Sidovov in 1918, who accused their “Fellow Comrades, the Futurists” of being “counter-revolutionary”; “too busy with cafes and embroidery of various quality for emperors and ladies” to enact actual change.39 These criticisms reveal just how much socio-political context affected the theory and praxis of the Italian and Russian avant-gardes. While both attempted to bring art into life, the futurist plans for doing so were far from practical. Indeed, they often showed a disdain for the very masses they hoped to emancipate. Balla, for instance, claimed that futurist clothes will succeed in brightening the streets, “even if their people are absolutely destitute of imagination and colorist sensibility”.40 Ultimately, again, the difference in approach derives from differing socio-political contexts. Arguably, futurist fashion never had a mass impact because there was neither the urgent political impetus for dress reform nor the state framework to support a widespread clothing revolution. The Russian avantgarde, on the other hand, had an unprecedented opportunity to shape the emerging Communist state through design. Constructivism, defined from its inception as the “communistic expression of material structures”,41 took the question of how to move beyond art theory into “practical activity” as its central concern.42 Crucially, this intervention had to be by and for the people, not handed down by an elite group of artist-intellectuals. As Walter Benjamin later wrote, “the place of the intellectual in the class struggle can only be determined, or better still chosen, on the basis of his position within the production process”.43 Through their work at the First State Textile Print Factory Stepanova and Popova participated directly in the teaching and practice of mass production. As Stepanova herself later admitted, though, the venture was not as successful as hoped.44 38 Balla, “Antineutral Clothing”, 203. 39 Tatlin, Malevich and Sidovov are quoted in Allan Antliff, Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Vancouver 2007, 78-79, 83. 40 Balla, “Antineutral Clothing”, 195. 41 See Lodder’s discussion of The First Working Group of Constructivists in Lodder, Russian Constructivism, 94-97, here 94. 42 See Aleksei Gan, “Constructivism” (Konstruktivizm, 1922), in: Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism 1902-1934, ed. and trans. John E. Bowlt, London 1988, 214-225, here 225. 43 Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer” (Der Autor als Produzent), in: Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock, London 1977, 85-104, here 93. 44 See Stern, “Against Fashion”, 54-55; and Lodder, Russian Constructivism, 145.



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Their clothing designs were never mass produced, and those textiles that were made were altered by factory workers to make them suitable for mass production.45 Similarly, Stepanova’s ambitious plans to revolutionise the teaching of textile design with a four-year course in “Artistic Composition” at the VKhUTEMAS, the Higher State Artistic and Technical Workshops, was never realised.46 Nevertheless, in immersing themselves in the process, methods and teaching of production, Stepanova and Popova remodelled themselves not as artists but as artist-producers or artist-engineers, questioning the role of the modern artist and the very ontology of art in the process. As Osip Brik wrote in his 1924 article “From Pictures to Textile Prints”, “the easel picture is not only unnecessary to our contemporary artistic culture, it is also one of the most powerful brakes on its development. […] The artistic culture of the future is being created in factories and plants, not in attic studios”.47 Through their work in the textile factory, Stepanova and Popova abandoned fine art, pioneering a new type of clothing which would “evolve from being the product of an artisan to that of industrial mass production. It thereby loses its ideological connotation and becomes one aspect of the cultural reality”.48 In so doing, they moved towards a constructivist integration of art and life. Paradoxically, though, Stepanova’s attempts to replace fashion with clothes which “have no independent value and are not an art product” is part of the reason why the vanguard never succeeded in integrating art and life.49 Her designs were both too artistic and not artistic enough. By removing aesthetic qualities from dress, it became too austere, too intellectual, and thus had little popular appeal. Across Europe, innovations in fashion design, marketing and production meant that good quality, vibrant, decorative ready-to-wear designs were increasingly available to women of all classes. For Russian women, faced with austerity and shortages, fashion was an even more crucial means of escape. Women wanted bright, cheerful, luxurious clothes, not harsh, shapeless, ideological ones. As Stern has shown, women who could bought fashions from abroad, undermining vanguard attempts to produce a classless fashion industry.50 In comparison to 45 See Natalia Adasinka, “Constructivist Fabrics and Dress Design”, in: The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, 1987, n° 5, 144-159, here 149. 46 Varvara Stepanova, “Organizational Plan of a Programme for a Course in Artistic Composition at the Faculty of Textile of the VKhUTEMAS” (1925), in: Zaletova, et al., Costume Revolution, 178-179. 47 Osip Brik, “From Pictures to Textile Prints” (Ot kartiny k sitsu, 1924), in: Bowlt, Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, 244-249, here 246 and 249. 48 Stepanova, “Present Day Dress”, 172. 49 Stepanova, “Present Day Dress”, 172. 50 Stern, “Against Fashion”, 55-56.

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more attractive (western) modes of dress, prozodezhda ironically came to signify money (or, rather, the lack of it), reinforcing precisely those class distinctions that the avant-garde wanted to eradicate from everyday wear. The failure of the avant-garde fashion revolution, then, was a failure of control: neither the futurists nor the constructivists could obtain the necessary control over everyday life required to enact their reforms. While they succeeded in questioning and challenging the definition and role of art in modern society, their revolution was an aesthetic, not a material one. Their attempts to construct “practical art”, that is, to work in and with material, were still too ideological. They recognised the need to “collaborate with the technician”, but only on practical issues regarding material, industry and production.51 On more ideological questions, both the futurists and constructivists claimed to know what the people wanted, often better than – and before – they knew themselves. In 1922 Boris Arvatov wrote that to “build not according to form, but according to social objective – that is what the proletariat wants”,52 yet the fact that it was constructivistinspired decorative textiles – and not the prozodezhda – that were actually produced and sold,53 demonstrates that the “proletariat” valued form too.

Fashion and Femininity In order to enact their clothing revolution, then, the avant-gardes needed to not only reject “art” but also embrace its dichotomous (traditionally feminine) opposites, namely, craft and decoration. Alongside the abstract, geometrical and industrial, they needed to explore “softer” qualities such as texture, sensuality and desirability. This side-lining of the female and/or feminine (even by women practitioners such as Stepanova or Exter) certainly played a role in the failure of the avant-garde to reform clothing. Volt’s ludicrous “Futurist Manifesto of Women’s Fashion” (1920), for instance, sets out to “transform the elegant lady” into a “machine-gun woman”. “Upon the feminine profile”, he writes, “we will graft the most aggressive lines and garish colors”.54 While Volt’s manifesto is an extreme example, it nevertheless points to a wider avant-garde tendency to eradicate traditional conceptions of femininity – an effacement which may have 51 Exter, “The Constructivist Dress”, 179. 52 Boris Arvatov, “The Proletariat and Leftist Art” (Proletariat i levoe iskusstvo, 1922), in: Bowlt, Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, 225-230, here 228. 53 See Lodder, Russian Constructivism, 151-152. 54 Volt, “Futurist Manifesto of Women’s Fashion” (Manifesto della moda femminile futurista, 1920), in: Rainey, Poggi, Wittman, Futurism, 253-254, here 254.



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derived from the desire to empower women, but ultimately ended up either objectifying them or effacing their identity as women altogether.55

Fig. 12: Nadezhda Lamanova, Design Sketch for Sportswear (1925). Reproduced in Iskusstvyo bytu, 1925.

Not all the avant-gardes were blind to the needs of the female public, though. Popova’s later dress designs, such as Design for a Window Display (1924), were much less severe than her 1921 costume designs for prozodezhda. In them, she embraced decoration, using colourful abstract patterns as the basis for simple, flattering, feminine day dresses. But perhaps the most successful vanguard dress designer was not a member of the historical avant-garde at all. Lamanova was neither a constructivist nor productivist, and while she shared many of their aims, her training as a couturier meant that she combined radical ideology with a more nuanced understanding of what modern female consumers wanted. As early as 1919, she devised a programme for a “Workshop of Contemporary Costume” which aimed to “give artistic value to the industrial production of clothing”,

55 Such a relationship warrants further discussion elsewhere. For more on the “woman question” in avant-garde fashion, see Braun, “Futurist Fashion”, 37-38 and Christina Kiaer, “His and Her Constructivism”, both in: Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism, ed. Margarita Tupitsyn, London 2009, 143-159, 150-154.

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creating “‘cadres’ of highly qualified producer-craftsmen industrialists”.56 The absence of “artist” in this formulation is notable. While Lamanova was keen to incorporate artistic principles, design still had to be led and produced by qualified professionals, not the other way round. In her designs for women and children, then, Lamanova worked through, with and in commercial culture to achieve a clothing revolution. She showed that it was possible to modernise dress and challenge traditional ideas of femininity and modesty without effacing gender and sexuality completely. Her Design Sketch for Sportswear (1925, see fig. 12) provides an interesting point of comparison to Stepanova’s sportodezhda reproduced above. While not exactly flattering – the garments are still wide and loose-fitting – they are less austere than Stepanova’s shorter, geometric uniforms. In them, Lamanova combines the Russian and the western, the modern and the traditional, the ideological and the commercial, and the decorative and artistic to great effect. The designs are plain, but the pleated skirt adds visual and kinetic interest, as well as an air of indulgence at a time of chronic fabric shortages. They echo western tennis fashions, but the red star motif still renders them distinctively Russian. Accordingly, Lamanova’s work was less radical than Stepanova’s, but it was also more effective. Despite – or perhaps because of – her concessions to aesthetics, she succeeded in rationalising clothes, making them “comfortable, harmonious and functional” while still retaining “decorative interest”.57 In particular, she integrated forms and motifs from Russian “folk costume”, into “urban clothing”,58 providing women with garments that not only appealed to their shared sense of national identity and pride but also “suit[ed] the new life ‒ active, dynamic and conscious”.59 Finally, and perhaps most crucially, Lamanova’s designs managed to be both classless and retain individuality. She believed that “[a]nyone, in spite of all congenital or other types of bodily faults, has the right to enjoy harmony”.60 Designers thus had to “take a more individual approach, related to the personality of the wearer”.61 Her commitment to individual adaptation is evident in designs such as the Design Sketch for Sportswear, which was printed in the Iskusstvyo bytu (Art in Everyday Life) catalogue, and featured instructions for the reader to sew the outfit herself. This focus on personal empowerment and engagement is strangely remi56 Nadezhda Lamanova, “Organisational Plan for a Workshop of Contemporary Costume” (1919), in: Zaletova, et al., Costume Revolution, 170. 57 Lamanova, “Concerning Contemporary Dress”, 176. 58 Nadezhda Lamanova, “The Russian Fashion” (Russkaia moda, 1923), in: Stern, Against Fashion, 177. 59 Lamanova, “Concerning Contemporary Dress”, 176. 60 Lamanova, “Concerning Contemporary Dress”, 174. 61 Lamanova, “Concerning Contemporary Dress”, 174.



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niscent of Balla’s modifiers, and, indeed, of the principles of the active citizen that the modernists and historical avant-garde were so keen to produce ‒ and yet, perversely, this individual agency was a product of mainstream commodity culture. With her more tempered modernism, then, Lamanova demonstrated just how important commercial, “low” culture was – or could have been – to the avant-garde. Vanguard experiments in fashion illuminate just one part of the wider relationship between “high” and “low” culture in modernity – a changing, problematic, ambivalent relationship that both the avant-gardes and modernists struggled to come to terms with. Perhaps Lamanova’s position as a vanguard outsider meant that she could adopt a more pragmatic approach to combining or reconciling “high” and “low”. Either way, what Lamanova’s work demonstrates is the necessity of studying such liminal (some might say “lesser”) figures and forms – whether Lamanova’s designs or fashion more generally – if we are to understand the role and legacy of the historical avant-garde. We need to further expand our field of focus to include the everyday. As Lamanova shows, the public sphere often hosted the most interesting, and effective, vanguard experiments in and with material.

Claire Warden

The Poetic Materiality of Fascism on the British Stage 1938 proved to be a difficult year. As Hitler made his way across Europe, in Britain ministers, military leaders and the general public seemed unsure of how best to deal with the renegade German Chancellor. Many stood against the fascist cause while some supported the marginal yet significant British Union of Fascists under the leadership of Oswald Mosley. Others remained ambivalent about the rise of Nazism. Throughout 1938 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain led a policy of appeasement, sending mediators and signing treatises, seeking to prevent armed conflict. In the face of enormous odds, Chamberlain travelled to Germany to broker peace, returning with a signed document, stating that these two countries would never enter into war with each other again. Chamberlain emerged from the aeroplane a hero, waving the signed document aloft at the Heston Aerodrome and presenting his “Peace for our Time” speech, words that would seem oddly misplaced when barely a year later his successor Winston Churchill declared war on an increasingly aggressive Nazi Germany. With the ongoing threat of fascism, the political theatre scene in Britain witnessed a tangible change. Companies, playwrights and performers turned from plays (though I use this term advisedly given the range of performance happenings) about unemployment and unscrupulous capitalist systems to works addressing the growth of fascism, encouraging a sense of political unity between a whole range of disparate characters. The so-called Popular Front strategy united many across the political spectrum, though on the far left a number were understandably reticent about joining with mainstream conservative groups. If the political scene exhibited a tense standoff between Hitler and Chamberlain, and between factions in the Popular Front, the theatre of this period endeavoured to understand and address the fascist threat through art. This chapter focuses on two such examples, both from the defining year: 1938.1 The first, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s On the Frontier, centres on two mythical countries – Ostnia and Westland – and the effects of pseudo-fascist policy and eventual war on the general population. The play is split into two geographical halves; the audience meets characters on both sides of the divide from the businessman Valerian to the academic Dr Thorvald, from the Leader to the embittered Martha. Beginning in peace and progressing towards a terrifying war which 1 Both these plays have complex performance and publication history. For ease, I have cited all quotations from the 1938 versions.



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brings death on and off the battlefield, the play concludes with ambiguity; while Eric and Anna (lovers from either side of the divide) find “the Good Place”, it is only in death that they discover it.2 At the end, as might be expected from a play performed in 1938, “Europe lies in terror”.3 The second, Stephen Spender’s Trial of a Judge, analyses the creeping influence of fascist thought upon important societal institutions, namely the legal system. It begins with the death of Jewish Petra at the hands of the Black Prisoners/Troops. The Judge, the central character in the play, finds the mob guilty but is forced to overturn his decision by the authorities. Much to the anguish of Petra’s Brother, Fiancée and Mother as well as the Red Troops, he concedes to the demands of the increasingly violent, dictatorial hegemony. But he cannot live with his failure to uphold the law and resigns before being incarcerated in prison and eventually led away to his death. All three playwrights exhibited a concern about the growth of fascism in Italy, Germany and Spain. The latter, in particular, captured their imagination. Both Auden and Spender travelled to Spain as sympathetic onlookers, anxious about the struggle against Franco’s fascist expansionism.4 On the Frontier and Trial of a Judge, then, represented the playwrights’ ongoing unease about European politics and the rise of right-wing dictatorships. In 1937, when presumably the playwrights were contemplating these plays, Spender and Auden collaborated on a volume entitled Authors Take Sides, a collection of reflections from various artists about the growing tension across Europe. Signed by such luminaries as Nancy Cunard, Pablo Neruda and Tristan Tzara, it presented opinions both for and against Franco and fascism, “for it is impossible any longer to take no side”.5 The list of those against fascism is decidedly longer than that for, though some adopted a more neutral position. Auden maintained that fascism in Spain would create “an atmosphere in which the creative artists and all who care for justice, liberty and culture would find it impossible to work or even exist”.6 Spender agreed: “if Franco wins, the principle of democracy will have received a severe blow”.7 While Isherwood is strangely absent from the collection, Authors Take Sides illustrates these writers’ commitment to thoroughly engaging with the rise of fascism and clearly demarcating their own opinions. Such an unequivocal

2 W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, The Ascent of F6 and On the Frontier, London 1966, 190. 3 Auden and Isherwood, Frontier, 190. 4 Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties, Oxford 1989, 4. 5 W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender (eds.), Authors take Sides, London 1937, prologue. 6 Auden and Spender, Authors, 4. 7 Auden and Spender, Authors, 13.

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approach to the fascist threat reappears in their plays of the following year; the audience could not be in any doubt as to the playwrights’ positions nor the severity of the situation. Both On the Frontier and Trial of a Judge were produced by Rupert Doone’s innovative London-based company Group Theatre, which also produced work by those other modernist poetic giants, T.S. Eliot, Louis MacNeice and W.B. Yeats. The latter was presented in collaboration with Unity Theatre, marking a decisive (though not wholly successful nor happy) connection between the more aesthetically-minded Group and the more politically-engaged Unity. Critical studies have often situated these plays alongside Auden, Isherwood and Spender’s novels and poems. Certainly they have been published as such. Faber’s versions are presented as an extension of the house’s poetry publication lists and, while Edward Mendelson’s magnificent collected works of Auden and Isherwood tell the performance history of On the Frontier, it is not a volume suitable for potential contemporary performance. If there is no suggestion of possible performance then it can be easy to relegate these experiments to the realm of poetry rather than theatre. But this is to do a disservice to two flawed but fascinating theatrical analyses of the fascist threat. Here I aim to redeem them, first through the moniker of ‘poetic drama’, a term, like ‘poetic cinema’, that proves potentially restrictive, and second (and concurrently) through the concept of performance, particularly those visual, architectural aspects of the performance experience.

Poetic Drama: Fighting Fascism with Verse The term ‘poetic drama’ has been used to define a broad range of dramatic works from Shakespeare onwards. Given Shakespeare’s pre-eminent influence on the British stage, it is no wonder that, in many ways, ‘poetic drama’ has become such a prominent form in Britain. Critic Glenda Leeming is careful to suggest that poetic drama is not a movement as such but, rather, that a collection of innovative examples can be read through this moniker. In this between-Wars context, she insists “what they [poetic playwrights] had in common was a reaction against the conventional realism of current commercial theatre writing, and a willingness to experiment with relating form and content to the 20th century”.8 Despite its historical origins, then, ‘poetic drama’ has a contemporaneity and, indeed, a sharp connection with actual lived experience. It is a form, according to Leeming, as

8 Glenda Leeming, Poetic Drama, London 1989, 2.



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committed to addressing 20th-century concerns as, say, the agitprop experiments of Revolutionary Russia or the naturalism of Ibsen. While there is no inherent difficulty with terming On the Frontier and Trial of a Judge ‘poetic dramas’, the term potentially isolates these plays from the theatre and the very act of performance. In her Modernism and Performance, Olga Taxidou provides useful, far-reaching conclusions about this most problematic of concepts. ‘Poetic drama’, she suggests, is “usually coined in opposition to the more daring theatricality of the avant-garde [and] has come to describe the dramatic works of writers we otherwise associate with literary experimentation”.9 She goes on to identify the problem with this label: Poetic drama has been primarily identified with the concerns, aspirations, experiments and politics of a predominantly Anglophone tradition of so-called ‘high Modernism’; and indeed it is often used as the benchmark that separates the radical experimentations of the Continent from the more conservative anti-theatrical tradition of canonical literary Modernism. However, most of the experiments taking place on the stage within Modernism had to encounter the problem of ‘poetry on the stage’.10

‘Poetic drama’, then, separates writers like Auden, Isherwood and Spender from experiments overseas. This is an artificial separation, connected directly, as they were, to figures such as Ernst Toller, Bertolt Brecht, Tristan Tzara, Louis Aragon and others.11 But it also suggests that the issue of poetry on stage was one that affected only a limited group of poets who also dabbled in theatre. Actually the issue of poetry on the stage affected a great number of playwrights and practitioners. Despite Taxidou’s reflections, there is a way of redeeming this term, interplaying it with the notion of performance, and particularly the materiality of performance, that is the human actors on a constructed stage. Poet and fellow playwright, T.S. Eliot (whose Sweeney Agonistes Group Theatre performed in 1934) conceived of poetic drama in a different way. In his book Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater, William Worthen suggests that Eliot provides a “useful point of repair from the austerities often associated with ‘poetic drama’”.12 This chapter attempts to reinvigorate the term ‘poetic drama’ so Eliot may well be of use here too. Certainly his 1920 collection of essays The Sacred Wood provides an innovative and valuable rendering of this idea. Eliot criticised those who understood poetic drama as elitist art, unable to connect with a majority of the theatre-going 9 Olga Taxidou, Modernism and Performance: Jarry to Brecht, Basingstoke 2007, 69. 10 Taxidou, Modernism, 79. 11 See Claire Warden, British Avant-Garde Theatre, Basingstoke 2012. 12 William Worthen, Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater, California 1992, 99.

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public. He conceded “possibly the majority of attempts to confect a poetic drama have begun at the wrong end; they have aimed at the small public who wants poetry”.13 Rather, he suggested, poetic drama connected far more with everyday experience than might initially be presumed: In plays of realism we often find parts which are never allowed to be consciously dramatic, for fear, perhaps, of their appearing less real. But in actual life, in many of those situations in actual life which we enjoy consciously and keenly, we are at times aware of ourselves in this way, and these moments are of very great usefulness to dramatic verse.14

So while naturalist realism might seem the most appropriate medium to examine material events and circumstances, actually poetic drama with its inherently “dramatic” style chimes perfectly with the drama of the everyday. Eliot’s conclusions parallel Auden, Isherwood and Spender’s view that poetic drama was not elitist ramblings, but a perfectly acceptable method of analysing the rise of fascism. Indeed, Eliot reflected further, poetic drama “must take genuine and substantial emotions, such emotions as observation can confirm, typical emotions, and give them artistic form”.15 Auden reiterated Eliot’s conclusion in his 1938 The Future of English Poetic Drama by saying that “poetry is a medium which expresses the collective and universal feeling”.16 This sort of poetic drama then, is not simply an imaginative flight of fancy, but a form that breaks through affected emotion and stagey technique. All this suggests, of course, that the term ‘poetic drama’ as traditionally understood is unsatisfactory for neither play maintains a poetic voice in any sense, preferring instead to combine the poetic and the, for want of a better phrase, ‘non-poetic’ or even ‘anti-poetic’. For instance, in Trial of a Judge, when the Black Troops condemn the Judge, the poetic voice disappears to be replaced with polemic, propagandist prose. On the Frontier contains far more prose than poetry, with poetry reserved for dreamlike moments of escape or political challenge from the dancers, Eric and Anna, and the workers. Auden suggested a “possible form of drama for the future is one that combined prose and verse”.17 Certainly Trial of a Judge and On the Frontier embody this new form. For both, the threat of fascism and the seeming inevitability of war, destroys the poetic voice; poetic drama suddenly becomes purposefully anti-poetic drama. 13 T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood, London 1960, 70. 14 Eliot, Sacred, 83. 15 Eliot, Sacred, 84. 16 W.H. Auden, The Future of English Poetic Drama, in: The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Plays and Other Dramatic Writings, ed. Edward Mendelson, New Jersey 1988, 521. 17 Auden, Future of English Poetic Drama, 514.



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Far from pulling away from contemporary issues, these two examples of poetic drama address the growing power of fascism directly. A Times Literary Supplement review of On the Frontier (28 October 1938) pointed to the play’s active engagement with global political issues, almost overlooking its aesthetics entirely: For years we have complained, concerning the average modern drama, that it has not been contiguous with modern life. It has been a drama of little detached intrigues, usually erotic. Here is the swing of the pendulum – a drama so much absorbed with characteristic world events that the play hardly stays in the theatre at all. Its whole reference is outside.18

In a letter to Spender, Auden expressed his concerns about this, saying “the subject is too contemporary for a semi-realistic play”.19 In fact, both plays arguably overextend themselves in their valiant attempts to make poetic drama relevant, timely and active. In both cases, actual world events nearly overtake the plays. Barely a year later fascism was less a threat than a dominating reality; plays providing warnings to audiences or attempting to express the severity of the situation suddenly seemed rather passé. This is not to say that the plays do not maintain a relevance beyond the immediate circumstances as neither focus solely on the rise of fascism. For Trial of a Judge, fascist suppression can be most acutely felt in its attitude and behaviour towards the Jews. Yet, the Black Prisoners murder Petra because of his nationality (Polish) and political affiliations (Marxist) as well as his religious/ethnic identity.20 It becomes a play attacking bigotry and discrimination as general concepts. In On the Frontier, despite the Popular Front’s intentions to unite populations behind an anti-fascist banner, Auden and Isherwood remained committed to critiquing the hierarchies of capitalism. In the final scenes of the play Grimm murders Valerian because of his behaviour as a businessman whose big stores undercut his father and mother’s shop leading to his father’s suicide.21 In one of the short interrupting scenes, consisting of three dancing couples and two leftist political workers, the playwrights draw particular attention to the different class experiences of war. The episode resists saying that the potential war is entirely unjustified (clearly a difficult claim to make in the face of fascist expansion) but it does suggest that war affects people in remarkably different ways. As the Third Male Dancer confirms “Soldiers haves guns and are used in attack;/ More of them go

18 John Haffenden, W.H. Auden: the critical heritage, London 1983, 276. 19 Mendelson, Plays, 653. 20 Stephen Spender, Trial of a Judge, London 1938, 16. 21 Auden and Isherwood, Frontier, 183.

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than ever come back”.22 The childlike rhyming couplets simply add to this feeling of impuissance. So, while both are clearly anti-fascist plays, Auden, Isherwood and Spender’s verse contains subtleties that undermine the easy claims of a nationally-united Popular Front. This creative experimentation with dramatic form remained a political act in itself, a striving after a new way of structuring and vocalising art. Auden suggested that “the search for a dramatic form is very closely bound up with something much wider and much more important, which is the search for a society which is both unified and free”.23 It is a grand claim. And yet as Auden, Isherwood and Spender engaged with this new form, it is easy to see the way political freedom and artistic experimentation, anti-authoritarianism and creative theatrical exploration, might be regarded as inextricably connected.

Materiality of the Stage: the Visual Reconstruction of Fascism Considering the poetic as a linguistic device might seem the most obvious path of examination, for poetry is characteristically linguistic, relying on language play for its success or otherwise. Yet, this unbreakable connection between the poetic and textual signs has done a disservice to the very idea of poetic drama, trapping these plays in conventional discourses of poetry rather than connecting them with performance which brings a uniquely dynamic sensibility. Worthen attempts to re-imagine the poetic as beyond language or at least unfettered by the structures of language: “Poetic drama exposes a ‘deeper consistency’, not only through its verbal design, but also in the way it presses the performance to evade the scenic priorities of stage realism”.24 According to Worthen, the poetic can be as visual as it is linguistic, as integral to performance methods as to the script on the page. Auden concluded likewise, saying “as to scenery, I think this element is important”.25 In accordance with the linguistic experiment of poetic drama, sets should also imbibe of a sense of imaginative symbolism: “I do not think realistic setting is necessary now, especially as we have to compete with the cinema, but a few objects to establish a sense of reality [are]”.26 Such a rejection of mimetic 22 Auden and Isherwood, Frontier, 154. 23 Auden, Future of English Poetic Drama, 522. 24 Worthen, Modern Drama, 101. 25 Auden, Future of English Poetic Drama, 522. 26 Auden, Future of English Poetic Drama, 522.



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stages and acceptance of visual images representing the ‘real’ abound in both plays, connecting the experimental playfulness and dexterity of the language to the visual aspects of performance, a consideration often overlooked by scholars and critics who focus, by and large, on the language as poetics. In Trial of a Judge, this non-mimetic, poetic set resonated with the play’s language experiments, with the prison as its central motif. Spender’s interest in prisons originated years earlier, publishing “The Prisoners” in his 1933 collection Poems. The poem itself is full of sympathy for the prisoners – “My pity moves amongst them like a breeze”27 – and presents them as trapped in a world of dim images, slowed Time and inescapable hopelessness. It is an image Spender would come back to in Trial of a Judge where images associated with prison experience are distinctly ambivalent. On the one hand prison imagery is used to describe the experience of the oppressed. Third Red understands this but also relates the image to the incarcerated position of the Judge: “He loves true justice but his office is bound in the same chains that bind our lives”.28 While at this stage the Judge does not stand with the revolutionaries, later he recognises the accuracy of Third Red’s words. On the other hand, however, the very same trope is used by the Second Black Prisoner to describe the period since the First World War. The entire play, of course, is a thinly veiled impression of Nazi Germany and the comments about the legacy of the 1914-19 conflict makes this parallel all the stronger. As the Second Black Prisoner has it, “Stabbed in the back, our warriors were betrayed/ Since when, chains have bound us for many years/ Of slavery worse than conquest”.29 However, against the backdrop of the Judge’s actual physical incarceration, the politician Hummeldorf and the Second Black Prisoner have a conversation which seems to incorporate two different readings of this ‘chains’ image. Challenging Hummeldorf’s request that the mob be silent, the Second Black Prisoner mockingly retorts, “this was the old fool who said that our Leader would be in chains so long as he himself remained in power”.30 Hummeldorf’s reply – “we are bound each to each by many chains/ Of mutual interest, which binds me to you/ As they bind you in the centre of your power”31– seems to suggest another reading of the ‘chains’ image. Here the chains symbolise dependency and yet the power that controls them still suggests hegemonic systems of repression.

27 Stephen Spender, Poems, London 1933, 37. 28 Spender, Trial, 63. 29 Spender, Trial, 81. 30 Spender, Trial, 84. 31 Spender, Trial, 84.

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Within Spender’s poetic dialogue the prison with its chains and bars reappears frequently. Yet, in order to fully grasp the effect and even meaning of the prison image, it is vital to understand Trial of a Judge as a piece in performance. To read this play as poetry only is to disregard the major characteristics of drama, that is its ephemerality and immediacy; distinguishing it from literary genres, the play is only realised in action. In the stage directions, Spender describes the prison set: “The stage is separated into three cells. One, to the left is a yard, containing a tree. The second, the middle, is a prison cell, bare, white and simply furnished. The third, to the right, is a Guard Room”.32 Artist John Piper designed the set which is described in detail by critic Michael Sidnell: An abstract Expressionist setting – his first design for the theatre – was anything but dreamlike. The brightly coloured, severely geometrical screens and simple, stylized balcony helped to create a powerful – even terrifying – image of cruel and implacable force bearing down upon vulnerable individuals.33

Sidnell is situating Piper’s set very firmly in a particular European mode; here we do not have the symbolist visions of an Edward Gordon Craig or an Adolphe Appia, but rather an expressionist terror. The set actively mirrors the inescapable authority of the Black Troops who maintain: “indivisibly was ARE, and by our greater strength of being/ Defeat all words”.34 Their statement is almost theological in tone; the great indivisible yet triune ‘I AM’ becomes a collection of men, intent on ‘defeating all words’ rather than proving to be the ‘Word’ in the beginning. Here there is no grace but, as Sidnell puts it, “cruel and implacable force”. And what is particularly interesting for my argument is that, for the Black Troops (and in conjunction their use of ‒ in Althusserian terms – the Repressive State Apparatus of the prison), it is words that are defeated. While this can, therefore, be read as a piece of poetic drama in some ways, actually the potential for poetry seems to be destroyed by the overwhelming oppression of the visual image. Despite the repressive, brutal architecture of the stage, at the end, visually suggestive of the potential victory of the Red Chorus, the walls dividing the cells collapse and the prisoners join hands. Simultaneously the Chorus of Red Prisoners speak a verse of hope which, nevertheless is fragmented and dreamlike, gradually drifting away to just the single word “softly”.35 But the conclusion is ambiguous for the final speech is given to the Judge’s Wife, one of the recurring 32 Spender, Trial, 99. 33 Michael Sidnell, Dances of Death: The Group Theatre of London in the Thirties, London 1984, 231. 34 Spender, Trial, 109. 35 Spender, Trial, 113.



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voices of fascism. Her last sentence – “Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!”36 – is tempered by the Chorus of Red Prisoners who finish the play with “We shall be free. We shall find peace”.37 But, again, the performance techniques are particularly important here. The voices whisper through the darkness. Given that the whole play is wrapped, as the playscript suggests at the start, in “illusion and uncertainty” this final scene acts as a concluding framing device. This is coupled with drumming, a recurring emblem in modernist avant-garde theatre, tapping into a sense of primitivism while also creating a feeling of ongoing threat. The verse and performance conditions together leave us with a profound and lasting sense of ambiguity. Whereas Trial of a Judge embodies incarceration as its central motif, both in its poetic voice and material set, On the Frontier could be described as a play about division or, as the title suggests, frontiers. Isherwood’s description of Robert Medley’s set clearly nods to this thematic concern and to its effect on the audience: “Medley’s divided set, ‘The Ostnia-Westland Room’, was so striking that the whole audience applauded when the curtain rose”.38 But while the set graphically presented the division between the two countries, it also visually suggested a potential unity between individuals rather than political systems, with the inclusion of an open downstage space.39 Auden and Isherwood’s description of the set similarly exposes division rather than unity: It is not to be supposed that the Frontier between the two countries does actually pass through this room: the scene is only intended to convey the idea of the Frontier […] The chairs are arranged in two semicircles, and the concentration of lighting should heighten the impression of an invisible barrier between the two halves of the stage.40

The divided set is reflected in the divided poetic voice throughout. Take, for example, the songs of Westland and Ostnian students, sung simultaneously and yet powerfully antagonistic towards one another: “Forward to victory follow him now!” clashes with “I must fight among the clouds”.41 And yet even in these songs, there develops a sense of unity that seems to undermine the very design of the stage. Both sets of students display extraordinarily similar intentions; “Up and defend your country from harm!” chimes with “I/Will save my country ere I die”.42 As always in war, despite the antagonism 36 Spender, Trial, 115. 37 Spender, Trial, 115. 38 Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and his Friends, London 1977, 244. 39 Sidnell, Dances of Death, 247. 40 Auden and Isherwood, Frontier, 130. 41 Auden and Isherwood, Frontier, 146. 42 Auden and Isherwood, Frontier, 145-146.

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between the two sides, a strange sense of solidarity emerges. This theme continues in all the poetic sequences, which overwhelmingly detail the unity (or at least potential unity) between people while the prose sections maintain the sense of division. Many of these poetic scenes occur in the unified space at the front of the stage or even “Before the curtain” thereby distancing the characters and their poetic voices from the divided Ostnian-Westland Room. As an example, returning to the recurring theatrical motif of the prison, the short interruption scene between Act 1, scene 1 and scene 2 sees four prisoners illuminated by “a ray of light, barred with shadow, as if through a prison window”. 43 Their challenge – “And the people will be free then to choose their own road!” – seems to address everyone, hence their position in front of the curtain.44 The same is true of the dancing scene which situates itself in this space of freedom in order to challenge those directing them towards war45 or the battlefield interruption where, harking back to First World War trench warfare, the soldiers from both sides meet across their own frontier.46 In death Anna and Eric appear to overcome the scenic frontier to meet in “the Good Place”, a recurring poetic symbol of unity. In fact, the “Good Place”, this space outside the demarcated set of the Ostnian-Westland Room, is a stock image in Auden’s poetry, appearing first in “The Voyage”, a poem of January 1938: “And alone with his heart at last, does the traveller find / In the vaguer touch of the wind and the fickle flash of the sea / Proofs that somewhere there exists, really, the Good Place”.47 However, just three months later, after the Anschluss of 18th March, Auden seems far less optimistic about this mythical place: “History opposes its grief to our buoyant song:/ The Good Place has not been”.48 Whereas the dominant, terrifying set of Trial of a Judge appears to collapse in the face of unified poetic voices, the divided Ostnian-Westland Room of On the Frontier (despite the numerous moments of unity in front of the curtain) seems to overwhelm and eventually destroy any sense of the Good Place, in the earthly life at least.

43 Auden and Isherwood, Frontier, 128. 44 Auden and Isherwood, Frontier, 128. 45 Auden and Isherwood, Frontier, 153-155. 46 Auden and Isherwood, Frontier, 171-174. 47 W.H. Auden, The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939, London 1977, 231. 48 Auden, English Auden, 256.



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Poetic Drama and its Challenge to Realist Materiality In his later reflections on those feverish, influential pre-War years, Stephen Spender (despite reservations) compliments the Auden-Isherwood plays for their remarkable reappropriation of the poetic drama genre: The Auden-Isherwood plays are only the beginning of a movement far more significant than any ‘revival’ of the poetic drama or even any sudden flourishing avant-garde poetry; for what is required and what we may get during the next years is a revolution in the ideas of drama which at present stagnate on the English stage, and the emergence of the theatre as the most significant and living of literary forms.49

Spender boldly suggests that this new poetic drama (including his own Trial of a Judge) might ignite a more far-reaching artistic revolution. Worthen concludes similarly, pointing to the potential of poetic drama for a reinvigoration of theatrical genre: “by altering the text’s place in the discourse of the stage, poetic theater undertakes a political assault on realistic theatricality”.50 The term ‘poetic drama’, then, need not automatically restrict a play’s performance potential; it does not necessarily force us to read the script as the defining characteristic of any given play. Rather the use of verse liberates performance from any slavery to realism, enabling plays that focus specifically on important contextual issues but do so using non-realistic (or at least non-mimetic) methods. What Worthen suggests, and what these plays ultimately demand, is that poetry in the theatre constructs a new sense of materiality, one that is not ‘real’ and yet never wavers from its analysis of the ‘real’.

49 Stephen Spender, The Thirties and After: Poetry, Politics, People (1933-75), London 1978, 61. 50 Worthen, Modern Drama, 107.

Vladimir Feshchenko

Dematerializing Verbal and Visual Matter Wassily Kandinsky’s Bitextuality We want literature to follow boldly after painting.1

With this slogan, the Russian futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov one hundred years ago, in 1912, launched a modernist aesthetic programme for uniting poetry and the visual arts, one in which word and image stood for two intertwined modes of artistic expression: the verbal and the visual. This chapter discusses the issue of the artist’s text and the artistic avant-garde strategy of bitextuality. This strategy implies conveying artistic meanings through two media in parallel: the verbal text and the painted image. Bitextuality, or the concurrent use of verbal and pictorial media, can be viewed as a particular case of intermediality.2 Building on this premise, I consider the text of the artist as a switch between two codes, the verbal and the visual, which creates a two-fold, bitextual object. Attention to such code-switching in itself is hardly new, of course. This issue was considered in terms of semiotics and communication theory by Roman Jakobson in a famous article, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation” (1959), where he introduced the term intersemiotic translation or transmutation, which he defined as “interpretation of verbal signs by means of nonverbal sign systems”.3 However, in his definition of transmutation, the Russian-American linguist did not mention the reverse process, that is, the interpretation of nonverbal signs through the verbal sign system. This process in literary studies is often defined as ekphrasis. While both transmutation (and kindred notions) and theories of ekphrasis provide interesting instruments, I intend to analyze a third type of intersemiotic recoding, one combining the two mentioned types simultaneously and differentially – or, the reciprocal translation of verbal signs into nonverbal and vice versa – because I believe that such

1 Velimir Khlebnikov, “We want a word maiden”, in: Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, I, Letters and Theoretical Writings, ed. Charlotte Douglas, Cambridge, MA 1987, 246. 2 Aage A. Hansen-Löve, “Intermedialität und Intertextualität: Probleme der Korrelation von Wort- und Bildkunst – am Beispiel der Russischen Modeme”, in: Dialog der Texte. Hamburger Kolloquium zur Intertextualität: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, eds. Wolf Schmid and Wolf-Dieter Stempel, Sonderband 11, Wien 1983, 291-360. 3 Roman Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation”, in: On Translation, ed. Reuben A. Brower, New York 1959, 232-239, here 233.



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open transitions between different sign systems and different artistic media can be specifically revealing in our understanding of the avant-garde. Bitextuality implies two different processes when we take recourse to the traditional divides between the arts: 1) the writer (poet, philosopher, theorist) acts as painter; 2) the painter acts as writer (poet, philosopher, theorist). In what follows I consider the latter case, namely, how the painter verbalizes his own visual and plastic experience in verbal matter. The choice for Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) here is motivated by a number of reasons. Firstly, it is he who introduced the term text of the artist in the title of his 1918 theoretical book Steps. Text of the Artist (originally published in German in 1913 under the title Rückblicke). Secondly, and more importantly, Kandinsky was one of the first, if not the first, in art history to value verbal reasoning and theorizing as a key element of his artistic system. The central objective of his system was to present and define the grammar of his art, to compile the ABC, vocabulary and terminology of his own system of art. Lastly, and most essentially, in the case of Kandinsky the artist for the first time also theorizes the language of his aesthetic experience.4 In his essay “Malen’kie statejki po bol’shim voprosam” (Little Articles on Big Questions, 1919) Kandinsky proclaims: “A fundamental turning point is attained. Its fruit is the birth of the language of art”. 5 The quest for the language of art correlates with the contemporary linguistic turn in philosophy and science. The painter himself calls it the “spiritual turning-point”, which in the sphere of the arts took the shape of searching for an art method: one should study not what to paint, but how to paint. All Kandinsky’s reflections and writings about art involve considerations of the verbal problematic. His texts, moreover, can be divided into three different genres: poetry, commentary on his own paintings, and theoretical writings on abstract art in general.

4 The image/text problem in Kandinsky’s abstract art is discussed in: Philippe Sers, Kandinsky, Philosophie de l’art abstrait: Peinture, poésie, scénographie, Milan and Paris 2003; Vassilena Kolarova, “The Interartistic Concept in Kandinsky’s Paintings. The Image/Text problem”, in: Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology, 2007, n° 4, , (23.02.2013); Nadia Podzemskaia, “Art et abstraction: forme, objet, chose. Théories artistiques, linguistique et philosophie”, in: Ligeia, 2009, n° 89-92, 33-46. 5 Wassily Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, eds. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, Cambridge, MA 1994, 425.

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Verse Kandinsky’s poetical oeuvre represents the first aspect of his bitextuality. In his short autobiography published in Germany in 1913 the artist recalls that in his youth he had written poetry which he subsequently destroyed.6 Nevertheless, he continued to write verse and, whenever painting failed him, words became the appropriate tool of self-expression and intersemiotic self-translation. At times, he writes in the same autobiography, the opposite happened; the arising poetic sensations took a visual shape instead of a verbal one. Characteristically, his 1903 etching album was titled Stihi bez slov (Verses without Words). From 1909 to 1911, during his period of transition from figurative art to abstraction, Kandinsky composed a series of experimental poems, as the untitled one presented here: Ring the drop was falling It rang “Ring” it rang A drop was falling. A heron spread its wings Rustling Wings rustling A grey heron7

As we can see, the painter here seeks to grasp verbal analogies to his pictorial sensations. If we analyse this piece of poetry, which looks more like a sketch than a full-scale poem, we can observe the process of intermedial translation. It becomes clear how the object signified by the words of this text is losing its objectiveness and materiality, while transforming itself into an abstract form. Already in the first line, we can seize a certain step beyond the limits of the visible – “a drop was falling”. A drop of water can be imagined as an object of pictorial representation. However, it is more difficult to imagine the time-lapse process of its falling down on the canvas. Kandinsky does not consider the material aspect of the drop of water anymore but rather views it as a geometrical shape moving in abstract space. Linguistically speaking, the past continuous of the verb phrase “was falling” (the past imperfect in Russian) highlights the dynamics of the subject in question. The whole first line, “Ring the drop was falling”, actualizes the processual meaning of the “sounding drop”. It rings, that is, it produces a 6 See Jelena Hahl-Koch, “Zametki o poezii i dramaturgii Kandinskogo” (Notes on Kandinsky’s poetry and drama), in: Mnogogrannyj mir Kandinskogo, Moscow 1999, 124-130. 7 Translation by Emily Wright. The Russian original is published in: Hahl-Koch, “Zametki o poezii i dramaturgii Kandinskogo”, 124.



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prolonged sound effect. Introducing a lexical unit from music vocabulary, the author incorporates a different semiotic coding from the musical sign system. In the third line, the same process is reinforced by tautology – “ring it rang” – thus not only depicting the reverberating nature of the sound, but also reflecting upon the same inner form of the two different tense forms – “ring” and “rang”. The two words, in their turn, appear as repetitions of the same from the first and the second line, which creates a varied but repetitive abstract rhythm of the text. As a resulting effect of these first lines, the water drop as an elementary pictorial image acquires an abstract character, no longer related to material reality. The same principle is applied in the artist’s 1905 picture Russian Beauty in a Landscape (see fig. 13) featuring a mythological fairy-tale woman character, where the particular spots or drops of tempera dematerialize the subject-matter of the canvas, transforming it into a rhythmical sequence of abstract patterns.

Fig. 13 (left): Wassily Kandinsky, Russian Beauty in a Lands-cape, oil on canvas, 1905, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. Fig. 14 (right): Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VI, oil on canvas, 1913, State Hermitage Museum.

On the subject of rhythm, Kandinsky wrote in duhovnom v iskusstve (Concerning the Spiritual in Art): The apt use of a word (in its poetical meaning), repetition of this word, twice, three times or even more frequently, according to the need of the poem, will not only tend to intensify the inner harmony but also bring to light unsuspected spiritual properties of the word itself. Further than that, the frequent repetition of a word […] deprives the word of its original external meaning. Similarly, in drawing, the abstract message of the object drawn tends to be forgotten and its meaning lost.8

8 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, New York 1977, 15-16.

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Kandinsky makes use of the same technique in his later poetry, especially in his 1912 book Zvuki (Sounds), as well as in other poems which have been recently published from the archives.9 If we take a brief look at the list of titles from Sounds, we can clearly see the way to abstraction at the level of nominalisation: Open That Unchanged A Thing or Two Not Still? Why? In two Exit Later The break Different Softness Adventure Sight lightning Look Seeing10

Originally Kandinsky wanted to call his collection The ‘It’ Series, but he chose the more tangible yet abstract title Sounds. The dominance of abstract nouns, personal and indefinite pronouns, auxiliary words and infinitive verbs contributes to the dematerialization of meaning in the poetic text.11 The same linguistic principle will be applied in Kandinsky’s manner of naming the works of art, with such abstract titles as Composition, Improvisation, colour names and shapes. In such linguistic experimentation, akin to other avant-garde poetical strategies, he aimed to affirm a new mode of perceiving the work of art.

9 See Boris M. Sokolov, “Otdelit’ cveta ot veshhej: poisk bespredmetnosti v neopublikovannom pojeticheskom cikle V. V. Kandinskogo ‘Cvety bez zapaha’” (To Detach Colours from Objects: A Search for Non-Objectiveness in W. Kandinsky’s Unpublished Poetic Cycle ‘Flowers without Odour’), in: Bespredmetnost’ i abstraktsija, ed. Georgij Kovalenko, Moscow 2011, 166-182. 10 In: Wassily Kandinsky, Sounds, New Haven 1981. 11 Of particular importance is the issue of Kandinsky’s Russian-German bilingualism. Interlinguistic self-translation as bilingualism in the linguistic sense here represents a particular case of intermedial self-translation as bitextuality in a broader aesthetic sense. See Nadia Podzemskaia, “Teoreticheskoe nasledie V.V. Kandinskogo i problema mnogojazychija” (W. Kandinsky’s Theoretical Legacy and the Problem of Multilingualism), in: Mul’tilingvizm i genezis teksta, Moscow 2010, 297-315.



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Self-Commentaries on Paintings Another type of text written by Kandinsky is the commentaries on his own pictures, published in exhibition catalogues. Most interesting is the text Composition VI in which the famous picture of the same name (see fig. 14) undergoes a structural analysis by the painter himself. Kandinsky notes that initially he painted a fairly figurative picture on glass titled Potop (Deluge, 1911). Later on, he wished to revise this theme for a composition, but he did not succeed for quite some time, as he “was still obedient to the expression of the Deluge, instead of heeding the expression of the w o r d ‘Deluge’”.12 So, what did Kandinsky actually experience? The very word deluge presses heavily upon him and he wants to yield to a mood, that is, to a pure sensation of the inner sound and not to the external impression of the word deluge. Unconsciously, he perceives the self-reflective nature of the word. The Russian word for deluge – potop – is a palindrome, a form that can be read in both directions. Abstracting himself from the meaning of the word and concentrating on its pure form, he projects this idea on his own picture and is stunned by its composition and forms, with no more reference to the denotative meaning of the theme of deluge: “This glass-painting had become detached from me”, he comments.13 Finally, the composition was drawn as if by itself (“in two or three days”, “involuntarily”). The new non-figurative sensation implies non-mimet-ism, a tension contained in itself, in between its constituents. He sees the composition as an organic whole: “1. on the left the delicate, rosy, somewhat blurred center, with weak, indefinite lines in the middle; 2. on the right (somewhat higher than the left) the crude, red-blue, rather discordant area, with sharp, rather evil, strong, very precise lines”.14 Between these two centers, there is a third, main one, which “one only recognizes subsequently as being the center, but is, in the end, the principal center”. The pink and the white colours are foaming as if blotted out by a mist. The spectator looking at the picture, Kandinsky writes, is situated “somewhere” in a place of constant search and balancing. Ultimately, he concludes, the initial theme of the picture (the deluge) was “dissolved and transformed into an internal, purely pictorial, independent, and objective existence”.15 Thus, by means of inner, intersemiotic translation into verbal thinking the artist reaches a reciprocal effect in visual matter. The inner linguistic form transmutes into the inner plastic shape, existing in a parallel, bitextual dimension. 12 Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, 385. 13 Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, 386. 14 Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, 387. 15 Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, 388.

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Another interesting example of Kandinsky’s auto-ekphrastic technique is his essay “Pustoj holst i tak dale” (Empty Canvas etc.) written for the Cahiers d’art journal in 1935. It gives an account of how an empty canvas starts filling up with elementary abstract shapes: “Empty canvas. In appearance: truly empty, keeping silent, indifferent. Almost doltish. In reality: filled with tensions, with a thousand low voices, full of expectation. A little frightened because it can be violated. But docile”.16 Then it describes the formation of forms – the line, the point, the circle – against the empty canvas. Here we notice that Kandinsky’s shapes are self-organized and self-referential. They generate a new life on the canvas, with shapes as living beings with voices. For example, the line is “going of its own accord”. Each element speaks for itself: “here I am!”, “listen, listen to my secret!”. Therefore, such shapes endowed with voices function as performative propositions and speech acts, referring to themselves, in linguistic terms, or as self-contained abstract signs.

Theory of Art In contrast to his poetry, where Kandinsky experimented with words treated analogously to his painting practice, in his essays commenting on his own works of art, the verbal reasoning performed the role of auto-ekphrasis, which translated his visual sensations expressed in pictures back to words. Apart from these two types of verbal-visual interactivity, Kandinsky’s writings comprise a third and most important type of textual produce: his theoretical treatises that substantiate his artistic vision. I am referring primarily to three major books – Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), Steps. Text of the Artist (1918) and of course Tochka i linija na ploskosti (Point and Line to Plane, 1926) – laying the foundations for Kandinsky’s aesthetical doctrine. The core point of Kandinsky’s artistic doctrine is the principle of “inner necessity”. A work of art, according to him, consists of two elements: the inner and the outer. The combination of both form and content is necessary and inseparable. As Kandinsky remarks: “the relationships in art are not necessarily ones of outward form, but are founded on the inner sympathy of meaning”.17 Based on this guiding principle, he builds an integral system of “basic elements of painting”. These elements constitute the language of art. One of his early writings is characteristically called Farbensprache (Language of Form and Colour, 190416 Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, 780. 17 Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 2.



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1909). Speaking of the “deep kinship of the arts”, he dwells upon the semantic indefiniteness of colours in painting, as opposed to shapes that are definite and able to exist independently. Translating his reasoning on colours into verbal language, he notes: A never-ending extent of red can only be seen in the mind; when the word red is heard, the colour is evoked without definite boundaries. If such are necessary, they have deliberately to be imagined. But red, such as it is seen in the mind and not by the eye, exercises at once a definite and an indefinite impression on the soul, and produces spiritual harmony. I say ‘indefinite’, because in itself it has no suggestion of warmth or cold, such attributes having to be imagined for it afterwards, as modifications of the original ‘redness’. I say ‘definite’, because spiritual harmony exists without any need for such subsequent attributes of warmth or cold.18

Indeed, from a linguistic point of view, terms such as “red”, “blue” or “yellow” are words with no definite reference. They refer not to objects, volumes or surfaces but to perceptions, to certain transitions. As the art theorist Nelson Goodman put it, emeralds are never blue nor are they green, they are grue. Virginia Woolf describes this transition in a famous passage from her novel Orlando: “Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another”.19 The painter or writer feels acutely the materiality and immateriality of colour, so colour becomes a variable whereas form remains constant. It is only through a keen scent that an artist can “attain the artistic truth”, according to Kandinsky. A picture for him is a phenomenon affecting the spectator by the inner meaning through the totality of outer pictorial elements. A good illustration of this principle is Kandinsky’s analysis of the “point to plane” as a basic artistic element in verbal-visual retranslations. The geometric point is a primary element of the graphical language. The point, Kandinsky elucidates, represents an incorporeal, invisible concept, which, “considered in terms of substance, equals zero”.20 However, this zero conceals various attributes of human nature. That is, the point has a certain semantics for us: “We think of the geometric point in relation to the greatest possible brevity, that is, to the highest degree of restraint, which, nevertheless, speaks”.21 Therefore, imagined as a union of silence and speech, the point has been given its material form in writing. As a punctuation mark, the full stop belongs to language and signifies silence, a break in speech. Yet in writing, the point is merely a sign serving a 18 Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 3. 19 Virginia Woolf, Orlando. A Biography, London 2000, 13. 20 Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane: Contribution to the Analysis of the Pictorial Elements, New York 1947, 25. 21 Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, 25.

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useful purpose. As a rule, we do not attribute a particular inner meaning to the point. But Kandinsky maintains that the point can be seen as a symbol that has an “inner sound”. Reconsidering the point in terms of artistic value, the artist actualizes its inner properties and semantic potential. Kandinsky provides an example of intersemiotic recoding, coding the narration in musical terms: 1. Let the point be moved out of its practical-useful situation into an impractical, that is, an illogical, position. Today I am going to the movies. Today I am going. To the movies Today I. Am going to the movies It is apparent that it is possible to view the transposition of the point in the second sentence still as a useful one with an emphasis on the destination, the stress on the intention, loud fanfare. In the third sentence the illogical, in pure form, is at work. This may be explained as a typographical error – the inner value of the point flashes forth for a moment and is immediately extinguished. 2. Let the point be moved so far out of its practical-useful situation that it loses its connection with the flow of the sentence. Today I am going to the movies. In this case, the point must have considerable open space around it, so that its sound may have resonance. In spite of this, its sound remains delicate – overpowered by the sound of the print surrounding it.22

.

Finally, the culmination of Kandinsky’s line of reasoning: As the surrounding space and the size of the point are increased, the sound of the print is reduced and the sound of the point becomes clearer and more powerful.

Thus arises a double sound – print-point – besides the practical-useful association. It is a balancing of two worlds which can never meet or agree. This is a useless, revolutionary state of affairs – the print is shaken by a foreign body which cannot be brought into any relation to it.23

This is how, according to Kandinsky, the world of abstract painting comes into being. The point as an elementary sense-distinctive sign, which in itself is full of potential meanings, serves as the starting point in building the alphabet of art. The point as material and pragmatic sign falls short of its materiality in favour of its symbolic inner meaning as dematerialized unit of visual grammar. It then 22 Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, 27. 23 Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, 28.



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becomes rematerialized in Kandinsky’s actual pictorial techniques, colliding with different sorts of materials and compositions. In conclusion, we can say that the three textual genres discussed above represent a specific discourse of the artist’s writings. The text of the artist stands out as a type of text specifically correlating artistic perception and conceptual cognition, represented respectively by aesthetic values and linguistic concepts, as this type of text demonstrates not only verbalization of the aesthetic experience, but also the metareflexion of such a verbalization. Being a pioneer of intentional artist’s writing, Kandinsky produced an extensive literature on the language of art. The role of verbal reasoning in Kandinsky’s artistic system is unprecedented. Transitions between the verbal and the visual are characteristic of both his paintings and his literary texts, including verse and poems in prose. In the latter, he establishes verbal analogies to his pictorial sensations, whereas in the former he creates abstract forms analogous to linguistic concepts. The close reading of his poetical works demonstrates the free transitions within dual verbal-visual coding with correspondences between verbal patterning and pictorial practice. The same procedure may be found in his commentaries to paintings published in exhibition catalogues, where Kandinsky explains how abstract concepts transform into elements of the visual whole. By means of intersemiotic auto-translation from verbal discourse to visual language and vice versa, the artist makes the mental concept transmute into the inner plastic form, both existing in a common bitextual space. Thus, he seeks to revolutionize Gotthold Lessing’s Laocoön model of the non-translatability of media in arts. In Kandinsky’s conception, verbal and visual content become mutually recoded and transmuted. My work is funded by the Russian Foundation for Humanities (RGNF) within project n° 11–34–00344a2 “Artistic Experimentation: Communicative Strategies and Linguistic Techniques”.

 Material Memory

Andrea Sakoparnig

Beyond Matter or Form Invalidating Subliminal Contradictions in the Aesthetics of Matter In 1996, Rosalind Krauss curated the exhibition “Formlessness: Modernism Against the Grain” at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. In the preface to the catalogue she declared: “Formless: A User’s Guide has been in germination since the early 1980s, when it became clear to its authors that certain artistic practices […] could only be characterized adequately through the operations of Bataille’s informe”.1 In referring to the term informe, Krauss intended not only to designate performative operations, but also to “pick apart certain categories that seemed to us increasingly useless [...] namely, ‘form’ and ‘content’”.2 Krauss is a prominent representative of the popular notion that performative art differs from previous art in its peculiar openness – a notion that typically concludes with bidding farewell to form. In a similar fashion the diversity of the tendencies of the avant-gardes has commonly been elucidated by a playing off against each other of the terms matter and form. Indeed, choosing to work with either of these terms has almost become a question of passionate conviction. However, this bare opposition of form and matter risks corrupting the demands and objectives of the avant-gardes. In order to grasp the specificity of the avant-gardes’ achievements, an aesthetics of matter may be developed to break with single-sided elucidations and repudiate them as reductive and misleading. I will argue that in defining the nature of materiality in the avant-gardes we should not thereby dismiss either form or matter, but only the conceptual opposition between them, and that we should re-formulate their relational dynamic and, consequently, the meaning of informe. The central aim of my chapter is to validate these postulates and thereby draw an outline of the character of such an aesthetics of matter. Firstly, it will be useful to imagine what an aesthetics of matter is or could be by contrasting it with the current theories that seem akin to it.3 I will henceforth refer to these forms of aesthetic theory as ‘matter-oriented aesthetics’. With this term I assemble a bundle of diverse theories – from the Derrida-informed aesthetics of the event, via aesthetics of presence, atmosphere and performativity, through to those which recall aesthesis – that have in common an elevated value given to 1 Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, Formless. A User’s Guide, New York 1997, 9. 2 Krauss and Bois, Formless, 9. 3 I will mainly refer here to the relevant debates in Germany.

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materiality.4 Secondly, I will argue that these aesthetics exacerbate the subliminal remnant misconceptualizations of the form-matter relation by substituting a primacy of matter for a primacy of form. As we will see, this leads to serious reductions. Thirdly, the objectives of an aesthetics of matter can only be realized, its claims satisfied and new corruptions of its ideas hindered, by reflection on the history that underlies it. Obviously, this chapter should only be seen as an attempt to indicate the lurking dangers rather than a solution to all problems. This ties in with my second aim: to focus on those aspects relating to the emergence of materiality as such. Finally, I will outline the contours of an aesthetics of matter which rethinks the relation of form and matter as a kind of dynamic and productive (cor)relation.

1. I will indicate some symptoms of the deficiencies in current theories on matteroriented aesthetics, which will highlight key issues for the construction of a new aesthetics of matter. For the sake of brevity, my descriptions of competing contemporary approaches will be sketches only. I intend to clarify the intuition that if we elucidate these works in terms of tense negotiations on the relationship between form and matter, we will achieve a clearer understanding of the avant-gardes. Some artworks obviously evade schematic analysis in which the emphasis is either exclusively on form or matter. Kazimir Malevich’s work exemplifies this: it is traditionally regarded as formalistic, but it can also be analysed productively in terms of its contribution to new understandings of the materiality of painting. This notion also applies to other ‘abstract’ artists. Analogously, the full potential of matter-accentuating works such as Robert Smithson’s glue pours, Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings or Joseph Beuys’s works using fat would not be understood

4 Karlheinz Barck, Peter Gente, et al. (eds.), Aisthesis: Wahrnehmung heute oder Perspektiven einer anderen Ästhetik, Stuttgart 1990; Gernot Böhme, Atmosphäre: Essays zur neuen Ästhetik, Frankfurt/Main 1995. Gernot Böhme, Aisthetik: Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre, München 2001; Karl Heinz Bohrer, Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance, New York 1994; Karl Heinz Bohrer, Das absolute Präsens: die Semantik ästhetischer Zeit, Frankfurt/Main 1994; Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: a New Aesthetics, London 2008; Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Diesseits der Hermeneutik. Die Produktion von Präsenz, Frankfurt/Main 2004 (Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, Stanford 2003); Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, Stanford 2005; Dieter Mersch, Ereignis und Aura: Untersuchungen zu einer Ästhetik des Performativen, Frankfurt/Main 2002; Wolfgang Welsch (ed.), Die Aktualität des Ästhetischen, München 1993.



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if they were considered only to be experiments in new materials. Indeed, such works thematize materiality by thematizing (resistance to) form. In addition, one may point to the non-exhaustive conceptualization of the key concept of performativity. Originally intended as a concept that would enable comprehension of avant-garde experiment with material generation, performativity is surprisingly blind to the underlying dynamics of form and matter. Performative procedures are regarded primarily as formless. Symptomatically, the term ‘performativity’ arrived as a promise for overcoming metaphysical dichotomies yet has instead served to reinvigorate conventional dualisms (cognition vs. mere perception, determinacy vs. indeterminacy, meaning vs. appearance). Indeed, the narrative of current matter-oriented aesthetics may be loosely characterized as follows: Before the avant-garde, art forms provided closed and stable artworks with fixed meanings and conventional semiotic inferences, thus giving birth to a transformed and perverted materiality. Instead, the performative procedures of the avant-gardes made ‘real’ material meaning happen. Matter thereby was considered to be procedural as an event. However, we must reject the logic of this narrative, which is strongly indebted to the traditional, but questionable contraposition of form and matter. Despite this, contemporary aesthetics can provide a positive critical orientation for developing a more appropriate aesthetics of matter. Most of the contemporary approaches are informative, not so much as effective and comprehensive theories, but in drawing attention to ignored aspects. The current demand for matter-oriented aesthetics arose in response to transformations initiated by the avant-gardes. More specifically, this increasing awareness of materiality in art arose following the usage of unconventional, previously disreputable material, questioning what is to count as aesthetic material. Experimental works set out to explore potentials in material as well as potential materials, and by dismissing former functions, especially representative ones, the new materiality resisted the marginalization of its own meaningfulness. Artworks staked a claim for liberating and emancipating material from a violently adjusting form. That is one reason why amorphous, unstable, ephemeral, flexible and transformable material gained importance. Works enacted the sacrifice of form and the protest against idiomatic conventions by disproportioning, annulling or dissolving form. This was put into practice mostly by works that displayed their disorganized and disintegrated basic structure and by works that re-synthesised original fragments as montages, (dé)collages and assemblages. Such works emphasized the physical properties of the material – its manufacture, its surface texture and physical behaviour – or critically displayed the aggressive act of shaping. Put simply, the material-based poetics of the avant-gardes not only encouraged the use of new material in ways that critically reflected the dogmatic, normative understand-

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ing of artistic material, they also raised awareness towards material in general. The new status of materiality resisted conventional hermeneutic schemes and approaches, and new tools of analysis and interpretation were required. Matter-oriented aesthetics was supposed to do justice to these tendencies, but as I mentioned earlier, the notion of materiality often went hand in hand with the notion of form, which is the crucial point most of those theories miss. Intended as a response to the oblivion of the material, they conversely neglect the form. In my view, the reflexivity between form and matter is particularly characteristic of the avant-gardes as they deal with the tensions and frictions of a one-sided primacy. Furthermore, current theories tend to focus on the material as an immediate fact, regarding avant-garde materiality as simply a non-formal and non-relative quality: the production of materiality is elucidated via such vague terms as appearance, emergence and event, and somehow all of these terms aim to marginalize the processes of mediation. As a consequence, the techniques of the avant-gardes are reduced to unconscious or unintentional processes and approaches to artworks are reduced to mere perceptive experiences. In some theories the issue of aesthetics gets reduced to a perceptive attitude towards an object.5 This broadens the concept of the aesthetic to such an extent that any distinctive character becomes blurred. This is also a result of the desire for a “new immediacy”,6 itself a complementary result of scepticism towards mediation. All these conceptualizations bring about an erosion of long-established aesthetic categories and have tended to support the case for an irrational, affective aesthetics. Moreover, matter-oriented aesthetics seem to support the argument that doing away with form implies doing away with the semiotic in general. As a consequence, matter is regarded as authentic, as non- or pre-semantic, and even as a resistant force to our desire for semiotization.7 Aesthesis-based theories especially aim to establish the aesthetic as a basis for the cognitive and thus declare it to be pre- or even non-cognitive. According to these reflections, material is mere matter, the epitome of the sensuous. So, considering the basic schemes of matter- or form-oriented aesthetics, we can state that whereas form-oriented aesthetics assume that material is secondary to formal processes, matter-oriented aesthetics assume that material is primarily a performative result. Both treat form and material in a reductive way. In my opinion, the root of this reduction is thinking the form-matter relation externally. In terms of the former, aesthetic difference is brought about by formal work on material; it remains vague as to which way form is acting on material, with 5 Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, 39. 6 Böhme, Atmosphäre, 11. 7 Dieter Mersch, Was sich zeigt: Materialität, Präsenz, Ereignis, München 2002, 11-44.



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what impulses, and how aesthetic coherence is to be attained. In this scheme a basic aspect remains unarticulated, namely aesthetic work as work on and with material. As a consequence, formation seems to involve arbitrary action regardless of material difference. Material is thought to be passive, physical stuff in need of externally-motivated mediation. Apprehended thus, materiality is marginalized; it disappears behind the meaning it is supposed to refer to. This is the point at which matter-oriented aesthetics is inserted as a corrective. Plausibly, it accuses form-oriented aesthetics of denying the material and asserts instead that the material always appears in its own, self-referential materiality and material meaning. However, the elucidations of matter-oriented theories are similarly problematic insofar as they misconceive materiality as immediate. How the ‘generation’ of materiality is to be comprehended, is thus left enigmatic.8 Even according to them the appearance of materiality is often (implicitly) illustrated by formal processes that explain how the material refers to its own meaningful materiality.9 At the end of the day, prior to any supposedly immediate appearance, there is a mediation. As indicated thus far, it is clear that the question of materiality demands more than just a typology of new materials, techniques and processes. Avant-garde art objectifies more than a transformed concept of materiality: it mirrors old tensions and frictions that need to be reconsidered.

2. The transformations aesthetics has undergone derive essentially from the endeavour to think the form-matter relation non-reductively. The following very brief history tracks, albeit selectively, the climaxes of those paradigms which have subtly shaped today’s concepts, and which might yet help to re-orientate them. The imbalance within the form-matter relation dates back to the ancient notion of hyle (gr. ὕλη, matter) as indeterminate matter bearing a potential that can only be actualized by eidos (gr. εìδος, form). The powerful Platonic theory of Forms regards form as ontologically essential, as real and intelligible, whereas matter is regarded as contingent, un-real, epistemologically unworthy and thus negligible.10 Plato thereby not only affirms that abstract forms are more fundamental than the perceptible, but that as universals they are also independent, 8 Fischer-Lichte, Performance, 75-137. 9 Fischer-Lichte, see chapter 3. 10 Plato, Republic, ed. and trans. Ivor A. Richards, Cambridge 1966, esp. 500-517.

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transcendental and existing without any need for material concretion. According to Plato, matter is shaped and determined by passively receiving form. Plato’s theory thus laid the ground for the subsequent marginalization of matter in aesthetics and as a result for the confrontation of the intelligible with the perceptible. Against this, Aristotle’s hylemorphismus (gr. Υλομορφισμός) conceives of substance as a compound of matter and form, both sharing principles of mutual relation that can only be found in the concrete. Thereby Aristotle conceptualizes matter as a relative term. Additionally, he thinks of matter as a necessary premise, bearing the potentiality (gr. δύναμις, dynamis) of all concrete beings.11 The following centuries brought further debates regarding how the form-matter relation should be conceived (especially Thomism). But it was not until the early 18th century, when form and matter became genuine concepts in the newly-developing philosophical discipline of aesthetics and the decline of metaphysics, that the question of their relation once again came to set the agenda. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten was the first to elevate the sensuous in his Aesthetica.12 As a complement to discursive clear and distinct cognition, aesthetic thinking completes our cognitive competences, thereby mending its deficiencies. The sensible-perceptible is no longer thought to be merely passive material for rational, cognitive processes, but has its own dignity and value. Although Baumgarten’s text is rarely read today, it continues to cast a long shadow over the discipline and still claims many adherents. Nonetheless, Baumgarten, along with his successor Immanuel Kant, interpreted form as the decisive element concerning aesthetic difference.13 Paradoxically, it was Hegel who made the first crucial step in the de-marginalization of matter by doing justice to its determining force and by re-interpreting form as historical.14 Seeking to overcome the abstract dichotomy of form and content, Hegel points out their dialectic co-constitutivity. Neither dominates in the concrete artwork, for otherwise their relation would be merely abstract, external and aesthetically illegitimate. Nonetheless, according to Hegel, matter is contingent and the only way to cope with this contingency (in relation to the Idea) is to reduce the degree of its indeterminacy by giving it sense and meaning. Since Hegel negates the sig11 Aristotle, Physics, revised text, with introduction and commentary by William David Ross, New York 1936, esp. 194b9. 12 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetica, Hildesheim 1961. 13 Immanuel Kant, “Kritik der Urteilskraft”, in: Werke in zwölf Bänden, vol. 10, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, Frankfurt/Main 1977, §35, B 217. (See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, Cambridge 1999). 14 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I”, in: Werke in 20 Bänden, vol. 13, eds. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, Frankfurt/Main 1986. (See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on Fine Arts, trans. T.M. Knox, 2 volumes, Oxford 1975).



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nificance of matter and the sensuous as such, it may seem that he is the ideal advocate for an aesthetics of content that is to be interpreted as the counterpart of an aesthetics of matter. After all, he seems to accept matter only as a carrier of sense and meaning, not appreciating its own potential of meaning. Nevertheless, the most intriguing feature of Hegel’s thought is that it recognizes that art necessarily objectifies the Idea in a sensuous and material way, thus not only limiting the full and true representation of the Idea negatively, but also determining and enabling it positively. So, the other side of Hegel’s aesthetics of content is an aesthetics of matter with which his idealism struggles fiercely. This is evident when we consider Hegel’s hierarchical “System of the Arts”, which may be read as a history of form. The hierarchy is structured according to the value each type of art is assigned relative to the form-matter relation. The logic is quite simple: the more that materiality is suspended, the worthier the art. However, in Hegel’s system art loses its elevated status as an exclusive medium for self-understanding at precisely that moment at which its own sensuous objectivity becomes problematic. Ultimately, art has necessarily to transgress itself just as the specific art-forms have done: the infinity of absolute spirit contradicts the finitude of the art-object and content dissolves form. Accordingly, the last stage of development within the realm of art is the romantic, which objectifies the very limits of objectification within itself. According to Hegel, the ‘end’ of art is reached when art, being bound to the object, fails to transgress the object and at best objectifies its inescapable objectivity in and as an object. Hegel’s reflections may help us gain a better understanding of the form-matter relation. Revising Hegel’s problematization of art’s being bound to sensuous material, we may say that the problem art is working on is its own materiality – materiality that is a result of mediation by form. Bearing in mind the demands of matter-oriented aesthetics as well as Hegel’s remarks on the content-form relation, the way in which we elucidate this mediation will be important for the following discussion. Hegel is already aware that matter resists instrumentalization as semiotic bearer. Matter unfolds its own determinacy by resisting mediation, while nonetheless being mediated. Thus, matter is not immediate, not directly present, not merely given ‘as such’. Its qualities appear negatively via form and formal processes, and the dynamics of matter and form finally lead to a transgressive modification of form. Hegel is the first to provide an immanent aesthetic explanation for the tendency toward the dissolution of art’s boundaries. Declaring art to be fundamentally driven by a critically and potentially self-suspending impulse, Hegel’s theory predicts the impulse of the avant-gardes towards challenging the boundaries of art and non-art.15 It is precisely the negotiation of form 15 Gregg Horowitz, “Aesthetics of the Avant-Garde”, in: The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed.

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and matter that nourishes this impulse. And yet we cannot fully clarify the avantgardes’ specific understanding of materiality through a Hegelian Idealism. For Hegel, aesthetic objectivity rests fundamentally on the immaterial, although it insists on material objectification. Perhaps this is the reason that, against the impetus Hegel provided, subsequent aesthetics may be read as aesthetics before Hegel.16 Theodor W. Adorno drew upon Hegel’s ideas, enriching them in a way that promises a better understanding of what an aesthetics of matter could become. Adorno was not so much concerned with materiality itself but with the dynamic, dialectical processes underlying that emphasis on materiality which became the hallmark of the avant-gardes. In this respect, Adorno’s most pressing argument is that to actualize the potentiality of matter, and to recognize further potential materials and potentials in material presupposes the development of formal techniques and processes as well as a rationality of form. This development is itself to be motivated by material impulses. Adorno begins these reflections by accusing idealistic (and more specifically Hegelian) approaches of being blind to form.17 However, in sympathy with Hegel’s criticism, he argues against materialistic approaches that take matter to be the real objective. Thus, according to Adorno, matter is not given in itself, but exists only in the distinct, concrete and already formed. Concurring with Adorno, we may then argue that the avant-garde emphasis on matter is nothing more than the effect of an inner-aesthetic dynamic, a striving to overcome the hierarchic binary. In other words, the constitution of form and materiality is deeply inter-related. Contrary to Plato, and in line with Hegel, matter does not receive form passively, but actively evokes and provokes form by actualizing itself. The material thus provides the impulse for its own mediation. Contrary to Hegel, this mediation is not a de-materialization leading away from matter, but an assertive ‘making appear’ of matter as such. The mediation process actualizes the materiality of a specific material by giving birth to material meaning via the generation of a specific form.18 In contrast with traditional conceptions, matter is not the medial basis for formation, but, as actualizing force, matter is rather the basis of mediality. Thus, materiality is the result of a forma-

Jerrold Levinson, Oxford 2003, 748-760, here 750. 16 Gregor Schwering and Carsten Zelle, Ästhetische Positionen nach Adorno, München 2002, 7-13. 17 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Ralf Tiedemann, newly translated, edited, and with a translator’s introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis 1997, 83. 18 See Gerald Bruns, “On the Conundrum of Form and Material in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory”, in: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 66, 2008, n° 3, 225-235, here 225.



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tion process that is initiated and motivated by the material, and form is nothing other than the substantiated result of this material mediation. Material, as catalyst for the ongoing development of mediation, causes the generation of new material meanings by continuously provoking new forms and forming processes. For this reason, at a certain level of material mediation form becomes formless; or, in Adornian terms, informel.19 The same is true for art-forms: they begin to dissolve, and genres lose their differentiation.20 When Adorno speaks of the informel of music, he has in mind “a type of music which has discarded all forms which are external or abstract or which confront it in an inflexible way”.21 He pleads for a reformed apprehension of the form-matter relation: “[music] strive[s] to do away with the system of musical co-ordinates which have crystallized out in the innermost recesses of the musical substance itself”.22 Form is no longer regarded as dominant over matter; form that is motivated by the impulses of the material can justify itself as legitimate and adequate to material demands and claims. Tracing the origins of the term informel, we may arrive at paintings by Wols or Bernard Schultze.23 The German usage in its turn derives from the French art informel (art ‘without form’). While Adorno’s borrowing of the term is mostly interpreted relative to these art movements, he actually does not suggest that music should henceforth be ‘without form’ or ‘formless’. Instead, he ties the term to earlier conceptions,24 pointing to artworks that are non-conventional and thus subvert normative notions of form. The informel is therefore not equivalent to the non-formal, it rather indicates that form itself works against its tendentiously oppressive. Congruent form is transparent or invisible, apparently formless. But it only seems to disappear insofar as it is no longer perceivable as prevalent. Thus, formlessness is assigned to a special ratio of form that refuses idiomatic and pregiven form-solutions. This idea results from Adorno’s reflections on the fatal rationalizations that led to a devastating control over the material and a crisis of both material and form in art – tendencies which the avant-gardes themselves 19 Theodor W. Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle”, in: Quasi una Fantasia. Essays on Modern Music, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone, London 2002, 269322. 20 Theodor W. Adorno, “Die Kunst und die Künste”, in: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10.1, eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, Frankfurt/Main 2003, 432-454, here 432. 21 Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle”, 272 ff. 22 Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle”, 272 ff. 23 See Max Paddison, “Introduction. Contemporary Music; Theory, Aesthetics, Critical Theory”, in: Contemporary Music: Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives, eds. Max Paddison and Irène Deliège, Ashgate 2010, 1-15, here 6. 24 Karl Rosenkranz, Ästhetik des Häßlichen, Königsberg 1853, 4 ff.

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have both introduced and striven against. Adorno was convinced that through the adequate mediation of material a truly appropriate form could emerge: a form that would both emphasise the materiality of artworks and positively transform rationality in general. He also admitted that the integrity of form – always in danger of becoming too affirmative within the tendentious totality of the aesthetic semblance – might no longer be convincing:25 “The strict immanence of the spirit of artworks is contradicted [...] by a countertendency that is no less immanent: the tendency of artworks to wrest themselves free of the internal unity of their own construction, to introduce within themselves caesuras that no longer permit the totality of the appearance”.26 Adorno argues that form and matter coconstitutively condition one another, against the prevailing paradigms. Discontinuous, fragmentary, paratactic and dissociative forms gain in importance, thus suspending the rigidity of the binary logic of formalists vs. materialists. What is to be regarded as matter or as form is finally a question of perspective: form itself, while it is worked upon, can be material. Hegel prefigured this dialectic in the potential turn from form to content and vice versa.27 While Adorno’s claims may not be truly novel, his distinctive contribution lies in the way in which he re-evaluates both material and form and avoids presenting them as externally related.

3. In conclusion, the problem of the form-matter relation as it is staged in aesthetics is not circumnavigable. Form and matter are irreducible, dialectical and dynamic principles, whose relation is continually under negotiation. My aim has been to show that what we, who are developing an aesthetics of matter, would wish to realize is in line with Adorno’s politics of form. Of course, Adorno is a common point of reference for the understanding of the achievements of the avant-gardes, but it is only by reorientation and reinterpretation of his key concepts that we may arrive at a fuller insight into his significance. If we wish to plead for a deeper understanding of materiality, we must at the same time strengthen our concept of form bearing in mind Adorno’s dictum: “Art has precisely the same chance of survival as does form, no better”.28 The next step is to reinterpret the neighbouring concepts of autonomy and aesthetic difference. It is debateable, however,

25 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 147. 26 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 88. 27 Hegel, Enzyklopädie, 265. 28 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 141.



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whether the strong coupling of form and aesthetic autonomy is still convincing.29 Adorno’s theory seems often to be shaped by a too limited notion of form as negative and closing force. We should rather emphasize its positive aspect: [form] is the nonviolent synthesis of the diffuse that nevertheless preserves it as what it is in its divergences and contradictions, and for this reason form is actually an unfolding of truth. A posited unity, it constantly suspends itself as such; essential to it is that it interrupts itself through its other just as the essence of its coherence is that it does not cohere.30

Form organises disintegrating impulses, unifying juxtaposed and repulsive elements without levelling their characteristics. It is only via form that the indeterminable can be determined as such, the nonexistent can be brought to appearance as if it exists, and the rights of the singular individual can be reinforced within the heterogeneous plurality: “In artworks, the criterion of success is twofold: whether they succeed in integrating thematic strata and details into their immanent law of form and in this integration at the same time maintain what resists it and the fissures that occur in the process of integration”.31 In so doing, form refuses closure, or becomes a moment in a process of synthesizing. In relation to the form of early avant-garde montages: “this is the function of montage, which disavows unity through the emerging disparateness of the parts at the same time that, as a principle of form, it affirms unity”.32 Perhaps the most important conclusion of this chapter is that we must say farewell to those understandings of the form-matter relation which associate it with a hierarchy and which forcibly determine our conceptual architecture. When binary presumptions are abandoned, the avant-gardes’ achievements, far from being mere experiments, show themselves to be reflections on the aesthetic as such. It is, perhaps, stating the obvious to assert that we have to comprehend that form does not condition material without material conditioning form. As a corollary, we come to another understanding of the art-work as both event and object, spontaneous appearance and objectification, process and state. If we are to bring about a better understanding of the specificity of the avant-gardes, we must continue to consider the form-matter relation, theoretically and in its concrete realizations, because it is (and will be) constantly negotiated in art.

29 Especially since this leads to the problematic rejection of action painting, happenings and ready-mades. See Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 221. 30 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 143. 31 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 274, 275, 72, 19, 6. 32 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 144 ff.

Eleni Loukopoulou

Upon Hearing James Joyce The Anna Livia Plurabelle Gramophone Disc (1929) This chapter will focus on two different formats of James Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle: the text and the recording of its final four pages. Anna Livia Plurabelle is a section from the first part of Finnegans Wake. After it was completed in 1924, Anna Livia Plurabelle was published in two Parisian magazines and then in book format.1 It appeared as a de luxe edition in New York in 1928 and as a pamphlet in T. S. Eliot’s Criterion Miscellany series in London in 1930. I have divided this chapter in two parts. I will first outline Joyce’s preoccupations during the writing of Anna Livia Plurabelle and then I will focus on how he was involved with key London writers and intellectuals to promote the text, and particularly its recording. My approach is based on the conceptual framework that Aaron Jaffe has developed through the distinction between “upstream” and “downstream” sites of modernist production. The notion of “upstream work”, refers to the composition of literary works per se; “downstream work” encompasses a multitude of strategies employed by modernist writers to promote their writings, referring thus to “critical and journalistic essays, autobiographies, [...] as well as setting up bookshops, publishing houses, little magazines, and artistic salons”.2 Scholarship has focused on such modernist mechanisms: Lawrence Rainey was one of the first to endorse a cross-disciplinary and inter-medial approach in relation to the ways modernist markets operated and how value was assigned to modernist works. In Institutions of Modernism, Rainey has analysed in detail the role that the market of limited editions played.3 Equally useful is “the construct of the snob” that Sean Latham has introduced as a means of examining how negotiations between the artist and the forces of early 20th-century marketplace developed. Through figures such as the snob, as Latham has persuasively demonstrated, modernists aimed to challenge “directly the structuralist organization of aesthetic production [ … to map their] own position within the chaos of 1 Anna Livia Plurabelle was first published in: Le Navire d’Argent, 1925, n° 5, 59-74. It was republished in: transition, 1927, n° 8, 17-35. James Joyce, Anna Livia Plurabelle, with a preface by Padraic Colum, New York 1928. James Joyce, Anna Livia Plurabelle, Fragment of “Work in Progress”, in: Criterion Miscellany (London), 1930, n° 15. In the 1939 published version of Finnegans Wake “Anna Livia Plurabelle” is book I.8, 196-216. 2 Aaron Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity, Cambridge 2005, 161. 3 Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture, New Haven and London 1998.



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the expanding literary marketplace and [articulate their] resistance to its organizational logic”.4 The contested terrain of modernist marketing devices is crucial for an understanding of how the supposedly solitary modernist writer was actually enmeshed in and relied on collaborative labour. Taking heed of these lines of enquiry, this chapter will shed light on the mechanisms of promotion concerning the recording of Anna Livia Plurabelle through London’s modernist marketplace. First, a few words about the content of Anna Livia Plurabelle: the central characters are two working-class women washing the dirty clothes on the banks of Dublin’s river, the Liffey. They gossip about the two key textual figures in Finnegans Wake, HCE and his wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle. The washerwomen give a detailed account of Anna Livia Plurabelle’s visit to the poor to give them gifts. As night falls, the figures of these women dissolve into the landscape. They become a tree and a stone. While Joyce was composing Anna Livia Plurabelle’s poetic prose, his main concern was to textually thematise the flow of rivers. He achieved this by making words flow into new experimental linguistic constructions. When Joyce revised and expanded Anna Livia Plurabelle in 1927 for the magazine transition, he exclaimed: “hundreds of river names are woven into the text. I think it moves”.5 Up to then, Joyce had estimated that he had devoted 1,200 hours of labour to this section and “an enormous expense of spirit” as he was prepared to “stake everything” on “Anna Livia Plurabelle”.6 And in 1929 he declared that either Anna Livia Plurabelle is “something or I am an imbecile in my judgement of language”.7 The role of portmanteau words is substantial here. As Patrick McCarthy emphasises, Joyce’s complex word formations with “references to several hundred rivers [...] give readers the simultaneous impression of strangeness and familiarity”.8 During his revisions of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” – which took place over twenty stages according to David Hayman – Joyce succeeded in making the river Liffey look strange.9 Indeed, thanks to this amount of work, the Anna Livia Plurabelle section and particularly its final pages are the most well-known lines from Finnegans Wake. A key contribution to this is its re-mediation through the sound recording that transforms the text to another medium, an “audiotext” as Adrian Curtin has char4 Sean Latham, “Am I a Snob?”, in: Modernism and the Novel, Ithaca, NY and London 2003, 121-122. 5 James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, I, ed. Stuart Gilbert, New York 1957, 259. 6 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (new and revised ed.), Oxford 1983, 598. 7 Ellmann, James Joyce, 589. 8 Patrick McCarthy, “‘Making Herself Tidal’: Chapter I.8”, in: How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake, eds. Luca Crispi and Sam Slote, Madison, WI 2007, 175-176. 9 McCarthy, “‘Making Herself Tidal’”, 177, note 3.

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acterised it.10 However, its popularity does not rely only on the sensual pleasure that the text and its recorded version offer. Its main asset, I would argue, is that in its pages Joyce expounds his theory of history by reassessing Giambattista Vico’s cyclical theory of history. In his study, Scienza Nuova (The New Science), Vico develops the concept of the “ideal eternal history”, the ricorso, according to which the three ages of the world recur cyclically. This structural framework has been interpreted as fatalistic and reactionary. Joyce himself suggested that The New Science and specifically the theme of historical cycles was “a trellis”, a structure for the writing of Finnegans Wake.11 When he was challenged about his fascination with Vico’s supposedly reactionary theories, as developed in the New Science, he answered, “I don’t believe in any science, [...] but my imagination grows when I read Vico as it doesn’t when I read Freud or Jung”.12 Peter Burke has shed light on Joyce’s fascination with Vico and explains that he was attracted “by Vico’s views on myth, on metaphor, on Homer, on language, on psychology, and much else besides”.13 Vico developed a complex theory of history and memory, and of particular significance for our understanding of Anna Livia Plurabelle is his distinction between poetic and historical memory. In Vico, the historical unfolding of language and events is often associated with the fluidity of rivers. Joyce’s preoccupations with ascribing historical time to his fluvial character are evident in the finale of Anna Livia Plurabelle. There, Joyce engages directly with Vico and it is worth quoting the section: “Teems of times and happy returns. The seim anew. Ordovico or viricordo. Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be”.14 As has been argued by Andrew Treip, the text here engages with Neo-Hegelian interpretations of Vico, where the idea of dialectical historical development is prominent: “Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be”.15 By juxtaposing these dialectically produced images with the portmanteau words that encompass Vico’s name “ordovico”, even in

10 Adrian Curtin, “Hearing Joyce Speak: The Phonograph Recordings of ‘Aeolus’ and ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ as Audiotexts”, in: James Joyce Quarterly, 46, 2009, n° 2, 269-284. 11 Ellmann, James Joyce, 554. 12 Quoted Ellmann, James Joyce, 693. 13 Peter Burke, Vico, Oxford, 1985, 7. 14 Joyce, Anna Livia Plurabelle, 32. 15 Treip draws attention to Joyce’s reading of Edgar Quinet. Treip argues that, like Quinet, Joyce employs “an analogy between historical and natural processes as an underlying structural figure in his text [… and this helps] to portray a history in a constant condition of flux and transition”. See Andrew Treip’s discussion of Joyce and Edgar Quinet’s, Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire de l’humanité (Œuvres complètes, Paris 1857), in: Andrew Treip, “Lost Histereve: Vichian Soundings and Reverberations in the Genesis of ‘Finnegans Wake’ II.4”, in: James Joyce Quarterly, 32, 1995, n° 3/4, 649.



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anagrammatic format “viricordo”, Joyce raises questions about established theories of history. This is more evident in the translation of Anna Livia Plurabelle in BASIC English – a system of 850 English words that C. K. Ogden, a Cambridge-based philosopher, had developed from the mid-1920s onwards in the service of international peace and commercial exchange. In 1932 Joyce collaborated with Ogden for the translation and he foregrounded his understanding of Vico’s theory of history. In addition, he illustrated the way he adjusted it. The version of the text in BASIC English reads as follows: A number of times, coming happily back. The same and new. Vico’s order but natural, free. Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be. Our Norwegian Thing-seat was where Suffolk Street is, but what number of places will make things into persons?16

The above extract is significant because it reveals Joyce’s theoretical stance towards Vico’s systematisation of historical knowledge. He did not understand Vico’s theory of history as being fatalistic. In the BASIC English translation we see that Joyce adds correctives to Vico’s order, the idea of the ricorso as expressed in the preceding lines as “A number of times, coming happily back. The same and new”. Joyce’s view of historical processes is one of freedom: “natural, free”. The freedom that is emphasised here is difficult to interpret as signifying a pessimistic or fatalistic view of history. As we know Joyce collaborated with Ogden and sent him numerous suggestions about the translation. The phrase “Vico’s order but natural, free” was approved by Joyce as a translation into BASIC English. And it is useful to consider here Jaffe’s point that Joyce as well as other writers (Shaw, Eliot, Pound) endorsed Ogden’s BASIC English project because they considered it as “a potentially viable means for disseminating literary work both beyond the highbrow and abroad, a possible intermediary step between originals and either annotations or translations”.17 For Pound, specifically – but this could be applied to Joyce as he had repeatedly spoken of his need to find not only the most precise words but also put them in the best possible order – BASIC was a “means to authenticate language-use, a way to train students to employ only words charged with the utmost degree of meaning [sic]”.18 This emphasis on precision was thus crucial for an accurate rendering of the meaning of Anna Livia Plurabelle in BASIC English.

16 James Joyce and C. K. Ogden, “Anna Livia Plurabelle in Basic English”, in: transition, 1932, n° 21. Special section “Homage to James Joyce”, 262. 17 Jaffe, Culture of Celebrity, 64. 18 Jaffe, Culture of Celebrity, 65.

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The translators’ decision to stress the concept of freedom in Vico’s system accords with subsequent interpretations of Vico’s work. For instance, Peter Burke has proposed that Vico was claiming that certain major historical trends repeat themselves, thus giving rise to a sequence of broadly similar forms of political organisation, law, mentality, literature, and so on. He did not claim that everything that happens is determined. On the contrary, he was vehement in his opposition to this idea of “fate”, as he called it, in the name of free will.19

Joyce’s understanding of Vico’s New Science should be considered in this context, that is, of man’s freedom to act upon the making of history, that is, the much celebrated line in Vico: verum et factum convertuntur, that is, “truth and making are convertible”.20 By truth Vico meant the knowledge of history that man produces retrospectively: “men make their world through their actual activity, and because of this they can intellectually make a knowledge of this world”.21 Neo-Hegelians understood that this type of historical knowledge could trigger new action that would shape the present and future.22 Vico’s New Science foregrounds the transition from a pre-philosophical way of thinking, when magic and myth defined the interpretative horizon, to the era of philosophical investigation and historical consciousness of being in the world. The development of the cognitive tools that gave rise to conceptual thinking, philosophy and science enabled the deconstruction of mythical interpretations of the world. The main achievement of Vico’s New Science was to explore what David Ayers has distinguished as “the view which can be found in figures as diverse as Vico, Hegel and [I. A.] Richards, that science has moved the world irreversibly out of the realm of myth and magic”.23 Similarly Len Platt understands Vico as the early 18th-century exponent of a virtuous rationalism that operated essentially through scientific method.24 Vico’s systematic investigation of history, literature and language was achieved through analytical thinking and original etymological inquisitions. As Ayers suggests, Vico explores ways “to discover a cognitive or other function for literature – its place in

19 Burke, Vico, 83. 20 Martin Jay, “Vico and Western Marxism”, in: Martin Jay, Fin-de-siècle Socialism and Other Essays, London 1988, 70. 21 Donald Phillip Verene, “Vico and Marx on Poetic Wisdom and Barbarism”, in: Vico and Marx: Affinities and Contrasts, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo, New Jersey and London 1983, 252. 22 Jay, “Vico and Western Marxism”, 73. 23 David Ayers, Literary Theory: A Reintroduction, Malden, MA and Oxford 2008, 49. See also, Burke, Vico, 87-88. 24 Len Platt, Joyce, Race and Finnegans Wake, Cambridge 2007, 24.



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the unfolding of human understanding”.25 Indeed, in Anna Livia Plurabelle Joyce embarks on new systematizations of historical knowledge, exploring the intersections of historicity and creative imagination anew. He did not subscribe to a determinist interpretation of Vico’s writings about history. Luke Gibbons’s point about Joyce’s “complex and unsettling” vision of history and of the past as a “destabilizing rather than a conservative force” is relevant here.26 The timelessness of the historical past, “Vico’s order”, of cycles and repetitions becomes destabilised if considered through the fluvial figure of Anna Livia Plurabelle. Joyce emphasises a way of thinking on grand historical scales and is able to express a conception of history through the phrase that describes the ever-changing movement of the water: “Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be”. And Joyce’s recording of this particular text offers the audience the exceptional opportunity to perceive his theory of history anew. Joyce’s firm belief in this text and his determination to disseminate it and promote its value were shared by a number of his contemporary writers and intellectuals. In the rest of this chapter, I will focus on how Ogden together with Eliot sought to disseminate both the text and the disc of Anna Livia Plurabelle. In the summer of 1929, in one of his many visits to England, Joyce made arrangements for the publication of Anna Livia Plurabelle as a pamphlet in Eliot’s Criterion Miscellany series published by Faber and Faber (1929-36). It was available on the market in 1930. The recording of Joyce’s reading of the last four pages of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” on a gramophone record took place in 1929. Since the disc was produced before the Criterion Miscellany publication of the Anna Livia Plurabelle pamphlet, it was advertised as “the first portion of [Joyce’s] ‘Work in Progress’ [the earlier title of Finnegans Wake until its publication in 1939] to appear [...] as an ordinary publisher’s item” in the UK.27 Initially it was available from Ogden’s Orthological Institute at Cambridge. Soon the record found a prestigious supplier: the shop Alfred Imhof (est. 1848), an institution in musical London with which Joyce established a long-lasting collaboration.28 Faber promoted both the pamphlet and the record by advertising

25 Ayers, Literary Theory, 49. 26 Luke Gibbons, “Montage, Modernism and the City”, in: The Irish Review, 1991, n° 10, 6. 27 C. K. Ogden, “Orthological Institute, International Orthophonic Archives”, in: Psyche, 10, 1929, n° 2, 111. 28 Paul Léon papers at the National Library of Ireland, 20 June 1939-2 October 1939, Paul Léon and James Joyce in correspondence with Monro, Saw & Co. See summary in Catherine Fahy, The James Joyce-Paul Léon Papers in the National Library of Ireland: A Catalogue, Dublin 1992, 137 and also, 86, 140, 148, 236.

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them together.29 Ogden used his journal Psyche to present the disc as a required supplement for understanding the Faber pamphlet, the first printing of which was on the market in June 1930. In the July 1930 issue, Ogden listed the themes of the recorded passage including “the Cyclical theory of history [...] memories of Dublin in general, and the aesthetics of river-surfaces in particular”.30 By explaining key themes and phrases from the recorded extract, Ogden is clearly addressing readers either unfamiliar with or even sceptical towards Joyce’s work, promoting the disc as a first step towards the discovery of Joyce’s meanings. As John Nash explains, “critics found that ‘his master’s voice’ allowed a means of ‘reading’ the apparently unreadable”.31 The record’s impact was enhanced by the pamphlet and it is not by chance that, in October 1930, Eliot proposed the production of further records with extracts from Ulysses and from Haveth Childers Everywhere, which was published as a pamphlet in the Criterion Miscellany series in May 1931.32 Eliot and Ogden aimed to create records of readings by living authors that would be sold via Faber not only in Europe but also in the United States. For Eliot and Faber, this was a more lucrative form of specialist publication compared to de luxe editions signed by the authors.33 For that reason, Eliot was in discussion with Ogden regarding new promotional strategies for such records.34 The project would operate similarly to a book-of-the-month club with an editorial board. Eliot had estimated that there would be many possible wealthy subscribers who for a fee of seven or eight guineas would receive four records per year (distributed by Faber) with readings by contemporary authors, such as W. B. Yeats or Virginia Woolf, and that the project could be sustained by a club with a minimum of twenty-five subscribing members.35 Joyce agreed and he even pro29 30 June 1930, Eliot to Ogden, partly quoted in Christie’s Catalogue of Sales, Printed Books and Manuscripts Including Modern Literature and Science, n° 316, New York 1988, 204. Also, 1-14 May 1930, Richard de la Mare to Ogden, and 25-28 April 1930, C. W. Stewart to Ogden all summarised in number 317, Christie’s Catalogue, 205. 30 Ogden, Psyche, 11, 1930, n° 1, 95. 31 John Nash, James Joyce and the Act of Reception: Reading, Ireland, Modernism, Cambridge 2006, 127. 32 29 October 1930, Eliot to Joyce, “Correspondence to James Joyce”, U B Catalogue, Special Collections, The Poetry Collection, University at Buffalo Library. See list at , (21.04.2013). 33 29 October 1930, Eliot to Joyce, Buffalo. 34 29 October 1930, Eliot to Joyce, Buffalo. 35 14 October 1930, Eliot to Herbert Gorman, Box 1, Folder 7, Herbert Gorman Papers. The Croessmann Collection, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. See list at , (21.04.2013).



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posed a collaborative recording, a joint “2-sided-disc” with James Stephens, the Irish writer, whom Joyce trusted to complete Work in Progress should he himself have to abandon it.36 Here we see how both Eliot and Joyce were keen to adapt to new developments in the publishing industry as book clubs such as the highly successful Book-of-the-Month Club (established in the USA in 1926), had expanded their clientele during the late 1920s and were thriving in the American book market. As Janice Radway notes, a key feature of American book clubs, and the Book-of-the-Month Club in particular, was that they consisted of judges who recommended books to their readers. The commercial success of these clubs lies in the fact that they formally and institutionally integrated the process of commodity distribution with that of literary evaluation [... and] that calibration produced an approach to books and reading that demanded a reconceptualization of the nature and limits of the literary field and an alteration of the relationship between author and reader.37

And it is precisely this new reconfiguration of the ways works of art were re-mediated to divergent audiences that might have created the conditions for the success of a disc club set up by Eliot and distributed by Faber from London. On a practical level, Eliot’s strategic planning had to do with the geographical proximity of the site of literary gramophone production, since Ogden had recently established a recording studio in central London. Ogden wrote to Joyce in an optimistic tone, suggesting new projects. As he explained, thanks to general equipment and organisation they had made great progress and they were in a position to produce rough experimental records at the cost of sixpence a record.38 Ogden emphasised that their present well-planned method of distribution would guarantee satisfactory income for Joyce and he repeated Eliot’s proposal that further recordings of Joyce reading other excerpts from his work should be made. The public was strongly interested in Joyce’s earlier record from 1924 with his reading from the “Aeolus” episode of Ulysses. Ogden suggested that one side should include a repetition of that recording as it was in demand on the market; on the other side, they could add any extract from Ulysses that Joyce would select.

36 James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, III, ed. Richard Ellmann, New York 1966, 203. 37 Janice Radway, Books and Reading in the Age of Mass Production: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Middlebrow Culture and the Transformation of the Literary Field in the United States, 19261940. The Adam Helms Lecture 1996, Stockholm 1996, 7. 38 25 October [1930], Ogden to Joyce, “Correspondence to James Joyce”, U B Catalogue, Special Collections, The Poetry Collection, University at Buffalo Library. See list at , (21.04.2013).

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Here, Ogden’s enthusiastic estimations rely on his perceptions of what the modernist market demands: he wrote to Joyce that people just wanted that particular recording. A further proposed recording would include passages from Joyce’s two most recent publications in Eliot’s Criterion Miscellany series. Equally striking in the Joyce-Ogden-Eliot correspondence is the extent to which Eliot was motivated to promote Joyce’s work through Faber on a British and international level. The quality of gramophones was improving rapidly contributing to a better listening experience. For example, in June 1931 Eliot wrote to Joyce that he had heard the record again on a gramophone of a better quality. He was enthralled by the magnificence of Joyce’s voice. Eliot was determined to publicise it further as a supplement to understanding the text of Anna Livia Plurabelle and because of the singular beauty of the reading.39 And through the establishment of the disc club Eliot was keen to employ the possibilities of the disc for the dissemination of modernist literature. Unfortunately, the scheme for the monthly disc club did not materialise due to customs restrictions and other regulations. In October 1930, Ogden, who used to send discs to Sylvia Beach’s bookshop in Paris, wrote to Joyce about an embargo on records sent to France. Imhof had a number of packets returned and after various enquiries he was informed that only single records and especially those sent via Air Mail could get through. The rest were sent to the Ministry of the Interior and they were returned to the sender. Ogden expressed his surprise about such developments as the Post Office had offered no satisfactory explanation.40 Possibly this was the result of prevalent policies of censorship. Joyce was the author of an obscene text. Ulysses had been banned since December 1922, and despite the efforts of his collaborators to assign cultural value to his work and arrange innovative modes of dissemination, there were still obstacles. Nonetheless, Joyce convinced Ogden to reduce the price of the Anna Livia Plurabelle disc from two guineas to one and consolidate his collaboration with Imhof.41 He believed that the shop’s prestige and its central location would contribute to the commercial success of the record. It is likely that many more people in London had listened to the disc than actually purchased a copy of it. For example, while in 1933 Joyce’s Dublin friend J. F. Byrne was visiting London, he was advised by Joyce to “hear the disc at the Imhof Gramophone Cy”.42 Apart from Imhof, the disc was also available from Ogden, or through Faber, when ordered together with 39 30 June 1931, Eliot to Joyce, Buffalo. 40 25 October [1930], Ogden to Joyce, Buffalo. 41 Joyce to Giorgio Joyce, 25 July 1931, The Jahnke Bequest, Zurich James Joyce Foundation. 42 22 June 1933, Paul Léon to J. F. Byrne. See summary in: Fahy, The James Joyce–Paul Léon Papers, 86.



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the Anna Livia Plurabelle pamphlet of the Criterion Miscellany. And to promote it further, Joyce was keen to encourage the famous Irish actress and singer Sara Allgood to study the text of Anna Livia Plurabelle and to work on a performance or a recital in London and even organise a tour.43 We never had the chance to hear Joyce reading other extracts from his work. But the existing recording justifies the enthusiasm and efforts that Ogden, Joyce and Eliot made to promote it. The disc indeed enhances our perception of the structural complexities of Anna Livia Plurabelle, a personification of Dublin’s Liffey, whose textual representation encompasses the names of around seven hundred other rivers, enclosed in portmanteau words. Upon hearing Joyce’s melodic Irish brogue, rendering the gossips about this riverine figure, the terms around matter and meaning, content and form, medium and message are recast. Indeed, the recording poses new questions about the aesthetics of river-surfaces.

43 Joyce to Giorgio Joyce, 25 July 1931, Zurich James Joyce Foundation. Also, Joyce, Letters, III, 261.

Lisa Otty

Small Press Modernists Collaboration, Experimentation and the Limited Edition Book To many artists and writers of the early 20th century, new media such as cinema and radio seemed to promise revolutionary modes of expression: with new capacities and potential, these electric technologies seemed certain to supersede the older forms of print and the book. As one 1916 futurist manifesto put it, in the modern age “mobile illuminated signs” would come to replace the black and white of ink on page, and the book would come to be seen as “a wholly passéist means of preserving and communicating thought, [which] has for a long time been fated to disappear [… the] static companion of the sedentary, the nostalgic, the neutralist”. 1 Such sentiments were not restricted to the avant-gardes: the impact of contemporary technological change on the book was a subject of considerable debate and the historicity of the form was usually a key argument in both denunciations and defences. One of the legacies of the late 19th-century Arts and Crafts presses was a powerful revival of interest in the traditional arts of the book; printing, binding, typography. Until the economic collapse of the 1930s, a burgeoning network of small presses flourished, producing hand-printed limited editions, frequently emulating historical styles and often inspired by and modelled on the work of William Morris and his Kelmscott Press. Countering the futurist celebration of mass media and new technology, in other words, was a rhetoric of nostalgia and handicraft that cast its eyes backwards rather than forwards and which centred on the book as a symbol of permanence and value amid the flickering and insubstantial signifiers of modern culture. By the mid-1920s, when the revival of interest in printing and book arts reached its zenith, the atavistic neo-medievalism of the Victorian presses seemed less compelling, and equally so the bombastic rhetoric of the pre-war avant-gardes. The book’s significance seemed considerably more complex and nuanced: while it remained an important icon of cultural value and historical significance, it no longer appeared as an unimpeachable form. In Paris, indeed, the book was becoming a key vehicle for avant-garde innovation and experimentation. Although iconoclastic, surrealism, with its foundations in Hegelian dialectics, allowed for the re-evaluation rather than the outright rejection of historical forms, models and genres. The surrealist book, full of surprising juxtapositions of 1 F. T. Marinetti, et al., “Futurist Manifesto on Cinema” (Sept. 1916), in: Futurism: An Anthology, eds. Lawrence Rainey, et al., New Haven 2009, 229.



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text and image, layout and material, mass production and craft, brought together and dialectically transformed diverse traditions and media.2 In the Anglophone context, numerous writers and artists with a self-conscious commitment to the modern and the innovative were also beginning to work in the fields of printing and publishing. The Hogarth Press, the Nonesuch Press, the Seizen Press, Franfolico, the Ovid Press, the Gregynog Press, the Hours Press, the Egoist Press, Haslewood Books, Three Mountains, the Black Sun, the Aquila Press: all were founded and/or run by modernist writers and artists. Forming an extensive network between London and Paris, where several expatriate British and American publishers were based, they explored the book in all its dimensions, modern and historical. Although largely obscured in historical accounts of British modernism, this network was a dynamic force at the time: ideas, texts, techniques and materials circulated among the small presses and the constellations of artists and writers that were associated with them. What was felt to be at stake in the small press movement is captured in the distinction, drawn by Janice Radway, between circulating and literary books.3 The circulating book begins to appear as such in the early 19th century, as a bound, functional object, created for exchange: conceived as a tool, a source of a particular knowledge or experience, and as a commodity. Such books were not conceptually linked to the author but rather to the reader. They were, as Radway writes “[r] egularly associated with either the pleasures of leisure time or with the particular objectives of special interests”.4 This new conception of the book threw into relief the older tradition of the literary book, in which books were associated with the author and considered “as serious, as a classic, and as a permanent and precious possession […] intellectual or cultural property”.5 Associated with education and scholarship, literary books demanded to be read seriously and reverentially. Where circulating books could be cheaply produced and printed, literary books required designs that would add gravitas and evoke durability, such as fine print with expensive papers and tooled leather covers. In the late 19th and early 20th century, when various new printing processes enabled a veritable explosion of cheap circulating books, the future of the literary book and everything it stood for came to seem in doubt. The revival of interest in printing and the book arts is, in part, a response to this situation, an attempt to re-inscribe an aesthetic hierarchy in which ‘good’ 2 See Renée Riese Hubert, Surrealism and the Book, Berkeley 1988, 25. 3 Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books: the Book of the Month Club, Literary Taste and Middle-Class Desire, Chapel Hill 1997. 4 Radway, A Feeling for Books, 129. 5 Radway, A Feeling for Books, 137.

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books would be identifiable. In this it spoke directly to the interests of an increasingly literate populace, interested in the possibilities for ‘self-improvement’ that books offered. In the increasingly prosperous 1920s, as a new middle class emerged, books were important symbols of culture and taste and widely understood, as Megan Benton has put it, “as tangible expressions of […] important cultural intangibles”.6 A good home aspired to have good books and personal libraries were widely understood to reflect the values and aspirations of their owners. Collecting limited editions of literary works became a popular and fashionable activity, and the small presses met this demand: sometimes reprinting luxurious versions of classic texts, sometimes acting as arbiters of taste by assembling lists of notable contemporary authors. Hand-printed limited editions with signed colophons listing the number of copies, papers used, and sometimes even the name of the printer, commanded significant prices and an international network of dealers grew up to match the network of presses. In this way, the limited edition books produced at the small presses enter into a space in which, as Lawrence Rainey writes, “aesthetic value [becomes] confused with speculation, collecting, investment, and dealing”.7 Scholars of modernism, picking up on the ideas of speculation and dealing, have tended to approach printing and publishing as secondary practices at the service of the primary creative work of writing. This has led to an assumption that writer-led small presses are practical or commercial operations designed primarily to get texts into print and make money, a mere footnote in the more important story of the work or author. While many of these printer-publishers did see their modernist peers into print, however, there were far easier ways to get work published: compositing, distributing type and pulling the press are all physically demanding and time-consuming jobs, on top of which assembling the signatures, arranging binding and distribution had to take place. Most small press owners found themselves devoting copious amounts of time and energy to their operation, leaving little left over for other creative practices. Had they simply wanted to put texts into circulation, they surely would have taken the same path as many of their contemporaries and simply employed trade printers, an easier and more cost effective option. For, while it is true that small presses were responding to a fashionable demand for first and limited editions, they were certainly not moneymaking ventures. The limited edition book may be designed to speak of ostentatious luxury but in practice profit margins were not high. Most presses struggled 6 Megan L. Benton, Beauty and the Book: Fine Editions and Cultural Distinction in America, New Haven 2000, 16. 7 Lawrence S. Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture, New Haven 1998, 76.



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to break even; a few managed a very small profit that usually had to be immediately ploughed back into the business. In short, these ventures cannot be properly accounted for in the terms of ‘circulating books’: their interventions into the ‘literary’ are also crucial. Part of a broader creative practice, an exploration of media and multi-modal artistic strategies, and a defence of the ‘literary’ it symbolises, the small presses take their place alongside their Arts and Crafts precursors in what Raymond Williams has identified as “a major affirmative response, in the name of an essentially general human ‘creativity’, to the socially repressive and intellectually mechanical forms of a new social order: that of capitalism and especially industrial capitalism”.8 However, although working within a tradition and a set of conventions, they also interpolate contemporary ideas, positions and artistic groupings, drawing on the aesthetic techniques and complex and sometimes contradictory strategies of resistance developed by modernist and avant-garde peers. As I now turn to two case studies ‒ John Rodker’s Ovid Press and Nancy Cunard’s Hours Press ‒ I hope to show that excavating these ventures today, uncovering their ambitions and connections, the collaborative relationships that underpinned them, provides an illuminating map of the intersections between different modernist practices and cultures, material, social, and intellectual. In the cases of Rodker and Cunard, for example, their exchange of ideas and material makes manifest the working relationships that connected British modernists of the 1920s to contemporary French surrealism long before the famous 1936 exhibition.

John Rodker, ‘Futurism’ and the Ovid Press In The Future of Futurism (1927), his speculative essay on the future direction of modernist writing, poet, novelist, translator and publisher John Rodker identifies the issue at the heart of contemporary literature, as “the problem of language and the significant, [which] is essentially a modern hurdle the arts must clear before they can again get into their stride”.9 While he argues that a literature of abstraction, which explores the activities of the mind and the senses, is the most promising direction for a future literature,10 he also locates the “hurdle” 8 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford 1977, 50. 9 Rodker, The Future of Futurism, London 1926, 64. 10 Rodker’s book finds the root of this abstract literature in an image that was also important to the surrealists: Lautréamont’s “fortuitous encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella” (Rodker, Future of Futurism, 5). Rodker had translated Chants de Maldoror a

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in material terms. In the pivotal chapter of the book, in which the problem is explicitly defined, he envisages a series of forms that would reshape the book: “will words be built up in mechanical exercises like the fugue or into geometric figures, the calligram; or will they be matched with each other for colour and weight; Mallarmé with his ‘Oui, la littérature existe, et si l’on veut, à l’exclusion de tout’”.11 In this questioning, then, Rodker allows for the literary to extend beyond the linguistic into the material, into the aesthetics of sensory experience and the physical and aural manifestations of writing. Envisaging “some shorthand of the emotions [which] might possibly adumbrate not only the matter but the manner of the literature of the year 3000” he describes books which “would be much more compressed, and simplified word endings and compound letters would take us back to the early Rolls”.12 However, this extension is quickly envisaged as the potential end of literature: “The arts will begin to merge into each other, no distinguishing definition will remain valid for any of them, for a time all will sink into the welter of the countless millions of books, musical compositions and pictures the ages are busy piling about us”.13 In the face of this welter we must, “react now against what shocks and utterly overwhelms us. So we are left with Mallarmé’s ‘A savoir s’il y’a lieu d’écrire’”.14 The problem of language and the significant ‒ reformulated through Mallarmé ‒ is to discover the grounds of writing. This is a double problem: for the grounds of writing is on one hand its essence, the abstraction of pure poetry or Rodker’s cerebral literature, and, on the other, its proper incarnation or place, Mallarmé’s le Livre. A new literature, Rodker is implicitly acknowledging, requires a corresponding new material practice of writing and print. Moreover, in that Mallarmé’s vision of the totalising force of literature is a strategic inversion, countering the opposing force of techno-scientific capitalism and all the “countless millions of books, musical compositions and pictures the ages are busy piling about us”, Rodker’s use of the quotation suggests that the future book is understood as articulating a mode of resistance. To act against “what shocks and overwhelms us”, we have to carve out a place for a new material practice of the literary. few years earlier, publishing it at his Casanova Society imprint in 1924, and the book had had a deep impact on his thought and writing. See Ian Patterson, “Writing on Other Fronts: Translation and John Rodker”, in: Translation and Literature, 12, 2003, n° 1, 88-113. 11 Rodker, Future of Futurism, 33. Bradford Cook translates this as “Yes, literature does exist and, I may add, exists alone and all-exclusively”, in: Stephane Mallarmé, Selected Prose, Poems, Essays and Letters, Baltimore 1956, 47. 12 Rodker, Future of Futurism, 65. 13 Rodker, Future of Futurism, 66-67. 14 Rodker, Future of Futurism, 70. Cook’s translation – “is there a reason for writing at all? ” –obscures the ambiguity of the formulation. Mallarmé, Selected Prose, 45.



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For Rodker, then, the book was neither static nor nostalgic, but an evolving and dynamic medium to be mobilised in the service of modernist literature. Adolphe 1920, the novel that Rodker had most recently completed, bears witness to this: in its refusal of punctuation and its densely overlaid and repeated imagery, the book seems to attempt the “shorthand of the emotions” and compressed form that Rodker envisaged as a means to draw upon and speak to affective experience.15 Adolphe 1920 was written during 1925/26, a period in which Rodker was frequently in France with his partner the poet Nancy Cunard. The two moved in surrealist circles and developed acquaintances with Breton, Crevel and Aragon (for whom Cunard would eventually leave Rodker).16 However, his engagement with French literature and culture had begun some years earlier,17 as had his experiments in book form. He had published his first book Poems in 1914, and following a war spent variously in prison, on the run or in Dartmoor’s ‘work camp’, in 1919 he had founded the Ovid Press. The press, which would operate until 1922, marked Rodker’s return to London literary circles with his new wife the novelist Mary Butts and constitutes something of an aesthetic statement. The list of Ovid Press authors and artists is a statement in itself: the first books were by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and T.S. Eliot. Rodker published his own collection of poems, Hymns in April 1920, and then The Black Country, a collection of prints by Edward Wadsworth shortly thereafter. Reassembling the so-called ‘men of 1914’ and mobilising a vorticist idiom in the design of the colophon and initials, the press seems to have been an undisguised attempt to re-establish a pre-war dynamic, and to position Rodker’s own work ‒ the books of the press, as well as his writing ‒ within that context. Rodker’s attitude towards his customers is more ambiguous. Ovid Press books were produced in small hand-printed editions, usually of around two to three hundred copies.18 They were sold at relatively steep prices, given the simplicity of the design and bindings and the lack of illustrations: 25s for the signed volumes of poetry by Eliot, Pound and himself, and a princely £2 2s for Lewis’s portfolio of drawings. But if, as this suggests, these books were targeted at the collectors market, then Rodker’s production also indicates an ambivalent stance with regard to conventional ideas of quality and craftsmanship. For in fact the actual printing and construction of these books is quite poor. There are numerous type15 Rodker, Future of Futurism, 65. 16 Rodker’s relationship with Cunard is documented in his diaries and personal papers. HRC John Rodker Papers, Box 5. 17 On Rodker’s ‘Frenchness’ see Ian Patterson, “Writing on Other Fronts”. 18 For details of Rodker’s editions, see Gerald W. Cloud, John Rodker’s Ovid Press, New Castle 2010.

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setting errors that have not been corrected in proof. Signatures are haphazardly folded so that pages are of irregular sizes, margins are wildly variant from page to page, and the lettering is heavily embossed. Rodker sometimes issued fewer copies than announced and on occasions made changes to the forms during the printing process. This meant that copies were often quite different within a single edition and collectors could not be quite certain as to the validity of the colophon information. In short, the material evidence of the books themselves suggests that Rodker cared little for fine press and limited edition conventions. It seems likely that Pound played an initial role in conceiving the press: certainly, he had been an important influence on Rodker before the war.19 Other collaborators were equally important, however. The most visible impact on the aesthetic of the Ovid Press was had by Edward Wadsworth, commissioned by Rodker to create the distinctive initials and colophon for the press. There is an affinity between the Ovid Press works of Rodker and Wadsworth. Wadsworth’s The Black Country, a collection of woodcuts, depicts industrial landscapes and captures what one reviewer called the “crude beauty” of factories, mines and slag heaps, expressing, as Arnold Bennett noted, a powerful “vitalizing emotion”.20 As the tone and subject matter of many of his Hymns makes clear, the exploration of the conventionally ugly and even repulsive was also central to Rodker’s own aesthetic vision (according to Richard Aldington, Hymns was “the expression of a vain and morbid sensibility” 21), and the attempt to capture vital emotions had been a central goal in many of his pre-war experiments. In fact, in the initials that he created for the Ovid Press, Wadsworth seems to be gesturing towards Rodker’s pre-war work as much as towards his own earlier vorticist paintings. Firstly, like writing, their design pivots on the relation and comparative thicknesses and positioning of black horizontal and vertical lines: so much so that on occasion the letter also most disappears into the background. Secondly, they clearly depict elements of the theatre and the stage as the backdrop to the letters: the S shows this most visibly, hovering over what looks like a trap door with the drawn back curtain next to it.

19 There is also a 1930 letter that suggests this. See Cloud, Rodker’s Ovid Press, 13. 20 Both reviews were printed along with the drawings. Edward Wadsworth, The Black Country, London 1920, n.p. 21 Richard Aldington, “Otherworld by F. S. Flint; Hymns by John Rodker”, in: Poetry, 17, 1920, n° 1, 44-48, here 47. For more on Rodker’s relationship with Aldington and other of the Pound circle, see Patterson, “Writing on other Fronts”, 88-113.



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Fig. 15: John Rodker, Hymns (Ovid Press, 1920). Copyright the estate of John Rodker. Reproduced by kind permission of Ernest Rodker. Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

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Rodker’s most significant pre-war publications were for and about the theatre. These included a sequence of performance poems collected under the title Theatre Muet and conceived, as part of the Choric School, in collaboration with dancers Kathleen Dillon and Hester Sainsbury. As theatrical experiments they aimed to tap into and communicate what Rodker called “primitive emotions”22 through the mobilisation of ‘dutch dolls’ or marionettes. Bypassing language, the silent, moving body Rodker predicated could turn a poem into the pure expression of sense, the communications of the vitalizing emotion. Here, as in the work of figures such as Edward Gordon Craig, the dancers’ bodies are figured as screens, rather than subjects with interior depths; the vital poetry or emotion they communicate is embodied in the materiality of their body and the sensuous movements they make. Thus Rodker seems to be echoing the ideas of one Ovid Press author, Arthur Symons, who identified dance as the modern ideal of artistic expression, “the intellectual as well as sensual appeal of a living symbol”.23 In this way, Rodker’s experiments are a species of the same primitivism that Frank Kermode identifies in the modernist cult of the dancer more broadly, which “depends upon the assumption that mind and body, form and matter, image and discourse, have undergone a process of dissociation, which it is the business of art momentarily to mend”. 24 In this sense Rodker was one of a number of male modernists who, as Kermode argues, articulated a Mallarméan fantasy in which the dancer’s body could be mastered and controlled in such a way that it could become the inscription of ‘pure sense’, pure poetry: the body as le Livre. In keeping with precisely this fantasy, Rodker, at the same time as having Dillon and Sainsbury perform these works, had attempted to use layout, spacing and visual marks to capture this vital emotion within the printed page. His writing was characterised by an unusual use of punctuation and layout; an “elaborate system of dots and dashes” as Pound put it in his introduction to Theatre Muet, which, he claimed, only made sense once the movement of the women’s bodies had been seen.25 A number of Rodker’s early collaborators also strove to capture the expressive movement of the body in other forms: David Bomberg, an old friend and fellow Whitechapel boy, created a series of abstract drawings of dancers inspired by the dancers working with Rodker, and quite distinct to 22 John Rodker, “The Theatre” (originally in: The Egoist, Nov. 1914, n° 21), in: John Rodker: Poems and Adolphe 1920, ed. Andrew Crozier, Manchester 1996, 177-178, here 178. 23 Arthur Symons, “Ballet, Pantomine and Poetic Drama” (The Dome, London 1898), cited in: Frank Kermode, Romantic Image, London 1957, 73. 24 Frank Kermode, “Poet and Dancer Before Diaghilev”, in: What is Dance?, eds. Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen, London 1957, 145-160, here 146. 25 Ezra Pound, “Foreword to the Choric School”, in: Others: A Magazine of the New Verse, ed. Alfred Kreymborg, 1, 1915, n° 4: The Choric School Number, n.p.



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his monumental almost vorticist paintings. Following the war, Hester Sainsbury turned from dancing to printing, attempting to catch the line of dance in wood and copper engraving, and illustrating many of Rodker’s Casanova Society books in the 1920s. Both were as much a part of Rodker’s pre-war world as the men of 1914, and both were influential presences during the years of the Ovid Press. Bomberg in particular was heavily involved with Rodker’s first publishing venture. Having studied book design under W. R. Lethaby at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, Bomberg helped his friend to realise his ambitions, advising on technical matters and design. It is likely that it was from Bomberg that Rodker learned of the printer’s traditions, which he attempts to turn to modernist effect in Hymns. ‘Catchwords’, for example, repetitions at the bottom of the page, are used to introduce surprising rhythms into the poetry. The most notable of these traditions-turned-innovations is Rodker’s use of the pilcrow mark, a relic of scribal practice which features in many poems. In Hymns, Rodker uses this mark as an intersection between the historical and the modern, for it is also clearly meant to echo the Wadsworth initials, extending their aesthetic into the poems themselves (see fig. 15). This happens primarily, although not always, in the first stanza, near the initial and in order to keep the stanza at the same height ratio, the lines of which the pilcrow form reflects. In one poem, they become a straight axis down the middle around which the stanza is arranged. In echoing the visual properties of the initials, these marks, like the catchwords, introduce repetitions: as indications of a break, however, they are also ruptures, fragmenting the line. Here, Rodker mobilises a print convention, a visual mark, to create poetic sense. As historically the pilcrow signals a letterform ‒ not the P that it resembles, but a C for capitulum, with lines intersecting it ‒ the mark not only echoes and repeats the function and visual presentation of initials, it also indicates an interchangeability between the linguistic and the nonlinguistic, between the letter and the line, which again intensifies its link with the initials. The expressive potential of the non-linguistic ‒ the relation between material writing and abstract sense ‒ is thus quite literally central to Rodker’s writing at this early point and to his ambitions at the Press.

Nancy Cunard, Surrealism and the Hours Press When Nancy Cunard opened her Hours Press in 1928, she had long been involved with the small press network. During her relationship with Rodker, she was both a frequent visitor to his print-works and an occasional creditor, lending him money to keep the Casanova Society afloat. But she also gained experience and

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knowledge through her own publishing, with the Hogarth Press and the Aquila Press and through her close relationships with writers such as George Moore, who was deeply involved with his own printing and favoured small press publishing, and Norman Douglas, who worked with the book dealer and publisher Pino Orioli. She was also an avid collector.26 Therefore when Cunard bought a century-old Mathieu Press from the journalist and printer Bill Bird, she knew that she was buying not only the technical means to produce books but also a machine with a pedigree: she owned the luxurious edition of Pound’s Cantos and all of the Contact Edition books that had been produced by Bird under his Three Mountains imprint. She made sure to foreground this in her advertising, which frequently declared both the age of the machine and its provenance, associating the Hours with both historical printing and modernist experimentation.27 Cunard knew the business and she knew the market: and unlike the Ovid Press, The Hours Press would be a financial success. Cunard’s list of authors includes many of the major modernist writers of the time: Pound, Aldington, Beckett, Rodker, and Bob Brown, whose experiments with reading machines and visual poetics are now well-known. However, it was in the context of surrealism that she saw her work at the press.28 Although she was not publishing writers associated with the movement, the Hours Press involved many key figures, including Aragon with whom the venture was founded, and George Sadoul who worked as Cunard’s assistant when the press moved into Paris. Although she turned to Rodker for help in the early stages of learning to handprint,29 it was with Aragon (already in the business of issuing collectable books in the form of erotic livres d’artiste) that she developed the typographic style of the press, experimenting with ornamentation and exploring the expressive potential of letter forms. Together they produced the book of which Cunard was most proud: Aragon’s translation of The Hunting of the Snark (1929). Having created its playful cover, Aragon declared it a fully surrealist work. It seems likely that what 26 Cunard’s home, where the Hours Press was initially housed, was ransacked during the Second World War: she lost many of her possessions, including almost all the papers related to the press. She completed an inventory as part of the restitution process: HRC Nancy Cunard Papers, Box 21 Folder 6. 27 HRC Nancy Cunard Papers, Box 27. 28 Surrealism is also a productive context for Cunard’s writing in the 1930s: see Tory Young, “Nancy Cunard’s Black Man White Ladyship as Surrealist Tract”, in: At Home and Abroad in the Empire: British Women Write the 1930s, eds. Robin Hackett, et al., Newark, DE 2009, 96-118. 29 Among Rodker’s personal papers is a carefully preserved copy of Cunard’s first effort: Norman Douglas’ “Report on the Pumice Stone Industry of the Lipari Islands”. HRC Joan Rodker Papers, Box 4 Folder 8.



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Fig. 16: Cover of La Chasse au Snark (Hours Press, 1929). Reproduced with the kind permission of the estate of Nancy Cunard. Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

he had in mind was the methodology of the production, for the work of typesetting, in practice, became for he and Cunard a process not unlike automatism in

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which it “matters little to the appraising part of one’s mind what one is transferring from written or typed pages to what will become the printed page”, the “p’s and q’s and b’s, in all this upside-down-inside-out world of printing, begin to acquire or resume their proper individuality”.30 The process focused Cunard’s mind on the material of the text ‒ the letters, the marks, the spaces ‒ which came to resonate with their own peculiar power. It is the ethnographic and political dimensions of surrealism that Cunard herself stresses in her memoir of the Press, however. “[Colonialism] was consistently denounced”, she writes, and “objects once thought of as the work of mere ‘savages’ from ancient Africa, Oceania, and the Indians of both the Americas, were greatly admired and prized, and several of the surrealists eventually became expert ethnographers from their sheer love of such things. Among these were especially Aragon, Breton, Éluard, and Sadoul”.31 Ethnographic study offered insights into not only diverse customs and practices but also, and crucially for the surrealists, a way to see afresh their own cultural norms and practices. The contingency this revealed suggested a revolutionary potential: for with the recognition of an equivalence between norms came the possibility of changing them. Throughout the 1920s, with this revolutionary potential in mind, surrealists would loosely and allusively use ethnographic imagery and objects to create juxtapositions that suggested cultural hybridity. It is this 1920s trend that Cunard’s books exemplify. She employed artists such as Yves Tanguy, Len Lye and John Banting to create covers, exotic dreamscapes that evoked foreign lands and peoples. Cunard understood these images to be working in relation to the texts in the book: it was through consideration of the covers Len Lye created for Laura Ridings’s Twenty Poems More, for example that Cunard felt she became able to “comprehend the particular symbolism within” Riding’s writing.32 When she moved the press to the Rue Guenégaud in Paris in 1929, its relationship to surrealist practice was made even more explicit. A shop was organised by Sadoul, chosen for its proximity to the surrealist gallery and decorated with Oceanic cloths and African beading, and alongside an interest in ethnography, circulars announced the intention to “always have a few specimens [of African or Oceanic art] on show, as well as certain modern French pictures, a few english and american books and the Surrealist series”.33 In this way, and through her employing them at the press and as book designers, Cunard was creating econo30 Nancy Cunard, These were the Hours: Memories of My Hours Press, Reanville and Paris, 19281931, Carbondale 1969, 11. 31 Cunard, These were the Hours, 41-42. 32 Cunard, These were the Hours, 104. 33 HRC Nancy Cunard Papers, Box 27.



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mic opportunities for surrealist artists and writers, supporting cultural work as well as contributing to it, and putting ideas and relationships before commercial aims. This was a key element of the Press: Cunard gave a very generous 33% and

Fig. 17: Cover of Henry Music (Hours Press, 1930). Reproduced with the kind permission of the estate of Nancy Cunard. Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

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sometimes 50% of profits to her authors (compared, for example, to Rodker’s 10%), and she approached each book as a collaborative project, working closely with her authors, adapting to each author’s visual and aesthetic ambitions. When she published Rodker’s Collected Poems in 1930, for example, she used the Ovid Press initials at his request. One of the most interesting collaborations undertaken at the Hours Press was that between Cunard and Henry Crowder, the African American Jazz musician who helped her at the press from 1929 onwards. Henry-Music is a book of compositions by Crowder, who Cunard was keen to present as an artist on terms equal to those of her other authors. What she produced, however, is a work of contradiction and conflict, torn between the demands of her market and its progressive ambition. The central gesture of the book ‒ the conception of which was Cunard’s rather than Crowder’s ‒ is a direct reversal of ‘primitivist’ appropriation: the poems, by Cunard, Beckett, Aldington and others, were the inspiration for the music, and in this sense prior to it, so this is an attempt to use white European culture to ‘inspire’ or invigorate Crowder’s musical practice. However, the layout of the book, which presents the poetry as a collection in the first half of the book, with the scores grouped together in the second half, unavoidably sets up a kind of hierarchy in which the music appears as secondary to the texts. The reasons for this are undoubtedly practical: Cunard would not have been able to print musical scores, for it would mean the purchase or loan of an entire new set of types, spacings and symbols, and she would be aware that Hours Press customers, like most of the collectors of private press editions, were poetry buyers rather than music buyers. However, the ambivalent attitude displayed in the layout continues in the cover design. Man Ray’s striking and fashionably Art Deco covers use the depth of different planes to fragment the composition, creating a disjunction between the top and bottom areas of the cover. The colouring of the lettering, which shifts from black to white where it would be overlaid onto the darkest areas contributes to this fracturing, making the light CR, for example, jump out as if at a different distance or size than the darker letters. In this way the composition, as Man Ray scholar Wendy Grossman has suggested, successfully evoked the rhythms of Crowder’s improvisational jazz.34 The image of Henry is again a shallow field, his head and shoulders framed by a “high collar” as Cunard put it, created from her own arms covered with bracelets. But, as Grossman suggests, this can also be read as a gesture of possession. Likewise, on one hand, the images of objects can be read as an indiscriminate adoption of all things black as tokens of a fashionable negri-

34 Wendy Grossman, Man Ray, African Art and the Modernist Lens, Minneapolis 2010.



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tude, “regardless of national origin or artistic intent”.35 Or, on the other, as a surrealist juxtaposition that ‘mates’ apparently unrelated objects in order to engender startling effects, suggesting not a uniform exoticised ‘blackness’ but rather a revolutionary collision of the different aesthetics ‒ African, Oceanic, American, and European Art Deco ‒ that points forward to the specific concerns of Cunard’s monumental anthology Negro (1934) and specifically to what Laura Winkiel has described as that work’s transnational politics.36 Henry-Music, in short, is a deeply ambivalent work that articulates in its material form the complex dynamics of the historical moment. It was intended as a gesture of solidarity, but ends by subjugating Crowder and his work to the traditions of European printing and publishing. In this, it reveals the inadequacy of the form of the limited edition book in an increasingly polarised and complex artistic and political landscape. It was one of the last books that Cunard would produce, before closing the Hours Press in 1931 to concentrate on collecting material for Negro. Thus the Hours Press marks the close of a decade, opened by the Ovid Press, in which small presses and limited edition books played a crucial role in circulating, enabling and articulating modernist aesthetic ambitions. This chapter arises from research conducted during an Alfred W. and Blanche Knopf Fellowship at the Harry Ransom Centre, University of Texas at Austin: I am indebted to the staff and librarians there for their patient assistance. This work is part of a larger project on small press publishing, which is generously supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK.

35 Grossman, Man Ray, 138. 36 Laura Winkiel, “Nancy Cunard’s Negro and the Transnational Politics of Race”, in: Modernism/Modernity, 13, 2006, n° 3, 507-530.

Tabea Schindler

Plaster as a Matter of Memory Auguste Rodin and George Segal In 1988, German art historian Joachim Heusinger von Waldegg published a short article entitled “Erinnerungen an Gips” (Memories of Plaster). He suggested that 20th-century artists working in plaster were reacting to the material’s historicity.1 In his opinion, plaster awakens memories of the art of the French Academy and the Salons as well as of archaeological collections.2 The emergence of cast collections in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was the direct result of excavations, the general engagement with and fascination for antiquity, and, finally, the institutionalisation of archaeology as an academic discipline.3 Such collections often served educational purposes and were meant to memorialize the past of the western world.4 In this chapter, I analyse the extent to which the material and the working techniques of plaster still might be interpreted as matters of memory in the art of the late 19th- and 20th-century sculptors Auguste Rodin and George Segal. I use the term “memory” in a broad sense that encompasses its various forms. However, my focus here is not primarily on collective memory, but rather on individual memory and the preservation of past things and phenomena in works of art.

1 Joachim Heusinger von Waldegg, “Erinnerungen an Gips. Zur Geschichtlichkeit eines Werkstoffs”, in: Kunst & Antiquitäten, 1988, n° 2, 106-113, here 106. 2 Heusinger von Waldegg, “Erinnerungen an Gips”, 106. 3 Bettina Uppenkamp, “Potenziale der Bescheidenheit. Über kunstvolle und kunstlose Möglichkeiten in Gips”, in: Material in Kunst und Alltag, eds. Monika Wagner and Dietmar Rübel, Berlin 2002, 139-162, here 146; Bettina Uppenkamp, “Gips”, in: Lexikon des künstlerischen Materials. Werkstoffe der modernen Kunst von Abfall bis Zinn, eds. Monika Wagner, Dietmar Rübel and Sebastian Hackenschmidt, Munich 2010, 106-113, here 109. 4 On the educational function of plaster casts as mementos of the past, see for example Tomas Macsotay, “Plaster Casts and Memory Technique. Nicolas Vleughels’ display of cast collections after the antique in the French Academy in Rome (1725-1793)”, and Helen Dorey, “Sir John Soane’s Casts as Part of his Academy of Architecture at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields”, both in: Plaster Casts. Making, Collecting and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present, eds. Rune Frederiksen and Eckart Marchand, Berlin and New York 2010, 181-196 and 597-609 respectively.



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A “Dead” Material: Plaster in the 19th Century Plaster typically refers to the production of casts after antique statues and was used by 19th-century sculptors almost exclusively for preliminary designs. Plaster, like wax and clay, was considered a low material because of its plasticity and its connotations with everyday life.5 Because of its material immediacy, it was mainly appreciated in studio practice.6 It was only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that plaster gradually emerged as an autonomous artistic material. Sculptors had begun to experiment with a variety of non-traditional materials, and plaster was appreciated for its versatility and combinability with other materials as well as with ready-mades.7 In general, 19th-century artists had few words of praise for plaster as a material, as it was associated with the techniques of casting and with unfinished sculptures. As early as 1816, German painter Johann Friedrich Overbeck wrote a letter to his friend L. Vogel in which he tells him of his visit to the recently expanded Vatican Museums in Rome: “No more dead plasters stare at you, no! marble breathes at you”.8 Furthermore, contemporary writers commented on plaster as a medium of reproduction. The best known comment on casting from nature is to be found in Honoré de Balzac’s 1832 short story “Le chef-d’œuvre inconnu” (The Unknown Masterpiece). Balzac argues that the artist’s goal should be the expression of nature, not the imitation of it: “Otherwise a sculptor might make a plaster cast of a living woman and save himself all further trouble. Well, try to make a cast of your mistress’ hand, and set up the thing before you. You will see a monstrosity, a dead mass, bearing no resemblance to the living hand”.9 Such associations of plaster casts with death were common at that time, when the material as well as the casting techniques were closely related to archaeological practices and collections of casts.10 Furthermore, the notion of plaster as 5 Dietmar Rübel, Plastizität. Eine Kunstgeschichte des Veränderlichen, Munich 2012, 37. 6 Rübel, Plastizität, 37. 7 Uppenkamp, “Gips”, 110. 8 Margaret Howitt, Friedrich Overbeck. Sein Leben und Schaffen I, Freiburg 1886, 378: “Keine todte Gypse starren Dich mehr an, nein! der Marmor athmet Dir entgegen”. English translation by the author. 9 Honoré de Balzac, “Le chef-d’œuvre inconnu”, in: Honoré de Balzac, Œuvres complètes. La Comédie humaine. Études philosophiques, II, Paris 1925, 3-34, here 9: “La mission de l’art n’est pas de copier la nature, mais de l’exprimer! […] Autrement un sculpteur serait quitte de tous ses travaux en moulant une femme! Hé! bien, essaie de mouler la main de ta maîtresse et de la poser devant toi, tu trouveras un horrible cadavre sans aucune ressemblance”. English translation from Project Gutenberg. 10 For a sample of similar statements by 19th-century art historians and artists see Dietmar Rübel, Monika Wagner and Vera Wolff (eds.), Materialästhetik. Quellentexte zu Kunst, Design

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a “dead” material also stemmed from the ancient tradition of death masks which, from an anthropological point of view, were the origin of casting.11 The practice of making death masks was highly popular during the Renaissance and again in the 19th century.12 Significantly, both the archaeological practice of casting and the plaster death masks are closely connected with memory. These connotations of the material of plaster underscore the contrast between the “dead” copy and the “vivid” expression of “true” art.13 In this respect, the 19thcentury contempt of plaster is related to what Walter Benjamin addressed with regard to the lost “aura” in reproductions of art works.14 The casting procedure was not only associated with death in general but was also held to exemplify the death of art in particular.15 Accordingly, the long tradition of casting techniques and especially live body moulding was considered inartistic in sculptural practice.16 This is why anthropologists have studied plaster objects, whereas art historians for a long time ignored them. This neglect can be explained by the traditional understanding of art that stemmed from the Renaissance. The aim of the early modern concepts of idea and disegno was to strengthen the intellectual component in the artistic work. This was the basis for the emancipation of the fine arts from the trades, and their elevation to the liberal arts. The cast, however, goes against this understanding of art in that it involves the direct transfer of materials instead of the emergence of the work of art from idea or the intellect. Moreover, the early modern artistic ideal of imitating the visible world did not originate in material immediacy, such as that lent by direct contact in the impresund Architektur, Berlin 2005, esp. 43 (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel), 49 (Friedrich Theodor Vischer), and 52-54 (Moritz Carrière). 11  Georges Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance par contact. Archéologie, anachronisme et modernité de l’empreinte, Paris 2008, 115; see also Peter Geimer, “Image as Trace. Speculations about an Undead Paradigm”, in: differences, 18, 2007, n° 1, 7-28, here 10. 12 Uppenkamp, “Potenziale der Bescheidenheit”, 141; Uppenkamp, “Gips”, 108. 13 See also Uppenkamp, “Potenziale der Bescheidenheit”, 139-162. 14 See Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, Frankfurt/Main 1963. 15 Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance par contact, 119. 16 On live body moulding in 19th-century sculptural practice, see Jean-François Corpataux, “Live Body Moulding and Maternal Devotion in Marcello’s Studio”, in: Plaster Casts, eds. Frederiksen and Marchand, 307-318; Jean-François Corpataux, Le Corps à l’œuvre. Sculpture et moulage au XIXe siècle, Genève 2012; Edouard Papet (ed.), À fleur de peau. Le moulage sur nature au XIXe siècle, exh. cat. Paris, Musée d’Orsay, 29 October 2001-27 January 2002, Leeds, Henry Moore Institute, 16 February-19 May 2002, Hamburg, Kunsthalle, 14 June-1 September 2002, Ligornetto, Museo Vela, 14 Sept.-17 Nov. 2002, Paris 2001. The artistic procedure of live body moulding is represented in Edouard Dantan’s famous 1887 painting A Casting from Life, Oil on canvas, 131 x 103 cm, Göteborg, Konstmuseum.



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sion method, but rather in distance in the sense of a visual translation.17 As a result, the cast was excluded from traditional art history.18 This disdain for casts in the 19th century stands in stark contrast to early modern and modernist artistic practice. In his book La Ressemblance par contact, French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman therefore refers to the imprint as a “counter-history of art” and a “counter-model of the notion of art”.19 As early as around 1400, Cennino Cennini dedicated nine chapters of his treatise Libro dell’arte to casting methods.20 Furthermore, Cennini advocated that artists should cast directly from the models. It is known that Donatello followed this advice: in his 1460 sculpture of Judith and Holofernes in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, both Holofernes’s legs and Judith’s veil were most likely cast from nature.21 Even though 19th-century artists and critics disapproved of plaster as a “dead” material, it was still used extensively in artistic practice. For example, Swiss-born sculptor Adèle d’Affry, who mainly worked in Paris under the pseudonym Marcello, used casts of her own body in her bronze masterpiece Pythia from 1865-1870.22 Despite the frequent use of plaster in artistic practice and the success of Marcello’s Pythia, casting in plaster, especially casting from life, was basically not acknowledged as a proper artistic method until well into the 20th century. Thus, in the context of the discussions about realism in art in the previous century, it was often a scandal if a sculptor was accused of using casts in his work. As is well known, the French sculptors Auguste Clésinger and Auguste Rodin suffered from just such insinuations. The former’s 1847 sculpture Woman Bitten by a Serpent caused an outcry because it was made of life casts taken from Clésinger’s mistress.23 Rodin, by contrast, was wrongly accused of having cast

17 Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance par contact, 92-93, 101, and 121. In this context see also the early modern discourse on the goals of the fine arts and the paragone between painting and sculpture. 18 Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance par contact, 122. 19   Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance par contact, 101: “contre-histoire de l’art”, and 102: “contre-modèle de la notion d’art” (English translation by the author). 20 Cennino Cennini, Il libro dell’arte, chapters CLXXXI-CLXXXIX, ed. Fabio Frezzato, Vicenza 2008, 204-212. 21 Donatello, Judith and Holofernes, ca. 1455-1460, bronze, 236 cm, Florence, Palazzo Vecchio; see Corpataux, “Live Body Moulding”, 314; Corpataux, Le Corps à l’œuvre, 103; Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance par contact, 105. 22 Marcello, Pythia, 1865-1870, bronze, 290 cm, Paris, Palais Garnier; see Corpataux, “Live Body Moulding”, 307-318; Corpataux, Le Corps à l’œuvre, 89-90. 23 Auguste Clésinger, Woman bitten by a serpent, 1847, marble, 57 x 180 x 70 cm, Paris, Musée d’Orsay; see Corpataux, Le Corps à l’œuvre, 36; Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance par contact, 140-142.

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from life the legs in his 1875/1876 sculpture The Age of Bronze.24 In the Salon of the following year, the sculpture was not well displayed and was finally excluded from the exhibition altogether.25

Perpetuating the Creative Process: Auguste Rodin Despite Rodin’s setback with The Age of Bronze at the 1877 Salon, it is in his work that the most extensive use of plaster casts in both preliminary designs and final sculptures can be found. However, he was strictly against casting from nature – at least for finished works.26 In addition to highlighting the characteristics of the material and the sculptural process itself, he also developed procedures to smoothen the surfaces of his plaster figures. For example, he polished his plaster sculptures for official presentations, such as the 1889 model of his Burghers of Calais.27 One of Rodin’s inventions was to dip his plaster sculptures in liquid plaster in order to create a homogenous and smooth surface.28 Rodin even immersed other objects, such as leaves or fabrics, into plaster milk.29 He combined these plaster-covered objects with casts of his own designs, and applied this method to study material as well as to final sculptures.30 In this way, Rodin gradually discovered ways to use the material of plaster for autonomous works.

24 Auguste Rodin, The Age of Bronze, 1875/1876, plaster model, 180 x 71,1 x 58,4 cm, Washington DC, National Gallery of Art. Bronze casts are found at several museums. 25 Corpataux, Le Corps à l’œuvre, 150-175; Albert E. Elsen, In Rodin’s Studio. A photographic record of sculpture in the making, Oxford 1980, 158; Heike Höcherl, Rodins Gipse. Ursprünge moderner Plastik, Frankfurt/Main 2003, 31; Teuber, George Segal, 126. 26 Höcherl, Rodins Gipse, 57. The Mask of Rose Beuret (1880-1881), which is a cast taken from the face of Rodin’s life companion, was made exclusively for study purposes. 27 Albert E. Elsen, “When the Sculptures were White: Rodin’s Work in Plaster”, in: Rodin Rediscovered, ed. Albert E. Elsen, exh. cat. Washington, National Gallery of Art, June 1981-May 1982, Washington 1981, 127-150, here 127. 28 Elsen, “When the Sculptures were White”, 137; Höcherl, Rodins Gipse, 56 and 60. Italian sculptor Medardo Rosso, who considered Rodin his rival, achieved a similar result by dipping some of his plaster figures into liquid wax. Indeed, there are several parallels in the handling of plaster by the contemporaries Rodin and Rosso. For the latter’s work in plaster, see Sharon Hecker, “Shattering the Mould. Medardo Rosso and the poetics of plaster”, in: Plaster Casts, eds. Frederiksen and Marchand, 319-329. 29 The drapery of the Muse in Rodin’s Monument to Whistler, 1905-1910, for example, is a cast cloth, and the tree trunk in his proposition for the Monument to Puvis de Chavannes, 1899-ca. 1907, is dipped in plaster; see Elsen, In Rodin’s Studio, 185; Höcherl, Rodins Gipse, 56 and 64. 30 Höcherl, Rodins Gipse, 56 and 60-61.



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Eventually, he would go so far as to place plaster figures on a pedestal and identify them as works of art in their own right.31 Among Rodin’s innovations were his assemblages, which he created by reusing certain forms and fragments of casts of his own sculptures in different contexts.32 He even treated the partial figures themselves as complete sculptures. American art historian Albert E. Elsen, who in 1981 wrote the very first essay on Rodin’s work in plaster, pointed out that with the plaster fragments the artist aimed at connecting “past with present”.33 Indeed, Rodin’s plaster fragments and torsos are strongly reminiscent of damaged antique sculptures. For instance, his 1883/1884 Meditation without Arms (fig. 18) seems to continue the tradition of antique Venus sculptures while its exaggerated contrapposto markedly revises the ancient vocabulary. The crucial difference between antique sculptures and Rodin’s fragments was, however, that the former once existed as full figures whereas the latter were not meant to be executed as such in the first place.34 Rodin, who was a collector of archaeological finds himself, established another connection to antiquity by combining plaster figures with ancient pots. Rodin’s Meditation without Arms exemplifies his incorporation of the artistic process into the finished works. He left casting marks on the surface and emphasised the special characteristics of his fragile and friable material.35 This sculpture, which Rodin also named The Inner Voice, can be interpreted as a representation of the origin of artistic creation. Thus his choice of plaster for the material is consistent with the visual reference to ancient art. As Heusinger von Waldegg has argued, plaster was used whenever artists wished to emphasise materiality and its variability.36 This is certainly true for Rodin but also for other late 19th- and early 20th-century sculptors, such as Medardo Rosso and Alberto Giacometti. Unlike Rodin and Rosso, whose plaster figures were made using different casting techniques, Giacometti often moulded plaster directly onto a wire structure, which his brother Diego had built.37 Nonetheless, 31 Höcherl, Rodins Gipse, 17 and 187-189. 32 Höcherl, Rodins Gipse, 56-57; Uppenkamp, “Potenziale der Bescheidenheit”, 150-151. 33 Elsen, “When the Sculptures were White”, 141. 34 Elsen, “When the Sculptures were White”, 141 and 146. 35 Elsen, “When the Sculptures were White”, 145; Höcherl, Rodins Gipse, 12; Rodin sometimes preserved such traces of the creative process even in bronze casts. 36 Heusinger von Waldegg, “Erinnerungen an Gips”, 108. 37 Ernst Scheidegger, “Skulpturen in Gips von Alberto Giacometti”, and Christian Klemm, “Alberto Giacometti – Arbeiten in Gips”, both in: Alberto Giacometti – Skulpturen in Gips. Fotografien, ed. Ernst Scheidegger, Zurich and Frankfurt/Main 2006, 7-10, here 8, and 115-118, here 117, respectively.

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Fig. 18: Auguste Rodin, Méditation sans bras, around 1894 (n° inv. S. 680). Plaster, 54 x 18,8 x 15,9 cm. Photographed by Christian Baraja, Musée Rodin, Paris.



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for all of these artists, plaster was the material of their creative experiments and discoveries.38 Since the plaster sculptures usually originated from the artists’ own motivation rather than as commissions, they may be regarded as testimony to the sculptors’ creativity and modernity.39 Furthermore, it was by casting models in plaster that these artists documented different stages of their works and, in so doing, captured fleeting moments of their creative processes.40 Rodin, Rosso, and Giacometti considered some of their plaster figures as autonomous works of art.41 In contrast to Rodin and Rosso, however, Giacometti deliberately used the fragility of plaster for ephemeral sculptures that he destroyed shortly after their completion. Accordingly, French philosopher JeanPaul Sartre, who knew Giacometti personally, wrote in his 1948 essay “The Search for the Absolute”: This eager and obstinate worker [Giacometti] does not like the resistance of stone, which moderates his movements. He has chosen for himself a material without weight, the most ductile, the most perishable, the most spiritual to hand: plaster. […] Giacometti never speaks of eternity, never thinks of it. I like what he said to me one day about some statues he had just destroyed: “I was satisfied with them but they were made to last only a few hours.” A few hours: like a dawn, a distress, an ephemera. […] Never was matter less eternal, more fragile, nearer to being human.42

These ideas by Sartre about plaster underpin my argument in that they emphasise the material’s transient and fragile nature which is compared to human life. Reading this quote today, parts of it could also have been written with the art of American sculptor George Segal in mind. Even though Segal was of a later generation, his plaster sculptures of isolated, faceless humans might be associated with existentialist ideas as well as with Giacometti’s work.

38 Elsen, “When the Sculptures were White”, 127; Hecker, “Shattering the Mould”, 319; Höcherl, Rodins Gipse, 8. 39 Höcherl, Rodins Gipse, 12 and 17. 40 Hecker, “Shattering the Mould”, 319 and 324; Höcherl, Rodins Gipse, 56-57; Klemm, “Alberto Giacometti”, 115-116; Scheidegger, “Skulpturen in Gips”, 8; Uppenkamp, “Potenziale der Bescheidenheit”, 150-151. 41 Elsen, “When the Sculptures were White”, 149; Hecker, “Shattering the Mould”, 319; Höcherl, Rodins Gipse, 16-17. 42 Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Search for the Absolute”, in: Alberto Giacometti, exh. cat. New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, 19 January-14 February 1948, 2-22, here 5-6.

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Another Pygmalion Story: George Segal Segal’s plaster figures are direct casts from the human model. However, the novelty of his sculptural environments was his frequent use of the casting moulds themselves rather than positive casts.43 The artist developed his characteristic working technique in the early 1960s. He soaked gauze of the kind that had recently been designed for medicinal purposes in plaster and made imprints of his models.44 Then he assembled the hardened fragments into complete figures. The practice of combining fragments into a whole, coherent figure was popular in 19th-century academic sculpture.45 Whereas Rodin had combined plaster fragments into seemingly random assemblages, Segal revisited and revised the traditional process of combining separately cast parts into a whole through the innovative use of casting moulds and newly developed materials. Segal’s working method is evident in his 1968 Self-Portrait with Head and Body (fig. 19): this sculpture shows the very moment when the artist puts together the fragments to produce a complete figure. It also plays an important role within Segal’s oeuvre since it is his only self-portrait that actually presents him as a sculptor.46 In his other self-portraits and studio scenes Segal is shown either drawing or without any artist’s attributes at all, and in one of his studio environments he is not even present.47 Segal’s Self-Portrait with Head and Body shows a situation from the artist’s memory: when he was creating his 1968 sculpture Girl Sitting against a Wall I (Neue Staatsgalerie Stuttgart), the unfinished plaster figure without its head and legs reminded him of an archaeological find.48 In order to perpetuate this impression,

43 Segal’s work can be associated with Marcel Duchamp’s ideas about negative forms and casting moulds. Although Duchamp did not use these in his work, he wrote about them in terms of a concept or a paradigm; see for example Marcel Duchamp, “À l’infinitif”, in: Marcel Duchamp, Duchamp du signe. Écrits, ed. Michel Sanouillet, Paris 1975, 105-141, here 120, and Marcel Duchamp, Notes, ed. Paul Matisse, Paris 1980, 44. 44 Christian Geelhaar, “Marriage Between Matter and Spirit. Interview with George Segal”, in: Pantheon, 34, 1976, n° 3, 231-237, here 232; Uppenkamp, “Potenziale der Bescheidenheit”, 156. 45 Heusinger von Waldegg even refers to this academic practice as Segal’s secret paragon; see Heusinger von Waldegg, “Erinnerungen an Gips”, 111. 46 Jan van der Marck, George Segal, New York 1979, 156. 47 van der Marck, George Segal, 156; see also Brenda Schmahmann, “Cast in a Different Light: Women and the ‘Artist’s Studio’ Theme in George Segal’s Sculpture”, in: The Studio Reader. On the Space of Artists, eds. Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner, Chicago and London 2010, 220236, here 220. 48 Geelhaar, “Marriage Between Matter and Spirit”, 235.



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Fig. 19: George Segal, Self-Portrait with Head and Body, 1968, New York, Private Collection. © The George and Helen Segal Foundation / 2013, ProLitteris, Zurich.

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but also to emphasise that he had experienced this very sensation, he combined the female torso with an imprint of himself at work.49 This awakening of a human figure by assembling “dead” plaster fragments could be understood as another take on the Pygmalion story.50 It departs from the traditional Pygmalion narrative in that the artist represented and his sculpture are both made of the same material.51 Moreover, in comparison to that story, Segal worked in reverse, casting from living humans to make frozen plaster figures. Although it is unclear whether the seated girl is a figure to be completed or a beheaded and dissected body,52 the former possibility seems much more plausible in light of Segal’s own statements and working method. Furthermore, given Segal’s engagement with and continuation of artistic conventions,53 by assembling the fragments into a whole and depicting time-honoured motifs such as the artist in his studio, Segal enlivened not only his plaster figures, but also artistic traditions. Whereas Segal’s Self-Portrait with Head and Body conveys a memory of his personal experience, his 1982 Holocaust (fig. 20) memorial addresses the collective memory of the western world. The plaster original of The Holocaust is in the Jewish Museum in New York, and its bronze cast is erected in the Legion of Honor Park in San Francisco. Interestingly enough, Segal painted the bronze white so that it looked like plaster.54 Although Segal himself never referred to the victims of the eruption of the Vesuvius as a source of inspiration, his figures clearly recall those casts in Pompeii.55 At the same time, these calchi lying next to or even on top of each other convey an impression very similar to photographs of Holocaust 49 Geelhaar, “Marriage Between Matter and Spirit”, 235. 50 See also Heusinger von Waldegg, “Erinnerungen an Gips”, 111; van der Marck, George Segal, 156. In her article on Segal’s studio scenes, Brenda Schmahmann calls attention to the gender perspective in Segal’s Self-Portrait with Head and Body where the male creator is shaping the female “material”; see Schmahmann, “Cast in a Different Light”, 222. Such gender-specific connotations of creator and material are clearly represented in the Pygmalion myth as well. 51 Schmahmann, “Cast in a Different Light”, 228; Uppenkamp, “Potenziale der Bescheidenheit”, 157. 52 Schmahmann, “Cast in a Different Light”, 229. 53 See for example Schmahmann, “Cast in a Different Light”, 220. 54 If we remember Rodin’s procedure of dipping his plaster sculptures into liquid plaster so that their smooth surface reminds one of marble, Segal’s treatment is the opposite: he gave the effect of plaster to a costly material like bronze. 55 See also Heusinger von Waldegg, “Erinnerungen an Gips”, 110. In his 1969 monograph on French artist Yves Klein, Paul Wember made the same observation and named the casts in Pompeii the common source of inspiration for Yves Klein and George Segal; see Paul Wember, Yves Klein, Cologne 1969, 63. More recent studies specifically on the casts in Pompeii include Eugene Dwyer, Pompeii’s Living Statues. Ancient Roman Lives Stolen from Death, Ann Arbor 2010, and Estelle Lazer, Resurrecting Pompeii, London and New York 2009.



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victims. The visual and thematic connection of Segal’s Holocaust monument with Holocaust photographs and the Pompeii casts obviously answer the purpose of a memorial. Furthermore, this observation takes up the notion of 19th-century artists who saw plaster as a “dead” material which referred back to the past.

Fig. 20: George Segal, The Holocaust, 1982. Plaster, wood and wire, New York, The Jewish Museum. © The George and Helen Segal Foundation / 2013, ProLitteris, Zurich.

In both Segal’s Holocaust and Self-Portrait with Head and Body memory is present, albeit in different forms. Focusing on works of art that address collective memory, German art historian Monika Wagner has argued in her essays on artists Christian Boltanski, Anselm Kiefer, and Sigrid Sigurdsson that art works dealing with memory often used materials associated with it.56 The same can be 56 Monika Wagner, “Bild – Schrift – Material. Konzepte der Erinnerung bei Boltanski, Sigurdsson und Kiefer”, in: Mimesis, Bild und Schrift. Ähnlichkeit und Entstellung der Künste, eds. Birgit Erdle and Sigrid Weigel, Cologne 1996, 23-39; Monika Wagner, “Sigrid Sigurdsson und Anselm Kiefer – Das Gedächtnis des Materials”, in: Gedächtnisbilder. Vergessen und Erinnern in der Gegenwartskunst, ed. Kai-Uwe Hemken, Leipzig 1996, 126-134. Whereas Christian Boltanski often uses photographs and worn clothes and Sigrid Sigurdsson’s infinitely extendable archive- or li-

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said of Segal’s environments and materials as well as of his working technique of making imprints of living human beings, whether his sculptures are concerned with collective or with personal memory. Moreover, Segal’s plaster figures reveal and even highlight traces of the artist’s hand and, in so doing, create an aesthetic of the unfinished. Thanks to this perpetuation of the sensory and bodily experiences of both the artist and the models, they not only eternalise transient situations but also radiate authenticity and immediacy.57 These effects are heightened by the way the sculptures accentuate the characteristics of the material and show traces of the workmanship as well as by the facts that they are life-size and the pedestal has been abandoned. Segal’s environments appear to invite the beholder in, even though they are but frozen memories of past situations.

Re-Presenting the Absent The fact that plaster sculptures refer to past events, lost objects, or absent people implies that the material and its treatment in art convey an idea of temporality. More specifically, plaster is characterised by anachronisms: the material typically points to the past while the sculptures in their entirety reflect contemporary issues and are combined with materials or objects from their own period. The aspect of memory and hence the temporal element are also evident from the techniques of working with plaster, in particular the casting and impression methods: both aim at representing the absence of something or someone. Accordingly, Didi-Huberman defines the imprint as an interplay between physical contact and distance, “contact through which the imprint is created, distance through which it is now seen, abandoned as it is by that which originally engendered it”.58 In a similar way, German art historian Peter Geimer stresses that the imprint entirely depends on “this brief moment of contact and the visible evidence that it leaves behind on the impressionable ground”.59 Segal made the imprint permanent by

brary-like installation Architektur der Erinnerung (Architecture of Memory) includes books and drawings as witnesses of history and collective memory, Anselm Kiefer mainly works with natural materials and phenomena such as soil, wood, straw, and burn marks that should emphasise transience and ephemerality. 57 Heusinger von Waldegg, “Erinnerungen an Gips”, 113; Teuber, George Segal, 123. The same might be noted for Rodin’s plaster sculptures; see also Höcherl, Rodins Gipse, 59. 58 Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance par contact, 86: “[…] contact où se forme l’empreinte, distance où se présente à nous l’empreinte, désertée qu’elle se trouve maintenant par ce qui, autrefois, l’a engendrée”. English translation by Julia Slater. 59 Geimer, “Image as Trace”, 10.



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soaking gauze in plaster and letting it set. In so doing, he eternalises the imprint’s effect as a trace of the absent body. The explanations in this chapter show that plaster was not merely a neutral artistic material. Rather, in the 19th and 20th centuries it was heavily connoted and charged with meaning. Whether it be through the reference to ancient sculptures and archaeological finds, the documentation of the creative process, the rendering visible of individual and collective experiences, or simply the casting techniques themselves, the theme of memory often surfaces in late 19th- and 20thcentury plaster sculptures. The immediacy of production, with the artist’s and the models’ physical contact with the material, and the direct transfer of one matter to another, made casting in plaster the ideal artistic procedure to make the past, or absence, visible to the observer.60 Moreover, the plaster itself reveals traces of the creator’s hands at work, and in so doing, brings back the absent artist. Many thanks to Sarah McGavran, St. Louis, and Julia Slater, Bern, for their advice on this chapter.

60 See also Uppenkamp, “Potenziale der Bescheidenheit”, 141; Uppenkamp, “Gips”, 108.

Tomaž Toporišič

Deconstructive Readings of the Avant-Garde Tradition in Post-Socialist Retro-AvantGarde Theatre In this chapter we scrutinise how the retro- or post-avant-garde dealt with the “aesthetics of matter” in its response to historical predecessors. Our focus is more specifically on the theatre of the so-called retro-garda in the “countries of the Second World” (Aleš Erjavec), and in Slovenia in particular. It is our contention that in Slovenia, which is part of “Second” and late or post-socialist Europe, the tactics of reading the historical and neo-avant-gardes developed in contemporary performing arts were established with the help of the early 1980s academic process of redefining the avant-garde; a process which opened the discussion about the end of modernism. If the neo-avant-garde needed “to legitimate itself in tradition”,1 that is, the tradition of the historical avant-garde, and developed its tactics with the help of historical avant-garde materials, concepts, and achievements, the post- or retro-avant-garde to arise from post-socialist countries like Slovenia reads and deconstructs the avant-garde as a specific type of material in relation to other, local and political, ends that also set it off from postmodernist performance practice in “First” Europe and the West in general. As Borut Vogelnik, a member of the Slovene artistic collective IRWIN, argues in his statement “The Retro-avant-garde”, the retro principle in art is “a specific artistic practice [...] which has so far not been comprehended as a connected whole” and which “makes visible the continuity of the activity of artists of different generations who each in their own period were considered as avant-garde. Irwin understands retro-avant-garde literally, as a specific line of avant-garde art established retroactively”.2 In his retrograde principle of reading materials of the historical avant-garde Vogelnik points to two facts. First, with each of its new artistic artefacts the postmodernist retro-avant-garde builds up a new, eclectic reading of art-objects, concepts, even historical facts of previous avant-gardes. Its deconstructive reading uses avant-garde material together with other objects from the past as material that can be transformed, used or even misused according to the artist’s concept and free will. Second, this reading takes into account the fact that after modernism there are no authentic styles. In its aesthetic it mixes and 1 Lev Kreft, “Rekviem za avantgardo in moderno?”, in: Tank! Slovenska zgodovinska avantgarda, Ljubljana 1998, 13. 2 Borut Vogelnik (IRWIN), “The Retro-avant-garde”, in: The Last Futurist Show, ed. Marina Gržinić, Ljubljana 2001, 70-75, here 70.



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compounds avant-garde styles and art forms (plastic arts, theatre, ballet, music, film) from different historical periods and movements. With this practice of citation and deconstruction, of course, the Slovene retroavant-garde does not necessarily differ from other types of postmodernist performance arts in the West. The postmodernist performing arts in general intuitively or rationally employ Derrida’s deconstructive reading of western philosophy as its own (artistic) reading of the western theatre tradition and its orientation “toward an order of meaning – thought, truth, reason, logic, the World – conceived as existing in itself, as foundation”.3 This reading of tradition is positioned within the critique of what Derrida calls the “theological stage”: with its structure that “comports” the elements of the author-creator regulating the time or the meaning of representation understood as something that represents him, his thoughts, intentions, ideas.4 Postmodernist theatre thus develops something that Philip Auslander calls “other grounding concepts” of logocentricity, for example, the director’s concept or even the stage designer’s concept, in which “the logos of the performance need not take the form of a playwright’s text”.5 There are many examples of Slovene retro-avant-garde works that readily illustrate this trend. The event The Baptism under Triglav, premiered in Ljubljana in 1986 and directed by Dragan Živadinov is a telling case, as it also shows how there is always more at stake. Created by three constitutive artistic groups of the Slovene retro-avant-garde collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (consisting of the group the Theatre of the Sisters of Scipion Nasica, the group of painters IRWIN and the music group Laibach), Baptism was conceived as an explicitly a-dramatic, non-dramatic or – in terms of Hans Thies Lehmann – postdramatic structure. Its visual-conceptual strategies reverberated with the aesthetics of the total work of art, amounting to a stage event that was impossible to classify as theatre, opera or ballet, although – as Eda Čufer, the dramaturge of the performance points out – “it borrowed elements from all these art forms”.6 Baptism was a result of the deconstruction of the dramatic theatre and the reduction of the dramatic text as the dominant form of the “theological stage”. It replaced the textual with increasingly visual and spatial forms. When asked by the house dramaturge of the Cankarjev Dom, the biggest cultural centre in Slovenia, to prepare an unconventional celebration of the Slovene Culture Day by staging the epic poem of the Slovene romantic classic poet France Prešeren, The 3 Jonathan Culler, After Structuralism, Ithaca 1982, 28. 4 See Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Basset, Routledge 1997, 235. 5 Philip Auslander, Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Politics in Contemporary American Performance, Ann Arbor 1992, 29. 6 Eda Čufer, “Athletics of the Eye”, in: Maska, Spring 2002, n° 74/75, 81-88, here 81.

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Baptism at the Savica, the artistic team of NSK decided to stage an event about “rebaptizing” the nation(s). The idea of rebaptizing the nation tied in with the theme of Prešeren’s romantic poem, dealing with the period of Christianization of pagan Slavonic tribes as well as with the existentialist play by Slovene playwright Dominik Smole with the same title. While both texts could have served as prototexts for the screenplay of the performance, the artistic team chose to deconstruct the “theological stage” and the author-creator regulating the time and meaning of representation. As a part of their staging process they developed what Marina Gržinič calls “specific strategies of visual display techniques” in order to code, decode and expose the process of mapping national, socialist and post-socialist ideologies.7 They decided that the fundamental iconic principle on which they would base the event would be “a special/visual ‘rebaptising’ of the so-called mimetic concept of space into an abstract concept of space”.8 Thus – as is mostly the case with Slovene retro-avant-garde politicized art – they deliberately moved from the explicitly ideological sphere of the political theatre of the 1980s to the aesthetic sphere. The crucial principle they employed for articulating the event was based on a postmodern notion of intertextuality in which meaning is generated from links between existing texts. The tactic of “other grounding concepts” of logocentricity in the performance used by the artistic collective NSK was established by intertextual references to well-known images from the history of modern art, from romanticism to the historical avant-gardes, together with allusions to the “theatre of images” of Robert Wilson, Jan Fabre, Fluxus events and the Tanztheater of Pina Bausch, among others. Based on Adolphe Appia’s unrealized designs for the staging of Die Walküre (1890 to 1892) and fused with Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic painting Wanderer Above a Sea of Mist (around 1818), the performance worked in binary models, double-coding, juxtaposing, commenting, contextualizing, decontextualizing, appropriating and quoting objects and stories from the past. The performance also made extensive use of avant-garde and modernist works of art and concepts as its material. Thus it constructed its own retro-avant-garde structure of a stage event that intertwined palimpsest with simultaneity and did not result in a simple synthesis and ideological syncretism, but in artistic synaesthesia. The deconstructive theatrical tactics it employed for reading the past were based on appropriating certain well-known concepts of the historical avant-garde, such as the notion of Gesamtkunstwerk or total work of art, thus referencing Richard Wagner and Vsevolod Meyerhold, as well as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s futurist 7 Marina Gržinić, “The Retro-Avant Garde Movement In The Ex-Yugoslav Territory Or Mapping Post-Socialism”, 1997, , (10.07.2013). 8 Čufer, “Athletics of the Eye”, 83.



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concept of minute text and Kazimir Malevich’s suprematism. The references to separate elements of Wassily Kandinsky’s compositions, Hugo Ball’s costume in the Cabaret Voltaire, Malevich’s The Red Cavalry, Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, August Černigoj’s paintings and architectural work, and Ferdo Delak’s theatrical concepts, among others, need but be further mentioned to signal the importance of the avant-garde imagery and concepts for the event. The Baptism under Triglav, while sharing characteristics with other postmodernist performance work, can thus also be read as an instance of a distinct art produced by the post-revolutionary generation of the post-socialist Second World. For here, the material of foregoing avant-gardes is read differently than in the postmodernist art of the First World, for example in the work of Robert Wilson and Jan Fabre. Both admittedly share many tactics in their deconstructive reading of the avant-garde – for example, the intensity of sliding signifiers, decontextualization and recontextualization, eclecticism. However, the actual results of the reading are different. Whereas the works of Robert Wilson and Jan Fabre clearly fall under Frederic Jameson’s rubric of postmodernism, as a radical play of sliding signifiers, Baptism should be read as a reaction of post-avant-garde artists to the fact that the avant-garde was the last authentic style of contemporary civilization that ended with the defeat of revolutions. Tatlin, El Lissitzky and Malevich are thus read as aestheticized geometric forms, taken from the repertory of the past. Yet they are also submitted to what Erjavec calls “a recontextualization of their purported political intent”.9 As many examples show, the reading of the avant-gardes as developed in Europe’s Second World is obsessed with new interpretations of the historical avant-garde’s intermingling of art and politics. A good illustration is Matjaž Berger’s inscenation for the official celebration of the first five years of independence of Slovenia in 1996, presented on the Republic Square in front of the Slovene Parliament. Entitled KONS 5, the triumphal arch for the 5th anniversary of the independence of the Republic of Slovenia, the event’s title partially quoted a poem by the 1920s Slovene constructivist poet Srečko Kosovel. Performed by actors, musicians, athletes, members of the Slovene army and others, it practised both a deconstructive reading of the Slovene historical avantgarde – namely of three poems: “Kons. 5” by Srečko Kosovel, the poem “Electric Saw” by Anton Podbevšek, another avant-garde poet of the 1920s , and one by their contemporary, Vladimir Bartol – and an eclectic interpretation of that avantgarde’s large-scale open-air artistic events. In its deconstructive reading of the materials of the past it also included two avant-garde artists’ works of art. First, Nathan Altman’s celebration of the first anniversary of the October Revolution 9 Aleš Erjavec (ed.), Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition: Politicized Art under Late Socialism, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London 2003, 23.

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of 1917 in Petrograd with its decoration of the central obelisk on the great square in front of the Winter Palace with huge futurist abstract paintings. Second, Leni Riefenstahl’s films Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympiad (1938). In addition, KONS 5 juxtaposed inserts from Slovene films with a flyover of Slovene military aircraft, ballet inserts with descents by parachutes, a Slovene army military review with an actors’ review in old-timer American cars. With its machinery of army members, ballet dancers, athletes, and other artists, the whole celebration echoed and re-appropriated Soviet revolutionary performances, such as the 1920 The Storming of the Winter Palace, in which an army battalion and over 8000 citizens participated in the re-enactment of the 1917 event. As a performance KONS 5 was untheological enough in structure, in the sense that the political discussion about it was predominantly not launched by its postmodernist eclectic nature of sliding signifiers but by the very fact of its title: a citation of Srečko Kosovel’s avant-garde poem. Although the perform-ance used the poem somewhat in absentia – just as a part of its title – it provoked a vivid political discussion because the poem “Kons. 5” includes the following lines: “Dung is gold / and gold is dung. / Both = 0 /… / Whoever has no soul / does not need gold, /whoever has a soul / doesn’t need dung. / EE-AW”.10 The representatives of the Slovene right-wing political parties considered the title an offence to the newly established independent Slovenia and its five years of parliamentary democracy and thus boycotted the event. As Lev Kreft argues, the avant-gardes active before the retro-avant-garde all “had moved to the Institution of Art”, namely, to the galleries of modern art, and had therefore been “reduced to emptied aesthetic pleasure, in which all its politicity is lost”.11 The deconstructive reading tactics of the retro-avant-garde can, from this point of view, be seen as an attempt to restore a political dimension to the avant-garde, effectively, in the case of KONS 5, for this indirectly led to a political rumble that commented on the current post-socialist condition. As Aleš Erjavec has argued, the Slovene historical avant-garde thus “re-emerged in a different form, as a dehistoricized political application”.12 The fact that a specific postmodernist politicized art flourished in most of the countries of the former Eastern Bloc, including East Germany, can be clearly perceived also in the work of German choreographer Jo Fabian. His dance theatre pieces of the 1980s created what Jens Giersdorf termed “a truly post-modern 10 Srečko Kosovel, “Kons. 5”, trans. David Brooks, in: Kosovel, The Golden Boat, trans. Bert Pribac and David Brooks, Norfolk 2008, 76. 11 Lev Kreft, “Rekviem za avantgardo in moderno?”, in: Tank! Slovenska zgodovinska avantgarda, Ljubljana 1998, 13. 12 Erjavec, Postmodernism, 22.



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theatre in East Germany, a country that hadn’t worked through all the issues of modernity at that time”.13 With their attention to structure, meaning and elements of the theatre medium, his productions borrowed eclectically from Artaud’s theatre of the absurd, surrealist paintings, political theatre of the 1920s and 1930s, Bauhaus mechanical ballets, and also from the American avant-garde “theatre of images” and the tradition of German Tanztheater, specifically the work of Pina Bausch and Johann Kresnik. His theatre further appropriated some elements of Brecht’s theory of epic theatre while mapping the late socialist and post-socialist condition and striking against socialist theatre. His usage of Brecht resulted in demystification by depicting interactively the basic elements that comprised a confused social and historical situation. Of specific interest is Fabian’s 1993 production Whisky & Flags, which was restaged in 2003 and was meant to be restaged every ten years (note the parallel to Dragan Živadinov’s 50 year project of restaging his 1:1 which we briefly discuss further on). This production, in a language of signs close to Wilson’s “theatre of images”, deals with the political theme of German reunification and its consequences. It depicts East German history while making a parallel between two historical periods: the period of Nazi Germany and the period of German reunification. But at the same time Fabian brings a specific postmodernist problematization of the medium and of the institution of theatre. This problematization does not lead to a Brechtian arousal of the observer’s capacity for action but to the deconstruction of theatrical and social sign systems. The deconstruction in this specific case enables the spectator to peek behind the elaborate opaqueness of the reflecting surface of the work of art and to see the polyphonic chorus in the background that enabled its genesis. In this sense the performance is at the same time the deconstruction of the theatre of images and a (post-)Brechtian political theatre, combined with the deconstruction of the mythology of (Re)united Germany. His performance is a reaction to utopianism. It perfectly suits Mikhail N. Epstein’s idea of postmodernism and its approach to history: “Postmodernism, with its aversion to utopias, inverted the signs and reached for the past, but in so doing, gave it the attributes of the future indeterminateness, incomprehensibility, polysemy, and the ironic play of possibilities”.14 In Fabian’s Whisky & Flags – to paraphrase Epstein’s analysis of contemporary Russian culture – the East German communist future has become a thing of the past, while the WWII Nazi past and bourgeois German period before WWII approaches us in a decontextual13 Jens Giersdorf, “Hey, I won’t let you Destroy my History. East German Dance Theater and the Politics of the Restaging”, in: Maska, 2003, n° 5/6, 17-22, here 18. 14 Epstein quoted in: Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition: Politicized Art under Late Socialism, ed. Aleš Erjavec, 20.

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ized and recontextualized condition from the direction where we had expected to meet the future. Dragan Živadinov’s production Supremat, subtitled The Farewell Ritual from Neue Slowenische Kunst and NSK and premiered in Ljubljana in 2002, offers a fitting final example of our claims. The performance is but a part of the complicated preparation procedure for his big utopian 50 year project that started in 1995 and is described by Inke Arns as follows: In 1994, Dragan Živadinov, theater director of the NSK performance department “Cosmokinetic Cabinet Noordung”, announced a project which would last for the next 50 years. The “Noordung Prayer Machine” – a machine for the “production of holiness” – stretches out into the year 2045. By signing a contract, actors and actresses have agreed to participate in a production of “Love and State” (Inhabited Sculpture One Versus One), which was premiered in Ljubljana on 20 April 1995. The production will be repeated every ten years, until the year 2045. The first repetition will take place on 20 April 2005 with the same actors and actresses, in the same costumes, in the same scenery, on the same day and at the same time as ten years before. If an actor or actress dies, s/he will be replaced by a movable “robotic costume-symbol” combined with melody/rhythm. The four following productions will be guided by the same principle. The concept notes that the second repetition will take place in 2015, the third one in 2025, the fourth one in 2035, and the fifth in 2045. By the time of the fifth repetition, all the actors will be dead and the stage will be full of robotic costume-symbols, melodies and rhythms. The only survivor will be Dragan Živadinov, who together with the actor substitutes, will be launched in a space craft from a Russian launching site into the “Noordung” orbit of zero-gravity: By installing the actor substitutes in positions close to information satellites around the planet Earth, Živadinov will abolish “Retrogarda”. He predicts: “I, Dragan Živadinov, will die on 1 May 2045”.15

Apart from the allusion to Ben Vautier’s 1960s Fluxus work, more specifically to his Announcement of My Funeral, in which he created certificates on which he signed both his own and Yves Klein’s death, Živadinov’s project creates a strange statement and prediction: starting with 1994 I will personally begin the task of abolishing the retro-avant-garde, which will be fulfilled by my death in 2045. With this fact he proclaims all his performances to be Farewell Rituals to what NSK (in the words of IRWIN quoted at the very beginning of this chapter) defined as retro-avant-garde. His farewell rituals are thus farewells to a specific line of the avant-garde art established retroactively. As suggested by its title and subtitle, the former alluding to Malevich’s suprematism, the latter to the Slovene retrogarde movement of the 1980s and 1990s, 15 Inke Arns, “Free your mind and the rest will follow: Intim@ and the Great Teacher Astronaut”, in: Leonardo Electronic Almanac, 2000, n° 8, 1, 3.



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Supremat is conceived as a personalized farewell ritual by the director Dragan Živadinov from both the Russian historical avant-garde and the Slovene retroavant-garde. The performance thereby uses pastiche and recycles pre-existing themes and styles in a new context, among others quoting and bidding farewell the Slovene historical avant-garde magazine Tank and the neo-avant-garde group OHO…. In so doing, the subjective and utopian potential of the historic avantgarde still echoes as an inspiration for the performance. Yet Supremat further develops far more critical deconstructive readings of the art historical past. The most interesting and controversial moment of its reading of the avant-garde can be detected in its revival of the trauma of the identification with the assimilation of the historical avant-garde in the system of the totalitarian state during the first years after the October Revolution. Inspired by Dusty Hughes’s play Futurists, presented in the 1980s in London’s National Theatre, Supremat deals with the first poet-victim of post-revolutionary Russia, Nikolay Gumilyov, the founder of Acmeism. Reinterpreting the historical events of 1921 in Saint Petersburg with echoes of the Kronstadt revolt, Supremat captures the crucial moment of the historical conflict of the avant-garde in art with the avant-garde in politics, and the very beginning of the extermination of the former with the development of the latter in the period after the (Soviet) revolution. Its script or scenario, characterized by the usage of palimpsest, pastiche and appropriation techniques, can be read as a postdramatic opera aperta, mixing and compounding fragments and paraphrases of Russian poetry from the period (such as Vladimir Mayakovsky, Anna Akhmatova, Gumilyov, Alexander Blok) and Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Abandoned – a Memoir, transformed with deconstructive interventions. Although Supremat is no longer so densely populated with visual quotations and appropriations of the avant-garde and the past in general, it is marked by highly individualized and personalized presentations of works, concepts and thoughts of the historical and the neo-avant-gardes. First and most important is the citation of Fluxus table tennis, played with paddles with holes in the centre, which is an appropriation of the neo-avant-garde multi-player games or “Fluxfests”. The Fluxfest held at Douglass College in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in February 1970, for example, had a particularly amusing Flux-Sports component. Examples of games played here included soccer on stilts, a javelin toss with a balloon, and table tennis with paddles with holes in the middle or with metal cans (to be filled with water) attached. Supremat thus uses Fluxus paddles with holes in the middle as its central visual symbol together with the reappropriation of Meyerhold’s biomechanical movements of the protagonists, who are all representatives of Russian art in 1921. With even greater emphasis than in his earlier performances, Živadinov uses some specific “ingredients” to characterize

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his performances, this time the washing liquid Pril, which of course reminds us of Joseph Beuys’s use of honey, felt and fat in his Fluxus performances of the 1960s. With the statement “Art is but a temporary religion!”, it echoes and paraphrases Marcel Duchamp’s statement about art: “I just don’t believe in it with all the mystical trimmings. As a drug it’s probably very useful for a number of people, very sedative, but as religion it’s not even as good as God”.16 The performance thus echoes the impossibility of the avant-garde’s utopian ideas as stressed in Maxim Gorky’s imaginary statement from the scenario: “I want art to abolish politics. I want art to become a religion. I want millions to kneel to art”.17 Art being but a temporary religion, the avant-garde’s utopian ideas had to collapse. But they reappear in various forms, to be uttered again and again. They reappear in different restagings of Prayer Machines (to use Živadinov’s term for his performances) or Farewell Rituals. Oratorios and requiems, the examples we discussed in this chapter are de- and re-contextualizations of the big, utopian questions raised by the avant-gardes. Fragmented, deconstructed and appropriated in the global world of exchange, yet, nevertheless, a very fresh experiment with the material of the past, they present the foregoing avant-gardes as a lasting source of inspiration and a possible starting point for the work today.

16 Marcel Duchamp cited in Calvin Tomkins, Bride and Bachelors, New York 1976, 18-19. 17 Dragan Živadinov, Supremat, obred poslavljanja od Neue Slowenische Kunst in NSK, Slovensko Mladinsko gledališče, Ljubljana 2003, 4.

Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam

The Materiality of a Contemporary AvantGarde? Legacies of Surrealist Collage in Contemporary Art In Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World (2005) Nicolas Bourriaud identifies postproduction as a leading practice in contemporary art. The notion postproduction covers various sorts of montage, citation, recycling, and détournement, where artists are using pre-existing works or formal structures in all kinds of media.1 Such strategies have obviously been seen before in both the interwar avant-gardes and the neo-avant-gardes of the 1950s and 1960s. However, this does not mean that contemporary art is just repetitive. Bourriaud notes that “[w]hile the chaotic proliferation of production led Conceptual artists to the dematerialization of the work of art, it leads postproduction artists toward strategies of mixing and combining products”.2 In line with this Tania Ørum has claimed that there has been a heightened awareness of the materials and the materiality of artworks from the 1970s onwards.3 The aim of this chapter is to develop this characterisation taking the widespread legacies of surrealist collage in contemporary art as point of departure. In contrast to cubist and dadaist collage, the effect of surrealist collage generally relies more on semantic clashes of the elements rather than on formal ruptures. This chapter pursues this kind of collage technique in contemporary art by investigating three current tendencies: one that embraces objects obviously made in one piece, but with a metaphorical collage quality created by disturbing clashes of elements from different contexts, exemplified by Danish artist Louise Hindsgavl and British Jake and Dinos Chapman; another that clings to the reality fragment but uses it in a new digitised way, exemplified by Danish artist Peter Holst Henckel and Danish street artist ‘Frantz Flotten-heimer’; and, finally, a third tendency that confronts the concept of collage through a play with materials by making objects that look like collages made out of found objects, but which are in fact made of, for instance, painted bronze, exemplified by British artist Damien Hirst. Many other artists could have been included in each cat1 Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World (2005), New York 2007. 2 Bourriaud, Postproduction, 45. 3 Tania Ørum, “Feminist Avant-garde 1970-2008”, held at: Material Meanings, European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM), University of Kent, 8 September 2012.

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egory, but this selection illustrates how a broad span of materials, techniques and institutional affiliations all pay homage to surrealist collage despite their differences. The selected art works cover all from big, expensive museum pieces to street art, and the materials range from china, resin and painted bronze casts to photo-manipulated paper collages. They are all from the last twenty years and this timespan correlates with the renewed ‘surrealist’ interest I see in contemporary art. However, I neither see these selected artists nor the three categories as a new movement or as genuine neo-surrealism. My aim is to discuss what the similarities and references to historical surrealism mean. What is the state and potential of collage today? Is it still avant-garde?

Surrealist Collage First, a bit more about the surrealist collages of the 1920s and 1930s. In contrast to, for instance, dadaist or cubist collage of the 1910s, surrealist collage generally does not display each separate element, but lets the elements merge and connect.4 If we take a look at the collages of Max Ernst, for example, it might be difficult to see that they are in fact collages. Actually, Ernst often tries to hide the fact that the elements are stuck together. An example of this is the collage Au-dessus des nuages marche la minuit (Above the Clouds Midnight Passes, 1920, fig. 21). Here the borders between the elements are carefully concealed, and the figure appears as a unified whole despite the use of very different elements (photos of a woman’s legs, a ball of yarn, and a crochet work on a background of clouds).5 This technique becomes predominant in Ernst’s collage novels from the end of the 1920s and beginning of the 1930s (fig. 22).6 Here the collages are created out of illustrations from novels and magazines, and Ernst has incorporated the elements so well that they sometimes become impossible to distinguish from the whole. The material for the collages is carefully chosen: the elements have the 4 This notion of surrealist collage obviously clashes with Peter Bürger’s notion of montage in: Theorie der Avantgarde (1974), Frankfurt/Main 1996. For further discussion of this clash, please see my book Surrealistiske collager – underfulde billeder i kunst og litteratur, Aarhus 2011, or Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam and Maria Fabricius Hansen, “Grotesque! On Strategies of Figuration in the Sixteenth Century and the 1920s/30s”, in: Art, Technology and Nature: Renaissance to Postmodernity, eds. Jacob Wamberg and Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam, Aldershot 2013 (forthcoming). 5 Ernst has drawn a shadow on the thigh of the figure that dims the contrast between the edges of the elements. Werner Spies, Max Ernst Collages, The Invention of the Surrealist Universe, New York 1991 (from German 1988), 77. 6 Collage novels by Ernst, La femme 100 têtes, 1929, Rêve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel, 1930 and Une semaine de bonté, 1934.



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same scale, and Ernst has tried to blur the borderlines. He finally had the collages printed to make it even less obvious what was originally part of the picture and what has been pasted on.7

Fig. 21 (left): Max Ernst, Au-dessus des nuages ... Au dessus des nuages marche la minuit. Au dessus de la minuit plane l’oiseau invisible du jour. Un peu plus haut que l’oiseau l’éther pousse et les murs et les toits flottent, 1920. Collage with photographic elements and pencil, 18,4 x 13 cm, Private Collection, Küsnacht, Switzerland. Fig. 22 (centre): Max Ernst, Collage from the collage novel Une semaine de bonté, 1934, 15,5 x 19,5 cm. Fig. 23 (right): Max Ernst, Elle ressemblait légèrement à un cheval …, 1938. Collage, 15,5 x 12,5 cm, Work illustrating Leonora Carrington: La maison de la peur, Paris 1938, 2, Private Collection.

In Ernst’s collages the effect consists of a clash of elements with different semantic content, rather than a clash of different materials. The fact that it is the semantic clash of the elements, which is the most important part of surrealist collage, is emphasized by the surrealists’ own metaphorical use of the notion collage. Ernst himself writes explicitly that “in most of my collages there wasn’t any glue at all”,8 and he writes about the paintings by Magritte and Dalí that their “pictures are collages entirely painted by hand”.9 It is thus an extended and metaphorical use of the word collage, which depends less on technique than on structure: elements that are at the wrong place, in the wrong context, in surprising constellations. What touches us, disturbs us, shocks us, are the semantic clashes of the elements and their new surprising relations. Surrealist collages are monsters.10 Thus, in 7 M. E. Warlick, Max Ernst and Alchemy. A Magician in Search of Myth, Austin 2001, 105-108, and Elza Adamowicz, Surrealist Collage in Text and Image, Cambridge 1998, 62. 8 Max Ernst, Beyond Painting. And Other Writings by the Artist and His Friends, New York 1948, 13. 9 Ernst, Beyond Painting, 17. 10 Paldam and Hansen, “Grotesque!”.

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the collage Elle ressemblait légèrement à un cheval…, (She Slightly Resembled a Horse, 1938; see fig. 23) we do not see a horse head pasted on a ballerina, but a ballerina with a horse’s head. Our attention is not drawn to the principle of construction, but to the strange and amusing image and title. However, surrealist collages are never just illusionistic totalities; there are always clashes of heterogeneous elements at the semantic level that resist settlement and keep the collages open to interpretation. The surrealist collages never offer one illusionistic truth. Therefore, surrealist collage might form a kind of totality, but this totality never becomes totalitarian.

‘Collages’ in One Piece – Surreal Monsters Successors to such a monstrous and disturbing play with normal bourgeois life might be found in contemporary art objects made in one piece, yet with a metaphorical collage quality generated through disturbing clashes of elements from different contexts. This can for instance be seen in the grotesque, chimerical china figurines (2006-2013) of Danish artist Louise Hindsgavl. China figurines are associated with petit bourgeois life, with the cosy home. Hindsgavl is perverting this homeliness. She recreates scenes from everyday life in china, lets the delicate, fragile material clash with harsh motifs and plays ironically with the expectation of innocence and harmlessness given by the white, smooth surface and the decorative small scale of the figurines. This can for instance be seen in the work Everyday Scenario, – Surgery Suggestion (fig. 25), where a fat horse-headed woman is confronted by a smaller hare-headed man holding a mirror. The woman is also holding a mirror herself and on her white porcelain body red lines are drawn, to indicate the suggestions for surgery. This motif differs a lot from the idealised bodies often made in china, and the hybrid crea tures give the scene a dreamlike or surreal property, questioning if this really could be an ‘everyday scenario’. Another example is Jake and Dinos Chapman’s mannequin children. Zygotic Acceleration. Biogenetic De-sublimated Libidinal Model (1995, fig. 24) consists of a circle of conjoined, mutated mannequin children. They are realistically made, naked, without sex, only wearing black sneakers, with combed wigs, long eyelashes and big blue eyes – exactly as we know them from shopping malls and department stores, and then, at the same time, not at all as we know them. The strangeness of the children not only relates to the fact that they are conjoined. Several of them have vaginas between their faces, a big open anus instead of a mouth or an erect penis instead of a nose. The erect penises are – like the other mutations – not just added like a carrot on a snowman; they are integrated in the



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children’s faces as if they had organically grown from them. Like the collages by Ernst we saw, the piece appears as an integrated entity that disturbs us by consisting

Fig. 24: Jake and Dinos Chapman, Zygotic Acceleration. Biogenetic De-sublimated Libidinal Model, 1995. Fiberglass, 150 x 180 x 140 cm.

Fig. 25 (left): Louise Hindsgavl, Everyday Scenario – Surgery Suggestion, 2008. Porcelain, 27 cm x 35 cm x 14 cm. Fig. 26 (centre): Frantz Flottenheimer, Street art in Copenhagen at Sankt Hans Torv, 2009. Fig. 27 (right): Peter Holst Henckel, World of Butterflies, 1992-2002, 40 x 50 cm, Archival Ink on Somerset Velvet paper / ed. 5+1.

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of elements that normally do not fit together: elements that are in the wrong place. The realism becomes surrealism. The well-known is suddenly not well known at all. Here the innocent child has the genitals of a grown-up in the middle of its face, raising disturbing questions about consumerism or sexuality of children, while the pious, bourgeois woman by Ernst is equipped with dragon wings as she kneels in her living-room, subverting the homely peace and indicating an untameable force in the woman. In both examples the beholders project their fantasies into the blanks of the art work and try to fill out the gaps, to create links between the disparate elements. New wicked realities are proposed and hereby the strange and marvellous collages might be able to challenge and renew the worldview of the beholder.

Digital Collages – Digitised Reality Fragments A second tendency clings to the reality fragment, but uses it in a new digitised way. Here, two Danish artists could be mentioned: Peter Holst Henckel, who makes political, computer-generated collages of butterflies morphed with iconic photos of political events (1992-2002); and street art artist Frantz Flottenheimer, who also makes collages shaped like nocturnal butterflies, or moths, but creates them from photographic fragments of graffiti, tags, colours and torn posters. The nocturnal butterflies are set free as paste-ups where the original photos were taken, feeding on the city, but also offering small poetic changes to it (2009-2011), bringing attention to the marvellous in the well-known (fig. 26). Both artists make collages where bits and pieces are cut and pasted from different contexts and this results in collages where the elements save their independent, fragmented character and where the elements are morphed seamlessly together. Common to both types is, however, that all the elements are digital. They may depict all sorts of materials, but they are just representations of them. What is changed when the medium is changed? Do computer-generated collages function in the same way as their more tangible forerunners? Of course, the answer depends on the nature of the collage. If the surprising clash of a collage relies on a clash of certain materials and of their authenticity as reality fragments, then a digitised image or any other representation will not do it justice. In Picasso’s famous collage Still Life with Chair Caning (1912) the chair caning is not real chair caning but a representation of it printed on a piece of oilcloth. The tactility is obviously very different from real chair caning, and this is a point you do not get if you only see the reproduction. Likewise, digital collages



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that try to represent clashes of different materials will just be shadows of such clashes. But what happens when the more organic collages instead of being made by use of scissors and glue are created digitally? Not much, I would say. Digitising the collage process just makes it easier, faster and smoother. I am sure Max Ernst would have loved Photoshop. Some of the original collages Ernst made for his collage novels and other books do not exist today. They were not preserved because they were not important. The final work was the printed work. I have travelled around the world to see Max Ernst’s original collages. To me it has had an element of fetishism, excitement and even of awe. Sometimes I have been surprised by the tiny size of the collages, but that’s all it has added to my interpretation of them. Seeing the originals hasn’t expanded my understanding of surrealist collage, because this media first and foremost functions due to semantics, not due to materials. Peter Holst Henckel has morphed the iconic photo of the napalm-burned Vietnamese girl with a butterfly (fig. 27). The photo becomes the pattern of the butterfly, and the clash of beauty and horror is striking. Holst Henckel makes us see the photo again. He places it in front of us, but in a new strange context that makes us wonder, and that revitalises it. And it is not just one photo of one butterfly. The butterfly is part of a series of 68. In creating beauty he seduces us to confront the chaotic world and the images that we all know but do not see any more.

Fig. 28 (left): Damien Hirst, The Hat Makes the Man (after Max Ernst), 2004. Acrylic paint on bronze, 209 x 365 x 300 cm, series of 3. Fig. 29 (right): Max Ernst, C’est le chapeau qui fait l’homme, 1920. Gouache, india ink, and pencil, painting on print and collage, mounted on cardbord, 35,6 x 45,7 cm. Inscription, bottom right: bedecktsamiger stapel-mensch nacktsamiger wasserformer (“edelformer”) kleidsame nervatur auch !umpressnerven! (c’est le chapeau qui fait l’homme) (le style c’est le tailleur), The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

For this kind of images there is no difference between manually made and digitised collages. What matters is the referential nature of the elements that by use of

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displacement provide us with a fresh look at the world that we thought we knew or that we have forgotten to see.

Remediation: ‘Mock’ Collages The third and last tendency I want to address is mock collages that confront the concept of ready-made and collage through a play with materials by making objects that look like found objects, but which are in fact made of, for instance, painted bronze. There are plenty of examples of this by, for instance, Tony Matelli, Sherrie Levine or the Chapman Brothers. In the following I have chosen to focus on Damien Hirst’s The Hat Makes the Man (after Max Ernst) (2004, fig. 28), which is an explicit comment on surrealism. The Hat Makes the Man (after Max Ernst) is a big three-dimensional pastiche (209 x 365,4 x 300 cm) referring to one of Ernst’s most famous collages. Ernst’s C’est le chapeau qui fait l’homme (le style c’est le tailleur) (It’s the Hat that Makes the Man, 1920, fig. 29) is both a collage and an over-painting: the sheet used for the collage was originally an advertisement for hats, and Ernst has painted some of the hats over, left other hats visible, and has also pasted additional pictures of hats on the sheet. Finally, he has painted coloured fields between the hats and written a text that serves as title directly on the picture. This collage relates to an assemblage Ernst made in Cologne in 1920. Today only a bad photo of this assemblage exists, but it seems to have consisted of a single ‘stack man’ made out of wood, mixed materials and hats.11 Hirst’s The Hat Makes the Man (after Max Ernst) is generally faithful to Ernst’s collage. The colours are not exactly the same, but apart from that the composition is comparable ‒ apart from, of course, size and adaptation from 2D to 3D. Hirst uses the same kind of traditional men’s hats as those we saw by Ernst, and in keeping with the use of objet trouvé in surrealist collage as well as in Hirst’s own early work, he employs old doors to represent the coloured fields, which Ernst has painted between the hats. The paint peels off, the nails are rusty. However, this bricolage made out of available materials is an impressive trompe l’œil. A glance at the plate on the museum wall reveals that the material is acrylic paint on bronze, nothing else. The whole sculpture is made of bronze. The elements are not old, used, found by chance and put together. On the contrary: it is one big manufactured block, meticulously cast and painted. Instead of coincidence and automatism, this is a premeditated process: a careful remake of a collage claimed 11 Werner Spies (ed.), Max Ernst Œuvre-Katalog, Werke 1906-1925, Cologne 1975, 171.



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to be spontaneous. This might be an allegation that the surrealist collages were hardly made by mere chance: cast in bronze, Hirst’s piece emphasizes that it is only an illusion if the work appears randomly compounded. Hirst’s remediation is an interpretation and a comment. Despite the common motifs, Ernst’s small collage (35,6 x 45,7 cm) produces a totally different effect than Hirst’s monumental sculpture (209 x 365,4 x 300 cm). Ernst’s collage was an ephemeral work made of cheap everyday materials. Today, however, it is part of MoMA’s collection and has been reproduced countless times. Hirst underlines the status of Ernst’s collage by recreating it spectacularly in bronze. Bronze literally makes the work more permanent, and at the same time the bronze establishes the work’s status of autonomy by being one of the traditional materials of fine art: unique, organic, coherent and expensive. Hirst’s The Hat Makes the Man (after Max Ernst) is not an avant-garde protest against the art institution. It is a demonstration of the art historical implication of the avant-garde. Not as a revolt, but as a common and relevant frame of reference without which art would not be the same. Some might see this as the final death of the avant-garde. But it is not just that. The piece is, of course, an ironic gesture towards authentic ready-mades. Or maybe rather an ironic gesture towards museum guests who are so used to ready-mades that the biggest possible shock is when something turns out not to be made out of trashy everyday materials. Hirst is not against ready-mades as such. He often uses real ready-mades in his work and has paid tribute to them and to Duchamp on several occasions. He says, for instance: “[...] to put a fucking toilet in a gallery is fantastic. It’s, like, if a tree falls down on your land, or in your street, it looks ... bigger. [...] You never notice it until it falls down. Artists do that. They take things and they place them in front of you, but out of context. Things you know”.12 In The Hat Makes the Man (after Max Ernst) it is one of the central pieces of the avant-garde that gets this treatment. It is placed in front of us, not as a real ready-made but as a remediated piece of plagiarism. The surrealists praised Lautréamont for saying that “Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. [...] To be made good a maxim should not be corrected. It should be developed”.13 Hirst seems to follow this in conscious recognition of the necessity of plagiarism. As it stands on its pedestal of raw wooden pallets The Hat Makes the Man (after Max Ernst) is not just a negation or undermining of Ernst’s collage. On the contrary, in the spirit of surrealism it makes us reflect.

12 Damien Hirst and Gordon Burn, On The Way To Work, London 2001, 72. 13 Louis Aragon, “La Peinture au défi” (1930), in: Louis Aragon, Les Collages, Paris 1965, 59 (my translation).

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Shock and Collage in Contemporary Art Tania Ørum has claimed that “the blending of avant-garde references, mass cultural and commercial formats and innovative approaches [is] characteristic of what may be a neo-neo-avant-garde from the late 1990s onwards”.14 In line with this my aim has been to show how surrealist legacies and remediations work in many different ways: from the big, well-known, commercial works of Damien Hirst, to Louise Hindsgavl’s challenge of decorative mass cultural homeliness, and to the poetic, ephemeral works of a local street artist, so local and unknown that he is barely mentioned in the most comprehensive Danish book on street art.15 Now that he’s mentioned in this book he is no longer untouched by the art institution but a part of it, like his avant-garde predecessors 90 years ago. Is such an artist too insignificant to be included in the mapping of a contemporary avant-garde? And is an artist like Damien Hirst too exposed? Some might find it provocative to include a hyped, commercial artist like Damien Hirst in an avant-garde context, and I also doubt that a work like The Hat Makes the Man (after Max Ernst) can be called avant-garde; I think it is more a comment on the status of the historical avant-garde today. However, looking at particularly Hirst’s early work from the 80s and 90s (which was possible at the retrospective exhibition at Tate Modern in 2012) his debt to both the historical avant-garde and the neo-avant-gardes such as pop art and minimalism is clear. We are used to think of avant-garde art as exclusive, only partly accepted by the art institution, made by an artist who doesn’t earn money from it. Yet, why can expensive inyour-face works not have a subversive potential that we could call avant-garde? Isn’t Hirst precisely succeeding in integrating avant-garde practices into contemporary commercial mainstream culture? Sometimes this sort of integration dilutes all social and critical potential of the art work; as it is seen in for instance a wide range of advertisements (from Volkswagen to Café Noir) that use surrealist inspired imagery purely aesthetically, reducing the avant-garde tradition of disturbing semantic clashes to empty art historical references and slick effects. These advertisements have nothing to do with avant-garde: avant-garde is never just an aesthetic term. It would, however, be a fallacy to conclude that a work cannot have critical potential just because it is part of a broader visual culture or is made of expensive materials by a hyped artist. Also famous and popular works may have political and social impact. 14 Ørum, “Feminist Avant-garde 1970-2008”. 15 Lasse Korsemann Horne, Dansk Gadekunst: 49 artikler om dansk gadekunst, Aarhus 2011. With its 432 pages, this book gives a comprehensive overview of the current street art in Denmark. Frantz Flottenheimer is, however, only mentioned in one sentence (367).



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In Theorizing the Avant-garde Richard Murphy repeats Walter Benjamin’s warning that even “socially-engaged work […] risks being transformed unthinkingly through the artistic gloss of technical perfection solely into an object of aesthetic enjoyment”.16 Many contemporary art works express a “gloss of technical perfection”, which is obliviously the result of extremely laborious processes. However, the materiality of these art works might be more present to the viewer than if they were ‘just’ ready-mades commonly accepted by the art institution and spectators today. By mockingly changing the material from ready-made to bronze cast, or challenging our stereotypical expectations to a given material such as china, renewed attention is given to the mode of production and this prevents an immersive illusion that might reduce the art works to just ‘objects of aesthetic enjoyment’. Contemporary art thus preserves an “awareness of the social and institutional constraints which influence the form and content of the work of art”17 which, according to Murphy, is crucial to the avant-garde. It just does it in a new way, in a playful and self-conscious dialogue with the art institution and the beholder. This focus on production does not try to undermine capitalism or the institutional dependency. It is rather an upfront awareness of this organization of society as an unavoidable condition. By approaching this condition deliberately the artists both acknowledge and counteract its naturalisation. In an interview Jake Chapman thus comments on his and Dinos’s dependence on the art collector Charles Saatchi: “I’m happy to acknowledge the prostitutional relationship between his money and our objects. Aesthetics can’t exist outside commerce”.18 After years of dematerialisation the renewed focus on materiality is no Greenbergian purification. All sorts of media are potentially mixed and involved, and the materiality is crucial to an understanding of the works. Despite their commonalities the artists mentioned in this chapter are not part of an artistic or political movement, and maybe the focus on materiality, tactility, and sensuality is reinforced by the focus on the individual; the potential effect of the art work lies in the individual, not just in his or her more or less rational brain but in the body and its multisensory responses. In this approach contemporary art resembles the surrealism of the 1920s. Also, the political potential of historical surrealism might be seen as primarily internalised, meaning that the changes of society were expected to happen as a result of the changed worldview of the beholder.19 I doubt that any of the here mentioned contemporary artists has a full political, utopian 16 Richard Murphy, Theorizing the Avant-garde (1999) Cambridge and New York 2003, 12-13. 17 Murphy, Theorizing the Avant-garde, 32. 18 Sarah Kent, “{Blood brothers}. Interview with Jake and Dinos Chapman”, Time Out Magazine, London 2003. 19 Paldam, Surrealistiske Collager, 248.

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programme; however, in their dépaysement of the well-known they manage to challenge our fixed expectations at a micro-level and thereby, maybe, to set some new standards. Many other artists and materials could be mentioned: as part of the first mentioned tendency, for instance, the almost anthropomorphic melting plush furniture by Danish Nina Saunders or the grotesque, humorous and expressive metamorphoses made in clay animation by Swedish Nathalie Djurberg; as part of the second tendency the big mandala-like patterns made out of well-known commercial logos by Swedish Gunilla Klingberg; and, as part of the third tendency, giant kitchen tools by Palestinian Mona Hatoum – just to mention a few more. Bourriaud outlines a typology of postproduction art20 and concludes that: All these artistic practices, although formally heterogeneous, have in common the recourse to already produced forms. They testify to a willingness to inscribe the work of art within a network of signs and significations, instead of considering it an autonomous or original form. […] The artistic question is no longer: “what can we make that is new?” but “how can we make do with what we have?” In other words, how can we produce singularity and meaning from this chaotic mass of objects, names, and references that constitutes our daily life?21

It is not like the 1980s when artists “adhered to the poststructuralist declarations of the ‘end of history’ and gave up any political implications in favour of individual expression, recirculation of styles and materials”.22 According to Bourriaud the détournement of pre-existing artworks is not made “to ‘devalorize’ the work of art but to utilize it”.23 Like the surrealists used dadaist techniques constructively by engaging with the collage as an aesthetic strategy to create new, disturbing, wicked, utopian worlds and not just to demonstrate the chaotic, fragmented absurdity of the existing world,24 I think that the artists of today refer to surrealist imagery and aesthetic strategies because they consider them constructive and 20 Bourriaud lists five categories of postproduction art: 1) “Reprogramming existing works” – Hirst’s The Hat Makes the Man (after Max Ernst) would belong here. 2) “Inhabiting historicized styles and forms” – Hindsgavl, Chapman, Djurberg and Saunders would belong here as well as the contemporary use of surrealist collage techniques in general. 3) “Making use of images”. 4) “Using society as a catalog of forms” – Holst Henckel, Flottenheimer and Klingberg would belong here. 5) “Investing in fashion and media”. Bourriaud, Postproduction, 14-16. 21 Bourriaud, Postproduction, 16-17. 22 Ørum, “Feminist Avant-garde 1970-2008”. 23 Bourriaud, Postproduction, 37. 24 The surrealists’ constructive use of collage is the main hypothesis of my PhD dissertation: Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam, Konstruktive Collager – fra 1920’ernes surrealisme til Young British Artists, PhD dissertation, Aarhus 2008. See also Bourriaud, Postproduction, 37.



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use them as a means to address the world and produce meaning. This is not just a shallow eclecticism, nor is it a reactionary attempt at repeating historical surrealism. Contemporary collages do not mean the same as the surrealist collages of the 1920s: the resemblance is structural and relates to how the collages act and signify. Collage as a formal technique has lost its controversial news value. Today there are collages everywhere. In this history of success the shock potential of the early collages fades: collage has become a convention, often used in commercials, television and other mass cultural contexts. However, the shock that collage provides does not necessarily depend on the collapse of meaning, as Bürger suggests, but might be generated by the new interconnections that the beholder actualises between the heterogeneous elements of the collage: even if collage as formal technique does not shock, semantic clashes still have the potential to do it. Bourriaud demands “processes and practices that allow us to pass from a consumer culture to a culture of activity”25 and to him postproduction art “represents a counterpower”.26 I tend to agree. The beholder is the real protagonist of collage, and as Bourriaud writes: “It is up to us as beholders of art to bring these relations to light. It is up to us to judge artworks in terms of the relations they produce in the specific contexts they inhabit”.27 In surrealist collage (broadly and metaphorically understood as the surrealists themselves did) contemporary artists and beholders find an aesthetic strategy that still has power. When contemporary artists revive techniques and concepts from surrealism they do not just reproduce, they also include vitalising displacements that give renewed power and shock potential to the works. In my view such artists are thus able to make art that surprises the beholder; and art so convulsive that we, despite many years of habituation, still have to reflect and to take a stand; works that might be seen as a contemporary avant-garde.

25 Bourriaud, Postproduction, 92. 26 Bourriaud, Postproduction, 93. 27 Bourriaud, Postproduction, 94.

 Spaces and Places

Lori Cole

Reproducing the Avant-Garde The Art of Modernist Magazines “What should Latin American Art be? What should the attitude of Latin American artists towards European art be?” the Cuban magazine Revista de Avance (Review of Progress) asked its contributors in 1928.1 These questions underlie the magazine’s mission: to define and promote a local avant-garde art that can compete on an international stage. In a similar spirit to Revista de Avance, Alfred Stieglitz launched the magazine Camera Work in 1903, which he boasted as “containing the complete history of the evolution of Modern Art both in this country and abroad”.2 Camera Work and Revista de Avance emerge out of distinct national print contexts but both worked to establish national canons that they displayed and distributed in print. Magazines serve as proxies for physical art venues and allow readers from across the globe to see artwork to which they would not otherwise have access. Conversely, for print communities that perceived themselves outside the center of European production, magazines offered a way to gain a wider audience for the artwork that they promoted. Centralizing the role such publications played in supporting experimental artwork, the critic Gwen Allen observes: Magazines were not merely secondary or supplementary to other kinds of alternative spaces and institutions but were deeply enmeshed within the new cultural economies these institutions helped to bring about. To publish art – to literally make it public – was a political act, one that challenged the art world and the world at large.3

Periodicals such as Camera Work and Revista de Avance published and publicized new artwork, functioning as sites of display and patrons for such experimental work. By closely examining how Camera Work and Revista de Avance disseminated art across borders, I hope to demonstrate how artistic communities in the Americas worked to supplant Europe’s dominant cultural position through magazines.

1 “Directrices: Una encuesta”, in: Revista de Avance, 2, 1928, n° 26, 235. 2 Alfred Stieglitz to Ryerson Library, 28 April 1916. Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive. Beinecke Beinecke Rare Book Library, Yale University. 3 Gwen Allen, Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art, Cambridge, MA 2011, 7.

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Camera Work: Forming Avant-Garde New York Camera Work operated in tandem with Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery 291 to promote photography and modern art and to establish an audience for such work in America. Camera Work published high-quality photogravures and installation shots of works on view at 291 along with exhibition reviews and art criticism. Through the reproduction of images, Camera Work enabled a wider audience to “see” exhibitions, read criticism and commentary by artists on their work, and feel connected to a physical location that may have otherwise been inaccessible. In fact, the photogravures printed in Camera Work were themselves displayed in museum exhibitions and continue to be purchased as artwork.4 By establishing the magazine and gallery, Stieglitz hoped to foster an American art community receptive to photography and avant-garde artistic developments from across the world. Stieglitz’s ardor to establish and promote art institutions stemmed from his own frustration as a photographer whose medium was marginalized from the canon of art history. Stieglitz labored to find an audience for his work and for that of his peers, and as a result, took it upon himself to curate, sell, and promote photography and modern art. Stieglitz launched his curatorial career by organizing what he called “demonstrations”, experimental exhibitions that culminated in a show he mounted at the National Arts Club in New York in 1902 called “The Photo-Secession”. Referring to the German and Austrian painters who broke with the salons, the name “Photo-Secession” is at once defiant of and firmly rooted in art history. “Photo-Secession implies a seceding from the accepted idea of what constitutes a photograph”, Stieglitz explains, insisting upon the aesthetic merits of photography.5 Stieglitz founded the magazine Camera Work in 1903 to serve as a vehicle for the Photo-Secession movement. Edward Steichen, a photographer, painter, and fellow Secessionist, designed the art nouveau hardback cover and interior of the magazine.6 Camera Work featured photogravures, halftones, and collotypes, serving as a “small encyclopedia of the mechanical printing processes available during the first seventeen years of this century”.7 To produce such images, Stieg4 Photogravures from Camera Work are now in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art. 5 Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer (1960), New York 1990, 49. 6 While there were many other magazines dedicated to photography at the turn-of-the-century – Photo Era, American Amateur Photographer, Camera Notes, Photogram, The Photographic Times, The Critic, The Craftsman, Photography – none were committed to as luxurious a presentation of images as Camera Work. 7 Jonathan Green, “Introduction to Camera Work: A Critical Anthology” (1973), in: The Cam-



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litz made photogravures from original negatives, sometimes hand-coloring them, and printed them on Japanese vellum. The high quality of these images suggests that the magazine itself was a collectible art object containing small-scale exhibitions. Along with Camera Work, Stieglitz, with Steichen’s assistance, founded the “Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession” in November 1905 at 291 Fifth Avenue, which soon became known as just “291”. The April 1906 issue of Camera Work describes the galleries’ appearance at their opening: “One of the larger rooms is kept in dull olive tones, the burlap wall-covering being a warm olive gray”.8 Although the gallery space itself is recalled as a drab series of small rooms, its unimpressive pallor only worked to enhance its mythic status. The printed description of the space invited the magazine’s international readers to feel included in the gallery, which was envisioned as the center of a community committed to advocating for photography and modern art in America. As evidenced by its detailed description of the gallery space, Camera Work functioned as a print correlate to the Little Galleries of the Photo Secession, which jointly promoted photography and modern art. To reinforce this relationship, each issue of Camera Work was inscribed with a subtitle that read, “An illustrated quarterly magazine devoted to Photography and to the activities of the PhotoSecession”. The magazine printed announcements for upcoming exhibitions and reviews of past shows, further linking the print and exhibition spaces. While the gallery initially held a series of photography exhibitions, it soon also featured the drawings, paintings and sculpture of Rodin, Matisse, Picasso, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Stieglitz thought that this way, “photography could be measured in juxtaposition to other means of expression”.9 These exhibitions were explicitly linked with the magazine and gallery’s nationalist aspirations. For instance, the promotional materials announcing the Matisse show in 1908 read: “It is the good fortune of the Photo-Secession to have the honor of thus introducing Matisse to the American public and to the American art-critics”.10 Similarly, a show of Picasso’s drawings and watercolors is hailed as “the first opportunity given to the American public to see some of Picasso’s work in this country”.11 Stieglitz also promoted the work of American modernists era Viewed: Writing on Contemporary Photography, ed. Peninah R. Petruck, New York 1979, 10. 8 Camera Work, April 1906, n° 14, 48. 9 Alfred Stieglitz, Manuscripts, ca. 1922. Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 10 Announcements, 291. Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 11 Announcements, 291. Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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through a national lens, organizing shows such as “Younger American Painters” at 291 in 1910, which was reviewed in Camera Work, and “Seven Americans” at Stieglitz’s The Anderson Galleries in 1925, featuring Stieglitz’s work alongside that of Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, Paul Strand, Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe and John Marin.12 In the exhibition brochure accompanying “Seven Americans”, Stieglitz suggests that these artists are “an integral part of America today”.13 Through such rhetoric, Stieglitz positioned his galleries as a staging ground for the interaction between European and American artists and their ideas. Because Camera Work was hardbound, printed on high-quality paper, and contained pristine photogravure inserts, it was itself an object to be collected. Stieglitz urged libraries and museums to purchase it, as evidenced by a letter he wrote to the Ryerson Library at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1916, asking: I wonder whether the Ryerson Library would be interested in getting a complete set of Camera Work. It is the only publication of its kind in the world, and it is the only publication containing the complete history of the evolution of Modern Art both in this country and abroad […] I merely mention this as the time will come when Camera Work will have become so rare that one will not be able to complete sets at any price.14

Stieglitz used Camera Work’s future value as a means of marketing the publication; a plea that now has prophetic resonance. In 1929 Stieglitz sold 8,000 remaining copies of Camera Work to a rag picker for $5.80 while others he burned or donated to friends, since he lacked storage space.15 Ironically, because Stieglitz was forced to dispose of so many issues of Camera Work, today the original magazine is more of a rare, collectible object than ever.16 12 “Younger American Painters” was on view from 9-21 March 1910 at 291 and reviewed in Camera Work: “The Younger American Painters and the Press”, in: Camera Work, July 1910, n° 31, 31. “Seven Americans” was held at the Anderson Galleries, 9-28 March 1925. 13 “Alfred Stieglitz Presents Seven Americans”. Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 14 Stieglitz to Ryerson Library, 28 April 1916. Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive. Beinecke Rare Book Library, Yale University. 15 Alfred Stieglitz, “The Magazine 291 and The Steerage”, in: Twice a Year, 1942, n° 8/9, reprinted in: Stieglitz on Photography: His Selected Essays and Writings, ed. Richard Whelan, Millerton, NY 2000, 215; Stieglitz to Lewis Mumford, 10 July 1933: “Four years ago the complete set of Camera Work I had had up here for years I offered to the Evening Star. It was a wonderful sight to watch the volumes burn […] Soon I’ll be rid of all copies except the 3-4 sets I’m keeping for myself & O’Keeffe”. Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive. Beinecke Rare Book Library, Yale University. 16 In 1974 a complete set cost $30,000; in 2012 a complete set sold for nearly $400,000. Jean Dykstra, “January-February 2012 Auction Report”, in: Photograph Magazine. Online 27 Mar 2012, , (10.07.2013).



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Stieglitz himself was also a collector, purchasing his artists’ work to support them. He offered his collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the institution then considered the standard bearer for art in America, eventually inducing the museum to collect photography and American art.17 Explicit about trying to cultivate American tastes for modern art and photography, Stieglitz eventually named his gallery “An American Place”.18 The proliferation of institutions established thereafter to support experimental art in America attest to Stieglitz’s efforts. The Armory Show displayed similarly avant-garde art, including several of Stieglitz’s artists, in 1913, and the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art were founded in 1929 and 1931 respectively. Though Camera Work folded in 1917, Stieglitz inaugurated an age of magazines in New York centralizing and perpetuating the American avant-garde. Most notably, the 1916 issue of Camera Work announced “291 – a new publication”. A 20 x 12 inch object, 291 can be folded like a booklet or expanded to form a poster, defying the typical model for either reading a magazine or displaying artwork. 291 is an homage to Stieglitz and his gallery and contains a manifesto-like essay announcing that Stieglitz “wanted to discover America. Also, he wanted the Americans to discover themselves”.19 Beyond 291, Camera Work’s other successors include: The Blind Man, Broom, Rongwrong, Secession, New York Dada, The Seven Arts, Manuscripts, The Ridgefield Gazook and Others. Through his promotion of art at 291 and in print, Stieglitz hoped to transform America and what constituted American art.

Revista de Avance: What Should Latin American Art Be? Like Stieglitz’s magazine, Revista de Avance sought to compensate for a lack of local art institutions receptive to avant-garde developments. However, Revista de Avance claimed a very different relationship to “America” than that of Camera Work. In its 1928 questionnaire “¿Qué debe ser el arte americano?” the designation “American” signifies “Latin American”, a collective formed in opposition to North America and Europe. Revista de Avance staged the first exhibition of avant17 Stieglitz began corresponding with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1902. Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive. Beinecke Rare Book Library, Yale University. 18 After the building housing 291 was razed, Stieglitz went on to lead The Anderson Galleries, 1921-25; The Intimate Gallery, 1925-29; and An American Place, 1929-46. 19 Marius De Zayas, “Editorial”, in: 291, July 1914, n° 5/6, 3.

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garde art in the nation, the “Exposición de arte nuevo” (Exhibition of New Art), held at the Association of Painters and Sculptors from May 7- 31, 1927. Revista de Avance publicized, sponsored, and promoted the exhibition, printing the artists’ work in its pages accompanied by reviews of the show, thus enacting their own definition of “Latin American art”. Founded by Juan Marinello, Jorge Mañach, Martí Casanovas, Francisco Ichaso and Alejo Carpentier in 1927, Revista de Avance was intended to be the mouthpiece of “minorism”, a group that formed in 1923 in support of Cuban independence and pan-American solidarity. The minorists famously met every Saturday in the Café Martí to discuss their collective goals, which were described by Alejo Carpentier as “recent forms in art, Afro-Cuban music, [and] literary nationalism”.20 The editors were also involved in the annual salons and exhibitions held at the Association of Painters and Sculptors, including a 1923 conference on art and architecture organized by editor Jorge Mañach. Such activities led to the foundation of Revista de Avance and to the “Exhibition of New Art”. In 1927 the group published a “Declaration” advocating for “new art in its diverse manifestations” and “Latin American unity”.21 The title of the magazine changed yearly, first “1927”, or “1928” and then became revista de avance, in lower case. The two names jointly underscore the magazine’s impulse towards change, as the editors note: “We want movement, change, advancement, even in the magazine’s name!”.22 Accordingly, Revista de Avance enacts the project of the avant-garde itself, embodying a forward-propelling impulse. Revista de Avance was connected to a network of publications across Latin America, including Amauta in Peru, Repertorio Americano in Costa Rica, and Proa in Buenos Aires. The magazine developed a local language for articulating cubanidad while informing its audience of international artistic developments. Despite its international aspirations, Cuban artists and writers’ efforts to expand the role of art in Latin America emerged out of a singular political and 20 Alejo Carpentier, “El espiritu de equipo”, in: El Nacional (Caracas), 8 Nov. 1953. Quoted in Carlos Rincón, “Carpentier, ‘extranjero indeseable’”, in: Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, 34, 2008, n° 68, 196. 21 “Declaración del grupo minorista”, in: Carteles, 22 May 1927, n° 21, 16 and 25. , (10.07.2013). Note that Alejo Carpentier left after the first issue and was replaced by José Z. Tallet while Martí Casanovas was expelled from Cuba in 1927 and replaced by Félix Lizaso. Marlene Vázquez Pére, “The Revista de Avance in Cuban culture”, in: Cuba Now. Online 2 April 2010, , (10.07.2013). 22 “Al llevar la ancla”, in: Revista de Avance, 1, 1927, n° 1. The magazine was known at the time as 1927, 1928, 1929, or 1930 and “revista de avance” was explicitly lower case. However, scholars have since referred to the publication as Revista de Avance, and I adopt this convention.



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artistic milieu. Unlike in Europe, artistic communities in Cuba worked to construct literary and artistic canons rather than to refute or undermine them. The conditions that led to the movements that Peter Bürger addresses in his 1974 landmark study, Theory of the Avant-Garde, were unique to a European cultural and economic climate. Instead, Latin American artists and writers sought to legitimize and expand their profession so as to establish markets for their work.23 Moreover, the Cuban struggle for independence resulted in years of nearly constant war and foreign intervention. Cubans also had to contend with internal corruption, first battling Alfredo Zayas’s regime (1921-1925), and then the even more repressive reign of Gerardo Machado (1925-1933). Cuba’s economic and political subjugation, coupled with an intellectual tradition abetted by the poet and revolutionary José Martí, made artists and writers wary of being co-opted by another country’s agenda and intent on forming their own national platform. Emerging out of political upheaval, Revista de Avance designated itself the mouthpiece for a generation of intellectuals. Editor Francisco Ichaso declared the magazine “the literary and artistic voice of a generation intent on energetically revising the work of the past and bringing to Cuban life a different slant”.24 Revista de Avance featured work by international artists and writers such as John Dos Passos, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dalí alongside Cuban artists and writers including Félix Lizaso, Eduardo Abela, and Víctor Manuel. It contextualized and introduced foreign work to Cuban audiences and conversely, situated Cuban achievements on par with their international peers. According to critic Carlos Ripoll, Revista de Avance served as “the means by which Cuba communicated with the best of the revolutionary art world that had already emerged in Europe and America”.25 To showcase the work of a new generation of Cuban artists, the magazine organized the “Exhibition of New Art”, which opened at the Association of Painters and Sculptors on May 7, 1927. The artists in the show included: Eduardo Abela, Rafael Blanco, Antonio Gattorno, Gabriel Castaño, Carlos Enríquez, Víctor Manuel, and American artists, Alice Neel (then the wife of Carlos Enríquez) and Adja Madlein Yunkers. The exhibition was accompanied by a manifesto proclaiming the group the “artists of the new generation, who, with a concentrated effort,

23 See Julio Ramos, Divergent Modernities: Culture and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, trans. John D. Blanco, Durham, NC 2001. 24 Francisco Ichaso quoted in Juan A. Martínez, Cuban Art and National Identity: The Vanguardia Painters, 1927-1950, Gainesville, FL 1994, 10. 25 Carlos Ripoll, “La Revista de Avance (1927-1930) Vocero de Vanguardismo y Pórtico de Revolución”, in: Revista Iberoamericana, 30, July-Dec. 1964, n° 58, 261. All translations by the author unless otherwise noted.

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fight to incorporate the great undertakings of our time without neglecting [… our] essential Cubanism”.26 Revista de Avance publicized, sponsored, and promoted the exhibition and printed the artists’ work in its pages. Reviewing the show for Revista de Avance, Martí Casanovas situates the artists’ work and the exhibition in the narrative of change established by the magazine, writing: We fully condemn and negate the art of the nineteenth century […] The highest aspiration of our young artists is to forget all that has existed, all the museums they have visited, all the pyrotechnics of past art. We are trying to start anew.27

Casanovas claims the exhibition as part of the magazine’s platform to “advance” in the arts and celebrates the artists as propelling this change. The “Exhibition of New Art” represented a break from the dogma of the reigning art school in Cuba, the San Alejandro Academy, debuting a new style that synthesized Cuban and European artistic innovations. To counter the approach learned at the academy, many artists traveled to Paris to immerse themselves in the latest developments in avant-garde art. Upon their return, artists such as Abela, Gattorno, and Víctor Manuel applied cubist and expressionist principles to Cuban subject matter. Some of these innovations adopt an almost primitivist sense of the Cuban landscape, as in Abela’s image of peasants portrayed in distorted, cubist perspectives and bright colors. Critic Néstor García Canclíni argues that Latin American artists returning home from Europe sought to integrate their experiences abroad into their local culture: It was not as much the direct, transplanted, influence of the European avant-garde that awoke the desire for modernization in Latin American visual arts but rather the questions raised by Latin Americans themselves as to how to make their international experience relevant to developing societies.28

In this quest to relate their international experiences to their own culture, some Cuban artists’ work yielded a contradictory self-exotification.29 Describing such art in 1944, Alfred Barr, Jr., the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New

26 “Exposición de arte nuevo”, in: Revista de Avance, 1, 30 April 1927, n° 4, 70. Trans. in: Luis Camnitzer, New Art Cuba, Austin, TX 2003², 103. 27 Martí Casanovas, “Nuevas Rumbas: La Exposición de 1927”, in: Revista de Avance, 15 May 1927, n° 5, 99. Quoted in Martínez, Cuban Art, 11. 28 Néstor García Canclíni, “Modernity after Postmodernity”, in: Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America, ed. Gerardo Mosquera, London 1995, 31. 29 Martínez, Cuban Art, 50.



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York, observes how these artists combine autochthonous themes with foreign influences, writing: Paris and Mexico, the Italian Renaissance and Baroque masters have all contributed to modern Cuban painting but these foreign influences have been fused to a remarkable extent with native Cuban elements [… including] fighting cocks, sugarcane cutters, guanabanas, barber shops, bandits, nudes, angels, or hurricanes.30

Even to outside observers such as Barr, Cuban painters have visibly reconciled classical training, European influences, and Cuban subject matter. The success of the exhibition spurred the development of avant-garde art institutions in Cuba. Eduardo Abela founded the Escuela Libre de Artes Plásticas (Free Studio of Painting and Sculpture) in 1936. Although it lasted less than a year, the studio was extremely influential, both academically and artistically.31 The Lyceum, a women’s organization, was founded in 1928 by Berta Arocena and Renée Méndez Capote to hold art exhibitions, readings, and conferences. Revista de Avance continued to organize symposia on modern art, which they reported on in their pages, such as “La Nueva Estética” (The New Aesthetic) organized by Abela and Mañach. Revista de Avance was also part of a vibrant print community in Cuba, including its precursors Cuba Contemporánea, Social, and Carteles, its contemporaries Atuei, Juventud, Revista de La Habana, Grafos, and Revista de Oriente, and its successor, Orígenes (1944-1956). The “Exhibition of New Art” also sparked a lively debate over what constituted “Latin American Art”, articulated in a questionnaire issued in 1928 wherein the magazine asked its contributors: What should Latin American art be? Do you think that the work of an American artist should reveal American concerns? Do you think “Americanness” is a matter of perspective, content, or vehicle? Do you think there might be characteristics common to the art of all the countries in our America? What should the attitude of American artists towards European art be? 32

The questionnaire’s respondents hailed from across Latin America and in their answers, confronted the question of what artists’ responsibilities are to site and race. In his response, the Venezuelan historian and poet Rufino Blanco Fombona submits: “I believe that the American artist (we are not talking about the Yankees) 30 Alfred H. Barr, Jr., “Modern Cuban Painters”, in: The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, 11, April 1944, n° 5, 2 and 4. 31 Camnitzer, New Art Cuba, 154-155. 32 “Directrices: Una encuesta”, in: Revista de Avance, 1928, n° 26, 235. Note that “Our America” is a reference to José Martí’s 1892 essay of the same title.

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should reveal an American concern; better yet, an American inspiration”.33 For Fombona, “America” is a Pan-American coalition that will resist “Yankee” imperialism. The Cuban artist Eduardo Abela writes: “European art, properly speaking, old and weary of itself, has sought transfusions to keep it strong [...] American art is a life that comes from a life that has already been” suggesting that Latin American art will reinvigorate a dying Europe.34 Such responses fuel a debate over Latin American art’s international status, sustaining the artistic self-reflection initiated by the “Exhibition of New Art”. Through its exhibition and questionnaire, Revista de Avance brought into being the concept of “Latin American art” as a viable alternative to European art.

Promoting “American” Art “Daring experimentation with words, colors, and sounds was the chief preoccupation of an intercontinental avant-garde”, declares Eugene Jolas, the editor of transition magazine.35 Publications like transition, along with Camera Work, Revista de Avance and others, showcased experimental art and writing, using the magazine as a space of display and a means of transmitting images and ideas across borders. The critic Mark Morrison explains how through magazines, writers and artists “themselves create the canon by their interaction with each other’s work and that of their predecessors”.36 Both through their criticism and their dissemination of images, avant-garde magazines consolidated communities of artists and writers bent on reforming their art historical canons. Not only sites of display for experimental artwork, Camera Work and Revista de Avance also served as proxies for exhibition spaces, compensating for a lack of local institutions to support avant-garde art. Stieglitz explicitly cultivated American tastes, marketing exhibitions of European artists like Picasso and Matisse towards “an American public” and named one of his galleries “An American Place” in the hopes of spurring the nation to recognize the value of modern art 33 Rufino Blanco Fombona, “Respuesta a  ¿Qué debe ser el arte americano?” (Response to Questionnaire ‘What Should Latin American Art Be?’), in: Revista de Avance, Dec. 1928, n° 29, 361. 34 Eduardo Abela, “Respuesta a ¿Qué debe ser el arte americano?” (Response to Questionnaire ‘What Should Latin American Art Be?’), in: Revista de Avance, Dec. 1928, n° 29, 361. 35 Eugene Jolas, Man From Babel, eds. Andreas Kramer and Rainer Rumold, New Haven, CT 1998, 87. 36 Mark Morrisson, “Nationalism and the Modern American Canon”, in: The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism, ed. Walter Kalaidjian, Cambridge 2005, 14.



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and photography. Revista de Avance also supported a local avant-garde in an effort to challenge Europe’s cultural dominance. Both the “Exhibition of New Art” and the questionnaire “What should Latin American art be?” sought to establish “Latin American Art” as a viable alternative to European art. At once exhibition spaces and conduits for national art movements, Camera Work and Revista de Avance offered artists sites in which to showcase their work while building an audience for it. The efforts of these two disparate publications suggest that the magazine is a community-building enterprise that is at once local, corresponding to physical sites of display, and also international, circulating images beyond these sites to ensure a nation’s artistic legacy. It was by crafting artistic national canons in print that the avant-garde enacted its “daring experimentation with words, colors, and sounds”.

Gregor Langfeld

Bedeutungsveränderung und Kanonisierung des deutschen Expressionismus in den USA Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht, wie im Laufe der Kanonisierung des deutschen Expressionismus in den USA grundlegende Bedeutungsveränderungen auftraten. Dabei konzentriere ich mich auf New York, die führende Kunstmetropole in den USA, wo diese Strömung früh rezipiert wurde. In den zwanziger Jahren spielte dort Katherine Dreier in der Vermittlung der internationalen und deutschen Avantgarde eine wichtige Rolle. Seit Ende der zwanziger Jahre war das dortige Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) der entscheidende Faktor in der Kanonisierung der modernen Kunst. Vorliegender Beitrag endet mit den fünfziger Jahren, da der Kanonisierungsprozess seit diesem Zeitraum als abgeschlossen betrachtet werden kann. Während der Kanonisierung moderner deutscher Kunst projizierten einflussreiche Kunstvermittler unterschiedliche, oft irrationale Bedeutungen auf diese. Die Bedeutungsveränderungen waren für ihre Etablierung wesentlich und stimmten mit den ursprünglichen Absichten und Zielen der Künstler kaum überein. Ein Kunstwerk ist eben kein für sich bestehendes Objekt, das jedem Betrachter zu jeder Zeit den gleichen Anblick bietet. Diese Auffassung dürfte heute zwar kaum noch Erstaunen hervorrufen, doch ist es gerade deswegen wichtig, solche Prozesse der Bedeutungsveränderung zu rekonstruieren. Das ist schon deshalb der Fall, damit Gründe für den derzeitigen kanonischen Status bestimmter Künstler und Strömungen ersichtlich gemacht werden können. Die kanonisierende Wirkung der Institution Museum war aufgrund der Autonomie und der Anerkennung in der Öffentlichkeit sehr erfolgreich. Mit dem 1929 gegründeten MoMA zeichnet sich eine zunehmende Institutionalisierung und Professionalisierung der modernen Kunstszene ab. Damit gab es in New York erstmals eine öffentliche Institution, die exklusiv moderner Kunst gewidmet war. Das New Yorker Museum erhielt innerhalb kurzer Zeit eine Vorbildfunktion. Es wurde als das wichtigste moderne Kunstmuseum in den USA anerkannt. Und es bestimmte maßgeblich die Etablierung der modernen deutschen Kunst außerhalb Deutschlands. Andere Gruppen in der Kunstszene der USA, wie die Künstler selbst, förderten zwar bereits früher diese Kunst und pflegten enge Kontakte mit ihren deutschen Kollegen, doch setzten sie sich kaum durch. Katherine Dreier und die von ihr zusammen mit Marcel Duchamp 1920 gegründete Société Anonyme kann als exemplarisch dafür gelten. Ihr Ziel war es gewesen, das Verständnis für moderne Kunst in den USA zu fördern. Sehr bald organisierte hauptsächlich Dreier die



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laufenden Aktivitäten, während Duchamp Anfang 1923 wieder nach Frankreich zurückkehrte. In den nächsten zwei Jahrzehnten organisierte Katherine Dreier ungefähr neunzig Ausstellungen und hielt noch mehr Vorträge bzw. organisierte Diskussionen und Symposien.1 Als Dreier im Winter 1911/1912 in München studierte, hörte sie erstmals von Wassily Kandinsky.2 Dessen einflussreiche Schrift Über das Geistige in der Kunst (1912)3 half ihr, ihre vagen Vorstellungen von Kunst zu klären. Sie fühlte sich einverstanden mit Kandinskys Analogie von Malerei und Musik. Ende 1922 ernannte sie ihn, dem sie im Oktober am Bauhaus begegnet war, zum „first honorary vicepresident“ der Société Anonyme.4 Dreiers Vorstellung von moderner Kunst war mit der Theosophie verknüpft. Gerade avantgardistische Künstler fühlten sich mit dieser religiösen Lehre verbunden, da sie der abstraken Kunst eine besondere Bedeutung gab. Sie waren davon überzeugt, dass sie am Anfang einer großen Epoche lebten, die sich international auf allen geistigen Gebieten offenbare. Letztendlich fühlte Katherine Dreier sich künstlerisch denn auch mehr Kandinskys intuitiver Herangehensweise und seiner Vorstellung der geistigen Bedeutung abstrakter Kunst verbunden als der eher intellektuellen Position Duchamps. Während sie sich für ein weites Spektrum der zur Abstraktion neigenden Avantgarde einsetzte, distanzierte sie sich vom Naturalismus und vom figurativen Expressionsimus. Dreier erschien die Lebensnähe der Brücke-Künstler, die ihre sinnlichen Erfahrungen unmittelbar darstellten, als zu wenig vergeistigt. Im Grunde unterwarf sie alles ihren Vorstellungen von universellen, „kosmisch wirkenden Kräften“.5 Ihre irrationale, außer-ästhetische Kunstbetrachtung muss der Fachwelt und nüchternen Betrachtern suspekt vorgekommen sein. Die Kunstkritiker hatten denn auch keinerlei Sympathie für Dreiers metaphysische Auffassungen, für ihre Annahme einer kosmischen Kraft als Triebfeder des künstlerischen Tuns. Einige reagierten zynisch und stempelten ihre Auffassungen ab als bloße Rhetorik, um dürftige Kunst zu legitimieren. In Bezug auf Dreiers wichtigste Ausstellung, die „International Exhibition of Modern Art“ (1926/27),6 1 Ruth L. Bohan, et al., The Société Anonyme and the Dreier Bequest at Yale University: A Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven und London 1984, 772-779. 2 Katherine S. Dreier, Kandinsky, New York 1923, 3. 3 Wassily Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, München 1912. 4 Bohan, The Société Anonyme and the Dreier Bequest, 753. 5 Katherine S. Dreier, Modern Art. Catalogue of an International Exhibition of Modern Art Assembled by the Société Anonyme (exh. cat. Brooklyn Museum), eds. Katherine S. Dreier and Constantin Aladjalov, New York 1926, n.p. 6 Diese Schau war erst im Brooklyn Museum zu sehen, danach in den Anderson Galleries (New York), schließlich in der Albright Art Gallery (Buffalo) und in der Art Gallery of Toronto.

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fanden die meisten Rezensenten, dass abstrakte Kunst rein dekorativ sei, ohne Empfindung und intellektuelle Tiefe.7 Selbst als angewandte Kunst außerhalb des Museums konnten die wenigsten Kritiker in den Exponaten einen dauerhaften Wert erkennen. Im Grunde lief es auf die Aberkennung irgendeines ästhetischen Wertes hinaus, was den Ausschluss aus dem Bereich ernst zu nehmender Kunst rechtfertigte. Die Auffassung, dass die Exponate eigentlich gar keine Kunst seien und folglich nicht ins Museum gehörten, ist insofern nachvollziehbar, als amerikanische Museen bis dahin internationale moderne Kunst weder ernsthaft ausgestellt noch gesammelt hatten. Erstmals stellte das Brooklyn Museum seine Räume für eine solche Schau bereit, was an sich schon eine mutige Tat war. Doch Museumsdirektor William Henry Fox machte sich nicht zum Fürsprecher dieser Kunst. In seinem Vorwort distanzierte er sich von der Ausstellung, er ergreife weder für noch gegen diese Kunst Partei.8 Er wolle dem Publikum die Möglichkeit geben, diese Kunst zu betrachten, und er wolle ein Forum für künstlerische Debatten schaffen, weil das für die künstlerische Entwicklung unerlässlich sei. Doch überließ er es explizit dem Publikum, selbst zu urteilen. Erst mit zunehmender Distanz zu den Künstlern fand die Etablierung der Kunst statt. Mit der Errichtung des MoMA war eine gesellschaftliche Elite der USA wesentlich an der Durchsetzung moderner deutscher Kunst beteiligt. Eine kleine Gruppe Gleichgesinnter, darunter Abby Rockefeller, nahm Einfluss auf die Ausstellungs- und Sammelstrategien des Museums. Mit Alfred H. Barr, Jr. setzten die Museumsgründer einen Kunsthistoriker und Experten moderner Kunst als Direktor des MoMA ein, der fachlich-inhaltliche Professionalität besaß. Rockefeller akzeptierte ihn im gegenseitigen Einvernehmen, deutsche Kunst stärker fördern zu wollen. Barr machte sich durch sein Wissen, das er in Katalogen und Ausstellungen vermittelte, einen Namen. Darüber hinaus war er in seiner Funktion als Museumsdirektor und später als Leiter der Sammlungen Inhaber eines institutionellen Autoritätskapitals. Seine Autorität und Kompetenz wurde, vom Museum ausgehend, im gesamten künstlerischen Feld der USA anerkannt. Die große Ausstellung German Painting and Sculpture (1931) fand kaum anderthalb Jahre nach Eröffnung des MoMA statt. Das beweist, dass die deutsche Kunst ein essentielles Anliegen der Museumsleitung war. Barrs sachlich erscheinender Katalogtext zur deutschen Kunstausstellung 1931 kann leicht darüber hinwegtäuschen, wie subjektiv und einseitig seine Darstellungsweise der deutschen Kunst eigentlich war. Mit seiner Ausstellung bekräftigte Barr ein einseitiges, ste7 Ruth L. Bohan, The Société Anonyme’s Brooklyn Exhibition: Katherine Dreier and Modernism in America, Diss. St. Louis, Missouri 1980, Ann Arbor, MI 1980/1982, 98-101. 8 Dreier, Modern Art, New York 1926.



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reotypes Bild der deutschen Kunst, das internationale künstlerische Zusammenhänge marginalisierte. Diese Sichtweise war der Dreiers entgegengesetzt, die sich zwar für deutsche Kunst einsetzte, jedoch genau genommen keine nationalen Ausstellungen organisierte. Die moderne Bewegung war nach ihrer Überzeugung nicht an Landesgrenzen gebunden. Da deutsche Kunst nur Teil dieser Bewegung war, nahm sie sie nicht in erster Linie als deutsch wahr. Nationalität spielte also keine wesentliche Rolle in ihrer Beurteilung von Kunst.9 Barr dagegen schloss Künstler aus, die ihm zufolge nicht „typisch deutsch“, sondern international oder „französisch“ ausgerichtet waren. Er unterstrich nachdrücklich einen unterstellten Unterschied zwischen „französischer Form“ und „deutschem Inhalt“, der zumindest teilweise auf irrationalen Klischeevorstellungen beruhte, die eine lange, mitunter jahrhundertealte Tradition hatten, aber selten kritisch hinterfragt wurden.10 Für den Kanonisierungsprozess war diese einprägsame Profilierung der deutschen Kunst und deren Gleichsetzung mit dem Expressionismus, der angeblich einem überzeitlichen deutschen Volkscharakter entsprach, von großer Bedeutung. Barr trug damit zur Mystifizierung dieser Kunst bei. Seine nationalistische Perspektive überzeugte die Kunstkritik, was für die Rezeption außerhalb Deutschlands sonst nicht als selbstverständlich gelten kann. Obwohl Barr neben der Brücke den mehr zur Abstraktion neigenden Blauen Reiter als zweite wichtige Gruppe des Expressionismus nannte, war dieser weniger gut repräsentiert.11 Kandinsky fehlte als dessen zentrale Figur sogar gänzlich, da abstrakte Künstler laut Barr für die Ausstellung zu international ausgerichtet waren.12 Barr betrachtete sowohl das Werk von Marc, das er als dekorativ cha9 Catalog of an International Exhibition Illustrating the Most Recent Development in Abstract Art, Ausstellungskatalog Buffalo Fine Arts Academy/Albright Art Gallery, 1931, 7. 10 Barr schloss an eine alte von Giorgio Vasari ins Leben gerufene Vorstellung an, wonach die unklassische Gotik auf die Deutschen und nicht auf die Franzosen zurückzuführen sei, wo die Gotik in der Mitte des 12. Jahrhunderts eigentlich entstanden war. Er bezeichnete die deutsche Architektur als räumlich groß, barbarisch und plump. Er gebrauchte das Wort „entartet“ im Sinne von abweichend vom national eigenen, klassischen Ideal. Gregor Langfeld, Deutsche Kunst in New York. Vermittler – Kunstsammler – Ausstellungsmacher, 1904-1957, Berlin 2011, 34, 82. 11 Alfred H. Barr, German Painting and Sculpture, Ausstellungskatalog Museum of Modern Art, New York 1931, 10. 12 Die abstrakte Kunst war auf Barrs Ausstellung eine Randerscheinung: Hierzu kann die wohl vertretene Gruppe von Künstlern gezählt werden, die sich konstruktiv-geometrisierend mit der menschlichen Figur beschäftigte (Baumeister, Schlemmer und Molzahn). Von diesen Künstlern waren insgesamt nur fünf Kunstwerke ausgestellt. Franz Marc war allerdings mit sechs Gemälden vertreten. Korrigierter Katalog: Archiv Museum of Modern Art, New York: Reg 11.

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rakterisierte, wie auch das von Kandinsky formalästhetisch.13 Im Gegensatz dazu betonte Katherine Dreier gerade Marcs Verfahren in der Farbgebung seiner Tierbilder, und sie hielt Kandinskys geistige und transzendentale Auffassungen für wesentlich.14 Neben den unterschiedlichen Formen des Expressionismus bildeten die Maler der Neuen Sachlichkeit in Barrs Ausstellung eine eigene Gruppe: Otto Dix, George Grosz und Georg Schrimpf. Relativ wenige Maler der Neuen Sachlichkeit waren also vertreten, obwohl diese Richtung zeitgemäßer war als der Expressionismus. Schrimpfs Gemälde strahlten Zeitlosigkeit und Harmonie aus. Doch gerade Dix und Grosz, die bekanntesten Vertreter der Neuen Sachlichkeit, hatten Berührungspunkte mit dem Expressionismus. Weiterhin waren die Bildhauer Barlach, de Fiori, Kolbe, Marcks und Sintenis stark präsent. Diese tendierten zur klassischen und realistischen Form, was auf Zuspruch rechnen konnte. Allein Belling und Schlemmer waren mit abstrakten Skulpturen vertreten. In seinem Ausstellungskatalog erläuterte Barr, dass international orientierte Kunst nicht als ‚deutsch‘ bezeichnet werden könne! Reine Abstraktion, Konstruktivismus, Dada und Surrealismus waren auf seiner Ausstellung kaum vertreten. Dies geschah nicht etwa, weil er die abwesenden Strömungen und Künstler nicht geschätzt hätte. Er legte sogar große Bewunderung für das Werk von Hans Arp, Max Ernst und Kurt Schwitters an den Tag, indem er es bereits 1935 bzw. 1936 sammelte und ausstellte.15 Mit seiner Präsentationsweise schuf er eine konzentrierte Vorstellung von der deutschen Kunst. Seine Sichtweise rührte vom deutschen Kunstdiskurs seit dem Ersten Weltkrieg her und ging von einem überzeitlichen germanischen Künstlertum aus, das dem mediterranen Kulturkreis entgegenge13 1923/24 sah Barr am Vassar College Gemälde von Kandinsky auf einer von der Société Anonyme organisierten Ausstellung. Er empfand dessen Werk zwar als farblich dekorativ, aber gleichzeitig meinte er, dass Rhythmus fehle, wodurch die dekorativen Eigenschaften abgeschwächt würden. Er fand, dass Kandinskys Kunst keine Emotion vermittle. Das MoMA sammelte dessen Werk somit erst nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg aktiv, wenn auch Abby Rockefeller 1935 ein Aquarell (1915) stiftete und das Museum 1941 eine Zeichnung (1915) ankaufte. Barr meinte 1934, dass der dekorative Expressionismus mit seiner spontanen Ungebundenheit und rein ästhetischem Erleben die extremste Ausprägung in Kandinskys Werk gefunden habe. Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art, Cambridge, MA and London 2002, 31-32; Modern Works of Art: Fifth Anniversary Exhibition, Ausstellungskatalog Museum of Modern Art, New York 1934, 14. 14 Dreier schrieb: „The danger of the ornament which Americans find especially hard to avoid – Kandinsky has mastered and controlled. He saw the danger from the beginning. He speaks of his love of ‚the hidden‘, the mysterious, the quality of time“ (Dreier, Kandinsky, 12; Dreier, Modern Art, 30-33). 15 Diese Künstler waren auf den wichtigen MoMA-Ausstellungen „Cubism and Abstract Art“ und „Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism“ (beide 1936) vertreten.



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setzt war.16 Diese höchst einseitige Sicht auf die deutsche Kunst sollte sich als Schlüssel für deren Kanonisierung erweisen. Durch die Benennung weniger, anschaulicher Eigenschaften erlangte die deutsche Kunst einen eigentümlichen Status, ‚machte sie sich einen Namen‘. Der Begriff des Expressionismus funktionierte als Erkennungszeichen für die deutsche Kunst, die sich damit von der französischen Kunst unterschied und einen wahrnehmbaren Platz in der Kunstszene erhielt. Barr erklärte eine nicht-formalistische Sicht auf deutsche Kunst für essentiell, um sie verstehen zu können. Die formal-ästhetischen Eigenschaften dieser Kunst ordnete er den psychologischen, gesellschaftlichen, politischen, philosophischen und religiösen unter.17 Form und Stil seien weniger Selbstzweck als bei der französischen und amerikanischen Kunst. Er behauptete sogar, dass die deutsche Kunst in der Regel keine reine Kunst sei und die Künstler häufig Kunst und Leben miteinander verwechselten. Er meinte, dass zeitgenössische Künstler dabei in die Fußspuren ihrer Vorfahren traten: So habe Albrecht Dürer sich für Wissenschaft und Metaphysik interessiert, Hans Holbein für das Ergründen menschlichen Charakters und Matthias Grünewald für gewaltige Gefühlsäußerungen.18 Er prägte mit einer linearen Geschichtsauffassung das Bild vom unveränderlichen deutschen Volkscharakter, der seinen Ausdruck in der Kunst gefunden habe. Barr suggerierte auch, dass das idealistische Programm der Brücke durch eine romantische Interpretation mittelalterlicher Gilden inspiriert worden sei.19 Obwohl die Ausstellung ein breites Spektrum von ablehnenden bis hin zu begeisterten Besprechungen bewirkte, nahmen die Kritiker Barrs deutsche Schau insgesamt positiver auf als Dreiers internationale Brooklyn-Ausstellung mit vornehmlich abstrakter Kunst. Auch Barrs persönliche Einschätzung der Qualität des Expressionismus war Schwankungen unterworfen und manchmal geradezu gespalten. Das ist mit darauf zurückzuführen, dass sich seiner Ansicht nach die deutschen Künstler im Gegensatz zu den Franzosen auf den Inhalt und nicht auf die Form bezogen. Der Expressionismus war in jener Zeit noch nicht kanonisiert und es sollte noch dauern, bevor Barr erste Ölgemälde eines Brücke-Künstlers 16 Wilhelm R. Valentiner vertrat bereits 1923 eine ‚völkische‘ Konzeption der deutschen Kunst, als er für die Anderson Galleries in New York eine deutsche Kunstausstellung organisierte. Hiermit griff er, ähnlich wie Barr, den künstlerischen Diskurs auf, wie dieser sich seit dem Ersten Weltkrieg in Deutschland entwickelt hatte, als man den Expressionismus zur nationalen Selbstdarstellung heranzog und ihn infolgedessen aus dem internationalen Kontext heraus löste. W. R. Valentiner, A Collection of Modern German Art. Introduced by W.R. Valentiner, Ausstellungskatalog Anderson Galleries, New York 1923. 17 Barr, German Painting and Sculpture, 7. 18 Barr, German Painting and Sculpture, 7. 19 Barr, German Painting and Sculpture, 10, 13, 22 etc.

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und von einem Repräsentanten des Blauen Reiters anschaffte (abgesehen von vereinzelten Werken auf Papier). Barr bekundete durch seine ambivalente Haltung gegenüber diesen Künstlern, dass diese noch nicht kanonisiert waren. Die damit vorgeführte objektivierende Distanz erhöhte seine Glaubwürdigkeit. Seine Texte waren frei von jeder fanatischen Intoleranz, wie sie bei anderen Verfechtern der Avantgarde, etwa bei Katherine Dreier, durchaus auftreten konnte. Seine Analysen machten im Gegenteil einen gediegenen, vorurteilslosen Eindruck, weshalb Kunstkritiker gern seine Auffassungen übernahmen und weiter verbreiteten. Das einzige wichtige Gemälde eines deutschen Künstlers, das in der Zeit, als die deutsche Ausstellung lief, als Schenkung Philip Johnsons in die Sammlung kam (1932), war das Bildnis Dr. Mayer-Hermann (1926) von Otto Dix. Wenn die Aufnahme eines Künstlers in eine museale Sammlung als Indikator für die Kanonisierung gilt, so war damals für die neue deutsche Kunst weniger ihr expressiver Gehalt als vielmehr der Realismus der Darstellungen ein ausschlaggebendes Kriterium. Die moderne deutsche Kunst fand keinesfalls erst nach 1933 in den USA eine allgemeine Anerkennung. Sie war bis zum Aufkommen des Nationalsozialismus nicht grundsätzlich abgelehnt worden. Das wird häufig übersehen, wenn der heutige Kanon Forschenden als Ausgangspunkt dient. Damals genossen allerdings andere Kunstformen, die heute international nur noch eine marginale Rolle spielen, ein viel höheres Ansehen. Rezensenten schätzten klassische und figurative Tendenzen, wie diese in der deutschen Bildhauerkunst und Neuen Sachlichkeit zum Ausdruck kommen. Die Kunstszene wurde dominiert von einer Rivalität zwischen den Verteidigern traditioneller Normen und solchen, die auf deren Wandel abzielten. In dem Maße, in dem avantgardistische Strömungen etabliert wurden, verloren die traditionellen ihre bisherige Position in der künstlerischen Hierarchie. Konservative Kunstkritiker verrissen aus ästhetischen Erwägungen sowohl die moderne französische als auch die moderne deutsche Kunst, die beide nicht dem damaligen Geschmack entsprachen. Erst während der Periode des Nationalsozialismus setzte ein gravierender Umschwung in der Einschätzung der deutschen Avantgarde ein. In der ersten Hälfte der dreißiger Jahre war das amerikanische Interesse für die nationalsozialistische Kulturpolitik zunächst noch gering. Die Haltung änderte sich, als Deutschland 1937 entschiedene Schritte gegen die moderne Kunst unternahm. Dass einflussreiche Akteure in der amerikanischen Kunstszene das Thema jetzt verstärkt aufgriffen, war eine wesentliche Voraussetzung für die durchschlagende Akzeptanz einer Kunst, die vorher nur ansatzweise Anerkennung gefunden hatte. Barr stand wiederum in vorderster Reihe, als es darum ging, die moderne Kunst ideologisch zu legitimieren. Das erstaunt umso mehr, als er gemeinhin als Formalist schlechthin betrachtet wird.



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Ein Beispiel ist eine Pressemitteilung des MoMA vom August 1939, worin unter dem Titel „Exiled Art Purchased by Museum of Modern Art“ neue Ankäufe von Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Wilhelm Lehmbruck und von Werken französischer Maler angekündigt wurden. Diese Gemälde und die Skulptur Lehmbrucks kamen aus dem Besitz wichtiger deutscher Museen, wo sie von den Nationalsozialisten als ‚entartete‘ Kunst beschlagnahmt und verkauft wurden.20 Barr urteilte in der Pressemitteilung, Lehmbrucks Kniende (1911) sei eines der größten Meisterwerke moderner Skulptur und die Maler der angekauften Werke würden auch außerhalb Deutschlands zu den besten lebenden Künstlern zählen.21 Seine Ambivalenz in der Einschätzung dieser Künstler, die er 1931 zum Ausdruck gebracht hatte, war verschwunden. Jetzt bezeichnete er sie als international von größter Bedeutung, während er vorher fand, dass Kirchners Ausstrahlung eher national sei. Hiermit gelangte das erste Ölgemälde eines Brücke-Künstlers in die Sammlung, eine von Kirchners Berliner Straßenszenen (1913/14). Mit Klees Um den Fisch (1926) erwarb das Museum auch das erste Ölgemälde dieses Künstlers. Im gleichen Jahr folgte sein Aquarell Die Zwitscher-Maschine (1922) aus dem ehemaligen Besitz der Berliner Nationalgalerie. Um seine Ankäufe aufzuwerten, argumentierte Barr politischer als zuvor. Er zitierte Roosevelts Rede zur Eröffnung des neuen Museumsbaus über den Anspruch künstlerischer Freiheit in der Demokratie, womit der amerikanische Präsident die ideologische Position der USA gegenüber ‚entarteter‘ Kunst festgelegt hatte.22 Die politische Weltlage und die dadurch bedingte Positionierung amerikanischer Autoritätsinstanzen gegenüber moderner Kunst sorgten bei vielen Rezipienten für eine Revision ihrer Haltung gegenüber dieser Kunst. 1939 bezeichnete die Zeitschrift American Art News die Kniende als die wichtigste moderne Skulptur, die ein Museum in jenem Jahr erworben habe.23 Das Spätwerk Lehmbrucks gehörte von nun an zum Kanon moderner Kunst. Der Kontext der nationalsozialistischen Verfemung moderner Kunst spielte dabei die entscheidende Rolle, wodurch Lehmbrucks Spätwerk geradezu zum Sinnbild dieser Kunst wurde. Die zweite Hälfte der dreißiger Jahre brachte damit eine drastische Veränderung in der Einschätzung von Lehmbrucks Œuvre, wobei eher von einem Bruch als von einer kontinuierlichen Entwicklung gesprochen werden muss. Bis 20 Langfeld, Deutsche Kunst in New York, 127. 21 „Exiled Art Purchased by Museum of Modern Art“, Archive Museum of Modern Art, New York: Exhib. n° 186. Das Museum präsentierte die neu erworbenen Kunstwerke auf der 10-jährigen Jubiläumsausstellung „Art in Our Time“. 22 Die Rede war u.a. auf der Titelseite der Herald Tribune und in den New York Times ausführlich wiedergegeben (11 Mai 1939). Für weitere Reaktionen der Presse: The Archives of American Art (MoMA Archives, Public Information Scrapbooks), reel 5062. 23 „The Year In Art: A Review Of 1939“, in: American Art News, 30. Dezember 1939.

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zu diesem Zeitpunkt wurden die klassischen Skulpturen des Künstlers deutlich favorisiert.24 In der Presseinformation ging Barr auf die nationalsozialistische Kulturpolitik ein. Er führte aus, dass der Widerstand gegen moderne Kunst eng mit der Naziideologie verknüpft sei. Sofort nach der Machtübernahme habe die Unterdrückung moderner Kunst und Künstler begonnen. Er berichtete über „Verunglimpfungen moderner Meisterwerke“; über Entlassungen von Museumsdirektoren, Kuratoren und lehrenden Künstlern; die Beseitigung von Kunstwerken aus Museen und die beiden großen Münchner Kunstausstellungen von 1937.25 Barr meinte, die einzig gute Sache am Exil dieser herausragenden Werke sei, dass sie Länder bereicherten, wo künstlerische Freiheit noch Bestand habe. Barr hieß die exilierten Werke willkommen, welche die europäische Sammlung des MoMA so außerordentlich bereicherten. Im Allgemeinen konnten die Kunstkritiker sich Barrs Auffassung voll und ganz anschließen. So urteilte auch das American Magazine of Art, dass Kneeling Woman eines der großen Meisterwerke der modernen Bildhauerkunst sei.26 Der Rezensent nannte das Gemälde von Kirchner aus der Berliner Nationalgalerie den interessantesten Ankauf, da das Werk am unbekanntesten sei. Barr hatte das Gemälde jedoch bereits 1931 auf seiner deutschen Kunstausstellung gezeigt. Im Hinblick auf diese positive Reaktion bezüglich Kirchners Gemälde sollte man daran erinnern, dass die ersten Einzelausstellungen des Künstlers in Amerika, die nur zwei Jahre vorher stattfanden, keinerlei Beachtung fanden.27 Jetzt erst begannen sowohl das MoMA als auch Museen außerhalb New Yorks expressionistische Kunst zu sammeln. 24 Während Lehmbruck auf der Armory Show (1913) seine klassische Große Stehende (1910) verkaufte, blieb seine Kniende unverkauft und man reagierte hämisch auf das Werk. Milton W. Brown, The Story of the Armory Show, New York 1988, 146. 25 Bibliothek Museum of Modern Art (Releases 1939). 26 „News and Comment“, in: American Magazine of Art, 32, 1939, n° 9, 534-540, here 534. 27 Valentiner organisierte Anfang 1937 im Detroiter Museum die erste kleinere Einzelausstellung von Kirchners neueren Werken in den USA. Valentiner war sich bewusst, dass nur wenig Interesse für diesen „unbekannten Namen“ bestand. Er verkaufte nur wenige Aquarelle, allein Valentiner selbst kaufte ein Ölgemälde, um den Künstler nicht zu enttäuschen. Im September/ Oktober 1937 zeigte Curt Valentin dessen jüngeres Werk. Da die Ausstellung wiederum erfolglos war, erwarb Valentiner abermals ein Gemälde. Reinhold Heller, „Ernst Ludwig Kirchner“, in: New Worlds: German and Austrian Art, 1890-1940, Hrsg. Renée Price, New York 2001, 166 und 167. Valentin schrieb an Kirchner: „[…] Wenn sie die beiliegenden Kritiken lesen, so erschrecken Sie nicht zu sehr […] So kann ich auch über ‚praktische‘ Erfolge noch nichts melden. Aber man m u s s hier Geduld haben und langsam den Boden vorbereiten – und nicht für heute, sondern für längere Sicht arbeiten […]“. Valentin an Kirchner d.d. 5. Oktober 1937, Archiv Museum of Modern Art, New York.



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Kunstvermittler stilisierten die verfemten Künstler als Gegenpol zum Faschismus. Der Mythos vom antifaschistischen Künstler wurde geboren, der alle politischen Widersprüchlichkeiten übersieht. Die politische Gesinnung von dem Nationalsozialismus nahestehenden Künstlern wurde konsequent ausgeblendet, verharmlost oder umgedeutet, um deren Kunst auf diese Weise zu rechtfertigen. Im Zuge dieses Umschwungs öffneten sich die Rezipienten einer Ästhetik, die nicht eigentlich ihren Schönheitsvorstellungen entsprach. Umgekeht tabuisierten die Vermittler solche Kunst, die mit dem Nationalsozialismus in Verbindung gebracht werden konnte und deshalb als ‚kanonunwürdig‘ galt. Nach dem Eintritt der USA in den Zweiten Weltkrieg setzte sich die ideologische Sichtweise auf die moderne Kunst erst recht durch. Mit dem Sieg der Alliierten über Deutschland verfestigte sich diese Perspektive in einer wiederum veränderten, polarisierten Weltsituation. Die in den dreißiger Jahren eingeleitete Kanonisierung des Expressionismus konnte sich jetzt voll und ganz durchsetzen. Mit Barrs Darstellungsweise erlangten die Kunstwerke Symbolcharakter; sie standen für das Deutschland der demokratischen Weimarer Republik vor dem ‚Dritten Reich‘. Diese Kunst versinnbildlichte die Unterdrückung der Künstler, die sich der Tyrannei entgegensetzten und selbst ein besseres, geistiges Deutschland repräsentierten. Mit der Ehrung der Kunstwerke wurden stellvertretend auch deren Schöpfer geehrt, die unter widrigen Umständen zu leben hatten. Amerikaner mit demokratischem Pflichtgefühl und Mitgefühl für die Verfolgten fühlten sich mit deren Kunst verbunden, wodurch ein Identifikationsprozess einsetzte. Diese Tendenz verstärkte sich, sowie die USA vom Dezember 1941 an offiziell am Zweiten Weltkrieg im Kampf gegen Deutschland teilnahmen. Die vom NS-Regime zum einen anerkannte und zum anderen innerhalb Deutschlands verfemte Kunst war ein guter Leitfaden dafür, was nach der Zerschlagung des Nationalsozialismus tabuisiert und kanonisiert wurde. Kunst, die stilistisch mit der offiziellen Kunst des ‚Dritten Reiches‘ assoziiert werden konnte, namentlich naturalistische Tendenzen, wurden abgewertet. Damit verblasste nach 1945 das Ansehen vieler Künstler der Neuen Sachlichkeit und der Bildhauerkunst, die bis zur Zwischenkriegszeit hoch eingeschätzt worden waren. Die politische Argumentation über moderne deutsche Kunst behauptete sich auch noch nach 1945, nun jedoch angepasst an die Verhältnisse im Kalten Krieg. Damit verknüpft setzte sich die Anerkennung dieser Kunst weiter durch. Stellvertretend dafür sei die Ausstellung „German Art of the Twentieth Century“ im MoMA 1957 genannt.28 Der größte Teil der etwa 180 Exponate tendierte zum Expressionismus, woraus man schließen muss, dass die Organisatoren die 28 Das MoMA zeigte diese Ausstellung vom 1. Oktober bis zum 8. Dezember 1957, bevor sie nach St. Louis weiterreiste.

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moderne deutsche Kunst mit dieser Bewegung weiterhin gleichsetzten. Andere Strömungen, wie die Neue Sachlichkeit und konstruktivistische Tendenzen, waren nur vereinzelt vertreten, wobei die Pressemitteilung die Schau dennoch als die umfassendste Übersicht (most comprehensive survey) anpries, die je in den USA gezeigt worden sei.29 Werner Haftmann, der zu den einflussreichsten Kunsthistorikern der damaligen Bundesrepublik gehörte, lieferte den umfangreichsten Katalogbeitrag. Das Konzept des ‚nordischen Expressionismus‘ bestimmte Haftmanns Beitrag in German Art of the Twentieth Century, obwohl er gleichzeitig auf den internationalen Charakter der modernen Kunst hinwies.30 Ähnlich wie Barr und Valentiner etwa drei Jahrzehnte früher war er davon überzeugt, dass die formal-ästhetischen Eigenschaften der deutschen Kunst weniger Selbstzweck als metaphorisch für spirituelle Erfahrungen und für „die Stellung des Menschen im Universum“ seien.31 Er betonte nachdrücklich die Unterschiede zwischen deutscher und französischer Kunst und brachte sie auf die simple Formel ‚Dekor‘ versus ‚Illustration‘. Wie bereits dargestellt, war der Hinweis auf die Verfemung moderner Kunst durch das Naziregime schon vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg in den USA eine erprobte Technik, um diese Kunst aufzuwerten. Haftmann zog Parallelen vom Nationalsozialismus zu den kommunistisch ausgerichteten Systemen von vor und nach 1945 (DDR, Sowjetunion und China), womit er die politische Aufwertung der in diesen Staaten verfemten Kunst aktualisierte und ihr zusätzliches Gewicht verlieh. Seiner Ansicht nach hatten all die totalitären Regimes einen unechten, verschönerten fotografischen Realismus zur Folge, der von der Obrigkeit vorgeschriebene Inhalte darstelle. Beabsichtigt sei die Zerstörung freier, unabhängiger Gedanken und individueller Persönlichkeiten. Nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg war es Barr, der die moderne Kunst mit westlichen Demokratien identifizierte und sie als unvereinbar mit Faschismus und Kommunismus darstellte, womit er für Toleranz gegenüber dieser Kunst warb.32 Die totalitären Systeme standen dem Selbst29 Bibliothek Museum of Modern Art (Releases 1957). 30 Werner Haftmann, Alfred Hentzen and William S. Lieberman, German Art of the Twentieth Century, Ausstellungskatalog Museum of Modern Art (in Zusammenarbeit mit The City Art Museum of St. Louis, Missouri), New York 1957, 14. 31 Haftmann, German Art of the Twentieth Century, 19-20, 125. 32 Das kam in einer 1950 erschienenen Grundsatzerklärung amerikanischer Museen zum Ausdruck, bei deren Konzeption Barr die zentrale Rolle spielte. Mit dieser Erklärung verdeutlichten die Museen ihre Position gegenüber moderner Kunst. Weiterhin wendete Barr sich in den fünfziger Jahren wiederholt gegen die konservativen Mitglieder des Repräsentantenhauses George A. Dondero und Fred Ernest Busbey und Senator Joseph McCarthy, die moderne Kunst mit dem Kommunismus in Zusammenhang brachten und als subversiv und antiamerikanisch bezeichne-



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verständnis des Westens während des Kalten Krieges diametral entgegen. Es war eine Zeit, in der man sich mehr als jemals zuvor mit den Werten von Freiheit und Individualismus identifizierte. Illustrativ dafür steht das Vorwort im MoMA Bulletin anlässlich des 25-jährigen Bestehens des Museums vom damaligen Präsidenten der USA, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Sein Leitgedanke ist, dass künstlerische Freiheit als Ausdruck amerikanischer Gesinnung der Tyrannei grundsätzlich entgegensetzt sei.33 Ähnlich wie Roosevelt 1939 in seiner Rede zum 10-jährigen Museumsjubiläum, gab er der modernen Kunst eine politische Daseinsberechtigung, die fest in der amerikanischen Gesellschaft verankert ist. In diesem Sinne setzte Haftmann dem Realismus die Abstraktion und den Expressionismus entgegen, die sich ihm zufolge durch Individualismus auszeichneten. Die gesamte moderne Kunstentwicklung erklärte er kurzerhand für antinaturalistisch, was für ihn jedoch weniger die völlige Negation des Gegenstandes bedeutete als vielmehr eine persönliche Betrachtungs- und Erlebnisweise der gegenständlichen Welt. Deshalb spielte der Expressionismus eine so wichtige Rolle. In Haftmanns rigoroser Trennung der modernen Kunst von totalitären Systemen spiegelte sich die Ohnmacht der fünfziger Jahre gegenüber der nationalsozialistischen Vergangenheit, da die Kontinuitäten und Verflechtungen ausgeblendet wurden, so dass ein verfälschtes Geschichtsbild entstand, das der Etablierung der modernen Kunst diente. Die Förderer moderner Kunst praktizierten eine solche Haltung strukturell bewusst oder unbewusst, was zur zwingenden Aufwertung dieser Kunst führte und für deren Kanonisierung sorgte. Während nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg explizit gegen den Nationalsozialismus gerichtete Kunst kaum gezeigt wurde, beriefen sich einflussreiche Ausstellungsmacher und Kunsthistoriker wie Werner Haftmann auf den weltabgewandten Künstler, auf dessen Privatsphäre und persönlichen Bezug zur Welt. Sie versetzten die moderne Kunst in einen Zustand vermeintlicher Unschuld und projizierten Merkmale wie Individualismus, Gefühlsstärke, Unkonformismus und rebellische Haltung auf diese Kunst und auf die Künstler, die als Repräsentanten des anderen, besseren Deutschland galten. Besonders der Expressionismus symbolisierte Werte wie Freiheit und Individualismus, wodurch diese Kunstrichtung in den Demokratien identitätsbildend war. Die zeitgenössischen Entwicklungen in der Nachkriegskunst sorgten für eine weitere Aufwertung des Expressionismus. ten. Irving Sandler und Amy Newman (Hrsg.), Defining Modern Art. Selected Writings of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. New York 1986, 35-36, 214 ff und 220 ff. 33 “[…] freedom of the arts is a basic freedom, one of the pillars of liberty in our land. […] Likewise, our people must have unimpaired opportunity to see, to understand, to profit from our artists’ work. […] But, my friends, how different it is in tyranny […]” (Dwight D. Eisenhower, „Freedom of the Arts“, in: The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, 22, 1954, n° 1/2, 3).

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Kanonisierungen sind gesellschaftliche Vorgänge mit identitätsstiftender Wirkung. Der Betrachter erkennt sich im Kunstwerk wieder und sieht sich in seinen Überzeugungen bestätigt. Die Identifikation mit der Ideologie, die mit dem jeweiligen Kunstwerk assoziiert wird, schafft die Voraussetzung dafür, dass das Werk des ästhetischen Blickes für würdig befunden wird. Die nationalistische Perspektive auf die deutsche Kunst erwies sich als so erfolgreich, dass sie sich bis heute halten konnte. In diesem Sinne lebt das nationalistische 19. Jahrhundert kunsthistorisch weiter. Der Expressionismus gilt nach wie vor als die deutsche Kunst schlechthin, obwohl diese Auffassung widerlegbar ist. Im Laufe der Zeit projizierte man auf die so bezeichnete Kunstbewegung unterschiedliche, oftmals irrationale Bedeutungen (Ausdruck des deutschen Volkscharakters, demokratisch, antitotalitär etc.), die für deren Etablierung wesentlich waren. Die unterstellte ästhetische Autonomie von Kunst im musealen Raum ist bei genauer Betrachtung nur sehr bedingt tragbar. Ästhetische Erfahrungen sind das Produkt gesellschaftlicher und historischer Gegebenheiten. Der Rezipient erfährt das Kunstwerk zu einem bestimmten historischen Zeitpunkt und gebunden an einen spezifischen sozialen Ort, unter Bedingungen, aufgrund derer er jeweils die künstlerische Bedeutung aktualisiert.

Gunilla Hermansson

Expressionism, Fiction and Intermediality in Nordic Modernism After decades of scholarly discussions, the label ‘expressionist prose’ still comes with a question mark as its tail. Recently, in an edited volume on Kafka’s short stories, Moritz Baßler has suggested that we define expressionist literature not, or at least not solely, in terms of content and form but first and foremost in relation to a scene determined by different historical and sociological aspects, such as places of distribution and friendships.1 However, this simultaneously pragmatic and elegant solution is not immediately applicable to all literatures. In the Nordic countries, for instance, there is no such obvious scene. What there is, is a number of discourses and ideas surrounding the catch word ‘expressionism’, and a number of literary works that show resemblances to some of the forms and contents that were exhibited on the continental expressionist scene. However, the Nordic case might actually open up another possible approach to the problem, one that is less focused on how ‘expressionism’ and ‘prose’ can be reconciled in one definition, and more on how prose fiction and the discourses and ideas tied to expressionism interact. As we will see, this approach leads almost directly to intermedial fantasies and experiments, to gender issues – and to new theoretical problems. Thus, it may also suggest some of the ways in which prose fiction contributes to the history of European expressionism. In this chapter, I describe quite summarily the most distinct ideas and lines of rhetoric surrounding the word expressionism in the Scandinavian-speaking countries, and what happens when this rhetoric is activated in works of fiction. I refer to a number of writers, chosen for being both participants in the discussion of expressionism and for publishing prose fiction in the years 1910–1930: Emil Bønnelycke and Tom Kristensen in Denmark, Anna Lenah Elgström, Gösta Adrian-Nilsson and Pär Lagerkvist in Sweden, Hagar Olsson and Elmer Diktonius in Finland and Sigurd Hoel in Norway. They belong to the history of expressionism in the Nordic countries, I argue, although only a few of them presented themselves as dedicated expressionists at one point or another (Adrian-Nilsson, Bønnelycke, Diktonius). In order to develop and clarify the argument, the second half of the chapter will be dedicated to the novel På Kanaanexpressen (On the Canaan Express, 1929) by Hagar Olsson. It represents an interesting development both of 1 Moritz Baßler, ‟Unter dem Kafka-Massiv. Unterwegs zu einer Typologie expressionistischer Kurzprosa”, in: Kafka und die kleine Prosa der Moderne/Kafka and Short Modernist Prose, eds. Manfred Engel and Ritchie Robertson, Würzburg 2010, 181-193, here 182.

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the interaction between programmes and fiction and of the tentative intermedial experiments in Nordic modernist prose between the wars.

Intermediality, Expressionism and Prose Looking at the different attempts to define and discuss expressionism in the Scandinavian speaking countries in the period 1910–1930, one finds that besides the reaction against naturalism, the most widespread idea put forward is that modern literature should do as modern painting has already done.2 This hardly comes as a surprise, and of course, modern painting has provided a vocabulary not only for the artists and writers involved, but also for researchers, who speak of distortion, abstraction, montage, stark colours etc. in literary works. Typically, narrative features such as breaking with causality, with traditional psychology, chronology and perspective, but also more radically evading comprehensibility, are understood as parallels to painterly abstraction.3 But I find it difficult or even problematic to attempt to generalize these relations. When applied to novels and short stories, the notion of abstraction tends to end up in a quagmire of metaphorical elasticity,4 and once again, the theory of expressionist prose seems to be haunted by an “aber-dabei”; the combination of length and word-signs seems inevitably to offer resistance to radical abstraction, which then becomes a relevant category only for a very small part of the conventional corpus of expressionist prose. Suffice it to state that the main part of the chosen Nordic prose material is rather traditional when it comes to form, and we find no radical experiments verging on incomprehensibility. Bønnelycke experiments with chronology and both he and Olsson depict the interruption of other, metaphysical or fantastic worlds into everyday life. In Adrian-Nilsson’s modest literary oeuvre the fantastic is more in line with a decadent or gothic mode. Elgström and occasionally Hoel

2 This is what Torben Jelsbak in a Danish context has called the “ut-pictura-poesis” doctrine of Danish expressionism, in: Ekspressionisme. Modernismens formelle gennembrud i dansk malerkunst og poesi, Hellerup 2005, 87. 3 On incomprehensibility, see: Moritz Baßler, Die Entdeckung der Textur. Unverständlichkeit in der Kurzprosa der emphatischen Moderne 1910-1916, Tübingen 1994. 4 For instance in Neil H. Donahue’s attempt to reinscribe expressionist prose into a modernist tradition in Forms of Disruption. Abstraction in Modern German Prose. He maintains that Musil manages in Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless (1906) to write “an abstract novel without leaving the safe appearances of realistic setting, character psychology, and dramatic plot” (Michigan 1993, 70).



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work with stylized, sometimes even allegorical fictional universes. Lagerkvist’s short stories more radically resist a realistic milieu as well as psychology and plot, and he also works with stylization, parataxis and reduction. But only in some cases does it seem meaningful to interpret it as a way of working that parallels avant-garde painting. Such convincing readings (but also less convincing) exist on the ekphrastic quality and ‘angularity’ in Lagerkvist’s short stories in Motiv (Motif, 1914) and Järn och människor (Iron and men, 1915).5 In the story “Maurice Fleury” the protagonist has had his face destroyed in the war, and when his wife fails to recognize him, he speculates on how he might revenge himself by aligning his inner self with the brutal aesthetics of the grenade: It also happened that he reflected on the advantage for an amorist if his features had not been formed by a tender and conscious nature that, with forces drawn from his inner man, had for years and years anxiously carved them, but instead by the sharp iron that swiftly completed the many different incisions and only left dry abstractions behind.6

What I would like to propose here is that it might be productive to view these mimic efforts in the context of a striking tendency among several of the authors to let the rhetoric of the contemporary programmes and articles (written by other critics or themselves) flow into the fictional language. This is done either directly by letting catchwords from the discourse on pictorial arts become metaphors and adjectives describing a milieu or a physiognomy, by letting the characters discuss modern painting and/or more indirectly by including the cubist painter in the plot. What interests me, however, is not just how the authors create intermedial references, but how these are staged and valued within the fictive universe.

The Rhetoric of Modern Art in Fiction The typical rhetoric of the programmes and articles on expressionism, modern literature and art in the Nordic countries 1910-1930 works with a conglomerate

5 Teddy Brunius, ‟Det kubistiska experimentet”, in: BLM, 1954, n° 10, 805-814; Bengt Larsson, ‟Pär Lagerkvists litterära kubism”, in: Samlaren, 1965, n° 86, 66-95; Gunnar Tideström, ‟Något om Pär Lagerkvists kubism”, in: Synpunkter på Pär Lagerkvist, ed. Gunnar Tideström, Stockholm 1966, 93-100; Joachim Schiedermair, ‟Stil als Gesicht. Pär Lagerkvist, der Kubismus und ein offenes Ende”, in: www.germanistik2001.de. Vorträge des Erlanger Germanistentags, ed. Hartmut Kugler, Bielefeld 2002, 161-171. 6 Pär Lagerkvist, Järn och människor, Stockholm 1915, 63-64, my translation.

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of reduction, simplicity, clarity, manliness, health, power, monumentality and brutality.7 It is possible to trace this pattern in a tendency to mention, describe or to mimic cubist or abstract painting and technique in the fictional works of Lagerkvist, Bønnelycke, Kristensen and Diktonius.8 The tendency is most apparent in the 1910s and early 1920s, but as late as 1932, Diktonius published Janne Kubik: Ett träsnitt i ord (1932) and simply postulated the parallels between the narrative and an avant-garde technique in the subtitle (a woodcut in words) and in an introductory remark, where the novel was described as a primitive portrait, hard as a woodcut. The interesting thing is that when the rhetoric is activated in these works of fiction, it is almost invariably staged as problematic. In all of the works mentioned above, avant-garde painting is connected in disturbing ways with violence, war, revolution and masculinity in crisis. The very complex of the typical rhetoric of the “ut-pictura” doctrine apparently rouses as much anxiety and resistance as it thrills when subjected to a more elaborate ‘testing’ in the medium of the novel and the short story. The result is a striking ambivalence towards the new aesthetics in these authors’ fiction, although it was part of their programme (with the exception of Kristensen). The dominant rhetoric of the ‘doctrine’ in programmes and articles did not go unchallenged. Anna Lenah Elgström explicitly rejected it precisely on the grounds of the masculine and brutal rhetoric and views often connected to it. But it is also possible to discern another, more diffuse line of rhetoric that defines art in metaphysical, mystical and utopian terms. In Adrian-Nilsson’s (GAN’s) reviews and programmes about expressionism and modern art (1915–1922) he also speaks of simplicity, power and brutality, but he combines and increasingly exchanges these words with those of beauty, spirit, harmony, eternity and divine order. The shift is evident in the programme for a true cubism or rather geometrism, Den gudomliga geometrien (The Divine Geometry, 1922), where he presents ideas partly reminiscent of Kandinsky’s theories.9 Hagar Olsson activated the idealist and utopian line in her first collection of short prose, Själarnas ansikten (The Faces of the Souls, 1917). A young woman 7 I have described this in more detail in: Gunilla Hermansson, ‟Picturing Ambivalence. Problems of Engagement, Aestheticism and Violence in Early Nordic Modernist Fiction”, in: Cahiers de la Nouvelle Europe. Special issue: Transferts, appropriations et fonctions de l’avant-garde dans l’Europe, ed. Harri Veivo, Paris 2012, 47-61. 8 Primarily Lagerkvist’s Järn och människor, Bønnelycke’s Spartanerne (1919), Kristensen’s Livets Arabesk (1921) and En Anden (1923), and Diktonius’s Janne Kubik (1932). 9 Bengt Lärkner, Det internationella avantgardet och Sverige 1914-1925, Malmö 1984, 147-150. GAN’s two collections of short stories from 1910 and 1912 predate his writings on expressionism and/or modern art.



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called “Stjärnbarnet” (the star child; the one that the poet Edith Södergran vehemently reacted against) defines art as the source of the spiritual rebirth of mankind. The few chosen will in the near future create a pure art, an art “simplified to the uttermost contours, whose stylized, beautiful and crystal-like balanced system shall be transparent for the infinite and inexpressible light and whose colours and words shall not obscure the road to that which is not”.10 As we see, the two lines of rhetoric overlap, but in this case simplicity and stylization are connected to beauty, light, crystal etc. Another example would be Bønnelycke’s second novel, Aurora (1920), where the working with non-figural painting (and atonal music) is inscribed into the difficult navigation between the sufferings and desires of this world, and the eternal sphere of dreams, divine love and purity. Apparently this line does not provoke the same amount of ambivalence and anxiety as the more dominant rhetoric. It is forced into a balance, or simply tested and then dropped, or problematized in another work. From the mid-1920s Olsson treated expressionism as a thing of the past in her criticism, but she recognized it as having played an important part in paving the way for mysticism, spiritualism and utopianism. In 1925 she advocated a “utopianism for realists” and she added a concern for an engaged or revolutionary art working for a renewed mankind. She seems to be less concerned with the relation between modern art and modern literature. All the more surprising are the radical intermedial and intermaterial experiments in her novel of 1929.

Media Combination and Gender Trouble on the Canaan Express Whereas the large category of intermedial references is most excessively and playfully explored by the authors, as we have already seen, experiments with actual media combination are quite sparse (with the exception of some book covers by avant-garde artists).11

10 Hagar Olsson, Själarnas ansikten, Helsingfors 1917, 48, my translation. 11 The categories are defined by Irina O. Rajewsky in: ‟Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality”, in: Intermédialités/Intermedialities, 2005, n° 6, 43-64; ‟Border Talks. The Problematic Status of Media Borders in the Current Debate about Intermediality”, in: Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, ed. Lars Elleström, Basingstoke 2010, 51-67.

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Bønnelycke is one of the few authors who did experiment with integrating picture and word in his work.12 In his novel Spartanerne (The Spartans, 1919, see fig. 30) he momentarily turned words into pictures by repeating the words “Grave” (graves), ”Firkanter” (squares), and “Kors” (crosses). Olsson’s novel from 1929 is the other exception to the rule, and the most striking one.

Fig. 30: Emil Bønnelycke, Spartanerne (1919), 112.

På Kanaanexpressen (see fig. 31) is probably Olsson’s most medium-fixated work. Especially film and theatre are foregrounded literally in the plot as well as symbolically and metaphorically in the characters’ image of the self and the roles they play. The novel is arranged as a montage of texts with different focalisation, different genres and different art forms. The montage or putting together of textual fragments is made without breaking with chronology and a certain causality, but inserted into the text are 12 photographs that add to the complexity of the whole. The novel follows a group of intertwined destinies in Helsinki. Most attention is paid to Peter, who returns from a trip to Europe in the first chapter and slowly liberates himself from his old way of thinking and the stifling inauthenticity around him. Parallel to this we are presented with literary snapshots of the lives of a group of women and a few men divided between two generations. Two young (new) women are the true bearers of a new, optimistic and constructive spirit. Peter forms a pact with the one girl who is called the Eaglet and they choose “Canaan” as their motto. By the end Peter experiences a spiritual breakthrough to a new faith in the meaning of life. The novel concludes with another young 12 On Bønnelycke’s visual poems and manuscripts, see Torben Jelsbak, ‟Avantgarde og boghistorie. Emil Bønnelyckes bibliografiske aktivisme”, in: Lychnos, 2010, 239-259.



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woman, Florrie, a fugitive from a tuberculosis sanatorium. She wants to be truly alive in the time that she has left, and inspired by Peter she also struggles to sacrifice her past hopes and desires and become new. In the plot, the girls, strong and fragile at the same time, are contrasted with older and/or disabled women struggling to maintain life, which to them means being erotically desirable or loved. What pushes Peter into taking the leap is Florrie’s older sister, Tessy, who commits suicide when her lover, Chris, abandons her. Peter publicly accuses himself and society of having killed Tessy, because he and everyone else have served the pessimistic time spirit. Peter’s efficiency, his timing and his slogans are much admired by the young generation in a group called “Facklan” (The Torch), which includes the two young women. The group members nourish diverse modern ideas about religion, sexual liberation, pan-Europeanism etc., and Edith Södergran’s poems are part of their shared vocabulary. Whereas a previous chapter shows that much of their energy evaporated into mere words, drunkenness and casual sex, they now join in a new sense of communality under the banner of something rather vague called “a new life” and a demand for happiness. We could say that Olsson elaborates on a strong tradition in one of the German expressionisms, namely the messianic invocation of a new world and a new man. When published in late 1929, the novel was actually labelled an expressionist work by some reviewers and commentators, partly due to the strong ideological tendency, partly due to the visual outlook. The expressionist label may still be found in literary histories.13 There are minimal notes of attribution on the last page of the book, which tell us that the cover was designed by Olavi Paavolainen. He was the leading name of the Finnish Tulenkantajat (Torchbearers) group, which is generally presumed to be the model for the Torch group in the novel. It is difficult to determine which role Paavolainen played in the overall design of the book or how Olsson came by the pictures. The surviving manuscripts and letters offer little help, but in one way or another Olsson authorized the result and I treat the book as her intermedial and intermaterial project. Only one of the pictures is a reproduction of a painting, a self-portrait by Marie Laurencin, and the self-portrait by the Berlin-based photographer Yva (Else Neuländer-Simon) is double-exposed with a cubist painting by her colleague Heinz Hajek-Halke.14 The cover combines cut pictures by Albert Renger-Patzsch 13 Birgitta Svanberg mentions it as ‟the expressionist novel” in The History of Nordic Women’s Literature Online, 2012, , (22.05.2013). 14 Marion Beckers and Elisabeth Moortgat, Yva: Photographien 1925-1938, Tübingen 2001, 22

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Fig. 31: Hagar Olsson, På Kanaanexpressen (1929), cover.

(a train), Max Burchartz (Lottes Auge) and a work from the photo class in the Folkwangschule in Essen (a man’s portrait). Inside the book we find a cut picture (Atelier in der Gartenkugel) by the Bauhaus artist Georg Muche, a composition of cubes and a female figure attributed to one Alban in Paris and an abstract composition (Radio) by Hannes Flach from Cologne. At least two of the pictures relate to film: a portrait of the Danish diva of silent movie, Asta Nielsen by Rolf Mahrenand 208.



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holz, and a double-exposed photo by Francis Bruguière from a series for a neverfinished film called The Way. A picture of a US Navy airship is not attributed to a specific photographer, neither is the picture of what was perhaps Europe’s largest advertisement at the time, the word Citroën created with lamps on the Eiffel tower. A photograph of a portable typewriter is attributed to the Finnish newspaper man and politician, Eero Erkko. To sum up, the pictorial elements represent Bauhaus, Neue Sachlichkeit, celebrity photography, abstract photography, documentary photography etc. – and we might say that the self-portraits represent cubism. We are not presented with one style or aesthetics but with what we could call the state of the art of modern photography and modern visual culture in 1929. What the novel does not present us with are reproductions of expressionist woodcuts, blue horses or absolute, non-figurative paintings. If the “ut pictura poesis” of the pre-romantic painting-literature analogy relied on the realism and vividness of the painting, the avant-garde ‘doctrine’ conversely meant a radical departure from conventional realism and was often combined instead with a notion of capturing the essence of things through abstraction, or of simply constructing a reality.15 With the move from paintings to photographs in Olsson’s novel a new complexity is added to the question of representation and the modernist “ut-pictura” doctrine. The wide range from realist to abstract photos and montages only highlights the arrangement common to them all, as well as mediality as such. Knut Brynhildsvoll has suggested that the theme of a spiritual breakthrough might be interpreted as a parallel to the chemical process of photo development, and that the photos at the same time bring vision, perspective or the dynamic organizing function as such to the fore.16 But, as we see, the stress is on manipulation in a multiple sense which includes reproduction, effective mass communication, and the conflation of a market of art, of ideas and of advertising. At first glance it may seem that the pictures are celebrating modernity and modern form. But whenever there is talk of a modern style, a modern medium or a modern machine in the text, it is deemed shallow or alienating. Peter is visited by a poet who claims that the poetic voice of today is the voice of advertising, engineers, action and reality, and he wants Peter to help him disseminate his poems about aeroplanes through the cinema. In Peter’s eyes this man is nothing but a passage, letting thousands of ready-made words stream through him: “Here 15 See Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric, Chicago 1982, 1-18. 16 Knut Brynhildsvoll, ‟Tekst og bilde i Hagar Olssons roman På Kanaanexpressen”, in: Modernismen i skandinavisk litteratur som historisk fenomen og teoretisk problem, ed. Asmund Lien, Trondheim 1991, 411-418.

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is all, here is none. Crowding, haste, throng, loneliness. Entrance. Exit. Poster! Poster! Look out for the burglar, he is everywhere! The wallet! The handbag! The idea! The idea!”17 At the moment when Peter finally takes the leap and acts, the abstract photo by Flach is inserted (see fig. 32). On the other side of the opening is a translation of a poem from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (“Hast Never Come to Thee an Hour”). The poem puts words to the divine moment that melts all everyday concerns, including love and art, into nothing. The picture combines light and shadow, as well as stillness and movement by the way the Möbius-like form opens upwards. Together they force a halt in the reading of the novel, corresponding to the arrested moment of the epiphany, and at the same time they serve as a contrast to the effects of mass media.

Fig. 32: Hagar Olsson, På Kanaanexpressen, 180-181.

In contrast to the visual outlook, then, the central message of the novel seems to be that form as such is of no importance – the content, the spirit, the heart is what matters. But the story also tells us that some forms and expressions are more effective than others, and the paradoxes of Peter’s own media stunt are obvious: the protest and promise of Canaan is later disseminated in very much the same media as advertisements and the bourgeois conservatism.

17 Olsson, På Kanaanexpressen, 57, my translation.



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If we look more closely at the figurative pictures, we find a striking attention to the female body and the female portrait. Whereas Max Burchartz’s Lotte on the cover montage seems wide-eyed, yet confident, six of the twelve reproductions within the novel present female figures as objects and in different positions of distress, confinement or danger. Let me direct attention to three of them that all combine the female body with geometrical or cubist patterns. In Laurencin’s La Prisonnière (I) (1917) the female figure meets the observer’s eye through some sort of grid that covers the whole canvas. The painting was produced in her Spanish exile during the war, and it is mentioned by Elizabeth Louise Kahn as part of the “disruptive iconographic motifs that serve to destabilize the once-assertive self-image” of her pre-war self-portraits.18 In the novel it is inserted into the text at a moment of Peter’s complete self-loathing and worldweariness, thus also adding an interesting play with gender.

Fig. 33 (left): Hagar Olsson, På Kanaanexpressen, 190. Fig. 34 (right): Yva (Else NeuländerSimon), Self-Portrait (1926), in: På Kanaanexpressen, 212.

When Chris hands over Tessy’s lifeless body to the surgeon at the hospital, a photo of a naked female body in a tableau of cubic forms is inserted (see fig. 33). The body’s soft lines contrast with the sharpness of the shadow as well as with the cubes leaning over her, the two of them metaphorically cutting her legs off 18 Elizabeth Louise Kahn, ‟Marie Laurencin. Une femme inadaptée”, in: Feminist Histories of Art, Burlington 2003, 28.

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from her waist down. The box that she lies on gives associations to an altar of sacrifice. Chris sensed the surgeon as a brutal and cynical but extremely intense and admirably efficient machine, but the brutality of the picture might also point back to Chris himself. Yva’s self-portrait (fig. 34) shows a strange likeness to the painting by Laurencin, in that it imposes a geometrical pattern on the portrait. In Carmel Finnan’s interpretation, the portrait exhibits on the one hand a self-assured androgynous woman/artist who is not a sexualized object of male desire. On the other hand the eyes show vulnerability and the whole composition something less than self-sufficiency: The double exposure of the composition only serves to outline the fragmented nature of the represented self: it is constructed according to modernist’s contours, defined by the abstract lines of the superimposed painting. The self in this context is exposed as the construct that it is. It is a mask governed by contemporary ideas of subjectivity that allow the self to be represented in the public domain, but define the scope of the subject’s intent.19

On the other hand, the circles centred at a focal point on the forehead, the triangle opening from this point, as well as the crossed hands could also be associated with religious iconography. In Olsson’s novel the portrait is placed after Florrie’s decision to leave the care of Peter’s wife and start a new life. But on the other side of the opening, there is an enigmatic card to her from Chris, who is now leaving all his lovers behind, Peter’s wife, the dead Tessy and Florrie. He is on a boat, and remembers that Florrie once asked him whether he ever thought she would be happy. He gives no answer but simply remarks that darkness and fog are approaching, and that he keeps his eyes on the compass. The coordinates place him in the Atlantic Ocean. The portrait is the last photo in the novel. Does the combination of picture and text in this case point in the direction of liberation or confinement, determination or resignation? Is the New woman emerging or disappearing behind the wavelike formations? Is the geometrical form attesting to the hidden order of all things or simply stressing the lacks and limits of the new surface? The novel as a whole seems to be asking these questions rather than answering them. The novel concludes with a letter from a tuberculosis-feverish Florrie to her new self. Previously, Peter’s letters to her explain in a rather detached manner that he is no longer an individual but a number, a soldier in an army. Florrie’s letters to Peter, on the other hand, are confused and fumbling. Her last letter resembles 19   Carmel Finnan, ‟Between Challenge and Conformity – Yva’s Photographic Career and Œuvre”, in: Practicing Modernity. Female Creativity in the Weimar Republic, ed. Christiane Schönfeld, Würzburg 2006, 124.



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a prose poem with drastic metaphors that arouses associations with Edith Södergran’s, Elmer Diktonius’ and Pär Lagerkvist’s expressionist poems. “My heart is a predator”, she writes, and she claims that her savage heart is feeding on her own flesh. In contrast, the narrative voice sanctioned that Peter’s heart no longer devoured itself from the moment of his “leap”. With Florrie, however, “hunger” is the last word of the book. In spite of the idea of sacrificing the past and forcing the future in one revolutionary move, the structuring of the plot – like so many other messianic works – gives a focus on the intermediate time, the difficult transition from past to future. Here, the length of the novel also plays a significant role, foregrounding the struggle over time as such, at the same time as it makes the tense dialogue between text and photos possible. Parts of the ambivalent pattern detected in the previously mentioned novels and short stories seem to migrate into this early specimen of a photo-novel.20 The interplay between pictures and text in På Kanaanexpressen is in fact quite complex in relation to the valuation of modern form, to the problematizing of gender roles in modern society, and to the utopian ideology itself. In my view, the photographs contribute to a destabilizing of the devout optimism of the novel’s ideological tendency. Strong hopes are invested in the young, determined woman, but the pictures and the story together suggest that sacrificing the past and forcing the future is a more difficult and risky business for women.

Dynamic Modernism In 1929 the German expressionist ‘scene’ had echoed with goodbyes for a decade, and Hagar Olsson had appointed expressionism a place in literary history. Is it nevertheless relevant to label a novel like På Kanaanexpressen an expressionist novel? As has been clear from the outset, the label is almost empty without further specification. Rather than characterizing it as a novel that would have fitted the expressionist scene, I would describe it as an interesting, late elaboration of central features of German expressionism (utopianism, messianism) as well as a testing and struggling with modern forms typical of Nordic modernist fiction 1910‒1930. In this sense, the novel does belong to the history of expressionist prose, at least in a Nordic perspective. Such an approach stresses the historic20 If there is a similarity with Breton’s Nadja (1928), as Brynhildsvoll suggests (“Tekst og bilde i Hagar Olssons roman På Kanaanexpressen”, 411), it is only on the superficial level of media combination.

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ity and impurity of texts and suggests the meaningfulness of understanding the heterogeneous literary output of the expressionist scene and its less well-defined European fringes in dynamic rather than static terms. In the history of how expressionism was defined by the Nordic poet-critics 1910–1930, the modernised “ut-pictura” doctrine stands out as a common denominator. The short answer to the question, “what becomes of this rhetoric in the fiction by the authors in this period?” would nonetheless be: not much, at least not measured by the number of radical experiments with media combinations or with mimicking the effect of abstraction and reduction by means of narrative technique. In the chosen material, as well as in Nordic modernist prose at large, På Kanaanexpressen stands out as a remarkable exception of elaborate and complex media combination and integration. However, modern painting, as a theme filtered through certain kinds of rhetoric linked to both expressionism and cubism, has proved to be both important and productive in most of the authors’ works. The narrative, short or long, does seem to provide an opportunity for experimenting, investigating and testing the avant-garde aesthetics and the ideas connected to them, in ways that are offered neither in the lyric nor the programmatic genres – and often the result is highly ambivalent, mixing fascination, anxiety, devotion and resistance.

Ileana Pintilie

Materiality and Dematerialization in Paul Neagu’s Work The work of Paul Neagu (1938-2004) developed between East and West and became representative for a European cultural synthesis, achieved after bringing the two cultural spaces of East and West together. Educated at the Arts Academy in Bucharest in the 1960s, Neagu settled in the UK in 1970, his dowry being the cultural tradition of the artifact, with an obvious proneness to materiality. In this chapter I trace the transformation of materials in Neagu’s sensitive and sensuous work, which kept refining and dematerialising itself as it ever more clearly came to oppose form and material and to express a conceptual system that sought to intervene in space and place. Neagu’s artistic debut in Romania, in the age of socialist realism, took place in 1965, against the general trend of official art. The young artist rejected the figurative and refused to cling to a well defined artistic genre. Instead, he made his way towards mixed media with a series of provocative “tactile” objects. Considering sight to be an “exhausted” sense, Neagu chose to appeal to touch and taste, in an earnest effort to recover contemporary man’s lost receptiveness to materiality. Neagu also created a Manifesto of Palp’Art,1 where he emphasized the unified power of all senses as a possible path towards “an aesthetics of the organic”. The artist was hoping this would enable the receiver to totally “possess” the artistic object, beyond a “vulgar naturalist”2 perception of art in general. Already in Romania, then, Neagu moved away from the aesthetics of socialist realism, or at least from “realistic” art in the most simplifying sense. His series of tactile objects, which were entitled Neagu’s Boxes, were constructed from trivial materials at first, making up structures in the shape of match boxes, put together in a fragile ensemble, or of other materials such as wood, tin, leather, or organic materials. Despite their frailty, the objects had a sophisticated structure, with opening and closing flaps, mysteriously hidden deep inside the representation of a human figure, and utilising precious materials, such as velvet, or gilded mosaic pieces. The most representative work in this category, hinting at Byzantine monumental art, was entitled The Big Metronome (see fig. 35). It represented an assemblage of five pieces, arranged so as to form a cross, decorated with mosaic, 1 The manifesto was first published in English, in a 1969 exhibition leaflet, at Edinburgh, and later in Romanian, in: Petru Comarnescu, Iulian Mereuţă and Mihai Drişcu, “Laborator. Palp’Art”, in: Arta, 1970, n° 5, 34-36. 2 Paul Neagu, “Obiectele N”, in: România literară, 2 July 1970, n° 27, 26.

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copper, and enamel, protected by a large box, with opening and closing flaps, revealing its hidden heart little by little. Neagu’s Boxes were hybrid objects, in which the artist applied the composition-decomposition principle, alternating the visible and the concealed, toying with the materials so as to reveal the frolicsome character of the collection, projected as a challenge for the public, a trap which could be touched and dismantled into its numerous unseen components. These works, of amazing handicraft, appealing to all senses, especially touch, were the result of reclaiming a rediscovered Oriental tradition. Several of Neagu’s objects, including some of the boxes and the drawings that followed, were suggestive of the tradition of Coptic Egypt: human figures wrapped like mummies, small relic-objects, as if belonging to a funeral hoard, precious materials piled up alongside organic matter. Neagu’s intuition to rediscover and bring back to life objects from an ancient culture was converted into a performance, in 1971, named The Egyptian Picnic,3 in which the artist laid down on the grass, in a London park, a series of such small objects, which he then discovered gradually, with the help of touch.

Fig. 35 (left): The Big Metronome, 1966-1968, mixed-media. Fig. 36 (right): Street performance in Bucharest, 1968.

If, at the beginning, the objects were the size of boxes or cases, he later projected them in oversized versions, until they reached human dimensions, and installed them on stands, some provided with wheels. This transformed them into more complex and disquieting assemblages, because of their shape. All these objects 3 Paul Neagu and Monica Omescu, Paul Neagu. Catalogul unei donaţii (National Art Museum of Romania), Bucharest 1996, 8-9.



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contained surprise elements and bore ironic names or titles stemming from areas that had no connection with the arts. Such names were: Rationalizer of Collapse and Anti-collapse, Prestige Collector, Compact Criteriological Computer, Unbuilt Functionalizer, Twin Radiators, etc. From small forms, he moved to big objects, fixed on legs or wheels. These increasingly complex and bizarre structures were the expression of a precariously hidden irony, with ludicrous overtones, as it happened in the series of objects entitled Collector of Honours and Medals, where the artist probed into the reward system of “socialist medals of honour”, mocking the value selection system of the communist regime, with no relevance for society. With these objects, the height of human adults, Neagu organized a performance on the streets of Bucharest in 1968, occupying, among others, a busy avenue in the centre of the city (see fig. 36). This solitary initiative was considered the first public performance in Romania at the time.4 Neagu’s objects, with strange names such as “computer”, “aggregate”, “container”, “focus” or “collector”, made up the material of his first personal exhibition in 1969, an event which coincided with the birth of a new generation in Romanian art, originated by a generation of critical people with no tolerance for the current political context. The artist’s success became a fact once the first opportunities to exhibit arose – Neagu’s Boxes in Hamburg, in 1968, and in the Demarco Gallery in Edinburgh the following year. Paul Neagu’s friendship with Horia Bernea consolidated both their careers, since they communicated and supported each other in their research. Both Paul Neagu and Horia Bernea took part in the Paris Youth Biennial, in 1971, where they were singled out by French art critic Georges Boudaille, who dedicated an important study to the Romanian avant-garde in those years.5 The arrival in Bucharest of Richard Demarco, the Scottish gallery owner who wanted to discover Eastern Europe, gave Neagu an impulse to leave Romania. Consequently, he settled in Britain, at first actively involved in Demarco’s gallery exhibitions and the Edinburgh Festival.6 In this new British context, Paul Neagu organized an exhibition-installat-ion, in which his tactile objects were hanging from the ceiling and on the walls, while, in the darkness of the room, the visitor was invited to discover them with the help

4 More on the context of this first public performance by Paul Neagu in: Ileana Pintilie, Actionism in Romania During the Communist Era, Cluj 2000, 30. 5 Georges Boudaille, “L’avant-garde en Roumanie (suite)”, in: Les Lettres françaises, 1971, n° 1368, 26. 6 In 1972 he started to teach in various London or other British schools, and in 1976 he gained British citizenship.

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of touch (fig. 37). This exhibition method and event was probably Neagu’s most advanced instance of tactile art, which the artist promoted during those years.7 Drawing became, for him, a faithful medium, which helped him carry on his analytical research. If, at first, the boxes were objects, emerging from imagination and intuition, later they gained a conceptual character, being systematized as graphic artworks. This transformation process is conspicuous in the treatment of objects as technical models, sometimes instruction manual-like schemes containing information on the materials employed. Soon, these drawings were to give birth to other artistic concepts. The idea of deconstruction, of object fragmentation led to the division of forms in small units, likened to cells in living organisms. This basic model of form structuring, drawing on the model of the human body lingered in the artist’s mind for many years. He studied the way in which the strict geometry of the boxes was applied to anatomy, while the lines lost their firmness and became sinuous, imitating the organic matter.

Fig. 37 (left): Tactile objects hung in the dark, 1969, R. Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh, Fringe Festival. Fig. 38 (right): Anthropocosmos, 1971, drawing.

Thus, alongside his touchable boxes, the artist developed a conceptual system, based on a philosophical interpretation of the world, at whose centre was the human figure (Anthropocosmos); the body was deconstructed into parts the size of “cells”, structural divisions specific to the artist’s vision, meant to emphasize tracks-networks of energy. In a 1971 drawing, the artist suggested a scheme of materials, overlapping “conceptually and organically” at the same time, defin-

7 Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh, 1969 – Fringe Festival, Melville Crescent.



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ing the “architecture” of the Anthropocosmos (see fig. 38) in a tactile manner.8 Related to the human body, he developed a hierarchical system amplified from the one to the many, from the individual to the collective, from microcosm to macrocosm, the constant reference being the human universe, where communication was possible on the vertical scale, at various levels.9 Another invisible relation, highlighted by the drawing, was the one between impulse and vector, two subtle elements, which became a source of conceptual energy,10 which Neagu discovered in the relation between various elements and bodies generating force and vital flux, giving life to shapes, structures and three-dimensional objects.

Fig. 39 (top): The Great Tactile Table, 1970, three pieces, mixed media.

Fig. 40 (right): The Cake Man Tactile, 1970, drawing.

8 The here quoted phrases appear in the caption of a drawing by Paul Neagu (see fig. 38). 9 This scale, often described by Paul Neagu as a hierarchical system, started from the bottom – the individual level –, and moved upwards, going through an intermediate level – the community/ society – until it reached a cosmic dimension, which he evoked in the performance and series of drawings entitled Going Tornado, indicating an upward movement and reproduced further on. 10 There are several drawings dating from the early 1970s, in which the artist imagined these two mysterious, hidden forces – impulse and vector – as the very engine setting all things in motion. He employed terminology borrowed from physics, but managed to convey a metaphysical, spiritual message. While the impulse is the force generating movement, the vector indicates the direction of this movement. Both secure the vital force animating Neagu’s work.

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The series of research work entitled Anthropocosmos11 was further investigated in several items whose prominence highlighted the conclusions of this period. The first one was entitled The Big Tactile Table (fig. 39) or The Cake Man Tactile (fig. 40) and was conceived in 1970 for the Sigi Krauss Gallery in London. The installation was made up of several pieces, of which two flaps still survive,12 each consisting of two pieces. Each of them represents a human figure (two, all in all), made of cell-boxes, each containing a golden or turquoise mosaic cube. The figure seems embedded in the wood stand, with its edges reinforced like a frame, draped in cloth. The walls of the Sigi Krauss Gallery, then situated in Covent Garden, exhibited several works from the same series, drawings of human figures or small wooden objects, which could be regarded as “patterns” for human figures made of ginger bread. Obsessed with the materiality of substances, which he manipulated so as to add a sensorial experience, Paul Neagu wanted, in fact, to obtain spiritual understanding.13 With The Big Tactile Table, his art moved in a new direction, more open to the public than his first series of objects, which critics considered to be mysteriously individualized,14 keeping the secret of ideas buried deep down. Closely connected with the Anthropocosmos series, the performances generically entitled The Cake Man were planned and even acted out while the artist was still in Romania. An unconditioned connection grew between the moulds made of wood, which seemed individual creations, and the small ginger bread figures, beyond the mere transformation of a material into a new substance. The application of the wooden mould on the dough which Neagu used to make these figures expressed the contrast between the amorphous organic matter and the geometrical structure of a mould this material was supposed to adapt itself to. Fascinated by the flour, which he used to produce ginger bread figures, Neagu considered transforming this substance into a new form/structure, subject to an almost alchemical transmutation, a process with a great potential of artistic transfiguration. (His last public performance, entitled The Sublimation of the Flour, which took place at the Cavallini Gallery in Venice, in 1977, was based on this idea which had haunted the artist for many years.) This was an application of the endurance principle, by means of the geometric structuring of ephemeral organic matter. The performance-ritual Cake Man with 16 floors was first conducted in front of an

11 The thematic link between Anthropocosmos and The Cake Man is obvious, facilitating a more complete understanding of this period of creation. 12 The Big Tactile Table is now part of the Tate Museum collection in London. 13 Paul Neagu argued that “I can conceive a type of geometrical construction made of ‘frivolous material’ such as ashes or flour. Durability can be attained by repetition and not only by marble”, see Radu Varia, “Letter from Bucharest”, in: Studio International, 182, 1971, n° 935, 28. 14 Alastair Mackintosh, “Paul Neagu”, in: Art and Artists, 6, 1971, n° 65, 52.



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audience gathered in a friend’s house, in Bucharest, in 1970, then, the following year, at the Sigi Krauss Gallery in London, where a Cake Man made of 80 waffles was consumed, in a perishable construction emphasizing several issues: on the one hand, the formal connection between the elements of the assemblage, made of dough pieces, baked in shapes reminiscent of cells and networks of elements forming a human figure; on the other hand, the communication with the public, highlighted by the shared consumption of pieces from the “cake-man”, communication doubled by the messages addressed to the public, which were attached to the cake. This social element, expressed in the act of communication, remained a characteristic feature of Paul Neagu’s performances. As Paul Overy has rightly argued, despite the ephemeral character, which was not crucially important for the artist, the research he conducted for this series tended to have a holistic character, both because of the attempt to incorporate the participants’ senses and because of their degree of involvement in the performance.15 The conceptual scaffolding of Paul Neagu’s work gained more depth and momentum when he started to connect many of the ideas and elements he had put forward. Gradually, he built an entire system of mental storing, associating simple geometric shapes – the triangle, the rectangle and the circle first, then the cone, the pyramid, the sphere and finally the spiral – with various levels – individual, social and cosmic. With the help of this system, he started to put together all his visual creations – drawings, paintings, objects, installations and performances – in a compact and coherent whole, which he called “generative art”. The term was borrowed from the theories of applied linguistics formulated by the philosopher and logician Noam Chomsky, as well as by his famous “hierarchy” theory. This theory was advanced by Chomsky in several texts, especially the well-known Topics of the Theory of Generative Grammar,16 which was among the books Neagu read from the 1970s onwards.17 Generative art, in Neagu’s vision, is an art which can be deconstructed in parts carrying the whole, fragments he called “generative aggregates”, engendering new structures and ensembles with basic qualities. Building on this, the Generative Art Group (GAG) was founded in 1972, as a novel concept which enabled the artist to act in five distinct egos: Paul Neagu, as the group manager, was the visible one, organizer of various exhibitions and manager of the others’ presence in the public space. The other artists’ names were Honeysuckle, Larsocchi, Paidola and Belmood, each with a distinctive personality and style, various qualities being attributed to them: they were a poet, 15 Paul Overy, Paul Neagu: A Generative Context (1965-1981), Sunderland Arts Centre, 1981, 30. 16 Noam Chomsky, Topics of the Theory of Generative Grammar, The Hague, 1966. 17 Matei Stîrcea-Crăciun, Paul Neagu. Nouă staţiuni catalitice, Bucharest 2003, 210.

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a drawer, a painter, and a metaphysician. This concept was highly productive for Neagu, enabling him to work in five different manners, to create events, which could capitalize on his works and promote them in more varied publications. GAG’s existence was analyzed and interpreted in various ways by authors who wrote about Neagu; favouring a psychological approach, Paul Overy considered that the absence of his family, his siblings and friends from Romania caused the foundation of this fictional group. 18 As a matter of fact, two names – Edward and Anton – belonged to his brothers in Romania. Richard Demarco argued that the group was the result of “self-defense against vulnerability”. 19 It is possible that these explanations may be valid, to a certain point, but the fact is that the visible effect was a protean multiplication of the creative self, the artist finding various ways to present his ideas. All these characters were complementary to him, but it was through them that he obtained more interpretative views on his own work. In the GAG period, from a creative point of view, Neagu managed to successfully apply the principle of deconstruction because, in exhibitions, his drawings or paintings (on processed canvas with no frame) were presented as excerpts from a much more ample body of work. They were exhibited one next to another in rows and lines, fully covering one wall of the gallery. The title of the works thus presented was Simultaneously Apprehended Elements, with interchangeable elements; there were often empty spaces between the drawings, a white sheet of paper which interrupted sight. The images represented in the drawings and paintings were rather bizarre, in search for new angles of rendering objects or anatomical details incomprehensible at first sight. In classical art, the artist is usually withdrawn behind his creation, but now, in Neagu’s vision, he was featuring as himself, at work: the drawer Honeysuckle challenged the viewers with his drawing hand, holding a brush or a pencil, representing the artistic act itself (fig. 41). On other occasions, he featured the tree crown, from a bird’s eye view, or an eye, an iris in fact, turning into an abstract painting. In 1973, Neagu exhibited many of the works from this period at the Serpentine Gallery in London and in a group exhibition in Liverpool.20 Apart from the above-mentioned drawings and paintings, there were various stands and tables on which series of apparently random objects were exhibited, chaotically placed and giving the impression of a mixture that could generate endless sub18 Overy, Paul Neagu, 45. 19 Richard Demarco, “Such is the Dance”, in: Paul Neagu. Nine Catalytic Stations (1975-1987), exh. cat., The Scottish Sculpture Trust, Edinburgh 1988, n.p. 20 The climax was reached in the GAG presentation, “Possibilities Actualised Simultaneously”, 1973-74, in: “John Moores Exhibition”, Liverpool, 1974, see Overy, Paul Neagu, 45.



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jects of inspiration. The same mixture, reminiscent of the Fluxus movement’s installations, could be seen on his desk (fig. 42) and in some photos that showed him among the numerous strange things he considered inspirational back then.

Figs. 41 & 42: Generative Art Group, 1972, photographic documentation of an installation with drawing, Villa Arson, Nice, France

In his epistemological work, especially generative grammar, Chomsky was in favour of innate knowledge, activated by the environment. Generative grammar referred to a series of innate mechanisms, characteristic of a species, which, in a specific linguistic context, build skills specific of natural languages.21 Drawing on Chomsky’s hierarchy theory to structure his own theories, Paul Neagu’s hierarchy was illustrated by several works and expressed in different media, both in drawing (an important medium that connected various themes and motifs of his creation), and in other artistic genres he favoured. Neagu would place, at the bottom of his hierarchical construction, the individual, to whom he devoted the Anthropocosmos series, keeping the shape of a human figure so simplified and restrictive that it looked more like a container or a sarcophagus. The Cake-man can be likened to another thematic series, entitled Blind Bite (fig. 43),22 where eating was presented as a visceral, primitive act, associated by the artist with touch. For Neagu, the individual level was defined by intuition, spontaneity, emotion, and feeling, while the collective level was endowed with an unknown, superstitious power, the undifferentiated world, primeval freedom, 21 See Mircea Flonta, Cognitio. O introducere critică în problema cunoşterii, Bucureşti, 1994, 120124. 22 Overy, Paul Neagu, 57-58.

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and the collective subconscious. Eating was regarded as totally instinctive, nonvisual, tactile, which accounted for the artist’s choice to blindfold the participants in this type of performance. One of the most interesting versions of the Blind Bite performance took place in London in 1976, casting Paul Overy, Marc Chaimowicz and Anish Kapoor, among others. The participants, seated at a table, blindfolded, waited while the artist prepared the waffles; then, they ate without seeing the food, focusing only on the act of eating and becoming aware of the extent to which touch is present in our daily lives. The second hierarchical level was represented, in Paul Neagu’s collection of symbols, by the Horizontal Rain, which suggested, in his view, the structure of human society, an intuitive and scientific freedom. For this type of performance, the artist had a suit with numerous tiny transparent pockets, containing notes with messages for the participants. These messages stood for the “level of human communication”, their development in society. During a 1976 performance at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol, Paul Neagu was assisted by four students in a Horizontal Rain-like ritual. Each of the four participants was supposed to represent the four distinct personalities imagined by the artist for GAG. They each conducted a different intellectual activity (drawing, writing), while the artist, dressed in the above-mentioned suit and on roller skates, stood for the ordering force of the universe. Gradually, the four tables were drawn closer, and the four youngsters started to work together. The novelty of this performance consisted of the fact that the four young men, acting with the artist, directlypersonified the four “characters” who made up, together with Neagu himself, the Generative Art Group.23

Fig. 43 (left): Blinde Bite, 1976, Highbury New Park (Studio), London, participants: Paul Neagu, Paul Overy, Marc Chaimowicz, Anish Kapoor, among others. Fig. 44 (right): Gradually Going Tornado, 1976, performance, Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol.

23 Marc Chaimowicz, “Performance: Paul Neagu and his Generative Art Group at the Arnolfini”, in: Studio International, 5, 1976, n° 5, 285.



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Finally, the highest stage in this hierarchical series was entitled Gradually Going Tornado (fig. 44) and consisted of a series of performances, as well as drawings and other forms of artistic expression, with the artist, shaman-like, bringing together all separate elements in a circular movement, like a dervish, a spiral-like ritual in which Neagu took on the symbolic role of transforming the audience from a mere group of observers into a spiritualized community. Wearing a special suit, with objects evoking a certain “cultural heritage” and looking like a shaman’s accessories, Neagu allowed himself to be transported into an ecstatic state in which he could merge with the infinite self after atomization. In his drawings, a tornado-like, gigantic breath emerged from nothing, swallowing various objects and creating a huge unpredictable and intangible force around itself, more like a miracle, which he regarded as a spiritual manifestation. His hierarchical system, using geometric shapes, had a basic level represented by the triangle, associated with the individual, then the rectangle – a sort of a platform on which inter-human relations could develop – and the circle, inside society, which contained all the elements, while the spiral united the material and the immaterial, the lower and the upper strata, in a rising movement symbolizing the ascent, a metamorphosis or transgression of the mere human condition. Among the three geometric shapes – turned into “passages”, expressing a more complex reality, analogous to the human one (expressed in shapes ranging from simple to complex, from individual to social) – there was a vertical communication by means of vectoral movements, which ended up buried in the “big tornado”, a whirlpool absorbing everything in a rising movement that brought all elements to the same level.

Fig. 45 (left): Ramp-Hyphen, 1976, performance together with Perry Robinson, Serpentine Gallery, London. Fig. 46 (right): New York Hyphen, 1978, wood and metal, Elise Meyer Gallery, New York.

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It can thus be argued that, for Paul Neagu, performance art did not mean subscribing to a fashionable artistic trend. Rather, it was intimately related to experiment and to the development of an hierarchical artistic system, the performance being part of a creative process of identifying and illustrating the vital flux. This force animated the theoretical levels of his work.24 Many of his performances were playful, inclusive improvisations, in which the artist invited the public to take part, transforming them into happenings. Ever since he was young, Paul Neagu looked for an attitude that would enable him to move away from the academic environment in which he had been educated. During his university years, this attitude was expressed in a presence of being, channelled by some “photos”, “spontaneous performances”, as the artist called them, at the Black Sea and in the Danube Delta. These attitudes, expressed in “balancing exercises” performed in various other places (Balancing Exercise in front of the Colbert Pavilion at the Louvre, Paris), can be regarded as interventions in a space whose specificity was penetrated by the artist in order to alter it with his presence.

Fig. 47: Nine Catalytic Stations, 1980-87, Colchester, stainless steel.

24 Pintilie, Actionism, 32-34.



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The connection between the first and the second level of his performance-rituals was symbolically secured by a Ramp, in a performance with the same title, the artist’s attempt to detach himself from spatial coordinates and to remain suspended between heaven and earth after a short state of weightlessness. These ramps were initially presented as simple, spontaneous gestures, as proven by several such performances conducted in various circumstances and places: for example on a church wall in Greece, and on a tree in a park in Timişoara. Gradually, however, the artist analyzed these pure acts and integrated them into his conceptual system, discovering the fact that they were closely connected with other ideas and works, since Ramp was aimed at discovering touch and thus became part of the theoretical system Neagu had already developed. This performance was a corporeal one, involving the artist’s body during the event. The most complex performance in the series was considerably lengthy: Paul Neagu’s last of this kind, conducted together with Perry Robinson (RampHyphen, 1976, fig. 45). During an exhibition of various works covering the walls and a sculpture in the series Hyphen-Generator in the middle of the room, Neagu made a series of leaps on the wall, while his partner, blindfolded, made a note of the height she felt for each leap, recorded according to the vibrations perceived on the wall; Neagu then made the same notes inside the Hyphen statue, which was exhibited in the middle of the room. At a certain moment, when the artist could no longer jump, the roles were reversed: Perry Robinson replaced Neagu, while he got blindfolded and marked the place on the wall where he felt the vibrations. Marc Chaimowicz rightly argued that, during this performance which tested the physical and spiritual limits, Neagu was “half feline–half beast” and, a rare occurrence in performances conceived of by a male artist, trust and partnership dominated the relationship between the two actors, creating harmony even though they found themselves in opposing stances. 25 After 1975, Neagu’s interest turned to sculptural objects, whose shape brought together some fundamental elements in his artistic concepts: the basis was secured by a triangle, sketched by the object’s three legs, which supported a rectangular platform, which could be likened to a box or a table. One of the three legs was longer, slanting and stretching as if making a landing, making a connection with the Ramp series of performances; the object could be regarded as the mobile arm of a pair of compasses, drawing a circle. Still, the first creation in this series preserved an experimental character, reminiscent of the archaic plough driven by farmers. This sculpture, growing more and more abstract, was called Hyphen (fig. 46) and, in the artist’s view, brought 25 Marc Chaimowicz, “Performance. Paul Neagu: Hyphen-Ramp. Serpentine Gallery, 5-10 December, 1976”, in: Studio International, 3, 1977, n° 3, n.p.

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together the three basic geometric shapes: the square, the triangle and the circle. At first, Neagu called this first work in the series Subject generator, suggesting that it was a prototype which would generate ever newer forms. Mel Gooding observed that the shapes of this object were irregular at first, even if they were based on geometry, with the imperfections recalling the vernacular architecture in Greece, Italy, southern France, Scotland, or Ireland. Neagu himself defined this object in this way: “Hyphen is my recurrent instrument of work as the plough is for the farmer. Conceptually it relates the essence of the earth to the body of man and the ideas of the harvest”. With this sculpture, which he considered a “generator” of vital artistic force or a crux of energies, a whole system of objects was created, claiming more and more space. In other words, from open forms, tailored on constantly improved concepts, Neagu reached a series of sculptures, in intimate connection with one another, like a family of related forms which he described carefully and affectionately. This family of forms finally comprised of nine sculptures, each one deriving from another: Hyphen, Double Hyphen, Open Monolith, Fish, Starhead, Wake, Fish Over Gate, A-Cross, Edge Runner (fig. 47). The kinship of these forms, evolving in a visible succession, led to a new artistic concept, the catalyst, a common feature of these sculpture-objects which were meant to accelerate the metamorphosis of space and to raise the viewers’ awareness and understanding. As Paul Neagu repeatedly argued, the nine catalytic stations were not symbols, but signs, each of them containing multiple energies. Once they were conceived, the nine catalytic sculptures were first exhibited in the Demarco Gallery in Edinburgh and then in the Traquair House garden in Scotland, in 1988. Carefully analyzing the relationship between the sculptures and the space, Neagu added a new fundamental vectoral axis of time. But the two coordinates were perceived in their philosophical dimension, beyond the human condition. Mel Gooding made an analogy between the link of the nine sculptures and the organization of an orchestra, noting that perception was gradual, the viewer interacting with the ensemble.26 With this new thematic direction, Paul Neagu’s art lost its playful character which it had initially and probed more and more into holistic sculptural representations, in an attempt to gather solid concepts around these shapes, landmarks of a monumental construction. The reproduction of the works cited in this chapter is courtesy of Mr. Anton Neagu, Paul Neagu’s brother. 26 Mel Gooding, “Paul Neagu’s Nine Catalytic Stations”, in: Paul Neagu: Nine Catalytic Stations.

Clément Dessy

La maison d’artiste en portrait, manifeste et sanctuaire L’exemple de Fernand Khnopff En interrogeant la matérialité de l’œuvre d’un peintre, l’on pourrait étudier l’ensemble d’une œuvre qui, en l’occurrence, se matérialise toujours sur un support qu’il soit de toile, de bois ou de papier. L’ouverture aux aspects « matériels » invite néanmoins à prendre en considération les versants marginaux d’une œuvre à travers un exemple concret, celui de l’atelier d’un artiste, qui confère par la bande une signification complémentaire à l’ensemble de son œuvre. Une signification peut se tisser intimement entre un artiste, son œuvre et son public à travers un élément architectural tel que la maison du peintre symboliste belge Fernand Khnopff, construite à Bruxelles en 1900 et détruite vraisemblablement entre 1938 et 1940. Cet ensemble qui n’a pas peu contribué à la légende d’un artiste aux accents ésotériques mérite l’attention en tant que lieu d’affirmation d’une philosophie de la création et d’invitation à un mode de consommation de l’art.

L’imaginaire religieux de l’édifice Le fait de constater une adéquation entre la maison et la personnalité (artistique ou privée) de son hôte constitue le premier degré d’une compréhension qui, tout en ne manquant pas de justesse, délaisse d’autres questions légitimes. À partir de la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, la maison ou l’atelier s’inscrivent progressivement comme parts indéfectibles de l’œuvre d’un artiste, vecteurs constitutifs d’un « imaginaire »,1 d’une clé de lecture mettant en rapport l’œuvre et l’artiste puisque la maison (ou l’atelier) intègre concrètement des préoccupations d’ordre esthétique (décoration, agencement, style, etc.) et biographique (mode de vie, quotidien, etc.). Jeffery Howe rappelle aussi combien la maison de nombreux artistes fut conçue dès cette période comme une extension de leur personnalité artistique2 et comme « un corollaire majeur de l’idée d’artiste en tant qu’homme 1 Voir Jean Gribenski, Véronique Meyer et Solange Vernois (éds.), La Maison de l’artiste. Construction d’un espace de représentations entre réalité et imaginaire (XVIIe-XXe siècles), Rennes 2007. 2 Jeffery Wayne Howe, The Symbolist Art of Fernand Khnopff, Ann Arbor 1982, 144.

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de volonté, créant et dominant son environnement ».3 D’une manière commode, la maison d’artiste permettrait donc au commentateur d’aborder conjointement les deux aspects monolithiques d’une critique traditionnelle  : «  l’homme  » et « l’œuvre ». Cette commodité n’est pas la conséquence d’un hasard opportun. L’apparence générale de l’édifice est en soi porteuse de signification. La maison ne nous est hélas plus connue que grâce à un certain nombre de témoignages accompagnés de photographies4 – sur lesquels nous aurons l’occasion de revenir. Tous décrivent le caractère retiré de l’endroit et sa vocation à s’apparenter avec une église, un lieu de culte : il s’agit parfois d’une « manière de mausolée »,5 d’un « temple du Moi »,6 d’une « chapelle, peut-être ».7 Nous avons pu redécouvrir un article inédit de la plume du peintre, publié en allemand dans l’hebdomadaire viennois Die Zeit. Dans «  Mein Haus (Ma maison)  »,8 Fernand Khnopff dévoile ses intentions.9 Il commence par citer deux témoignages de visiteurs, publiés dans la presse quotidienne ; l’un parut « quelques mois » auparavant dans le journal bruxellois Le Petit Bleu du matin, sous le titre, « Die Sezessionskirche » (« l’église de la Sécession », en référence au mouvement viennois). Or, cette brève chronique s’intitule en fait « L’Église de l’Esthétique ». D’une perfection rigide, ses murailles mornes commandent le silence et le recueillement et, seules, les roses du jardin mettent un peu de fantaisie dans cet effort conscient vers la beauté hiératique. […] Qu’est-ce ? se disent les passants. Une église ? Le temple de quelque religion étrange et lointaine ? Le musée de quelque dilettante ?10

3 Howe, The Symbolist Art of Fernand Khnopff, 143. 4 Maria Biermé, Les Artistes de la pensée et du sentiment, Bruxelles 1913, 29-46 (reprenant l’article « Fernand Khnopff », in: La Belgique Artistique et Littéraire, juillet-septembre 1907, 96113) ; Louis Dumont-Wilden, Fernand Khnopff, Bruxelles 1907 ; Josef Engelhart, Ein Wiener Maler erzählt. Mein Leben und meine Modelle, Vienne 1943, 87-89 ; Hélène Laillet, « The Home of an Artist: Fernand Khnopff’s villa at Brussels », in: The Studio. An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art (London), 57, 1912, n° 237, 201-207 (aussi dans The International Studio (New York), 48, 1913, n° 191, 201-207) ; Wolfram Waldschmidt, « Das Heim eines Symbolisten », in: Die Kunst, 1906, n° 14, 158-166. 5 Dumont-Wilden, Fernand Khnopff, 32. 6 Dumont-Wilden, Fernand Khnopff, 26. 7 Laillet, « The Home of an Artist », 201. 8 Fernand Khnopff, « Mein Haus », in: Die Zeit, 37-38, 2 janvier 1904, n° 483, 9. 9 La présente recherche s’inscrit dans le cadre de la publication des écrits complets du peintre Fernand Khnopff aux Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique en 2014. 10 Anonyme [Louis Dumont-Wilden], «  L’Église de l’Esthétique  », in: Le Petit Bleu du matin, vendredi 14 août 1903, 2.



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Ce champ lexical du religieux, impliquant à la fois rituel, recueillement et retrait du monde, n’est pas anodin. En s’y référant dans son propre texte, Khnopff révèle que cette compréhension de son atelier correspond à son idée personnelle.11 L’aspect général de l’édifice est fait de « lignes froides et sévères ».12 D’une « clarté rigide, la façade a quelque chose d’hostile et de mystérieux »13 et « a un air réservé, presque dédaigneux ».14 Au blanc s’ajoutent les couleurs bleu, doré ainsi que noir pour les châssis. De même que dans les églises romanes où les tranchées ne permettent d’apercevoir que de minces parcelles de ciel, « ses petites fenêtres aux boiseries noires et garnies de velours blanc, ou de soie bleu-de-ciel » achèvent la rupture symbolique de l’intérieur avec le monde extérieur : « aucune fenêtre placée trop bas ne vous met en contact avec la vie »,15 « par aucune fenêtre on ne voit la Vie qui passe ».16 Maria Biermé indique « que le jour ne pénètre dans son atelier et dans les pièces contiguës que sous l’aspect d’une sorte d’aurore, grâce à d’admirables vitraux ».17 La propriété, ceinte d’un mur, renferme un jardin où « seules, les roses du jardin mettent un peu de fantaisie dans cet effort conscient vers la beauté hiératique »,18 renvoyant à l’image de l’hortus conclusus et de la virginité mariale. En présentant le lieu comme la « forteresse d’une individualité en perpétuelle défense contre le Monde et la Vie »,19 Hélène Laillet souligne le privilège restreint que constitue la visite de cette maison et le parcours strict à observer dans une succession de pièces que distribue un couloir rectiligne.20 De l’entrée, on aperçoit au bout du couloir une série de marches en marbre menant à l’atelier. Les murs sont d’un stuc brillant, créant un reflet irréel accentué par les lumières des vitraux bleus. On accède sur la gauche au premier salon dit «  blanc  », qui sert aussi au peintre de salle à manger. L’accès à l’atelier est fermé au visiteur par une barre de laiton, le temps, selon le vœu de l’artiste, que

11 Pour plusieurs descriptions attentives de la maison, voir Michel Draguet, Fernand Khnopff ou l’ambigu poétique, Paris 1995, 337-348 ; Howe, The Symbolist Art of Fernand Khnopff, 143-151 ; Henri Lacoste, « L’atelier de Fernand Khnopff », in: L’Émulation, 1927, n° 47, 39-40 ; Francine-Claire Legrand, « Fernand Khnopff – Perfect Symbolist », in: Apollo, 62, April 1967, n° 85, 278-287 ; Anne Van Loo, « Passé-Futur. La maison-atelier de Fernand Khnopff », in: Vienne-Bruxelles. L’architecture de Rob Krier à la Fortune du Palais Stoclet, Bruxelles 1987, 59-63. 12 Dumont-Wilden, Fernand Khnopff, 32. 13 Dumont-Wilden, Fernand Khnopff, 26. 14 Laillet, « The Home of an Artist », 201. 15 Laillet, « The Home of an Artist », 201. 16 Dumont-Wilden, Fernand Khnopff, 31. 17 Maria Biermé, Les Artistes de la pensée et du sentiment, 36. 18 Anonyme [Louis Dumont-Wilden], « L’Église de l’Esthétique », 2. 19 Dumont-Wilden, Fernand Khnopff, 26. 20 Laillet, « The Home of an Artist », 201.

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l’esprit du visiteur se vide avant de se confronter aux œuvres.21 Un petit atelier attenant dissimule les œuvres en cours. De retour dans le corridor, avant la salle à manger un escalier conduit à un autre salon dit « bleu ». Les autres pièces sont inaccessibles au visiteur. Aucune porte ne sépare les espaces intérieurs, si ce n’est des « portières », des rideaux de tissus. L’intérieur demeure extrêmement dépourvu en termes de mobilier, même la table de la salle à manger n’est dépliée que pour le repas : Si l’artiste ne vous le disait pas, vous ne sauriez que vous vous trouviez dans une salle à manger – comment le pourriez-vous  ? Rien ne la désigne comme telle dans les faits. Au moment des repas, seule une petite table apparaît, pour disparaître ensuite presque aussitôt.22

Le second témoignage inédit, inséré dans le compte rendu d’une représentation du Roi Arthus d’Ernest Chausson au Théâtre de la Monnaie à Bruxelles, en 1903, offre plusieurs indices concernant le mobilier intérieur : C’est un peintre, célèbre à Bruxelles, et même à Paris, – du côté des indépendants  ! – Khnopff, – qui a dessiné les costumes. Ah  ! l’intérieur de M.  Khnopff, son vestibule aux dalles blanches aux murs blancs, sa galerie blanche, sa salle à manger pareille, avec sa table pour deux, et son petit canapé pour unique siège, triomphe du ripolin, couloirs de sucre vernissé où s’ébaubissent les snobs de la Cambre  ! L’atelier de Khnopff, enfin, où trois chaises pour tous sièges, dans la blancheur lunaire, simulent un confortable vraiment trop primitif, l’atelier, – plus ahurissant que le reste de l’appartement, meublé avec trois meubles, – Cadet-Roussel, où êtes-vous ? – l’atelier dont le parquet s’ennoblit d’un grand cercle d’or, où l’artiste vient poser – excusez la modestie ! – le tableau dont il veut faire les honneurs. On ne s’ennuie pas en Brussel !23

Dans le corridor, les salons et l’atelier, on trouve exposées des œuvres peintes et sculptées du maître ainsi que d’autres artistes admirés (un dessin d’Edward Burne-Jones,24 L’Amazone au combat de Frans Stuck) dans quelques ensembles décoratifs, parfois sous forme d’autels, tel celui très visible de l’entrée qui expose un paon, la toile Une Aile bleue (1894) ainsi qu’une fine colonne bleue, surmontée d’une statuette grecque.25

21 Engelhart, Ein Wiener Maler erzählt, 88. 22 Laillet, « The Home of an Artist », 204. 23 Sparklet [Albert Flament], « Le Trottoir roulant. Mardi 1er décembre », in: L’Écho de Paris, 6 décembre 1903, 1. 24 Laurent Busine, « To Sir Edward Burne-Jones from Fernand Khnopff », in: Fernand Khnopff 1858-1921, cat. expo. Bruxelles, Salzbourg et Boston, Bruxelles 2004, 45-52. 25 Biermé, Les Artistes de la pensée et du sentiment, 31.



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Fig. 48 : Façade avant de la maison-atelier de Fernand Khnopff. © Musées royaux des BeauxArts de Belgique, Bruxelles / AACB.

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Fig. 49 : Vestibule. © Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Bruxelles / AACB.



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Posture et image d’artiste La mise en évidence de plusieurs significations symboliques, dont on aura déjà compris celle de « tour d’ivoire »26 en bordure de la ville, de « sanctuaire où la vie ne pénètre pas »,27 montre combien le bâtiment matérialise « une conception du monde et de la beauté »28 que se fait l’artiste – par rapport au « vulgaire », dirait-on. Khnopff « aristocratise » et ritualise sa fonction.29 Cette image comporte une part d’artifice. L’un de ses biographes et amis concède, « chez Khnopff une sociabilité qui, pour être réservée, n’en est pas moins agréable ».30 Le peintre ne dédaignait effectivement pas les milieux mondains et aristocratiques bruxellois. Jusqu’à présent, cette volonté d’isolement31 n’a cependant pas été mise en regard de la vaste entreprise de diffusion médiatique dont bénéficie l’édifice au cours de cette décennie. Pour le dire schématiquement, si « c’est contre elle [la Vie] qu’il [Khnopff] a dressé son rêve d’art », si « c’est contre elle qu’il a élevé les murailles de cette maison, sanctuaire et tour d’ivoire »,32 comment faut-il interpréter la multiplication des témoignages, des comptes rendus et des photographies de cette maison, orchestrés par le peintre lui-même, dans des revues internationales (Belgique, Royaume-Uni et États-Unis, Allemagne, Autriche, France)  ? Il y a là un paradoxe flagrant, intrinsèquement lié à la personnalité de Khnopff, qui unit une apparente volonté d’isolement à la recherche d’une visibilité médiatique (grâce à son rôle de correspondant pour la revue The Studio) et qui allie une sobriété de goût avec une indubitable mégalomanie personnelle. Si la maison représente Khnopff, au moment où il a accédé à la plus grande renommée, après 1900, le lieu attire, et il est même conçu visuellement pour attirer. Dans le théâtre de la ville, le peintre met glorieusement en scène son retranchement du monde. Il limite les visites mais n’hésite pas à livrer des photographies pour des reportages et monographies  ; l’article le plus diffusé est sans doute celui d’Hélène Laillet, publié dans The Studio, tant dans son édition londonienne que new-yorkaise (1912 et 1913).

26 Dumont-Wilden, Fernand Khnopff, 31. 27 Dumont-Wilden, Fernand Khnopff, 32. 28 Dumont-Wilden, Fernand Khnopff, 26. 29 On comparera cette attitude avec celle d’un écrivain comme Stéphane Mallarmé dont la langue hermétique destine l’œuvre à une « aristocratie » des lettres (voir Alain Vaillant, JeanPierre Bertrand et Philippe Régnier (éds.), Histoire de la littérature française du XIXe siècle, deuxième édition actualisée, Rennes 2006, 405). 30 Dumont-Wilden, Fernand Khnopff, 24. 31 Voir notamment Draguet, Fernand Khnopff, 339-340. 32 Dumont-Wilden, Fernand Khnopff, 31.

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Le concept de posture, de manière d’être dans le champ artistique, tel que le définit Jérôme Meizoz, fonctionne pleinement avec cet exemple. Celui-ci désignerait une formulation de l’être artistique qui passe à la fois par une manière d’agir (comportement) et l’ethos (discours) de son expression artistique.33 L’importance accordée à la définition posturale de soi se serait accentuée avec l’émergence de l’ère médiatique.34 Or, en l’occurrence, on ne peut que constater cette interaction entre la définition d’une image de soi, patiemment élaborée, avec l’investissement de l’espace des revues. Anne Léonard a déjà noté avec discernement que, dans les écrits qu’il livre à la revue The Studio, Khnopff n’aborde point son propre travail artistique.35 C’est une remarque que l’on peut généraliser à l’ensemble des articles publiés par le peintre. La seule exception notable où Khnopff aborde son propre travail réside en cet article, mis au jour pour la présente recherche : « Mein Haus », où la sobriété du titre met exceptionnellement en évidence l’énonciation à la première personne. Le peintre débute toutefois par une forme d’esquive, faussement modeste, où il exprime un certain malaise : Lorsque je reçus dernièrement l’aimable invitation à donner une description de ma maison pour l’hebdomadaire « Die Zeit », j’hésitai un instant – je dois l’admettre – à y donner suite. C’est toujours en effet une chose peu commode que de parler de soi-même, et d’autant plus lorsqu’il s’agit d’écrire. Une phrase de Walter Crane me revient toutefois à l’esprit : « L’idée qu’un artiste visuel entreprenne d’écrire le commentaire de son œuvre paraîtra étrange : on pourra l’admettre lorsque ce travail se limite à ce que l’on pourrait qualifier d’histoire naturelle de son œuvre, ainsi que ses sources, ses influences, son objectif et son idéal ».36

Khnopff prend ici la parole par rapport à son « œuvre » ; la citation qu’il reprend de Walter Crane est assez explicite de la façon dont il considère sa maison. Le peintre a en effet pris soin d’y penser le moindre détail. Si un architecte bruxellois, Édouard Pelseneer, en a bien signé les plans (conservés aux archives de la Ville de Bruxelles), il n’en demeure pas moins, comme le concède Howe luimême, que l’intervention du peintre est capitale dans la conception.37 Dans tous

33 Jérôme Meizoz, Postures littéraires. Mises en scène modernes de l’auteur, Genève 2007, 18-25. 34 Meizoz, Postures littéraires, 15. 35 Anne Léonard, « Internationalist in Spite of Themselves: Britain and Belgium at the Fin de Siècle », in: Internationalism and the Arts in Britain and Europe at the Fin de Siècle, éd. Grace Brockington, Bern 2009, 244. 36 Fernand Khnopff, «  Mein Haus  », in: Die Zeit, 37-38, 2 janvier 1904, n°  483, 9. Traduit par l’auteur avec l’aide précieuse de Nicolas Schroeder. 37 La maison de Khnopff n’est d’ailleurs point comparable aux autres productions de Pelseneer, voir Howe, The Symbolist Art of Fernand Khnopff, 143.



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les cas, le bâtiment est présenté comme une réalisation personnelle, part intégrante de son univers.

Fig. 50 : Éléments de décoration à l’entrée. © Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Bruxelles / AACB.

Le fait que, dans son article, Khnopff délègue la description de l’extérieur et de l’intérieur de sa maison en citant deux autres auteurs est en soi remarquable. On pourrait en déduire indirectement que l’édifice n’existe que pour être vu, reçu,

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commenté et « critiqué », avant même de constituer un lieu de vie quotidienne. Si la maison appartient à son « œuvre » et que le regard porté par les visiteurs joue un rôle central pour le peintre, elle possède néanmoins un statut particulier, en participant de l’image de l’artiste et du reste de son œuvre. Maria Biermé justifie d’ailleurs la « place aussi importante [accordée] à la description de cette demeure », qui encadre son étude de l’œuvre picturale, par le fait que le moindre détail «  s’[y] identifie avec les œuvres qu’elle enclot  ».38 Pour Hélène Laillet, «  Fernand Khnopff rêve et compose de belles œuvres, ici, dans cette atmosphère poétique ».39 Dumont-Wilden distingue même une forme de salon « surélevé au-dessus du sol de quelques pieds », un « rêvoir », contenant des œuvres d’artistes qu’il admire (« Le Vinci, Gustave Moreau, Burne-Jones, Delacroix »).40 On perçoit non seulement combien le lieu constitue « un véritable objet d’art » mais aussi, en sens inverse, comment le visiteur est conduit à imaginer cet espace comme un creuset, un « terreau » suscitant l’imagination ou l’inspiration de l’œuvre picturale. La fabrication mythique opère effectivement, puisque la maison, conçue en 1900, est bien moins un creuset d’inspiration qu’un résultat de celle-ci. Le peintre y nie l’espace comme lieu de vie puisque même la salle à manger y est effacée dans sa fonction par la précarité du mobilier. L’édifice relève de la personnalité artistique publique de Khnopff plutôt que de la part privée, intime de sa vie, qui est presque complètement effacée.41 L’expérience de Khnopff trouve son inspiration dans plusieurs modèles et notamment des peintres britanniques, qui occupent à cet égard une place pionnière. Dans ses écrits, Khnopff relate d’ailleurs ses visites chez Burne-Jones,42 Alma-Tadema,43 mais aussi chez Ford Madox Brown dans un article, « Un Souvenir londonien », publié dès 1898 dans Die Zeit.44 Ce dernier article confirmerait

38 Biermé, Les Artistes de la pensée et du sentiment, 30. 39 Laillet, « The Home of an Artist », 206. 40 Dumont-Wilden, Fernand Khnopff, 29. 41 En 1908-1909, Khnopff habite d’ailleurs dans une autre maison avec sa femme au numéro 28 de l’avenue Général Jacques voisine. 42 Fernand Khnopff, «  Des souvenirs à propos de Sir Edward Burne-Jones  », in: Annexe aux Bulletins de la Classe des Beaux-Arts. Communications présentées à la classe en 1915-1918, 1919, 35-42. 43 Fernand Khnopff, « Des souvenirs à propos de Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema », in: Annexe aux Bulletins de la Classe des Beaux-Arts. Communications présentées à la classe en 1915-1918, 1919, 9-16. 44 Fernand Khnopff, «  Eine Londoner Erinnerung  », in: Die Zeit, 15-16, 18 juin 1898, n°  194, 184-185. Le manuscrit en français de ce texte est conservé dans les archives d’Hermann Bahr à la bibliothèque du Musée du Théâtre autrichien, à Vienne.



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l’idée d’une médiatisation volontaire par Khnopff de sa propre maison-atelier, après avoir en quelque sorte contribué à mythifier celle d’un autre artiste. Si d’autres maisons d’artistes ou d’écrivains peuvent être citées à titre de comparaison, comme celles de Whistler, des Goncourt ou de Pierre Loti, il faut noter que le lieu, ici ritualisé, se démarque ici d’un espace de vie.45 La dissimulation des espaces plus quotidiens et l’aménagement des autres comme des galeries d’exposition chez Khnopff, ne consistent pas tant à rapprocher l’art de la vie du peintre qu’à présenter son existence comme exclusivement dévouée à la pratique artistique. On observera d’ailleurs en guise de clin d’œil la présence de cette raquette de tennis sur la cheminée du salon bleu, rappelant Memories, peint en 1889. Le vivre artistement des Goncourt est remplacé par une représentation d’un art malgré la vie. Ce que les deux écrivains montrent, c’est la conceptualisation d’un acte de décoration déterminant lui-même un art de vivre.46 Khnopff certes s’en inspire mais se réapproprie la formule dans un esprit où l’art efface la vie. Le bâtiment même de la maison des Goncourt n’est pas par eux conçu. Il est encore moins signé, comme l’est la maison de Khnopff où, près de l’entrée, une fenêtre circulaire renferme le monogramme trilobé de l’artiste, tel qu’employé pour signer son œuvre.

Fig. 51 (gauche) : Salon bleu. © Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Bruxelles / AACB. Fig. 52 (centre) : Autel dans l’atelier avec l’inscription « On ne a que soi ». © Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Bruxelles / AACB. Fig. 53 (droite) : Gravure publiée dans la revue Ver Sacrum (décembre 1898, 11), avec la même inscription.

45 La muséalisation de maisons d’écrivain est un processus apparu à la fin du XIXe siècle. Voir Elizabeth Emery, Photojournalism and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum (1881-1914). Privacy, Publicity, and Personality, Farnham and Burlington 2013. 46 Juliet Simpson, « Edmond de Goncourt’s Décors – Towards the Symbolist Maison d’art », in: Romance studies, 29, janvier 2011, n° 1, 1-18.

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L’écrit et le manifeste Un nouvel indice apporte la preuve que cette « tour d’ivoire » s’oriente avant tout vers un public spectateur. Il consiste en l’exposition sporadique d’écrits, plutôt d’aphorismes ou de légendes, sur les murs intérieurs et extérieurs du bâtiment. Outre la dimension de musée personnel avec l’exposition d’œuvres d’artistes admirés, la maison se convertit en un répertoire de citations, en une manière de manifeste artistique. Si l’on a déjà vu la répugnance qu’a Khnopff à parler luimême de ses œuvres, la plupart des inscriptions semblent pourtant devoir s’appliquer à leur ensemble. L’édifice, comme matérialisation de la littérature, véhicule un discours, certes minimaliste, mais qui assume indéniablement un rôle de passeur entre l’œuvre picturale et la pensée de l’artiste. Les différents témoins qui décrivent la maison rapportent plusieurs de ces citations, nettement repérables et commentées au fil de leur parcours. Sur la façade, au-dessus de l’entrée, on peut lire l’expression « Passé-Futur ». Dans le hall d’entrée près du paon et de Une Aile bleue, Laillet relève l’expression « Soi ».47 Le corridor révèle au milieu d’œuvres accrochées une phrase encadrée : « Tout vient à point à qui sait attendre ».48 L’atelier contient aussi un autel dédié à Hypnos, dieu du Sommeil, constitué d’une vitrine renfermant plusieurs objets et dominée des mots « ON NE A QUE SOI ». Maria Biermé évoque également une broderie japonaise suspendue avec « en dessous, ces paroles tirées d’un vieux conte d’Ésope, traduit en anglais par Walter Crane  : “Light winged the crane fled (légèrement ailée, la grue s’enfuit)”  ».49 L’ensemble paraît renvoyer à des idées esthétiques générales, inscriptibles dans la philosophie artistique de Khnopff, telles que la transcendance spatiale et temporelle, l’autodétermination (et le narcissisme) de l’artiste ainsi que le caractère éternel de l’art réconciliant les influences, l’acquis (« Passé ») avec ce qui doit être acquis par la création et l’innovation (« Futur »). Ces mottos constituent des sortes de mantras pour l’artiste en même temps qu’ils se destinent au visiteur-témoin. Ils sont des passeurs privilégiés de l’échange entre l’homme et l’œuvre via la maison-atelier, puisque ces mots reçus par le visiteur sont ensuite retenus pour donner un sens à la maison mais aussi à l’œuvre picturale. Les citations déclenchent un processus d’interprétation. Khnopff, qui affirme ne vouloir aborder que le « tissu moral » de sa maison plutôt que ses aspects matériels, cite lui-même le « On ne a que soi » dans son article.50

47 Laillet, « The Home of an Artist », 201. 48 Biermé, Les Artistes de la pensée et du sentiment, 31. 49 Biermé, Les Artistes de la pensée et du sentiment, 44. 50 Khnopff, « Mein Haus », 9.



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Il est intéressant de relever les différents lieux de sa pratique proprement picturale où le peintre prise volontiers l’investissement par des mots. Il s’agit, tout d’abord et de manière évidente, des titres des tableaux ; certains d’entre eux se révèlent particulièrement poétiques et énigmatiques. Ils peuvent avoir recours à la langue anglaise (et à la poésie de Christina Rossetti) avec I lock my door upon myself (1891). Les mots apparaissent aussi sous forme de légendes, à côté des images, dans le cas de gravures fournies comme ex-libris ou frontispices d’ouvrages. L’une d’entre elles porte d’ailleurs l’inscription « On n’a que soi », attestant du caractère longuement médité de ce « motto ». Ces inscriptions se déploient souvent en marge de l’image en tant que telle même si on les retrouve parfois au sein même des toiles de Khnopff. On y trouve notamment des formes tronquées qui rendent impossible jusqu’à la présence même d’un mot dans Une Aile bleue (1894). D’autres inscriptions sont livrées en un langage imaginaire, indéchiffrable, qui viennent produire le sens d’une énigme tout en obérant d’emblée la possibilité de sa résolution puisque le « mot » n’est pas formulé (cf. Avec Verhaeren, L’Art ou Des caresses ou L’Offrande). La maison se présente comme un manifeste de l’œuvre picturale. Son déploiement comme texte se retrouve jusque dans le cheminement linéaire auquel est soumis le visiteur (ou le pèlerin, pour filer la métaphore rituelle). Il est d’ailleurs significatif qu’une pièce pourtant incontournable dans une maison d’artiste ou d’écrivain soit dissimulée : la bibliothèque ! Cela alors que Khnopff ne pense pas sa peinture sans passer par la littérature.51 Khnopff a instauré sa réputation internationale à partir des années 1890. Il se tient à distance des manifestations bruxelloises de La Libre esthétique, succédant aux salons des XX qui l’ont pourtant fait connaître. Il dilue sa présence et expose internationalement (Londres, Munich, Vienne, etc.). Bien que relayant les événements artistiques en Belgique grâce à son rôle de correspondant au Studio, il se fait plutôt en Belgique le relais de l’art anglais. Cet individualisme cosmopolite trouve son écho dans l’architecture de sa maison qui se fait «  lieu fantasmé et projection de l’imaginaire de l’artiste ».52 Dans le style d’inspiration viennoise qu’elle professe, la maison de Khnopff, cette « Église de l’Esthétique », traduite en « église de la Sécession » dans l’article de Die Zeit, n’a pas pour prétention de faire école à Bruxelles. En cela, le peintre n’est pas architecte. On est à ce moment encore loin de la construction du Palais Stoclet en 1914, par Josef Hoffmann.53 Comment expliquer que le peintre n’ait pas 51 Draguet, Fernand Khnopff, 24. 52 Solange Vernois, « Introduction », in: La Maison de l’artiste, éds. Gribenski, Meyer et Vernois, 10. 53 Le peintre consacre un article pionnier à cette figure de la Sécession viennoise : « Josef Hoffmann Architect and Decorator », in: The Studio. An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art

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fait appel à un architecte belge comme Victor Horta, Paul Hankar ou Henry Van de Velde ? La maison-atelier de Khnopff prend soin d’éviter le style Art nouveau, en plein essor à Bruxelles ; davantage, elle en prend le contre-pied.54 C’est que, si elle doit fonctionner en tant que manifeste, elle ne peut valoir que pour l’artiste et non refléter l’œuvre d’une personne tierce. En tant qu’incarnation de ses principes propres, elle doit maintenir l’individualité acquise sur la scène bruxelloise. En se démarquant dans le théâtre urbain où il a éclos, Khnopff veut manifester son rejet des coteries nationales et profiter de sa notoriété pour se poser en indépendant. À la différence de nombreux artistes, il ne fait pas de sa maison un « lieu de sociabilité et de mondanité ».55 La maison de Khnopff, comme lieu de rituel, comme «  sanctuaire  », c’est enfin et aussi le tombeau « raté ». À l’occasion du décès du peintre, Jean Delville, peintre idéaliste belge, lui dédie une notice : La mort vint l’arracher à son art le 13 novembre 1921, dans une clinique bruxelloise, où il eut à subir une fatale opération. Monacalement reclus dans son home esthétique, le destin ne lui accorda pas l’ultime faveur de s’éteindre dans la maison silencieuse qu’il avait fait patiemment construire en 1900, selon la structure un peu rigide mais noble de son esprit et que d’aucuns ont appelée le Temple du Moi. On ne peut penser à l’œuvre de Fernand Khnopff sans évoquer en même temps cette maison qu’il avait voulue, là-bas, à l’écart de la cité, à quelques mètres des grands arbres du bois de la Cambre. Elle faisait, pour ainsi dire, partie de son œuvre. […] Dans ce sanctuaire dédié à la Beauté et au Silence, où l’on pouvait voir inscrite au-dessus d’un autel dédié à Hypnos cette pensée un peu étrange que le sommeil est ce qu’il y a de plus parfait dans notre existence, il semble que la laideur de la mort ne devait point en profaner l’harmonieuse et calme ordonnance. Sa maison n’a pas été le mortuaire où ses amis et ses admirateurs s’attendaient à devoir aller saluer sa dépouille mortelle pour la conduire à sa dernière demeure.56

En dressant le portrait du peintre par sa demeure, citant au passage une nouvelle inscription de ce texte architectural, Delville poursuit la logique établie par le défunt, « patiemment construite ». Lors de sa destruction, ce n’est pas seulement un édifice peu commun qui disparut du paysage architectural belge, c’est le témoin concret d’une postérité planifiée qui fut réduit à néant. Les recherches à l’origine de ce chapitre ont été permises grâce au soutien de la Fondation Wiener-Anspach à laquelle nous adressons ici nos remerciements. (London), 22, 1901, n° 98, 261-266. 54 Draguet, Fernand Khnopff, 340-342. 55 Vernois, « Introduction », in: La Maison de l’artiste, éds. Gribenski, Meyer et Vernois, 10. 56 Jean Delville, « Notice sur Fernand Khnopff », in: Annuaire de l’Académie royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, année 1925, Bruxelles 1925, 1-2.

Eveline Kilian

Liquid Modernity and the Concrete City Ford Madox Ford and Virginia Woolf In the wake of the spatial turn,1 scholars have repeatedly drawn our attention to the fact that our encounter with material spaces transforms them in the sense that we actively produce these spaces and bring them into existence in their specific meaning. This is effected both by social practices and by complex processes of reading and (re)writing which, in the case of urban spaces, result in individual mappings of the city.2 I will use this conceptual framework in my discussion of two writers who have significantly contributed to the imaginative shaping of the modern city: Ford Madox Ford and his The Soul of London: A Survey of a Modern City (1905) and Virginia Woolf’s London essays.3 My focus will be on the interplay of the concrete and the textual city, on its materiality and its textuality, under the conditions of modernity. The reference to modernity is significant because it contributes a specific perspective to the processes of transformation involved in the textual appropriations of the city by these authors. Baudelaire famously defined the essence of modernity as “the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent”.4 As David Frisby has pointed out, Baudelaire “viewed modernity as both a ‘quality’ of modern life as well as a new object of artistic endeavor”.5 Transposing this claim to our material, we can assume that the imprint of modernity will be discernible 1 See for example Doris Bachmann-Medick, Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften, Reinbek 2006; Barney Warf and Santa Arias (eds.), The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, London and New York 2009. 2 See in particular: Henri Lefèbvre, The Production of Space (1974), trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford and Cambridge, MA 1991; Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), trans. Steven Rendall, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London 1999; Julian Wolfreys, Writing London: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens, Basingstoke and New York 1998. 3 Virginia Woolf, “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (1927), in: Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw, Oxford 2008, 177-187; Virginia Woolf, “The London Scene” (1931/32), in: The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, ed. Rachel Bowlby, London 1993, 107-132, which includes “The Docks of London”, “Oxford Street Tide”, “Great Men’s Houses”, “Abbeys and Cathedrals” and “‘This Is the House of Commons’”. These five pieces were originally published in a group of six essays in Good Housekeeping in 1931/32, but the last one entitled “Portrait of a Londoner” (about Mrs Crowe, a housekeeper) was omitted from later collections. 4 Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), in: The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne, London 1964, 1-40, here 13. 5 David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin, Cambridge 1985, 15.

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in the authors’ choice of material as well as in their way of presenting it, in their particular take on urban spaces as well as in the role they carve out for themselves as observers, chroniclers and artists of the city. I borrow Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of ‘liquid modernity’ and ‘liquid life’6 as productive metaphors to describe a society characterized by rapid change, acceleration and constant movement, in which stability and fixity are replaced by a condition of ‘creative destruction’.7 Although Bauman is more concerned with our present-day globalized society, we can already discern the harbingers of the extremes he describes in Ford’s and Woolf’s London at the beginning of the 20th century. His evocation of conditions of constant uncertainty, of endless new beginnings and successive endings, of deletions and replacements, of accelerating speed and compulsive consumption8 become palpable in their essays. Both writers are concerned with the relationship between stability and transformation, but they do not become advocates of cultural pessimism. Instead they explore this modern spirit and fathom its potential for literary creation. I will be particularly interested in the interdependence of the ephemeral, the transient and the static and stable in their texts. This implies a close attention to time and time consciousness both with reference to the changes and transformations of the city produced by a movement in time, by the transition from past to present to future, and to the role of durability and longevity in the dynamic of continuity and discontinuity.

Ford Madox Ford: The Soul of London Ford exposes the opposition between stability and constant change as intrinsically false and instead opts for a dynamic relationship between the permanent and the transitory which he explores on various levels. On the very first page of The Soul of London he likens London to a personality who fascinates us and to whom we pay our visits (5). This comparison implies a certain interdependence between sameness and change, namely the one we would assume for any individual (or personality) who develops and grows over time and yet retains a recognizable and distinct identity. This supplies one reading of the term ‘soul’ in the book title and aligns Ford with the Baudelairean flâneur and painter of modern life who captures “the passing moment and […] all the suggestions of eternity that 6 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Life, Cambridge 2005, 1 ff. 7 Bauman, Liquid Life, 3. 8 Bauman, Liquid Life, 1-14.



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it contains”.9 Although London is attributed a personality of its own, it is at the same time characterized by impersonality and abstraction (8) that act as “leveller[s] of [the] individuality” of its inhabitants (13). This approach to the city also informs his method: he evokes the past insofar as it sheds light on the altered conditions of the present while the overall aim of the book is to grasp ‘the atmosphere’ of modern London, its personality, which is itself the result of layer upon layer of historic sediment, even if the individual sediments can no longer be clearly identified.10 Since his dealings are with a modern ‘personality’ subject to frequent shifts and adjustments, however, this endeavour proves difficult or next to impossible and involves the observer in a number of contradictions and failed attempts to grasp the totality, the identity or the essence of London. An impression of London as a whole is unachievable since London is illimitable (15); its borders spread uncontrollably and its expanse cannot be delimited. This difficulty is exacerbated by the recognition that reality, and hence also the reality or essence of the city, is the product of a subjective mind and will vary from observer to observer (e.g. 14). Moreover, different versions of the city are triggered by the transformations effected by modern developments like the speed of the different means of transport that seems to fragment impressions or frame the view so that the city appears like a story with many beginnings but no end (28, 42f.).11 In the end Ford engages with these difficulties by resorting to an oxymoron: London and the Londoner are equated with the modern spirit (13), hence their constant feature consists precisely in their eternal mutability, volatility and their perennial elusiveness. As paradoxical as this argument may sound, it makes sense in the logic put forward in the book, and it provides the rationale for the relativity of stability. If London represents the modern spirit, we can conclude that it has always been defined by transformation so that the idea of the static and the stable, which we tend to associate with the past (where things were reliable and fixed and unchanging) is nothing but a wishful projection of the human mind and unsubstantiated by the flow of time. Ford points out that the rapid expansion of the city has throughout history resulted in the same solutions to the housing problem: the erection of taller buildings and the move into the suburbs

9 Frisby, Fragments of Modernity, 17; see Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life”, 12. 10 Ford Madox Ford, The Soul of London: A Survey of a Modern City (1905), ed. Alan G. Hill, London 1995, 11-12. All subsequent references to this edition will be indicated in brackets. 11 This chimes in with one of the key concerns of modernist writing: the epistemological question of how to grasp and represent reality in any kind of totality as it is expressed by Lily Briscoe in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) with respect to Mrs Ramsay: “Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with” (London 1992, 214).

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with the extension of the public transport network (34–36). Building Improvement Schemes have succeeded each other; old houses were replaced by new ones, and these were in turn superseded by even more modern buildings. The details change, the principle remains the same. Stability and fixity have always been temporary features with a limited lifespan in an urban environment whose sole reliability is its unfailing commitment to change. At the same time the old and superseded displays a certain tenacity, a staying power; it never vanishes completely but leaves concrete traces that remain visible in the present so that the city becomes a kind of palimpsest, a simultaneous juxtaposition of different temporal layers, which results in the spatialisation of time: For all of the old Westminster will not be swept away, there will still remain a fragment of the ancient monastery wall, pieces of the cloisters, old Georgian courts, when already the improved buildings of today will be found to be inadequate, insanitary, smoke-begrimed for certain, picturesque probably, possibly glamorous, and surely very old. For once a building rests upon the soil of London, it seems to grapple to the earth as if with hooks far stronger than steel (100).

What is the role of the writer in documenting the modern metropolis according to Ford? Like the flâneur, he presents himself as a disinterested observer and recorder of London and the modern spirit it embodies. This allows him to occupy a metalevel and provide various reflections on the effects of modernisation, stability and flux, the past and the present without seeming too personally involved with one position or another. He can describe the different and limited views of London, but from his own distance he can also connect these different perspectives, demonstrate their interdependence and to a certain degree transcend them. The writer in Ford’s universe occupies a kind of third state or space between opposing standpoints, which he expounds on in chapters 4 and 5. In “London at Leisure”, Ford comments on the ‘work’ leisure has become, on the constant demands made on the individual to feverishly pursue various activities and on the onslaught of impressions they are constantly exposed to. Against this “laborious leisure” dominated by the culture of speed and acceleration he defines a “third state between work and amusement” (81) in which time slows down until the world almost seems to stand still. It is marked by “a suspension of the intellectual faculties” (81) and yet a heightened awareness of life. Max Saunders has linked this moment of spatialised time to the creative process by pointing out the transformation of narrative into vision, into a composition to be contemplated.12 And indeed, although this passage is not explicitly concerned with the 12 Max Saunders, “Ford, the City, Impressionism and Modernism”, in: Ford Madox Ford and the City, ed. Sara Haslam, Amsterdam and New York 2005, 67-80, here 74.



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artist, we recognize this state of inner distance and contemplation as a form of impersonality Ford shares with other modernist writers, who have inherited it from the romantic poets (Dorothy Richardson comes to mind here).13 It is a kind of Keatsian ‘negative capability’, although Ford does not eliminate his own self to become the city, his object of contemplation, but rather attains a state of mind that tunes in with the city’s own impersonality so that he can become a medium through which the metropolis displays itself in its kaleidoscopic patterns. Similarly, he sketches out a third position between “two habits of mind”: the Individualist, the humanist whom Ford associates with the past and who “sees his dead and his living as human beings” (99), as agents who leave their traces for the benefit of posterity, and the Theorist or Social Reformer, who sees “humanity as the gray matter of a theory” (96) and stands for progress and the future (and the abolition of individuality). The middle ground is occupied by the Philosopher who “observes passionlessly” and “accepts the accomplished things” (100), who balances the gains and losses and places them in the wider picture of historical development. This kind of impersonality translates into a stance of disinterestedness. Rather than describing the artist’s moment of creative contemplation that characterizes the ‘third state’ of leisure, it captures the analytical distance of the uninvolved chronicler that underlies much of Ford’s ‘survey of the modern city’. Nevertheless the writer cannot help but be enmeshed in the processes he describes and will inevitably betray certain leanings in his writing. Ford is reluctant to tackle this question, and we must rely on clues that again prove ambiguous. His self-stylization as a philosopher and man of leisure already indicates a certain class affiliation that marks him as relatively privileged. One of his sketches, for example, results from his inspection of a house and its rooms and occupants when he was in search of an investment (60–61), so he himself is part of that modern brand of people who rely on their entrepreneurial spirit to make a living. In that respect it is not surprising when the Philosopher declares himself on “the side of the friend of the future” (100), the Theorist, who is convinced that the modern transformations are on the whole improvements. This is at odds with the spectre of the levelling and extinction of individuality, however, that he conjures up on almost every page. In a world increasingly dominated by technology, the modern spirit expresses itself “in terms not of men but of forces […] without any visible human action” (29). We have to see his own attempts to retrieve that 13 Richardson, whom fellow-writer John Cowper Powys called “a Wordsworth of the city of London” (Dorothy Richardson (1931), London 1974, 19), developed her concept of impersonality, which is based on spatial, temporal and mental distance, in her series of novels, Pilgrimage: “Distance in time or space [...] reveals. [...] Each vista demands, for portrayal, absence from current life, contemplation” (Pilgrimage, IV (4 vols. 1915-1967), London 1979, 607 and 656).

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individuality through his own writing in this context and, according to his own parameters, this would associate him more with the spirit of the past. This contradiction resolves itself in a kind of Cartesian logic. As long as an individual can conceive of himself or herself as such, individuality survives. In other words, Ford cannot believe in the complete demise of the individual, and he finds numerous examples to prove his point. Even in the most uniform group of houses or people he discovers individual traits, small details that give each house, each figure in the crowd a personal touch (cf. 108). But in order to recognize these minute differences, we need to adjust our perceptive faculties. In Ford’s view, individuality is indestructible, because it is part of human nature. It is a human feature that tenaciously remains, no matter how metropolitan life transforms and reinvents itself: “And beneath and amongst all those clouds – thunderclouds, the cloud of buildings, the clouds of corporations – there hurries still the great swarm of tiny men and women, each one hugging desperately his own soul, his own hopes, his own passions, his own individuality. To destroy these individualities is impossible” (102). Ford not only equates London with the modern spirit but also with the human in general: London, with its “indecipherable face of a desperate battle field, without ranks, without order, without pity and with very little of discoverable purpose” is “in its want of logic […] so very human” (69). Consequently it is the writer’s task to act as the preserver of the human, that is to identify and detect the human in the chaotic and seemingly aimless confusion and restlessness of the city.

Virginia Woolf’s London Essays Woolf’s essays display a number of similarities to Ford’s London ‘survey’ and to previous writings about London. The beginning of “The Docks of London” takes up the tradition of approaching the city from the river. Like Ford, she is primarily concerned with the condition of modernity and its effects. “The Docks of London” and “Oxford Street Tide”, which form a thematic unity, are based on the idea of movement and transformation. The first essay begins with ships entering and leaving the docks, it touches on the temporal movement from the past to the present, from a rural and pastoral to an industrial and commercial England, it describes the activities on the river (e.g. the refuse being shipped down the Thames), the movement of the cranes unloading the ships and the goods being distributed over the country. The second essay focuses on the transformation of the raw materials arriving in the docks into the refined goods that are sold in the shops in Oxford Street, the fast-paced life in the busy streets and the transitory



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architecture in the commercial centre. Woolf’s narrative technique is reminiscent of early city films like Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin – Die Sinfonie einer Großstadt (1927), whose structuring principle is also movement, rhythm and speed. In the following passage from “Oxford Street Tide”, the perspective is that of a camera recording the flow of traffic in a busy city street: Parcels slap and hit; motor omnibuses graze the kerb; the blare of a whole brass band in full tongue dwindles to a thin reed of sound. Buses, vans, cars; barrows stream past like the fragments of a picture puzzle; a white arm rises; the puzzle runs thick, coagulates, stops; the white arm sinks, and away it streams again, streaked, twisted, higgledy-piggledy, in perpetual race and disorder.14

The moving mass never congeals into a recognizable pattern, it simply continues its unerring flow: “The puzzle never fits itself together, however long we look” (114). Although even buildings are as fragile as human identities and “stone and brick as transitory as our own desires” (116), Woolf, like Ford, does not believe in the spectre of complete disappearance and irretrievable loss. Instead her emphasis lies on simultaneity, on the city as a palimpsest that combines different time levels which produce an infinite variety of views as a result of rapid change. Variety means that you can either see flux or permanence, depending on the object of contemplation you choose. The two essays mentioned above are counterbalanced by others which provide a very different view of the city. “Great Men’s Houses” deals with dwellings of important literati, for example Carlyle’s house in Cheyne Row in Chelsea, or Keats’s house in Hampstead, which have been “bought for the nation” (117) and thus given permanence by being turned into commodified objects of cultural memory for people to visit.15 These buildings preserve a glimpse of 19th-century life,16 and the completely different world of suburban Hampstead emerges as a contemporary contrast to the money-making spirit of the City and the West End: “It is not a place where one makes money, or goes when one has money to spend. The signs of discreet retirement are stamped on it” (120). From a gender perspective, too much hankering after the stability of Victorian life would be foolish, however, as Woolf implies in her rendering of the Carlyle household with the lack of modern conveniences and with Mrs Carlyle 14 Woolf, The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, 114. Subsequent references to this edition will be indicated in brackets. 15 Jeanette McVicker particularly stresses the aspect of the commodification of the culture-producers: “‘Six Essays on London Life’: A History of Dispersal, Part II”, in: Woolf Studies Annual, 2004, n° 10, 141-172, here 142. 16 About Keats’s house it is said: “Nothing has been much changed since his day” (120).

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and her maid having to bear the brunt of the scrubbing and scouring and, not to forget, the killing of bugs: “Mrs Carlyle, as we see from the picture, […] had everything seemly and solid about her; but at what cost had she won it!” (119) These different visions of past and present, of stability and flux are brought together and reconciled at the end of the essay in the panorama view from Parliament Hill down on London: […] beneath [we] shall see the whole of London lying below us. It is a view of perpetual fascination at all hours and in all seasons. One sees London as a whole – London crowded and ribbed and compact, with its dominant domes, its guardian cathedrals; its chimneys and spires; its cranes and gasometers; and the perpetual smoke which no spring or autumn ever blows away. London has lain there time out of mind scarring that stretch of earth deeper and deeper, making it more uneasy, lumped and tumultuous, branding it for ever with an indelible scar. There it lies in layers, in strata, bristling and billowing with rolls of smoke always caught on its pinnacles. And yet from Parliament Hill one can see, too, the country beyond (121–122).

The juxtaposition of the crowded city, the resting-point of the observer and the glimpse of the country beyond defies an easy categorization of the city. It again suggests a palimpsest (“There it lies in layers, in strata”) and historical depth (“London has lain there time out of mind”) that reveal the changes that have occurred over time as transitory developments in an ongoing process of consolidation or solidification (“scarring that stretch of earth deeper and deeper”). In one crucial point Woolf differs from Ford, however: in her take on the consumer society, which is a direct result of the modern commercial spirit, and the writer’s relationship to it. At one point in The Soul of London Ford evokes its dangers and even sees the individual writer being subjected to the dictates of mass production (66n). But actually Ford is never quite willing to reflect his own reliance on these forces, on the fact, for example, that the flâneur cum writer is himself a product of the processes of modernisation and urbanisation, that he is wholly dependent on them and wouldn’t exist without them. Instead, he cultivates the impression, or at least the hope, that somehow his own writing, by cherishing individuality and the human, and by keeping a dispassionate distance to his subject matter, can set itself apart from them. In Woolf’s essays consumption takes centre stage. The circuit of demand and supply fuels all the processes that she describes in “The Docks of London” and “Oxford Street Tide”. Oxford Street and its fast-changing sights and sounds is likened to a newspaper with people appearing “to lick the ink off the placards and to consume more of them and to demand fresh supplies” (114). The present-day palaces are the department stores, temples of consumption that flaunt their constantly changing displays in an “effort to persuade the multitude that



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here unending beauty, ever fresh, ever new, very cheap and within the reach of everybody, bubbles up every day of the week from an inexhaustible well” (116), and even the buildings themselves are not made to last but subject to sudden demolition and rebuilding. Whereas Ford looks at this aspect of the market from the point of view of the producers (craftsmen and the press), highlighting their “dependence on the tastes of the great crowd” as well as the pressure to “produce work that is […] attractive for the moment” and to develop a “faculty for knowing what the public […] could be induced to ‘want’” (64–65), Woolf takes the standpoint of the mass of consumers in which she seems to include herself by using the pronoun ‘we’: “It is we – our tastes, our fashions, our needs – that make the crane dip and swing, that call the ships from the sea. […] Trade watches us anxiously to see what new desires are beginning to grow in us, what new dislikes” (112). Woolf’s juxtaposition of the docks and Oxford Street is based on a paradox similar to the one we already witnessed in Ford: the chain of production, distribution and accelerated consumption of ephemera is driven by the modern spirit and commodity capitalism, and it is precisely the stability and reliability of the velocity of transactions and the ever-changing abundance of wares on display in the shopping streets, “its solidness, its diuturnity”,17 that keeps the system in place. By squarely confronting the mode of consumption, she is able to carve out a separate space for her creative task. The relevant essay to make this point is “Street Haunting: A London Adventure”. In this text, the writer sets off on a ramble through the streets of London under the pretext of buying a pencil, a writing instrument. Not only this particular errand but also her likening of the busy streets to the vast amount of books that one can only get fleeting glimpses of, and the featuring of a second-hand bookshop, testify to the business of writing being deeply implicated in the process of production, distribution and consumption. Yet, the consumption described is purely visual, it is a scopophilic pleasure that is not bound up with the material acquisition of goods. As soon as she enters the street, the narrator sheds her self and becomes “a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye” devoting itself to “the bright paraphernalia of the streets”.18 The activity of this eye bears a certain resemblance to Ford’s ‘third state’ of “bathing in the visible world” (81) in that it is neither purpose-driven nor analytical: “The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. 17 Pamela L. Caughie, “Purpose and Play in Woolf’s London Scene Essays”, in: Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 1989, n° 16, 389-408, here 396. 18 Woolf, “Street Haunting”, 178-179. All subsequent references to this edition will be indicated in brackets.

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It floats us smoothly down a stream, resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks” (178). Woolf’s impersonality that is triggered by this shift from ‘I’ to ‘eye’,19 is less passive than Ford’s and is coupled with the creative imagination. It invests what it sees with beauty (179–181) and it takes the form of what Dorothy Richardson called ‘sympathetic imagination’20 in that it enables her for a brief moment to become another self, to slip into the mind and body of a passer-by and see the world through their eyes (187). Moreover, freed from material consumption, the observer’s mind can roam freely over the various displays in the shop-windows and imagine them in fictional lives and settings: “With no thought of buying, the eye is sportive and generous; it creates; it adorns; it enhances. Standing out in the street, one may build up all the chambers of a vast imaginary house and furnish them at one’s will” (181). This extends the physical ramblings of the flâneur to what Vara Neverow has called mental flânerie.21 For Zygmunt Bauman liquid life is consuming life in the sense that everything is turned into an object of consumption that loses its value in the course of being used.22 The emphasis therefore “falls on forgetting, deleting […] and replacing”.23 Woolf in her London essays pays tribute to the ephemeral, turns it into art and preserves that which is in danger of being forgotten and lost. This preservation in the literary text is not primarily mimetic but aesthetic, meaning that it looks at the objects represented from a specific angle that opens up new vistas and brings out the beauty of the trivial, the fleeting and even the uncompromisingly utilitarian, thus rendering them fit for aesthetic rather than material consumption. This is achieved by a simple change of perspective, as when she describes the beauty of utility in “The Docks of London” by focusing on the rhythmic and absolutely functional movement of the cranes or the open warehouses through which one sees the roofs of London in the background, thus establishing a connection between the seemingly so different worlds that comprise the modern city:

19 See Rachel Bowlby, “Walking, Women and Writing: Virginia Woolf as flâneuse”, in: New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts, ed. Isobel Armstrong, London 1992, 26-47. 20 Richardson, Pilgrimage, IV, 566. It is also the term William James used to translate Henry Bergson’s concept of ‘intuition’, which he paraphrases as follows: “the way to know reality intimately is [...] to sink into those data and get our sympathetic imagination to enlarge their bounds” (William James, “Bradley or Bergson?” (1910), in: Collected Essays and Reviews, London 1920, 491-499, here 493; emphasis in the original). 21 Vara S. Neverow, “Virginia Woolf and City Aesthetics”, in: The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, ed. Maggie Humm, Edinburgh 2010, 88-103, here 99. 22 Bauman, Liquid Life, 9. 23 Bauman, Liquid Life, 3.



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The warehouse is perfectly fit to be a warehouse; the crane to be a crane. Hence beauty begins to steal in. The cranes dip and swing, and there is rhythm in their regularity. The warehouse walls are open wide to admit sacks and barrels; but through them one sees all the roofs of London, its masts and spires, and the unconscious, vigorous movements of men lifting and unloading. Because barrels of wine require to be laid on their sides in cool vaults all the mystery of dim lights, all the beauty of low arches is thrown in as an extra (111).

Consuming Art and Its Material Conditions For the modern writer, the dialectic of sameness and transitoriness becomes a crucial question. Writers like Woolf and Ford find a mode to probe the flux of modern metropolitan life, its eternal fascination and its potential for literary transformation. At the same time they pay tribute to those aspects of the metropolis that spell stability and provide a sense of history and continuity, thereby rejecting a simple opposition between stability and flux. By doing so, they contradict and relativise the universalizing theories of cultural analysts and critics. John Attridge has put forward a similar point with respect to Edwardian sociology’s belief in the possibility to produce a complete and comprehensive picture of contemporary society, a goal Ford found desirable in principle but ultimately unachievable in practice.24 This skepticism finds its form in his highly fragmented and impressionistic survey of London. The rejection of universalizing views implies that Ford’s and Woolf’s own readings of the city are only partial, too, since they are grounded, among other things, in their own material conditions. In the great divide Ford evokes between West and East London (48), they both represent the West End perspective. Scopophilic consumption and observing the world from your club window, as Ford’s philosopher does (80), requires leisure and is a prerogative of the privileged. Theirs is an enabling privilege, because it gives them the choice of perspective. They can try to imaginatively inhabit disadvantaged selves without risk and consequences: Woolf’s “Street Haunting” ends with the narrator’s return to her own self and the comforts of her own home.25 Their position is the basis for their aesthetic distance. They can afford to be frivolous, irresponsible, superficial, following their own desires.26 Pamela Caughie has argued that in her London essays 24 John Attridge, “Steadily and Whole: Ford Madox Ford and Modernist Sociology”, in: Modernism/Modernity, 2008, n° 15, 297-315. 25 See also Susan Merrill Squier, Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City, Chapel Hill 1985, 47-48. 26 See Woolf, “Street Haunting”, 177.

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Woolf explores the relationship between literary and economic production in the sense that the material world elicits specific aesthetic responses but also in that the literary text reflects the writer’s own implication in the social system.27 The double connotation of ‘street haunting’ is instructive in that respect: the narrator haunts the streets of London, but the sights of destitution lurking in doorsteps right next to the shops, theatres and dance-halls also haunt her own narrative.28 Her inner detachment can be read, with Walter Benjamin, as the flâneur’s way of dealing with the troubling features of urban life by looking at these phenomena through a veil of magic charm, thus evoking the ugly and unpleasant but at the same time keeping it at a distance.29 But her and, to a certain extent, Ford’s aesthetic indulgence is more than a coping strategy. It also teaches us a different way of seeing, an appreciation of the rapidly changing face of the city and a sensual experience of the modern spirit. This is how their privilege becomes our pleasure as readers of their texts.

27 Pamela L. Caughie, “Purpose and Play in Woolf’s London Scene Essays”, in: Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 1989, n° 16, 389-408. 28 See also Jen-Yi Hsu, “‘The Skeleton Beneath’: The Haunted Sides of the Metropolitan Modernity and the Question of Community in Virginia Woolf’s Selected Works”, in: Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities, 2008, n° 25, 69-92. 29 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus. Zwei Fragmente, ed. Ralf Tiedemann, Frankfurt/Main 1969, 63.

 Bodies and Sensoria

Jim Drobnick

To “Feel Breathing” Duchamp and the Immaterial Aesthetics of Scent [see] One can look at seeing; one can’t hear hearing. – Marcel Duchamp, ca. 19141 SENSES: One can look at seeing. Can one hear hearing, feel breathing, etc. …? – Marcel Duchamp, 19482

As the “sensory turn” in contemporary art continues to develop, it becomes increasingly important to trace its art historical lineage, especially with regard to the sense of smell. Recent olfactory artworks tend to be written about as if they were novel and unprecedented. What is neglected is the understanding that for at least a century before the first blossoming of the use of smells in the performances, installations and multi-media works of the 1960s, the ground had been prepared by the numerous appearances of smell in the writings of modernist and avant-garde artists during the period of 1880s-1940s. The fact that many of these early modern artists practiced primarily in visual media only makes the formulation of an olfactory imaginary during this time all the more intriguing. This chapter considers the example of one artist, Marcel Duchamp, via an olfactory dimension and seeks to provide the basis for the sniffing out of an olfactory art history.3 Duchamp’s involvement with olfaction is evident in just about every aspect of his work – readymades, installations, sculptures, interview statements, project notes and droll word plays. Part of the complexity of analyzing smell in regard to Duchamp is due to the quantity of references. He engaged with scent in myriad dimensions: air, breath, perfume, body odors, mechanical fumes, evaporation, aromatic substances. Within the single figure of Duchamp, one can sniff a plethora of aesthetic strategies, from the synaesthesia of the symbolists, the scatology 1 Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (eds.), The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, New York 1973, 23. 2 Sanouillet and Peterson (eds.), Writings, 195. 3 For the development of a sensory turn in art history, see Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher (eds.), Sensory Aesthetics, special issue of Senses & Society, 7, 2012, n° 2; and Patrizia di Bello and Gabriel Koureas (eds.), Art History and the Senses: 1830 to the Present, London 2010.

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and abjection of Dada, the mechanophilic tendencies linked with modernism, and the transgendering and deconstructive approaches that presage postmodernism. In this chapter, I will sketch an overview of the elaborate realm of Duchampian olfaction through a few of his readymades and published writings and notes.4 In many ways, Duchamp’s work charges the immaterial medium of air with unusual aesthetic significance. His anti-optical streak finds in the use of air a means to engage with the broader sensory spectrum, particularly smell. Two of Duchamp’s comments, raised in the epigraph, are pertinent, though seemingly contradictory. In the Box of 1914, which includes notes in preparation for The Large Glass, Duchamp made the observation that while one can see oneself in the act of seeing, one cannot hear oneself hearing. He drew upon the subtle alteration between intransitive and transitive verbs to make a definitive conclusion about how vision is the only sense to bear a self-scrutinizing capability. Yet, by 1948, Duchamp’s opinion appeared to have shifted.5 A similarly phrased thought has been turned into a question. With the addition of “breathing”, smell is referenced. The preface to the phrase has expanded from just one sensory mode, “[see]”, to the more general “SENSES”. Most importantly, “can’t” has been replaced by the more inquiring “can”, thus leaving the matter of a sense beyond vision “sensing itself” an open one. Tellingly, the addition of an ellipsis invites the reader to fill in and complete the thought, perhaps by naming each of the remaining senses. Rather than asserting the impossibility of self-reflexivity in the non-visual senses, the phrasing of “Can one hear hearing, feel breathing, etc. …?” precisely allows that possibility and even seemingly proposes a challenge for the artist or reader to engage in further exploration. Contrary to the general belief that the senses operate transparently, that is, that they are mere conduits for sensory data and contribute nothing in themselves to the production of knowledge, Duchamp implicitly recognized the senses’ potential for conscious training, modification and discipline. Perhaps it is obvious that one can see oneself in the act of seeing. But what would it take to accomplish the more subtle activity of hearing “to hear itself”, for smell “to smell itself”? If the other senses were considered to have a self-reflexive, auto-critical edge, how might that impact aesthet-

4 Because of space limitations, other examples of smell in Duchamp’s work, such as his installations, will be addressed in an upcoming text. 5 During the interim, Duchamp had purportedly given up painting, and this statement seems to follow through with the logic of his “anti-retinal” comments by tentatively validating the other senses. 1948 was also on the cusp of happenings and installations that would see a more pronounced sensory edge. The shift could also be explained by his exhibition installations, which incorporated the senses dramatically, and so perhaps gave them more complexity than he may have judged in 1914.



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ics? In this respect, Duchamp’s 1948 question opens up a new line of analysis for the interpretation of his oeuvre. Despite his engagement with smell, a title not applicable to Duchamp is that of “olfactory artist”. The term, coined by Duchamp, disparaged painters who paint merely because they were addicted to the smell of turpentine. It was a moniker addressed to those who continued in this traditional medium despite the emergence of a social and aesthetic context that rendered painting obsolete and irrelevant. Given Duchamp’s self-professed abandonment of painting, the implication that it was a deluded and for the most part narcotic activity, is not surprising. How else, he seems to argue, could one explain the monomaniacal attachment to painting in the age of industrial production other than as a physiological compulsion, chemical dependence, or involuntary habit? For Duchamp, the odor of turpentine operated as that irresistible lure, an aromatic parallel to the Sirens, tempting painters into the studio and, once there, enchanting them into an odorinduced narcosis. Regarding Duchamp’s proposition to “feel breathing”, then, his moniker of “olfactory artist” was the archetypal example of unfeeling, of being numbed out, and hence served as the base upon which his aesthetics of scent was, if ironically, set against.6 Sexuality is never distant in Duchamp’s oeuvre and Thierry de Duve perceives an autoerotic aspect to the characterization of the olfactory artist. Crediting Duchamp with a variant of the term, namely “olfactory masturbation”, he reduced painting in the twentieth century to a solitary, self-satisfying pleasure because technological progress had undermined its status either as skillful craft or as a meaningful tradition.7 De Duve quotes Cellini to demonstrate how the ritual of painting has had a longstanding amorous quality, especially in the affectionate, tactile preparation of pigments. As much as Duchamp typifies painting as an onanistic activity, he also re-fetishizes it, substituting in his own work the grinding of chocolate for the grinding of colors. His fascination with bachelors, chocolate, grinding machines, and the like could be said to simply exchange one aromatic intoxicant for another. However, the difference between olfactory artists and Duchamp was that turpentine junkies do not recognize their addiction,

6 Dennis Oppenheim’s Recall (1974) picks up on the notion of turpentine’s effect on artistic identity. With a video monitor positioned aside a vat of turpentine, the artist recounts his days in art school and his frustration with the limitations of painting. The odor of turpentine acts both as a stimulant to memory and a signifier of an outdated artistic practice. See Jim Drobnick, “Reveries, Assaults and Evaporating Presences: Olfactory Dimensions in Contemporary Art”, in: Parachute, Winter 1998, n° 89, 10-19. 7 Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp, Cambridge, MA and London 1996, 148-149.

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whereas he was all too conscious of, and humorously self-deprecating towards, his personal obsessions. Artists may inhale aromas at their own private discretion, but what they exude is a matter of social concern. Whatever hazards turpentine may cause, for Duchamp other artists’ emissions were even more toxic. After the Armory Show (1913), for example, he satirically criticized the rank arrogance of the avant-garde exhibiting in the show: Beware of artists. Artists are beasts. [...] All artists since Courbet have been beasts. All artists should be in institutions for exaggerated egos. Courbet was the first to say, “Take my art or leave it. I am free”. That was in 1860. Since then, every artist has felt he had to be freer than the last. [...] They call it freedom. Drunks are put in jail. Why should artists’ egos be allowed to overflow and poison the atmosphere? Can’t you just smell the stench?8

In equating artists with reeking animals, Duchamp is not the first, though it is unusual to apply it to his fellow avant-gardistes.9 Odor often justifies prejudicial judgments by serving as an apparently objective indicator of another’s inferior or degraded status. This is in opposition to one’s own friends – or community, ethnicity, nationality, etc. – who are inodorate or pleasant-smelling.10 Turpentine intoxication may be the logic behind positioning egotistical olfactory artists on par with “drunks”, but what is interesting in the above statement is the mention of pollution. Living in Paris in 1911, Duchamp must have experienced the olfactory crisis occurring that summer in which phosphate factories from the suburbs afflicted the city with an unbearable stench. Historian Alain Corbin credits this event with fostering a new ecological awareness in France,11 and it is possible that Duchamp’s own call against the crime of “beastly” artists’ air pollution may have been influenced by this controversy’s intense publicity. In this sense, “feeling” breathing endangers one’s health, and the retrograde hubris of this beastly artist could be aligned with the similarly passé practices of the olfactory artist. The practice of jailing drunks mentioned by Duchamp leads to another, more insidious incarceration scenario. Duchamp often collected notes and meticu8 Martin Green, New York 1913: The Armory Show and the Paterson Strike Pageant, New York 1988, 268, emphasis in original. 9 See Jim Drobnick, “Towards an Olfactory Art History: The Mingled, Fatal and Rejuvenating Perfumes of Paul Gauguin”, in: Senses & Society, 7, 2012, n° 2, 197-208. 10 See Gale Largey and Rod Watson, “The Sociology of Odors”, in: The Smell Culture Reader, ed. Jim Drobnick, Oxford and New York 2006, 29-40. 11 Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, Cambridge, MA 1986, 227-228. The 1911 episode was not the only time stench overpowered the city, see David S. Barnes, The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle Against Filth and Germs, Baltimore 2006.



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lously recreated them in works such as the Green Box, which brought together materials for his monumental sculpture The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915-23). In the tradition of Pascal’s Pensées, the Green Box contained pithy conceptual experiments and schemes, among them one that addresses the medium of smell – air: Establish a society in which the individual has to pay for the air he breathes (air meters; imprisonment and rarefied air), in case of non-payment simple asphyxiation if necessary (cut off the air).12

This cross between debtor’s prison and the death penalty is a scene in the tradition of Swiftian polemics, with the similar morbid humour and inhumane rationality of “A Modest Proposal”. Such an air-managed society is menacing and dystopic, yet it is also a logical extension of the capitalist profit motive that has already subjected other life essentials to the imperative of scarcity and demand: water, food, shelter, heat, and so on. As air quality regulations proliferate in the current era – pollution credits, fragrance free zones, smoking prohibitions – there is almost a sense of inevitability to Duchamp’s disciplinary vision. Like the ominous implications evoked in his note, “Life on credit”,13 the body is inextricably caught between economic and legal axes. If “asphyxiation” is the final outcome of a seemingly absurd policy, it laconically makes explicit a ruthless strain in society that can never be ruled out.14 The lack of breath in asphyxiation is certainly a way to “feel breathing” – the ultimate consequence is, after all, death and the complete cessation of feeling. A “printed ready-made” continued the theme of the value of air. This solicitous, vague, but politely worded statement was supposedly found by Duchamp in a taxi and subsequently published in New York Dada (April 1921), edited by Duchamp and Man Ray:

12 Sanouillet and Peterson (eds.), Writings, 31. 13 Paul Matisse (ed. and trans.), Marcel Duchamp, Notes, Paris 1980, 289. 14 One only has to go as far as the ventilation systems of airplanes to find a near example. Because the supply of fresh air during flights entails a certain expense, airlines aiming to cut costs have been known to limit it as much as possible. The degree of deprivation differs between first class and the rest of the plane, with the higher paying tickets receiving better air. The deprivation has not only cost benefits, the reduced oxygen makes passengers more lethargic and thus perhaps easier to manage. Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fresh Air Cart (1972) could be considered an extension of Duchamp’s logic. See Jim Drobnick, “Trafficking in Air”, in: Performance Research, 8, Fall 2003, n° 3, 29-43.

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VENTILATION On the question of proper ventilation opinions radically differ. It seems impossible to please all. It is our aim, however, to cater to the wishes of the majority. The conductor of this vehicle will gladly be governed accordingly. Your cooperation will be appreciated. DADATAXI, Limited.15

In the intimate confines of a cab, air quality can, of course, be a variable matter, depending on the age and cleanliness of the vehicle, the hygiene and habits of the driver and previous passengers, temperature and so on. The seemingly genteel plea for cooperation is, for all intents and purposes, nothing but a directive for the passenger to be submissive, repress their own needs, and capitulate to the whims of the driver. The text’s printing in a Dada journal is especially comic, since the text’s urging for “cooperation”, the consideration of majoritarian concerns, and respectful attitude towards notions of the “proper”, could not be further than Dada’s penchant for shock, antagonism, insult, individualism and transgressive absurdity. Its placement in the journal also serves as an ersatz editorial statement by the “conductors” – Duchamp and Man Ray – exhorting the “passengers” (contributors and readers) to maintain their (in)civility. In this case, Duchamp’s ventilation readymade brings the focus to another way to “feel breathing”, for it is not only a matter of fresh vs. stale air, or breathing through the nose and mouth. It references comfort, which is a holistic sensation, encompassing the entire body.16 A major concept in Duchamp’s work is the body as mechanomorph – with inputs and outputs, fuel and waste, activities that can be calibrated and measured.17 One of his notes, on a “transformer intended to use up wasted bits of energy”, imagines capitalizing upon such breathing processes as “the exhalation of cigarette smoke”, “yawning, sneezing”, and “sighing” (as well as growing hair, falling urine and excrement, dripping tears, fainting, ejaculating and “sour looks”).18 Duchamp’s vision harnesses the laughably minute energies of the body’s quotidian exertions. The focus on secretions, exhalations, excretions – those products that transgress the boundary of the body, seemingly taking on a life of their own – deliberately raises the category of the abject. Duchamp’s “trans15 Sanouillet and Peterson (eds.), Writings, 179. 16 On ventilation as an artistic genre, see Jim Drobnick, “Airchitecture: Guarded Breaths and the [cough] Art of Ventilation”, in: Art History and the Senses: 1830 to the Present, eds. Patrizia di Bello and Gabriel Koureas, London 2010, 147-166. 17 See, for example, Harald Szeemann (ed.), Le Macchine Celibi/The Bachelor Machines, Venice 1975, and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works, Princeton 1998. 18 André Breton (ed.), Anthology of Black Humor, trans. Mark Polizzotti, San Francisco 1997, 281.



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former” does not only convert waste into a useful commodity, “energy”, it also redeems the socially stigmatized byproducts of the body’s essential processes, especially olfactory ones. What typically threatens the social order, the abject, is re-incorporated as a dutiful resource, thus confusing the original ideological distinctions between demonized “dirt” and culturally valued “raw material”.19 One could also note that “the exhalation of cigarette smoke”, “yawning, sneezing”, and “sighing” are instances that foreground the activity to “feel breathing” as a total body experience. The lungs, chest, face, head, demonstrate the breath as a complex interplay of internal organs and core muscle groups distributed throughout the body. A mechanical transformer to take advantage of such exertions trenchantly satirizes two aspects of corporeal monitoring in the early 20th century – Taylorism’s manic quest for efficiency by rationally managing the body’s every gesture, and the righteousness of fitness and diet enthusiasts who obsessed over mastication, intestinal cleansing, and so on.20 As opposed to the symbolist conception of the breath as sublime, especially in Mallarmé’s poem Toute l’âme résumée in which one’s soul is evoked by the exhalation of smoke, Duchamp poses an instrumentalist interpretation: the breath is not spiritual and dematerialized, but corporeal and functional.21 Despite the denigration Duchamp held for the “olfactory artist”, the aromas of paint served as intriguing metaphors for the subject of The Large Glass. In a preparatory note, Duchamp made an explicit connection between paint and perfume. Referring to the work in progress as a greenhouse, in which the “breeding of colors” occurs, he wrote of the pigment’s extra-visual dimension: Mixture of flowers of colour i.e. each colour still in its optical state: Perfumes (?) of reds, of blues of greens or of grays heightened towards yellow blue red or of weaker maroons. (The whole in scales.) These perfumes with physiological rebound can be neglected and extracted in an imprisonment for the fruit.22

19 On the abject, see Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York 1982, and Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, New York and London 1988. 20 See Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study, Cambridge 1998, and Harvey Green, Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport and American Society, Baltimore and London 1986. 21 On Mallarmé’s poem and the sublime, see Richard Klein, Cigarettes are Sublime, Durham, NC 1993, 64-65. 22 Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, trans. George Heard Hamilton, New York 1976, n.p., emphasis in original.

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Besides providing colour, the perfumes displaying “physiological rebound” seem to operate psychophysically, as both intoxicant and fuel, which is in concert with the other gaseous phenomena abundantly present in the notes to The Large Glass. The mechanical allegory of the mating process between a bride and a bevy of suitors features plausible internal combustion engine paraphernalia (ventilation systems, draft pistons, and exhaust pipes), as well as enigmatic mentions of “oscillating density”, “emancipated metal”, “illuminating gas”, “retail fog” and “vapour of inertia”.23 The gas is cut, cast into the malic molds (or “name brand bottles”) and eventually explodes. Since the “entire bride” has been placed under the glass, her “hygiene” also becomes a factor.24 What, precisely, would a perfume with “physiological rebound” either entail or feel like? How to conceive of a scent that is produced by the body and elicits irresistible attraction? One option is the notion of pheromones, chemicals secreted by insects and animals at certain times of the year to drive the mating process. While Duchamp’s notes predate the discovery of pheromones by about 40 years, he nevertheless captures their mode of production in body sweat and their near-robotic causality, which virtually turns independent organisms into copulating automatons. The presence of pheromones in humans has yet to be scientifically verified, however, though popular culture and perfume advertising embrace it enthusiastically. “Feeling” breathing, in this case, involves a chemical stirring of the passions and the mechanical operations of love, like a deterministic, involuntary reflex, that lay at the heart of the The Large Glass.25 The bride’s odor is more directly implicated in Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette (“Beautiful Breath, Veil Water”, 1921), an assisted readymade (a sculpture that adapts a pre-existing manufactured object) constructed from an empty Rigaud perfume bottle and a label picturing Duchamp posing as his female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy. The title employs two main connotations: to the Offenbach operetta, La Belle Hélène (and the Trojan mythological antecedent), and to violet water, eau de violette, a popular floral fragrance at the time.26 Perfume is an ethereal kind 23 Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare; Matisse (ed.), Notes. 24 Matisse (ed.), Notes, 68, 77, 104. 25 Contemporary artists have literalized Duchamp’s references to pheromones and aphrodisiacs. See Carsten Höller’s Pealove Room (1994), among others, discussed in Jim Drobnick, “Inhaling Passions: Art, Sex and Scent”, in: Sexuality and Culture, 4, Summer 2000, n° 3, 37-56. On pheromones in general, both for and against their role in human relationships, see James Vaughn Kohl and Robert T. Francoeur, The Scent of Eros (New York 1995), and Richard L. Doty, The Great Pheromone Myth, Baltimore 2010. 26 Hal Foster reminds readers of the original Rigaud perfume from which the bottle is appropriated, Un Air Embaumé (embodying the dual meaning of “perfumed” and “embalmed”). By linking his work, perfume and the practice of mummification, Duchamp implies that art is “a



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of “veil”, which can effect a change in one’s persona, so that one can become other as in a form of cross-dressing, or like a bride’s wedding attire which leads to a ritualistic change in status. Text fragments related to this work add further, more prurient, dimensions: “Elle a de l’haleine en dessous/(faire minette)/à qui ont fait minette/une femme qui se fait/faire minette a de l’haleine/en dessous”.27 Roughly translated, it reads as follows: “She has breath underneath/(cute pussy)/ to whom we do this [cunnilingus]/a woman who has cunnilingus done to her has breath underneath”. In interpreting a similar phrase of Duchamp’s – “Avoir de l’haleine en dessous” – Sanouillet and Peterson point out that “les dessous en laine” means woolen underwear, “so the beauty might have woolies or odor underneath – or perhaps both”.28 Here the affinities between smell, perfume, body odor and sexuality are made explicit. Dalia Judovitz makes the case that Belle Haleine is intimately related to Fountain (1917), Duchamp’s readymade of an upturned urinal, in that both invoke the absence of liquid and that the former is a form of “veiled” toilet water: “a ‘female’ analogue of the ‘male’ fountain, this work locates artistic originality within the ephemeral scent, the immanence of the ‘arrhe of painting is feminine in gender’”.29 Belle Haleine anticipated the appearance of celebrity brand perfumes (which were not to appear until decades later), and foreshadowed the connection between commodity, persona and performativity characteristic of the postmodern era. Like eponymous star perfumes of today, which are marketed to take advantage of the confusion between smelling like the celebrity (perfume veil) or smelling as them (bottled breath), the essence of identity seems to be distilled into the bottle. The scent invoked by the empty bottle could be of two types: to mask body odors or to enhance them. In contrast to the “stench” of artists’ egos described above, one could argue that Belle Haleine “captures the fragrance of the artist as a seductive woman”,30 thus rendering Duchamp distinct in his milieu. Female objectification features prominently here, which is specifically elaborated in Duchamp’s note in the Green Box – “for a hilarious picture –/Put the entire bride under glass, or in a trans/parent case”.31 Such objectification pertains as much to Belle Haleine as The Large Glass. Joselit remarks that Belle Haleine is not a readymade that is anthropomorphized, but one in which the “self [...] is

magic elixir – the breath of genius, the aura of the artist, or … the perfume of the gods”. Hal Foster, “A Rrose in Berlin”, in: Artforum, April 2011, 169. 27 Matisse (ed.), Notes, 275. 28 Sanouillet and Peterson (eds.), Writings, 109. 29 Dalia Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit, Berkeley 1995, 132. 30 Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp, 131. 31 Matisse (ed.), Notes, 77.

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encountered readymade”; it represents the “psychic idiom of a self caught in the process of commodification”.32 But this is not any “self”, the self contained as a commodity is an artist’s transgendered fiction who, until this point, only existed as a name and a signature. Belle Haleine provides the first visual representation of the artist’s alter ego and, by extension, a hint of her olfactory character. At the time of the early 1920s, Rigaud’s advertising relied upon illustrations in the style of academic figure drawings or 19th-century orientalist paintings. Duchamp’s label thus predated the use of photography by the perfume company by about a decade, which has since proven to dominate perfume advertising. With its mythic ability to seductively present “real” fantasies, Duchamp implicitly understood how photography could provide grounding for the ethereality of scent. While the bottle is empty, the image of Rrose Sélavy signifies its olfactory content with what Oliver Sacks calls a “smell-face”.33 Smell is a sense notably manipulable by language and imagery, and the photograph of Duchamp, looking fashionable and vampish, confers upon Belle Haleine an olfactory self-portrait in which the scent is conjured in one’s imagination.34 The theme of excessive commodification had an earlier incarnation in Duchamp’s readymade Air de Paris (1919), given to his benefactor and friend, Walter Arensberg. A pharmaceutical ampoule, emptied of its contents and resealed (appended with the label “serum physiologique”), contains a bit of nothing – 50cc of “Parisian air”.35 Duchamp’s rationale that the wealthy Arensberg “had everything money could buy”36 and so was presented with an artifact of apparent worthlessness bears an anti-commodity sentiment, yet at the same time it achieves the very commodification of such air. The humorous parody of the souvenir is not without its sinister edge, since the packaged and controlled atmosphere rests on the continuum with Duchamp’s dystopia of “air meters” and asphyxiation. Air de Paris reverses the traveling process: instead of the individual exercising mobility and visiting sites with exciting and unique aromas (as travel literature on exotic locales typically promise), air is bottled and transported to the 32 David Joselit, Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941, Cambridge, MA 1998, 181, 185. 33 Oliver Sacks, “The Dog Beneath the Skin”, in: The Smell Culture Reader, 184-186. 34 For discussion on a contemporary artist who has manufactured her own olfactory self-portrait, see Jim Drobnick, “Clara Ursitti: Scents of a Woman”, in: Tessera, The Senses/Les sens, Summer 2002, n° 32, 85-97. 35 The original in Arensberg’s possession broke, and Duchamp describes how the replacement was procured and sealed in a letter to Henri-Pierre Roché in 1949, where he specifies the ampoule at 125cc. Francis M. Nauman and Hector Obalk, Affectionately, Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp, trans. Jill Taylor, Ghent and Amsterdam 2000, 272-273. 36 Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, trans. David Britt, New York 1978, 99.



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individual at home. The allure of the Parisian ether is one that factored in the advertising campaigns of many French perfumes post-World War I, especially those that sought to appeal to the American market.37 Scents by such perfumers as Coty (Paris), Guerlain (Paris Nouveau) and Bourjois (Soir de Paris) transformed the ambience of the world’s centre of fashion into a wearable scent.38 A perfume by Dorin, Un Air de Paris (1921), marketed by images of elegantly dressed women, a flower seller, and a hat-tipping gentleman set against a panorama of the treelined Champs Elysées, seems to, like Duchamp, render available the “aura” of the city for personal consumption.39 Unlike a bottle of perfume or the serum originally filling the ampoule, Air de Paris premises a certain paradox: to breathe it is to destroy it, to resist is to remain in a perpetual state of desire.40 It exists in a neither/nor state in which one may possess the object but not be able to experience it. Duchamp’s packaging of Parisian air echoes a similar activity of bottling and collecting emanations of the urban landscape in the late 18th century when scientists constructed an olfactory map of the city in an effort to catalogue its dangerous airs (believed to be the cause of disease) and to plan a scheme for sanitization.41 The pharmaceutical ampoule thus alludes simultaneously to the medicinal and the miasmic, the therapeutic and the poisonous, the life-affirming and life-threatening. If Paris Air seals in a portion of the atmosphere, such an act may allude to Duchamp’s questioning of the nature of art as something inherently volatile. In the notes on inframince (or “infrathin”), Duchamp conceives of a work that undermines the ontological stability of painting by re-imagining it as constantly shifting between gaseous, liquid and solid phases of matter: Condensing vapours – on polished surfaces (glass/copper/infra thin one can draw and perhaps re-condense/at will a picture which would appear/by the application of water vapor (or other).42 37 The notion of Paris air as something to be cherished could only be maintained by tourists and foreigners, since residents often sought to escape the enervating vapors of the city for the rejuvenating atmospheres of the mountains and countryside (Elizabeth Barillé and Catherine Laroze, The Book of Perfume, Paris and New York 1995, 184). 38 Barillé and Laroze, The Book of Perfume, 184. 39 For contemporary olfactory artworks that in some sense derive from Air de Paris, see Drobnick, “The City, Distilled”, in: Senses and the City, eds. Madalina Diaconu, et al., Berlin and Vienna 2010, 257-275. 40 Jerrold Siegel, The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation, and the Self in Modern Culture, Berkeley 1995, 168. 41 Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant, 15. See also Rodolphe el-Khoury, “Polish and Deodorize: Paving the City in Late Eighteenth-Century France”, in: The Smell Culture Reader, 18-28. 42 Matisse (ed.), Notes, 36.

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A gaseous painting would be one way, then, to keep an artwork continually fresh, alive and evocative of its “original fragrance”. Rather than drying out and entering into the realm of history, a condensing, fragrant painting would remain ever “wet”, that is, in process, like at the moment of creation.43 Indeed, the dynamic painting is performative, one that can be called into presence whenever condensation occurs, and hidden (stored in a vial?) during the evaporative phase of the cycle. Such a painting undermines the conventional ontology of the artwork by shifting phases – instead of a discrete, eternal object, the painting is seemingly alive.44 In fact, the painting’s ability to evaporate and condense mimics the respiratory rhythms of inhalation and exhalation. If the air contained in Paris Air is considered something potentially breathable, the atmospheric painting of dissipating and consolidating vapors imagines a painting even further enmeshed in the notion of breath – that is, an animated artwork emulating breath itself. Duchamp’s concept of the “infrathin” itself is another source of olfactory relevance. In one cryptic note, for instance, he declares: “smells more infrathin/ than colors”.45 Dalia Judovitz interprets this by arguing that a painting is constituted by both colours and smells (perfume is its “invisible dimension”). “This is why”, she concludes, “smells are more ‘infrathin’ than colors, since the former invoke different sensations at the same time; even as it has ceased to be a liquid through evaporation, perfume lingers as a gas”.46 Examples of infrathin are not relegated to painting or colours. Duchamp lists a number of examples, such as “When the tobacco smoke also smells of the mouth which exhales it the two odors are married by infra-slim”.47 Other infrathin phenomena are fragile, tenuous, on the verge of perception and knowledge: the sound of velvet trouser legs brushing together, the warmth of a seat that has just been vacated. It is, as Amelia Jones, describes, “an infinitely thin layer, neither inside nor out, that defines yet precludes difference”.48 She regards Duchamp’s interest in permeable borders, interpenetration, and the simultaneous embrace of identity and otherness as evidence of a poststructuralist sensibility. The two odors, smoke and breath, are categori43 Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp, 131. 44 Two other gaseous painting projects with life-like qualities are mentioned in Duchamp’s notes. One envisions a smidgen of encased smoke: “Take 1 cubic centimetre of/ tobacco smoke and paint/  the exterior and interior surfaces/ a waterproof color –”. The other prefigures the exploding mechanical performances of Jean Tinguely: “Balloon/ blown up slowly/ which bursts .../ water spout/ wind/ vapors –/ headlights – Sparks”. See Matisse (ed.), Notes, 168 and 196. 45 Matisse (ed.), Notes, 37. 46 Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp, 131. 47 Sanouillet and Peterson (eds.), Writings, 194; Matisse (ed.), Notes, 11, 33. 48 Amelia Jones, Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp, Cambridge, UK 1994, 144.



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cally separate but “married” by infrathin, and thus provide an example of how Duchamp undermines “the notion that there is a stable set of boundaries between self and other, maker and viewer or viewed image, presence and nonpresence”.49 It is notable that to “see seeing” requires the assistance of an exterior mirrored surface, in which one witnesses a reflection of oneself in the process of seeing. With the other senses, however, self-reflexivity occurs within the sensory apparatus. To feel breathing (smell smelling), taste tasting, touch touching, and hear hearing would employ the body’s own coinciding sensations in the nose, mouth, skin, ear – in other words, multiplicity within singularity, diversity within sameness. “Infrathin” thus identifies the modality by which “feel breathing” and the aesthetics of scent can operate. Counter to the vested interests of collectors and museums, Duchamp maintained that the reputation of a work of art was ephemeral, a fleeting infatuation. Its “freshness” disappeared after forty or fifty years.50 More than market value, critical interpretation, object status, or idea, Duchamp regarded art, in essence, as a “perfume”: American museums want at any price to teach modern art to young students who believe in a “chemical formula”. All that produces only the vulgarization and complete disappearance of the original fragrance. This does not deny what I was saying above, for I believe in the original fragrance, but like all fragrances, it evaporates very quickly (some weeks, some years at most); what remains is a dried nut, classified by historians in the chapter “history of art”.51

In itself, the idea of originality has a volatility that renders its status transitory; it evaporates over time. Duchamp’s notion of an emanating fragrance closely approximates the notion of “aura”, both etymologically (the word derives from “atmosphere” or “breath”) and ideologically (as unique presence).52 In contrasting “chemical formula” against “original fragrance”, he seemed to privilege the natural over the synthetic, an odd concern for authenticity from an artist whose work was often premised on irony and critique. However, to return to the thread of “feel breathing” articulated so far, Duchamp adopted a commonsense notion

49 Jones, Postmodernism, 145. 50 Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett, New York 1971, 67. 51 Quoted in Joselit, Infinite Regress, 184, emphasis in original. 52 However, this is difficult to reconcile with some of Duchamp’s other statements, such as the advice he offers to artists that they must resist the temptations of pleasing their immediate audience, and, instead, aim for the “true public” fifty to one hundred years in the future. Sanouillet and Peterson (eds.), Writings, 133.

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of what an audience might like to breathe – an artificially spiked gulp of air, or an innately complex and vivid inhalation? Such a return to the natural perhaps makes sense within the role Duchamp ascribed to himself in his later years, that of a respirateur or “breather”: I like living, breathing, better than working. I don’t think that the work I’ve done can have any social importance whatsoever in the future. Therefore, if you wish, my art would be that of living: each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral. It’s a sort of constant euphoria.53

Such a self-description of a euphoric existence, of seemingly living on air as a breatharian, has contributed much to the magisterial persona of Duchamp in which he conveys transcendence from the world for art.54 Sometimes considered a refreshing admission of insouciance toward the careerism of the artworld, or a ruse to deflect curiosity about his secret workings on Étant donnés, the remark at face value exemplifies the inquiry into “feel breathing” at its logical conclusion – as a daily, continual practice. Judovitz notes the homophonic relationship between the pronunciation of “air” in English and “art” in French (arh)55 and this may have been the “beautiful breath” that had oriented Duchamp’s olfactory aesthetics all along. Is the elevation of air, and by extension scent, to the ultimate and omnipresent artistic material another of Duchamp’s notorious endgame ploys, or a strategy to reconfigure the nature of artistic practice?56 Whether endgame or springboard to a dispersed, post-media practice, air serves as the invisible but necessary medium infusing the conditions of possibility of the artist’s life and work. While the olfactory imaginary remains on a textual level for other artists of his era, Duchamp took the leap from language, to objects, to living, through his deceptively simple conjecture to “feel breathing”.

53 Cabanne, Dialogues, 72. 54 For more on “breatharians”, see Drobnick, “Trafficking”. 55 Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp, 106. On a related homophonic note, Duchamp’s pataphysical streak is evident in his numerous mock-scientific measurement concepts, such as the “temperature/‘color’ of touch” (Matisse (ed.), Notes, 273). “Odeur hauteur” (Matisse (ed.), Notes, 270), or “odor height”, fits into this genre, yet what makes this one different are the homophonic reverberations. Other variations include “Oh dérouter” (to elude, throw off the scent) and “eau de roteur” (burp water). With a shift in syllable emphasis, though, another meaning becomes clear, “odeur auteur” (odor author), a fitting title for the creator of so many olfactory word plays. 56 Similarly, one could almost consider the difference between the two of Duchamp’s prefatory quotes on the ability to “feel breathing” as an example of infrathin, that is, the difference between an observation and a question, a conclusion and a beginning, and endgame and a springboard.

Christiane Heibach

Synthesis Instead of Analysis Avant-Garde Eat Art and the Cultural Dimensions of Taste Avant-garde experiments with the human sensorium have a complex prehistory. In this chapter I first survey a number of cultural historical issues relevant for what I consider to be a proper understanding of the social and political dimensions of avant-garde Eat Art in particular. In a second move I scrutinise a series of avant-garde Eat Art exploits: the initial and classic experiments of the Italian futurists, and the neo-avant-garde works of Daniel Spoerri and Joseph Beuys. There are many ways to start a brief historical survey of the issues involved in avant-garde experiments with the sensorium, yet Ludwig Bechstein’s “The Tale of the Land of Cockaigne” is perhaps the most poetic: Listen to me, and I’ll tell you a tale of a fine country. Lots of people would go there if they only knew the way. It is too far, though, for people, both young and old, who find winter time too hot for them, and summer too cold. Now this fine place is called the Land of Cockaigne. The houses there are all thatched with cakes, the doors and walls are made of gingerbread, and the beams of roast pork. […] As you may well imagine, birds fly around in the air ready roasted; geese and turkeys, pigeons and capons, larks and fieldfares, and if reaching out your hand seems too much trouble, they’ll fly right into your mouth. Every year is a good year for sucking pigs; they run about ready cooked, with carving knives in their backs, so that anyone who likes can cut a fresh, juicy slice.1

The “Tale of the Land of Cockaigne” in Ludwig Bechstein’s version imagines a land where everything is available in abundance and can be enjoyed without any effort. Especially delicacies which in everyday life were not easily available for the average worker or peasant form part of this fantasy: bratwurst, cheese, fish and all kinds of meat, wine, milk and honey. But also luxury goods belong to the range of things at everyone’s disposal: elegant clothing, precious jewellery and – especially for the benefit of men – women who, once they have become old and grumpy, can be sent to the fountain of youth and return as young beauties. At this point of the fairy tale the narrative turns into a moral parable: lazybones are rewarded for their idleness, drunkards get the best wine for free, gamblers win 1 Ludwig Bechstein, “The Tale of the Land of Cockaigne”, in: Fairy Tales of Ludwig Bechstein, trans. Anthea Bell, London, New York and Toronto 1966, 141-142.

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money even when they lose the game, and jokers and liars who do nothing but play tricks on others get paid for their evil-mindedness. The description of this topsy-turvy world concludes with: If you like to work hard, do good and avoid evil, you’ll not be welcome in the Land of Cockaigne; they’ll show you the door. But if you’re clumsy, stupid and full of conceit they’ll take you for a nobleman. If you can’t do anything but eat, drink and sleep, you’ll be made a count. And if, by common consent, you are acclaimed as the laziest, most worthless of all, you’ll be king of the whole land and get the biggest share of money!2

Ludwig Bechstein was director of the court library in the small Thuringian dukedom Meiningen when he published his collection of fairy tales around 1845. The “Tale of the Land of Cockaigne” refers to an ancient motif, which had been popular in European literature and art since 1300. However, in contrast to the contemporary version of the Grimm Brothers, which contains paradoxical linguistic constructions in pre-Dada style to point to the implausibility of the existence of such a paradise,3 Bechstein refrains from paradoxical formulations in his version and hence links the description of the land closer with reality. This literary strategy amounts to a strong moral (and political) message: Bechstein’s land of Cockaigne stands for the decadence of nobility4 and is contrasted with the protestant and bourgeois ethics of a meritocracy: the moral of the story lies in its upside-down valuation of diligence and discipline, of abstinence and asceticism. Thus, Bechstein writes a negatively formulated eulogy on the values of the rising protestant bourgeoisie. In this context it is no coincidence that nearly half of the (relatively short) fairy tale deals with the availability of food. The condemnation of gluttony and sloth not only fits in seamlessly with the Christian moral doctrine, but points to a general motif of western culture: the devaluation of taste and – inextricably linked with it – of smell since antiquity. In nearly all epistemological theories since Aristotle, be they inspired by religious conviction or not, 2 Bechstein, “The Tale of the Land of Cockaigne”, 144. 3 This version begins as follows: “In the time of Schlauraffen I went there, and saw Rome and the Lateran hanging by a small silken thread, and a man without feet who outran a swift horse, and a keen sharp sword that cut through a bridge. There I saw a young ass with a silver nose which pursued two fleet hares, and a lime-tree that was very large, on which hot cakes were growing” (Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, The Story of Schlarauffenland, 1815, , (11.03.2013)). 4 In Germany the medieval poet and Humanist Sebastian Brant first used the motif to formulate a critique of the decadency of the nobility in his satire Das Narrenschiff, published in 1494. Around 1567 Peter Breughel the elder created his famous painting Schlaraffenland. The German word “Schlaraffenland” derives from the medieval German word “sluraff”, lazybones, while the etymology of “cockaigne” remains unclear. As Bechstein indicates, it is a French (“Welsh”) word.



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taste and smell are dismissed as the least important of all senses, and accordingly they are called the “lower senses”. The reasons for this judgement vary and are not exclusively inspired by moral considerations but also involve epistemological and aesthetic aspects. From the point of view of cultural history, western cultures have always established hierarchies of the senses, because the valuation of sensory perception is fundamentally related to the question of the relation between human beings and nature. In the course of this epistemological discourse the sense organs have been awarded the status of biological facts, and therefore represent man’s roots in nature. Hence they seem to contradict the desire to define the distinctive features of human beings (as opposed to animals) with reference to their ability to structure the world thanks to intellectual skills, which are not related to an external world, but are to be interpreted as evidence of the godlike nature of mankind. The ongoing philosophical discussion on the significance of the senses for intellectual insight, reaching back to antiquity, has led to a relatively stable hierarchy, in which the sense of sight for distant and distinct cognition has acquired the highest rank in most theories of perception. Visual perception partly shares the first rank with acoustic perception, but mostly the ear is valued as a sense second in importance, followed by the sense of touch. Taste and smell come last in this hierarchy of the senses, because according to most epistemologies they trigger like/dislike-reactions, but do not contribute to any intellectual accomplishment. Consequently, western cultures have always been cultures of ocularcentrism.5 Nevertheless, there are models which counteract this ranking, mostly deriving from sensationism and/or empiricism. In accordance with the famous statement attributed to Aristotle that “there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses”, these approaches deal with the respective contributions to intellectual insight made by each of the senses. One of the most famous examples of sensationism is Etienne Bonnot de Condillac’s Treatise on Sensations from 1754, in which he imagines a statue that is deprived of every sense but one.6 Condillac thereby aims to prove that the statue can acquire the same abstract and intellectual abilities from any of the senses, be it the sense of taste or smell, the sense of sight or the sense of hearing. Therefore, he begins his thought experiment with the most primitive sense in the cultural hierarchy of the senses, that is to say, smell. In smelling something the statue experiences at least pleasure or pain. When it smells something it likes, it aims to repeat the sensation. It is thus forced to develop a concept of sequence and numbers to be able to differentiate 5 See, for instance, the extensive work by Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: on Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, MA 1990. 6 See Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Philosophical Writings, I, Hillsdale, NJ 1982.

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between pleasant and unpleasant odours. In the end, the statue has acquired intellectual abilities, such as a sense of time, of memory, and a concept of the different characteristics of the olfactory sensations. This thought experiment leads to the conclusion that every sense in its very own way of perceiving the world finally results in identical intellectual abilities – with one exception: the sense of touch. According to Condillac it is the only sense that gives the statue a notion of itself as an entity, irrespective of the environment surrounding it; tactile experience gives the statue a sense of identity. Unlike Condillac’s thought experiment, which aims to prove that every sense has the same value (except for the sense of touch, which is regarded as even more precious), the dismissal of smell and taste as ‘lower senses’ is the standard in epistemological models. In this respect Immanuel Kant’s analysis of the functions and characteristics of the senses is paradigmatic. He divides the five senses into three higher senses of perception (sight, hearing, touch), and two lower senses of pleasure (taste and smell). According to Kant taste is slightly more valuable than smell, because it is more “sociable”, while smell is intimate (it penetrates the body through the lungs) and egoistic, because when scents unfold, they are imposed on all those present whether they like it or not. Furthermore, odours are “fleeting and transitory”. This also applies to taste, but taste is superior, “because by anticipation it judges the benefit of food beforehand, at the very gate of entrance to the alimentary canal. The benefit of food is closely linked with a rather certain prediction of pleasure as long as luxury and indulgence have not overrefined the sense”.7 One of the most decisive arguments for degrading smell and taste is the following: The more strongly the senses themselves feel affected by the intensity of the inflow which comes to them, the less information they provide. On the other hand, if they are expected to yield a great deal of information, they must be affected moderately. In the strongest light we see (distinguish) nothing; and a stentorian, forced voice stupefies (suppresses thought). The more susceptible to impressions the vital sense (that is, the more delicate and sensitive), the more unfortunate is the man.8

It is mainly its inherently physical character, the act of incorporation that accompanies smelling and tasting, and its close relation to the basic necessities for survival, which point to the inescapable interrelation between human beings and nature, that leads to the continuous low regard for these senses. 7 Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Carbondale 1996, 46. 8 Kant, Anthropology, 45.



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Intellectual perception allegedly presupposes physical distance and is equated with reflection and intellectual cognition. Being overwhelmed by corporal sensations might constitute an emotional experience of pleasure, but in the end these fugitive impressions do not last. Furthermore, one of the most important paradigms of intellectual cognition is differentiation. Analytical thinking has formed the foundation of any science since the 19th century and is based on the identification of discrete entities and their relations. Objects of all kinds, be it artefacts or natural phenomena, are examined in order to detect their specific composition. In contrast, smell and taste are synthetic senses; they are activated by complex chemical compositions that cannot be totally deconstructed while being experienced. A good taste or a good smell is always a result of chemical reactions between numerous elements – even such smells and tastes that we consider to be identifiable (the smell of roses, the taste of an apple) are complex coalescences. To deal with smell and taste as sensory experiences therefore challenges the established paradigms of cognition. One could say that with the senses of smell and taste on the one hand, and those of sight and hearing on the other (the sense of touch is somewhere in between) we are faced with two worlds of antagonistic epistemologies, which as a consequence lead to completely different ontologies: synthesis instead of analysis, incorporation instead of distance, immediate pleasure or disgust – that is to say, simultaneous perception – instead of logical argumentation based on cause-and-effect analyses (in the sense of sequential thinking that relies on the identification of discrete elements). In the following I concentrate on taste as paradigmatic example of this alternative epistemology (although smell might be equally illustrative), which is to be elaborated with reference to alternative concepts of perception and aesthetic practice.

The Synthetic Dimensions of Taste in the Arts Nothing surpasses the excellence of cooking when one knows how to cook well, as we do in France. For once, nature does things less well than we do. Our savoir faire magnifies the given, which belongs to a suborder when raw. The aroma of roasted coffee early in the morning makes our muscles and skin quiver with delight; the smell of roasting meat, which verges on that of burning meat delights our spirits – although rather less so than caramel, mere sugar until it meets fire […]. Once again, this literally supernatural excellence emanates from mixtures and confusions. Fire fuses many things together. The raw gives us tender simplicities, elementary freshness, the cooked invents coalescences. Conversely, analysis slices and dices raw; synthesis

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requires flame. As a result, the latter tend towards knowledge and culture; the former remains unrefined. What if the philosophy of knowledge had not yet begun?9

In his “Philosophy on Mingled Bodies” the French philosopher Michel Serres presents an extended philosophy of taste that seems to be the counterpart to the above-mentioned epistemologies, which praise distance and difference as basis for intellectual cognition. Serres emphasizes the synthetic character of cooking, which leads to “coalescences” that are based on irreversible transformations of the substances. The organ of taste, the tongue, has, according to Serres, three functions: it is used for speaking, tasting and kissing. These activities have one thing in common: they establish relations – to intellectual cognition through language and, in extension, thought, to nature through the satisfaction of our basic needs, and to other people through desire and love. Thus they create synthetic fusions, whose relevance reaches far beyond the indicated process of establishing relations. For in linking the sense organ of taste, the tongue, to certain activities, Michel Serres points to a decisive shift that epistemologies have to perform when dealing with taste (and also smell): they need to consider the enormous cultural significance of these senses, which have generated important cultural skills that decisively influence and even shape our everyday life. In the case of taste, this comprises techniques of searching and producing food, preparing meals (and thereby developing multiple transformative strategies of cooking, baking, flavouring, etc.), and finding and establishing standards of presenting and consuming food. Last but not least, the cultural semanticization of foodrelated customs and traditions, play a decisive part in forming social identities, however these might be defined.10 The historical and anthropological dimensions of taste, including the related cultural skills and the systems of meaning they generate, have been subject to a lot of studies, mostly in the social sciences and related fields (like anthropology).11 9 Michel Serres, The Five Senses. A Philosophy on Mingled Bodies, London and New York 2008, 166-167. 10 Cultural semanticization has multiple dimensions, one of them being the identification of nations with their specific food traditions. It is no coincidence that derogatory terms intended to debase national peculiarities often refer to specific dishes, like the word “krauts” for Germans or “frogs” for the French. In German the term used to insult Italians is “Spaghettifresser” (“spaghetti muncher”), the Turks are pejoratively called “Kümmeltürken” (“caraway Turks”) in reference to the condiment that is frequently used in oriental dishes. 11 Just to name a few of them: one of the earliest and still groundbreaking publications on the significance of table manners was published by Norbert Elias in 1939: Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation. Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchen, Bd. 1: Wandlungen des Verhal-



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Unfortunately, this has barely had an effect on philosophy and aesthetics in what regards the sense of taste (or smell). In her important work on taste, smell and touch12 the philosopher Mădălina Diaconu points out that – maybe because of the afore-mentioned general reasons for the low regard for taste as a means of cognition – our culture has failed to develop storage technologies for smell and taste. Therefore, one of the most important arguments against the aesthetic qualities of smell and taste is – to quote Kant again – their “fleeting and transitory” nature. This contradicts the aesthetic criteria developed since 1800, the self-definition of the arts, which was essentially an emancipation from other than aesthetic values. At this time, with the movement of classicism and romanticism, the arts (and the artists) struggled for autonomy and developed norms for the arts that prevented them from being used for other than artistic purposes. Eversince, the self-definition of the arts has inherently been linked to the notion of eternity and duration, so that they could serve as guarantee for the artist’s individual long-lasting fame,

tens in den weltlichen Oberschichten des Abendlandes, 18th edition, Frankfurt/Main 1993 (The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, vol. 1: The History of Manners, Oxford 1982). Elias describes processes of change in civilization and sees the development of table manners (for instance, eating with knife and fork instead of using one’s fingers, replacing the custom of all eating from one big pot with the use of individual plates, the separation of digestion processes from the act of eating) as a movement towards a notion of shame and privacy, which, according to him, was an important prerequisite for the establishment of bourgeois conventions. Furthermore, there is of course Pierre Bourdieu’s study entitled Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Cambridge, MA 1984. He focuses on the distinctive function of food for the identity of social classes. What is appreciated as delicious and what kind of food is preferred is, according to Bourdieu, inherently linked to the self-image of the respective class and also influences the image of others (as the examples of derogatory terms for other nationalities show). Bourdieu calls this combination of social practices and identity construction the “habitus”. The anthropological study of Claude Lévi-Strauss on The Raw and the Cooked (New York 1969) is an impressive example of a theory of cultural semanticization related to the traditions of food preparation derived from research on indigenous people. In the last decades numerous additional studies have been published; to name only a few: Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Das Paradies, der Geschmack und die Vernunft. Eine Geschichte der Genussmittel, Frankfurt/Main 1990 (Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants, New York 1992); Eva Barlösius, Soziologie des Essens. Eine sozial- und kulturwissenschaftliche Einführung in die Ernährungsforschung, Weinheim and München 1999; Carole Counihan (ed.), Food and Culture: A Reader, London 2005; Paul H. Freedman, Food. The History of Taste, Berkeley 2007. 12 See Mădălina Diaconu, Tasten, Riechen, Schmecken. Eine Ästhetik der anästhesierten Sinne, Würzburg 2005. This thorough study is one of the rare philosophical contributions regarding the multiple aesthetic dimensions of these three neglected senses. Another one, which focuses on taste, was published in 2007 by Harald Lemke, Die Kunst des Essens. Eine Ästhetik des kulinarischen Geschmacks (Bielefeld). And there is a more general study by Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste. Food & Philosophy, Ithaka 2002.

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but of course also as a sellable good that served as means of subsistence for the now independently working artist. Therefore, storage technologies have strongly affected the choice of artistic media. The language of written poetry (in contrast to orally transmitted poetry, which had long been the common presentation form for language art), the canvas for painting and stone or metal for sculptures – these are durable media that shape our notion of the arts to this day. Performance arts were valued less because of their fleeting and volatile character; smell and taste where no topic at all for aesthetics.13 Furthermore, during the 18th century aesthetics experienced a shift towards differentiation – each form of art developed its own self-concept, thereby distinguishing itself from other art forms. From this time on, aesthetical theory relies on functional and sensorial differentiations: visual arts – as the name indicates – are arts for the eye, music is the art for the ear, literature the (synaesthetic) art for inner imagination, and – this is not common, but some philosophical thinkers like Johann Gottfried Herder in his late 18th-century aesthetics promote it – sculpture is the art for the sense of touch.14 This self-constitution of the arts is based on differences: the differentiation of specific media that are able to guarantee long-lasting storage and define the character of each art and that are related to a specific sense organ, respectively. Smell and taste in contrast have no fixed media relations, they are ephemeral, and their characteristics are essentially based on coalescences, not on differences. First of all, both are synthetic in the sense of sensory experience. Taste without smell is an enormously reduced experience, because we can only taste five basic substances: saltiness, sweetness, bitterness, sourness and umami, a general notion of “spiciness”. All subtle aromas need the receptors in the nose to unfold their taste. Furthermore, taste is not possible without a tactile experience – we do not only taste the aroma, but we feel the structure of what we eat – whether it is hard or soft, crispy or smooth, etc. Then we hear what we chew – the freshness of vegetables, for example, is indicated by cracking sounds; and finally, of course, sight plays a decisive role in the act of eating, because it determines the expectations and triggers a first reaction of delight or disgust with regard to the meal in question. Secondly, as the quotation by Michel Serres already emphasizes, cooking is the art of synthesizing: bringing together different tastes and substances by 13 See Christiane Heibach, Multimediale Aufführungskunst. Medienästhetische Studien zur Entstehung einer neuen Kunstform, München 2010, 89 ff. 14 See Johann Gottfried Herder, “Viertes Wäldchen über Riedels Theorie der schönen Künste”, in: Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke in zehn Bänden, vol. 2: Schriften zur Ästhetik und Literatur 1767-1781, ed. Gunter E. Grimm, Frankfurt/Main 1993, 289 ff.



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different means and techniques, combining them in a dish, and thus in a meal. Thirdly, taste and the art of cooking have multiple social and psychological implications. As already mentioned, it contributes to the construction of national and class identities, and also – as needs to be added – group identities of all kinds. This power to shape identities has not only collective, but also individual dimensions: there is a strong interrelation between nourishment and character, as the French “gastrosopher” Jean-Anthèlme Brillat-Savarin says in his Physiology of Taste from 1825: “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are”.15 This individual dimension points to another decisive consequence of the synthetic character of taste: taking the act of eating (and tasting) seriously confronts us with the inseparability of body and mind. Our alimentation makes the interrelation of body, mind and psyche obvious. Furthermore, eating is an act of sharing, as in nearly every known culture eating is an act that is usually performed within a group – it is a social act. This makes it much more than a pragmatic necessity for survival, it makes it the spiritual act par excellence (I will come back to this later) and challenges the individual’s tendency to keep things for him/herself.

The Synthesis of Senses and Substances The first to integrate the acts of cooking and eating into art practice were the futurists with the Manifesto of Futurist Kitchen from 1930, in which Marinetti introduces the principles of futurist cooking. First up, “[a]bsolute originality in the food”, which means that traditional combinations and recipes are to be replaced with experimental and seemingly absurd compositions to fight the mediocre everyday routine of meals. It also involves the creation of complex dishes, e.g. “simultaneous and changing canapés which contain ten, twenty flavours to be tasted in a few seconds”.16 Second, the design of a perfect meal requires an unusual harmony between the table (crystal, tableware, decoration) and the taste and colour of the dishes; furthermore, perfumes are to be used to “enhance tasting” and music has to be played between the courses “to help annul the last taste enjoyed by re-establishing gustatory virginity”. Furthermore, forks and 15 Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie des Geschmacks, Frankfurt/Main 1979, 15: “Sag mir, was Du ißt, und ich will dir sagen, was du bist”. This statement can be read as a predecessor of Ludwig Feuerbach’s social judgment “man is what he eats” from 1846. 16 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Manifesto of Futurist Cooking, , (10 March 2013), first published in: Gazzetta del Popolo (Turin), 28 December 1930. All following quotes refer to the Manifesto on this website.

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knives are banned to intensify the “tactile pleasure” while eating the complex sculpture-like dishes. Thirdly, new solutions using the latest scientific methods of chemistry to develop techniques that preserve the healthy substances of food and minimize “the destruction of active substances (vitamins etc.)”.17 By integrating cooking and eating the futurists accomplished their programme of combining art and life. The futurist banquets consisted in irritating combinations of tastes and intersensorial experiences in intermedia surroundings. Furthermore, the dishes were arranged in the style of classical works of art, like the famous “Sculpted Meat” of the painter Fillia (pseud. Luigi Colombo), as described in the same manifesto: [T]he Sculpted meat […], a symbolic interpretation of all the varied landscapes of Italy, is composed of a large cylindrical rissole of minced veal stuffed with eleven different kinds of cooked green vegetables and roasted. This cylinder, standing upright in the centre of the plate, is crowned by a layer of honey and supported at the base by a ring of sausages resting on three golden spheres of chicken.

The futurist banquets, celebrated in the Taverna al Santo Palato, the first (and only) futurist restaurant located in Turin that opened in 1931, were veritable works of art in the sense of “staging” food in a multimedia surrounding of table decoration, light, music, and fragrance, which was experienced with all the senses.18 Furthermore, the dishes challenged acquired and culture-bound taste preferences: the opening dinner of the tavern included dishes like “Chicken Fiat” – a roasted chicken filled with slightly sweetened lead balls served with whipped cream.19 Cecilia Novero compares this multimedia “staging” of futurist banquets to a “Wagnerian Opera” and emphasizes its synaesthetic and synthetic character, which allows to differentiate the ingredients: “Each ingredient, though, is not taken in isolation: its taste is reinterpreted and recontextualized”.20 She also points out that the Futurist Cookbook is full of adjectives with the prefix con-:

17 This part of the Manifesto reads like a predecessor of molecular gastronomy, when Marinetti demands the use of “electrolyzers, […] atmospheric and vacuum stills, centrifugal autoclaves, dialysers”. 18 For detailed descriptions see Harald Lemke, Die Kunst des Essens, 21 ff., Cecilia Novero, Antidiets of the Avant-Garde. From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art, Minneapolis 2010, 20 ff. 19 The “Futurist Cookbook” contains further unusual combinations, often with allusions to technological inventions in the title, but also in the recipes. See Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Futurist Cookbook (1932), London and San Francisco 1989. 20 Novero, Antidiets, 23.



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contattile (with something to touch), conrumore (with noise), con profumo (with perfume), conluce (with light).21 While the futurist kitchen emphasized the synthetic and the simultaneous aspects of the act of eating, it aimed to be intersensory education and intermedia event alike. But it also showed the cultural implications of taste: with their crusade against pasta, the futurists pointed to the political dimensions of alimentation and its significance for national identities.22 Cooking forms ideologies, and the ideology of the futurist kitchen was closely related to Italian fascism and to a technologically inspired world view that the futurists cultivated from the outset.23 Thereby they pointed to the ambivalent social character of eating: eating habits are an integral part of any national identity, and eating together has a bonding effect and thus helps to strengthen and sometimes even to create communities.

The “Eathical” Dimensions of Eat Art The implications of eating and community forms one of the core messages in the later Eat Art movement of the 1960s. The horrors of World War II had caused nothing but chaos, destruction and death, and war experiences had deeply affected the youth of the avant-garde artists of the 1960s. The founder of Eat Art, the Romanian Daniel Spoerri, was Jewish, his father a victim of the Nazis. Another prominent protagonist of Eat Art, Joseph Beuys, tried to cope with his war experiences by mythologizing organic material – for example, fat as a symbol for the protection of the body against freezing in winter. Eat Art becomes a crucial mode of expression for existential needs. Daniel Spoerri’s artistic work with food is essentially driven by an understanding of eating and cooking as a basic social act. He begins in the early 1960s with the trap paintings which convey a deeply paradoxical message, from both a social and aesthetic point of view: the strategy of conserving not the meal but the remains of a meal, and arranging them in the manner of a panel painting points to the ephemeral but recurrent (and therefore inextinguishable) character of the act of eating, in contrast to the desire for eternity and steadiness that the static 21 Novero, Antidiets, 25. 22 The Manifesto of Futurist Kitchen fights the Italian national dish, that is, pasta. Pasta, says Marinetti, “is not beneficial to the Italians”, for instance, it is “completely hostile to the vivacious spirit and passionate, generous, intuitive soul of the Neapolitans”. This contempt also had a political reason: the durum wheat for pasta had to be imported and made Italy economically dependant on other nations. 23 For a further analysis of this correlation see Novero, Antidiets, 26 ff.

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and preserving paintings stand for. Seen from an aesthetic point of view, the trap paintings, which are arranged like nature-morts or still lifes, point to the repugnant aspects of eating: the ugliness of finished plates and stained table cloths function as counterpart to the traditional panel painting and the artificial beauty of still lifes.24 Later Spoerri made a series of trap paintings linked explicitly to the people who shared the meals, “eaten by”-arrangements: “Eaten by Marcel Duchamp” from 1964, “Eaten by Visitors of the Biennale of Sydney 1979”, and so on. Hence, these trap paintings can be interpreted as epitaphs for ephemeral moments and preserve the memory of meals shared with friends, with people who once played a role in Spoerri’s life. Consequently, Spoerri transferred his obsession with food into the realm of performative art when he opened his first restaurant in 1970, where he created special banquets and dishes that are closely related to the futurist Eat Art avant la lettre. Spoerri’s palindrome meals, for instance, confront the guest with his/ her expectations with regard to the visual arrangement of dishes and the order of courses, as can be deduced from the following example. First of all, as starter, cigars are served which prove to be little bread sticks. The ‘cigars’ are followed by coffee, served in demitasses which in reality contain a consommée with horseradish cream. Then follows a plate of “fancy chocolates” together with a cup of scoops in different colours: The “chocolates” are actually minced meat balls in white wrappings; the scoops prove to be mashed-potato balls. Then the fish course – normally salty of course: the palindrome principle makes it a sweet dish consisting of marzipan, and the pasta that is served at the end turns out to be spaghetti-shaped vanilla ice-cream with strawberry sauce and white coconut flakes (as parmesan in disguise).25 In these performances Spoerri points to the synaesthetic character of eating, with expectations being determined by the eye, and emphasizes to which extent eating habits are rooted in cultural traditions and standards.

24 Harald Lemke points to the ambiguous meaning of the “Tafel-Bild”, Spoerri creates when he transfers the remains of the “Tafel”, the table, to the structure of a “Tafel-Bild”, a panel painting. See Lemke, Die Kunst des Essens, 44. Spoerri himself refers to the ugly side of the trap paintings: “Daß ich einen Moment wählte, der nach landläufigen Begriffen nicht schön war, geschah ja gerade, weil ich die Welt so sah, hässlich, dreckig und traurig und nicht schön aufgeräumt und verlogen arrangiert”. Daniel Spoerri, Eat Art. Daniel Spoerris Gastronoptikum, Hamburg 2006, 30. For an extensive interpretation of Spoerri’s Eat Art see Novero, Antidiets, 145 ff. 25 See Daniel Kofahl, “Kunst, Kulinaristik und Nachhaltigkeit in der Ernährung“, in: Kunsttexte 3, 2009, , (10 March 2013), n.p.



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It is no coincidence that most cultures cultivate eating as a social event, which therefore has strong ethical implications. While Spoerri concentrated on challenging the ordinary frame of food-related acts like cooking and eating, Joseph Beuys chose a different approach: he cultivated and refined a down-toearth way of cooking for his friends, caring for the origin of the ingredients and emphasizing the ecological aspects of food. Unlike the futurists, who propagated nationalism, Beuys contributed to the birth of a global ecological conscience that led to the foundation of the Green Party in Germany.26 There are other artists that perform cooking and eating as part of an interventionist art. The German group “Raumlabor”, for example, travels through Germany with an inflatable tent and stops at trouble hotspots in cities or in inhospitable places, as, for instance, under a motorway bridge. They invite the local residents to cook and eat together and create a social and spatial frame, where people meet, talk, eat and drink – four things that seem to belong together. They call their “kitchen monument” a “prototype for the construction of temporary communities”.27 Cooking, eating and drinking leads to communication and to community building, even if it is just for one evening. The space in which this takes place is demarcated by the transparent tent skin, so that the often inhospitable surroundings are not hidden from view. Such performances exist for the very moment, and they are conducive to synthetic experiences in a similar way as futurist cooking – albeit without the mauvais gout of xenophobic patriotism. Thus, the synthetic can be found in the new horizons of taste which explicitly turn against cultural framings and standardizations of the kind Spoerri stands for, and in the deliberately celebrated social acts of cooking and eating. The latter establishes a conscience of the multiple ethical implications of cooking and eating that could be called “eathics”. Furthermore, the multiple transformative character of these processes is at least implicitly emphasized. Eating is not only necessary for survival, but also a process of incorporation and transformation with highly transcendent implications. The sacrament of the Holy Communion is a good example: bread is transformed into the body of Christ and eventually incorporated by the person receiving the Holy Communion; thereby, in a figurative sense, the body of Christ 26 See Lemke, Die Kunst des Essens, 78 ff. Lemke refers to other examples such as the Food Justice Movement in the US, founded by Frances Lappé in the 1970s and which fights for fair trade and a vegetarian way of life, 115 ff. Founded in 1989, the slowfood-movement follows similar aims, especially concerning the appreciation of local goods and biodiversity, although they do not propagate a specific diet. See , (10 March 2013). 27 “Prototyp zur Konstruktion temporärer Gemeinschaften”. See Jan Liesegang, Matthias Rick and Marco Canevacci, Küchenmonument, Berlin 2007, 2, , (10 March 2013).

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is merged with the body of the believer. Michel Serres sees a conjunction of synthesis and analysis in this act: the breaking of the bread preceding the transubstantiation stands for the analytic process of creating single, discrete parts, which then merge with other substances through incorporation and lead to a community that is bound together by this one act of breaking bread and sharing it. This transcendent dimension of the act of eating is an often reflected aspect in literature and film. One short example should suffice to illustrate this: in Tanja Blixen’s story Babette’s Feast and Gabriel Axel’s film version of 1987, a puritan sect leading an ascetic way of life is confronted with the benefits of indulgence. At the end of the 19th century a small protestant community on the coast of Jutland gives shelter to the French refugee Babette, who proves to be an excellent cook. But in this puritan religion food is only a means of survival, and indulgence is forbidden. Babette, after having spent years in this sad community, wins the lottery and decides to give a banquet for those who saved her life. This banquet causes an uproar within the community, whose members are at odds with each other. They fear that they might enjoy eating the exquisite dishes and decide not to succumb to any kind of gustatory sensation: “Remember, your tongues do not know any taste” is the given motto. However, in the course of the meal the sensual sensations prove to be stronger, which becomes clear in a sequence of close-ups, showing slight changes in the mimics of the twelve guests. When, in the course of the banquet, the community members begin to reconcile and reunite, synthesis and transformation come together. They relax, forget their stubbornness and begin to mellow, which means that they are transformed from a bunch of strict, cheerless – and lonely – ascetics into a joyful, generous and loving group. By this transformational act their community is recreated – in the same way as the single food components are transformed into dishes of synthetic delight. All this happens thanks to the generous act of giving, altruistically performed by Babette.28 As shown above, Michel Serres’s philosophy of taste as a philosophy of the mingled is arranged around the three dimensions of the organ of taste, the tongue: the tongue tastes, speaks and kisses – it is physical, intellectual and emotional. The fourth dimension emerging from these three aspects is the spiritual one: the Holy Communion, the core ritual of the Christian religion, brings people together, but this is also – as the Eat Art examples have shown – a general characteristic of the act of eating, irrespective of any kind of religious ritual. 28 While this is a very positive interpretation of the transcendent character of eating and cooking, one of the most negative realizations of this topic might be the legendary film by Marco Ferreri, La Grande Bouffe (1973), a harsh critique of the decadent bourgeois way of life, full of mythological allusions.



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The ambivalent character of Eat Art between criticism and idealism, between total art work and an aesthetics of disgust makes it such an interesting and manifold mirror of cultures and societies. This happens because Eat Art emphasizes a synthetic view on life and shows us an alternative approach to traditional epistemologies: it integrates senses, media and actors, and thereby makes it obvious that some aspects of our lives cannot be explained by dismantling them into their constituent components. The consequences of such an alternative epistemology of synthesis for our approach to life are only just beginning to be discovered.

Susan Best

Lygia Clark, the Paris Years The Body as Medium and Material This chapter considers how the matter and materials of visual art practice are radically expanded by the Brazilian artist, Lygia Clark. In particular, I focus on Clark’s participatory works made in the late 1960s and early 70s while she was living in Paris. These works, or “propositions” as she called them, involved mundane substances such as: plastic sheets, stones, plastic bags, cloth, and vegetable nets.1 Clark described her propositions as about “the suppression of the object”.2 This characterisation suggests a close affinity with conceptual art and its dematerialisation of the art object, often understood as an attack upon traditional art materials and methods of art production. The term “dematerialisation” was coined by Lucy Lippard and John Chandler in 1968, to account for two ways in which the traditional art object was dissolved: art as idea and art as action. In the first version, they argue, “matter is denied, as sensation has been converted into concept” – this is the most familiar description of conceptual art.3 With the second version of dematerialisation they propose that art has been transformed into “energy and time-motion”.4 This second kind of dematerialisation includes performance and body art. Art as action is an apt way of describing many of Clark’s works from the 1960s. Indeed, Clark’s work has been classified as akin to conceptual art, most notably through her inclusion in the “Global Conceptualism” exhibition of 1999.5 Clark’s participatory works, however, do not adhere to the anti-aesthetic, anti-expressive protocols that inform and constrain late modern North American art movements, such as minimalism and conceptual art. Her works intensify aesthetic experience by directly involving the body of the beholder. In fact, her participatory works require the actual body of the beholder to produce the work of art. Unlike much 1 Lygia Clark, “Livro-obra” (On the Magic of the Object, 1983), in: Lygia Clark, ed. Manuel Borja-Villel, Barcelona 1998, 152-154, here 153. 2 Lygia Clark, “Da supressão do objeto (Anotações)” (On the Suppression of the Object (Notes), 1975), in: Lygia Clark, ed. Borja-Villel, 264-269. 3 Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art”, in: Lucy Lippard, Changing: Essays in Art Criticism, New York 1971, 255-276, here 255. 4 Lippard and Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art”, 255. 5 Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Tactics for Thriving on Adversity: Conceptualism in Latin America, 1960-1980”, in: Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, Rachel Weiss, et al., Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s, New York 1999, 53-71.



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performance and body art of the 1960s and 70s, which also used the body as a medium of expression (usually the artist’s body), these interactive works are usually private, involving just the participants and the materials and substances with which they interact. In other words, in Clark’s work the body of the participant becomes the site of aesthetic experience. The feelings elicited in the body become the work of art. Rather than the singular focus on visual appearances, all manner of sensory excitations are explored: touch, taste, movement, sight and hearing. By using the body in this way, Clark challenges us to reconsider how we understand the dematerialisation of art and the location and nature of aesthetic experience.

The Anti-Aesthetic Let me begin this analysis of Clark’s extraordinarily evocative art propositions by briefly outlining how her work conforms to the anti-aesthetic ideals of late modern art. It is around the idea of rejecting authorial authority that she most closely follows the anti-aesthetic tradition. Yve-Alain Bois has argued that Clark’s entire oeuvre aims at the “disappearance of the author”.6 By emphasising aesthetic reception rather than self-expression, she adheres to the questioning of the centrality of the artist’s subjectivity that is a consistent aim of anti-aesthetic art practices of the 1960s and 70s, most notably minimalism and conceptual art. Indeed, Clark articulates her aims in exactly this fashion. She said of her Do-itYourself artwork Caminhando (Walking or Trailing): “Through the Caminhando I lose authorship. . . I dissolve into the collective”.7 In this proposition from 1963, which took the form of an instruction piece, the participants make the work themselves with the very ordinary materials of paper and scissors. The instructions for the construction of the work were published in the English art journal Signals in 1965.8 Included in the journal were templates for the construction of the work as well as a photograph of a woman in the process of making it. Clark describes the process of making the work as follows: Make yourself a Trailing: you take the band of paper wrapped around a book, you cut it open, twist it, and you glue it back together so as to produce a Möbius strip.

6 Lygia Clark, “Nostalgia of the Body”, with an introduction by Yve-Alain Bois, in: October, 69, 1994, 85-109. 7 Clark, “On the Suppression of the Object”, 265. 8 Clark, “Walking Along – Do it Yourself”, in: Signals, April-May 1965, 7.

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Then take a pair of scissors, stick one point into the surface and cut continuously along the length of the strip … When you have gone the circuit of the strip, it’s up to you whether you cut to the left or the right of the cut you’ve already made. This idea of choice is capital. The special meaning of this experience is in the act of doing it. The work is your act alone. To the extent that you cut the strip, it refines and redoubles itself into interlacings. At the end the path is so narrow that you can’t open it further. It’s the end of the trail.9

This work produces a quite startling reaction: if you follow the trail of the Möbius strip by cutting along the outside of the strip, at some point you will find yourself inside the loop and cutting the other side of the paper. Even though this is what one expects to happen, it is still very disorienting and surprising when it does. It is as if something has invisibly shifted and we find ourselves suddenly in another place. This startling experience of virtual movement is a gentle but invigorating form of the ‘shock’ so consistently invoked as a crucial aspect of modernism and modern life. We can understand the power of this work by thinking about the account of surprise and startle in the work of American psychologist, Silvan Tomkins. According to Tomkins the hardwired affective response of surprise or startle serves to reset perception – it clears away whatever feelings or perceptions may be in the psychic apparatus to enable full attention to be turned to the startling phenomena.10 When we are surprised, we involuntarily stop what we are doing; we are suspended between the old action and any further action. This momentary suspense cuts up the flow of time and thereby enables more intense focus on the action that follows. The renewed intensity of focus following surprise is an aspect of almost all of Clark’s works. Surprise cuts us off from familiar reality as it plunges us more deeply into the experience of her propositions. Writing about this work to her friend and fellow artist Hélio Oiticica, Clark describes Caminhando as seminal: after this work the object is no longer important to her, except as a mediator for participation.11 In effect, materials are not fashioned into aesthetic objects for lasting contemplation. Rather they operate as conduits for interaction and experience that leaves no residue. Clark is very specific about the challenge her approach posed to conventional ideas of the artist as expressive genius. To underscore her meaning she lists words that she regards as no longer having meaning such as “genius” and the “work” 9 Clark, “1964: Trailings”, in: Clark, “Nostalgia of the Body”, 99. 10 Silvan Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness. Vol. 1: The Positive Affects, New York 1962, 498. 11 Clark, “Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica: Letters 1968-69” (Lygia Clark. Hélio Oiticica. Cartas 1964-1974), trans. Michael Asbury, in: Participation: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Claire Bishop, London 2006, 110.



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and “individualism”.12 In her questioning of authorship, Clark is aligned with the impulse towards impersonality that underpinned minimalist art of the 1960s as well as much conceptualism. This sentiment is well expressed by the American minimalist artist Carl Andre who stated that his whole oeuvre was dedicated “to the creation of work utterly free of human associations”.13 This impersonal sentiment is not just a feature of the visual arts at this time, it is echoed by many philosophers and theorists in the same period, most famously by Roland Barthes in his classic essay “the death of the author” which was first published in 1967 as part of the conceptual art magazine project, Aspen 5 + 6.14 One of the most haunting expressions of this idea, however, was written by Michel Foucault in Les mots et les choses (1966). He gestures towards a future where as he puts it “man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea”.15 This desire for the self-erasure of the artist is a recurrent impulse throughout modern art. Yve-Alain Bois has called this desire an impersonal urge that he tracks from at least the latter part of the 19th century in the work of Seurat.16 Bois notes that, at times, the impersonal urge is articulated as a desire for complete objectivity and the elimination of subjectivity. When oriented towards absolute self-effacement, each effort is bound to fail, as indeed Bois emphasises. The impulse in such instances is driven by an impossible quest for complete negation. Despite the acknowledged impossibility of achieving this ideal, the negation or attenuation of authorship is an idea that keeps returning, as if it is necessary to offset the just as consistent tilt towards the idea of the expressive (and usually) male genius. In contrast to other articulations of this impersonal ideal, Clark’s efforts to eclipse authorship are not intended to produce art that is “emotionally dry”, to cite conceptual artist Sol LeWitt’s instructions on the matter.17 Rather, as Roland Barthes anticipated, the death of the author makes way for the reader or participant, who becomes a vital part of the aesthetic encounter in Clark’s work. Con12 Clark, “On the Suppression of the Object”, 265. 13 Carl Andre, in: Cuts: Texts 1959-2004, ed. James Meyer, Cambridge, MA 2005, 291. 14 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”, in: Image–Music–Text, trans. Stephen Heath, New York 1977, 142-148. 15 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York 1973, 387. 16 Yve-Alain Bois, “The Difficult Task of Erasing Oneself: Non-composition in Twentieth-Century Art”, held at: Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton University, 7 March 2007, , (10.01.2013). 17 Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” (1967), in: Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, eds. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, Berkeley 1996, 822.

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trary to all expectations, the diminution of authorship intensifies the expressive and affective dimension of art. For Clark, aesthetic expression is realised by the participant; without their actions no work of art exists. Clark refers to the strange imaginings that her work often unleashes as a kind of “magic” internal to the participant.18 The body is the medium for this magical experience. The works are intended to help the participant draw out of themselves a rich capacity for living and experiencing in order to combat modern alienation. This richly associative approach to prosaic materials is in marked contrast to the literalism that characterised the minimalist use of materials. The minimalist approach is well captured by Frank Stella’s famous statement about his stripe paintings: “what you see is what you see”.19 And all you see in Stella’s stripe paintings, according to Carl Andre, are stripes. “There is nothing else in his painting”, he insists.20 Stella, Andre continues, is not interested in expression, sensitivity or symbolism – just stripes. The meaning, then, is in the work, right there on the surface. As Stella further explains: “all I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion”.21 Literalism is posed here as an antidote to the associative, subjective qualities of materials. In contrast, Clark rejects certain romantic ideas about authorship and genius in concert with the anti-aesthetic tradition, while retaining the ideas of aesthetic feeling and imaginative associations to materials, albeit in a different form.

Biological Architecture: The Language of Bodies In late 1968 Clark moves to Paris, where she lives until her final return to Brazil in 1976. It is while she is in Paris that she proposes a series of group works that involve more than two participants. In these works, the experience of her propositions is shared. Where previously her works involved one, or at the most two participants, her new collective works involve groups of people closely collaborating. In the earlier works that involved two people from around 1966-1968, there was an intense intimacy forged between the participants through proximity and mutual exploration. For example, O eu e o tu (The I and the You) from 1967 joined 18 Clark, “Letter to Helio Oiticica” (1968), in: Lygia Clark, ed. Borja-Villel, 236. 19 Frank Stella in “Questions to Stella and Judd by Bruce Glaser” (1966), in: Theories and Documents, eds. Stiles and Selz, 121. 20 Carl Andre, “Preface to Stripe Painting” (1959), in: Theories and Documents, eds. Stiles and Selz, 124. 21 Stella, “Questions to Stella”, 121.



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together a man and a woman through elaborate clothing. The bright blue clothing is made from a plasticized material that is smooth and cool to the touch. More specifically, the work is comprised of two jump suits or boiler suits joined together by a slightly stretchy cord located near the abdomen on each suit, which limited movement. The suits also have matching hoods that obstruct vision and muffle hearing. There is a strong feeling of containment and restriction about the construction of O eu e o tu that turns the attention inwards. This is amplified by the openings in the suits that are formed by six zippers on each outfit. Inside the openings are substances to explore that are loosely gendered – rough for men, smooth for women – so that the man discovers masculine textures inside the woman’s suit and the woman similarly discovers feminine qualities or textures inside the man’s suit. The process of exploration reveals to each participant the self in the other: the man, as it were, finds himself in the woman’s body and vice versa. In sum, O eu e o tu continues the use of materials to startle and surprise. When the participant is encased within the suit, materials do not register objectively but are apprehended as a series of qualities that might pertain to many things – bristly, rough or smooth, silky, wet-like. This fragmentary perception is amplified by the incapacity to see what is being felt. In the group works of the late 1960s, materials become more closely aligned with the body. This shift in approach to materials is explicitly noted by Clark, she explains: “what remains of the object (some elastic bands, plastic sheets, jute sacks and thread) are quite empty of meaning and can only be brought to life by human support”.22 The reduction of artistic means serves to intensify the importance of human action and interaction. Works, or forms of architecture, are now literally constructed from bodies and these meagre materials. Clark calls these constructions “poetic shelter in which inhabiting is equivalent to communicating”.23 That is, bodily gestures both construct the environment and serve as a kind of communication: a stance or position like ‘legs apart’ is at once a structure and an invitation, a tunnel and a passageway for someone else to pass through. An environment is elaborated from bodies in contact, in touch with one another. In Arquiteturas biológicas II (Biological architecture II, 1969) a tunnel is made by two bodies, for two bodies to meet in the middle. The main materials are netting, elastic and plastic. When recently exhibited at the “Lygia Clark Retrospective” at the Itaú Cultural Centre in São Paulo (2012), the potential structure 22 Clark, “L’art c’est le corps”, in: Lygia Clark, ed. Borja-Villel, 233. 23 Clark, “O homem, estrutura viva de uma arquitetura biológica e celular” (The Body is the House: Sexuality, Invasion of Individual ‘Territory’, 1971), in: Lygia Clark, ed. Borja-Villel, 248.

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appeared puzzling and inert; it was folded up and placed in open white bins with other works from this series. It required the trained invigilators to animate the work and show visitors how these materials could be worn. When assembled, two standing bodies have their arms and legs encased in pockets made from netting; their heads are inserted in hoods made from the same netting material with an attached net of shells. Attached to the pockets are large plastic sheets forming a cross, the lower section of plastic forms a V-shaped tunnel through which two blindfolded participants crawl until they encounter each other. Clark said of these works: The environment only exists in the sense that there is this collective expression. It is created by the gestures of participants, in which each person takes a sheet of plastic and in turn produces a cell which involves this or that participant and so on. Through each of these gestures a living biological architecture is born, which when finished the experience is dissolved.24

The documentary photographs of these works are incredibly striking and evocative. The works are a testament to a time of great optimism about the possibilities of all kinds of cultural rebirthing and yet at the same time there is the kind of strict compositional control of materials and space that is most often the byproduct of training in painting. It is no surprise, then, that Clark studied with Isaac Dobrinsky and Fernand Léger in the early 1950s, as well as with one of the masters of painting writ large, the Brazilian landscape architect, Roberto Burle Marx from 1947 to 1949. Her career began in painting in the late 1950s, but rapidly moved beyond the restrictions of the frame. Later, when reflecting on her starting point in geometric abstraction, Clark spoke of a desire for a kind of immersion in the work: “I began with geometry, but I was looking for an organic space where one could enter the painting”.25 The biological architecture series realises this aim: participants interact with real intersected planes and their gestures make these planes into an organic space. Other works in the series include: Arquiteturas biológicas Ovo-mortalha (Biological Architecture: Egg Shroud, 1968) and Arquiteturas biológicas: Nascimento (Biological Architecture: Birth, 1969). Arquiteturas biológicas Ovo-mortalha involves two participants who face one another, each person puts his or her feet into small net bags sewn into a large rectangular sheet of plastic. They are

24 Clark cited in Guy Brett, “Lygia Clark: Six Cells”, in: Lygia Clark, ed. Borja-Villel, 27. 25  Clark cited in Mary Schneider Enriquez, “Mapping Change: a Historical Perspective on Geometric Abstraction in Argentina, Venezuela, and Brazil”, in: Geometric Abstraction: Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, New Haven 2001, 32.



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instructed to wrap the body of the other with the sheet. The combination of both potential life and smothering death are signalled in the title: Ovo-mortalha. Arquiteturas biológicas: Nascimento also suggests a psychically significant event – birth. It requires six people to build a human tunnel. Two people put their legs into net bags sewn into the ends of a rectangular plastic sheet and then lie on their backs with their legs in the air. Four people then function as organic buttresses, two at each end, offering a shoulder each to hold up the legs. The intimate environment elaborated from bodies in close contact is palpable even through the mediation of the documentation. In these works the body is connected to others in a common body or a community experience. The body turns outwards towards others and the world. It becomes a vital building block, what Clark describes as “the living structure of cellular architecture, the mesh of an infinite tissue”.26 The participant becomes what French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls a “fold” in the “flesh of the world”; that is, the body is continuous with the world – part of its tissue – and yet individuated, a cell or fold within it.27 This model of the relationship between bodies and the world emphasizes reciprocity and interdependence, rather than the customary sovereignty of the self over the world or others. Clark began reading Merleau-Ponty in the late 1950s and according to YveAlain Bois his work remained a life long interest and influence.28

Strange Imaginings: Group Works at the Sorbonne The next series of propositions was developed when Clark worked with a group of students at the Sorbonne. In 1972 she was invited to teach a course on gestural communication. Combining the group actions of the previous suite of works with the more associative use of materials of some of her earlier works, this series underscores the enigmatic nature of the body: its capacity to generate or embrace illusions. Two works are particularly suggestive of the strange imaginings of the body, Canibalismo (Cannibalism) and Baba antropofágica (Cannibalistic Slobber), both 1973. In each group action, one participant lies on the ground surrounded by the group. In Canibalismo, the blindfolded students take and eat food from a pouch 26 Clark, “L’art c’est le corps”, 233. 27 Clark’s idea of cells that are part of an infinite tissue echoes Merleau-Ponty’s metaphor used to describe vision and the body as continuous and yet separate from the world. The body is a “fold” in the flesh of the world. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Evanston 1968, 146. 28 Bois, “Some Latin Americans in Paris”, in: Geometric Abstraction, 88.

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located over the belly of the reclining student. The reclining student wears a blue plasticised suit with a matching hood that recalls the boiler suits of O eu e O tu. In Baba antropofágica the action is reversed: thread is drawn from a cotton reel in the mouth of each of the participants and placed on the body of the reclining student. If the action of Canibalismo generates a fantasy of eating the other, then the reversed action of Baba antropofágica is something like giving one’s inner substance to the other and, indeed, this is precisely what Clark reports. The participants felt as if they were taking out their own insides.29 These fantasies of the body take Clark’s practice into more dangerous territory and in a diary entry from 1973 she refers to a series of “counter-transfers” that depressed her.30 Her counter-transferences are not described in any detail, however she reports that one student referred to Baba antropofágica as showing him how women ensnare men in their spiders’ webs – his transferential response to the situation, perhaps. His perception, transferential or otherwise, seemed absolutely right to Clark. This pair of works perhaps follows too closely the typical oral phantasies of infancy described by Melanie Klein, such as devouring the other, eating the contents of the mother’s stomach, or taking out the mother’s insides.31 The repetition of typical aggressive infant phantasies would make transferential reactions more likely than in any other works.32 In sum, this pair of works intersects with typical phantasies rather than promulgating a recovery of the wild imaginings, feelings and sensations of a pre-individual body. While the reference to cannibalism in art production has a particular history in Brazil – it served as a metaphor for early 20th-century Brazilian responses to modernism – significantly in Clark’s works cannibalism is figured as a mutual or reversible relation.33 Clark’s final series of works (if we can still call them that), Estructuração do Self (The Structuring of the Self, 1976-82), move wholly into the therapeutic context, addressing severe psychotic fantasies about the body. As early as 1971, 29 Clark, “Paris, July 6th 1974”, Letter to Hélio Oiticica, in: Lygia Clark, ed. Borja-Villel, 288. 30 Clark, “Untitled text”, in: Lygia Clark, ed. Borja-Villel, 298. 31 See Melanie Klein, “Some Theoretical Conclusions Regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant” (1952), in: Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-63, London 1988, 61-93. 32 The work of Melanie Klein is referred to in Clark’s article, “Objeto relacional” (Relational object), in: Lygia Clark, ed. Borja-Villel, 321. Klein’s work models the infant’s phantasies and defences predominantly in terms of oral metaphors or strategies: for example, incorporation and projection. The desire to devour the mother and her babies is one of many graphic phantasies she recounts. 33 Brett notes that Clark renews Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 idea of Antropofágia, namely the idea that Brazilian culture ‘swallowed’ other cultures in order to create its own. See Brett, “Lygia Clark: Six cells”, 23.



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when contemplating a shift in this direction, Clark argued that such work would continue the trajectory of her collective works, and move her practice into the world.34 In this last phase of her work many of the familiar textural substances she used in her art practice – nets, hoses and bags – are redeployed to augment the damaged body-image of the patient. In light of these last works, we can see that Clark’s work always had a therapeutic function. The aim of art, she said in the early 1960s, is to combat depersonalisation and to offer modern man “the chance to find himself”.35 It is the participant however, not the artist, who is given the chance to find him or herself. Clark’s subjectivity is not the object of exploration or exposition; she like other artists of the 1960s and 70s rejects self-expression. The quest for self-discovery is a gift to the participant that is made possible by her inventive use of very ordinary materials, sometimes to stimulate wild associations, at others to build a sense of interconnection and community. Her primary material, however, is the body. She, like many in the 1960s, believed deeply in the transformative power of the body and bodily activities, particularly those that entailed group interactions. Group psychology, so often conceptualised as the domain of lowered capacity, is here a source of hope and liberation. We can understand her work with both groups and individuals as an “experimental exercise of freedom”, to use Brazilian art critic Mário Pedrosa’s phrase.36 She teaches us, then, that freedom and liberation from oppression require attention to the body and interior life as well as the social and political context.

34 Clark, “Untitled Text”, in: Lygia Clark, ed. Borja-Villel, 280. 35 Clark, “On the Magic of the Object”, 154. 36 See Rina Carvajal’s explanation of the term in “The Experimental Exercise of Freedom”, in: The Experimental Exercise of Freedom: Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathias Goeritz, Hélio Oiticica and Mira Schendel, eds. Susan Martin and Alma Ruiz, Los Angeles 1999, 35-36.

Gaëlle Théval

Les matérialités à l’œuvre dans la « poésie élémentaire » de Julien Blaine Les récits retraçant l’histoire des avant-gardes en France retiennent bien souvent, pour la période allant de 1960 à 1980, celle des groupes textualistes comme Tel Quel, laissant parfois l’impression erronée d’une absence d’héritage des avantgardes historiques comme le Futurisme ou le dadaïsme autrement que par l’entremise, ô combien défigurante, du Surréalisme. Pourtant, ces années sont également marquées par le développement en poésie d’une néo-avant-garde, que l’on pourrait mettre en parallèle avec l’émergence des courants néo-dadaïstes comme le Nouveau Réalisme, souvent reléguée, voire niée dans sa dimension poétique, que l’on a maintenant coutume de qualifier du terme générique de « poésie expérimentale ». Courant peu visible, de par son absence des circuits habituels de diffusion de la poésie, mais aussi, aux yeux de l’histoire littéraire, de par l’absence de constitution d’un groupe et d’un manifeste commun1 au profit d’une organisation en réseaux internationaux autour de revues2 ou encore de festivals,3 la poésie expérimentale se construit dans un double geste d’opposition aux groupes d’avantgardes formalistes et de redécouverte des avant-gardes historiques, alors très peu connues en France. Contrairement à la première néo-avant-garde post-1945 que forme le groupe lettriste, particulièrement à Isidore Isou, les acteurs de la poésie expérimentale cherchent à rétablir une filiation, à redessiner les lignes d’une histoire littéraire tronquée, selon eux, par le géant surréaliste. Les revues citées, en publiant des manifestes et poèmes alors introuvables, pointent une proximité des formes et des pratiques dans le domaine des arts plastiques et dans le domaine poétique, tout en mettant en évidence les spécificités de ce courant, liées tant au contexte historique qu’aux médias employés. Multipliant les expérimentations, introduisant dans le poème des éléments non linguistiques (images, éléments plastiques, sons), empruntant ses techniques de production à d’autres arts 1 Les quelques tentatives en ce sens, notamment celle de Pierre Garnier fondant le «  Spatialisme » en 1968, se sont soldées par un échec. Cette absence jette d’ailleurs le doute sur la pertinence même de l’appellation d’ « avant-garde », fût-elle « néo », autrement que pour indiquer un lien de filiation esthétique avec les avant-gardes historiques. 2 Notamment OU-Cinquième saison (1964-1979) revue-disque consacrée à la poésie sonore dirigée par Henri Chopin, L’Humidité (1970-1978) de Jean-François Bory, puis, à partir de 1976, DOC(K)S, fondée par Julien Blaine. 3 Le plus important de par sa longévité notamment fut Polyphonix, initié par Jean-Jacques Lebel, à partir de 1979.



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(comme le collage), variant les moyens de production et de diffusion (magnétophone et disque, photographie, performance live), dans une perspective de relativisation et souvent de sortie du livre, cette poésie expérimentale livre des objets hybrides, marqués par l’intersémioticité et l’intermédialité. Qu’elles se nomment poésie visuelle, sonore, ou action, ces pratiques ont en commun une attention constante portée à la matérialité du poème et de l’ensemble de ses composantes. Né en 1947, Julien Blaine est une figure centrale du courant expérimental. Bien que proche, par certains aspects, de mouvements comme Fluxus, le poète s’est toujours tenu à l’écart du groupe, refusant l’enfermement lié à cette notion au profit de l’esprit de «  réseau  » dont sa revue DOC(K)S4 fut une plateforme majeure. Depuis 1962, il développe une poésie polymorphe qu’il qualifie d’ « élémentaire »5 « composée de tous les éléments existants, à commencer par le corps, composé lui-même de sang, de chair et d’os ».6 Se désignant de manière récurrente comme un «  poète physique  », «  en chair et en os  », Blaine met en effet tout d’abord en jeu, lors de performances, la matérialité même de son corps, tout entier engagé dans le processus de constitution du poème qui ne se réalise pleinement que dans le hic et nunc de son effectuation. Cependant, l’œuvre est aussi marqué par la production de poèmes destinés à la publication où se donnent à lire et à voir différentes matérialités, celle de la lettre, celle du signe, celle du medium ou du support. C’est à l’idée maîtresse d’une circulation entre les différents modes de manifestation du poème chez Blaine que sont la performance et la mise en livre et, partant, aux phénomènes de transmédiations qui interrogent différents types de matérialités que nous nous intéresserons d’abord, pour envisager ensuite ce qui permet leur articulation. Quel que soit le medium utilisé, un même paradigme lie ces différentes manifestations : celui du corps. Clé de voûte de l’œuvre de Blaine, la performance convoque en effet le mouvement, le souffle, et la voix : C’est un corps dans un espace et c’est un son

4 Fondée après Les Carnets l’Octéor (1962-1963), Approche (1966-1969) avec Jean-François Bory et Robho (1967-1971). 5 Dans un entretien, l’auteur précise qu’il ne connaissait pas l’emploi que faisaient Hans Arp et Kurt Schwitters de ce terme. De fait il l’utilise d’une manière sensiblement différente. « Entretien avec Julien Blaine et Jean-François Bory », in: Poésure et peintrie : d’un art, l’autre, Marseille 1993, 346. 6 Julien Blaine, entretien, in: Blaine au MAC, un tri, Limoges 2009, 51.

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dans un corps, ce son est celui de mon corps ou celui de cet espace c’est un son de nature : voix, viande, etc. ou un son d’artifice : musique, bruits, etc. Puis c’est un geste du corps et un mouvement de cet espace et comment jouent ensemble le geste du corps et le mouvement de l’espace […] 7

Ce paradigme se retrouve à chacun des niveaux de l’œuvre, pour chacune des unités matérielles envisagées. La poésie de Julien Blaine est ainsi « élémentaire », d’abord en ce qu’elle autorise une décomposition du poème en la somme de ses éléments matériels.

Fig. 54 : Chute? Chut typographiés, 1982, reprod. dans Blaine au MAC: un tri, Limoges 2009, 10.

7 Julien Blaine, « La performance », in: DOC(K)S, 3, 2003, n° 29/30/31/32/33, « Action », 82.



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Corps de la lettre et corps-lettre Première unité matérielle mise en œuvre par le poète, la lettre se voit traitée, au sein du poème, non seulement comme matériau mais comme matière. Autonomisée de façon à « sortir la phrase de sa gangue »8, elle s’y manifeste de manière littéralement incarnée, et animée. La circulation intermédiatique du poème Chute/chut ! (1962-1982)9 est à cet égard emblématique. Dans cette performance, le poète dégringole, dans une chute vertigineuse, les escaliers de la gare Saint Charles à Marseille pour ensuite, un doigt sur la bouche, prononcer l’onomatopée « chut », mettant ainsi en œuvre, par le jeu de mots alliant la chute à l’injonction au silence, un passage de l’écrit (le titre de la performance), au corps (la chute effective), puis à la voix. La même année, le poète réalise une œuvre intitulée Chute ? Chut typographiés (fig. 54) qui affirme son lien avec la première sous le signe de la transposition intermédiale. Or celle-ci s’effectue à plusieurs niveaux : l’œuvre se présente en effet non pas, comme le titre le laisse entendre, sous la forme d’un imprimé, réalisé en typographie, mais comme un photogramme tiré du film de la performance, colorié au feutre, montrant le corps du performeur en pleine chute dans les escaliers. Sur celui-ci, le corps du poète a été entouré au feutre rouge, une flèche le désignant comme « caractère ». Les contremarches servent de support à l’inscription « espace », l’arrête des marches devenant « ligne ». C’est alors le réel même qui se fait page, support d’inscription, et le corps du poète caractère typographique, éclairant d’une nouvelle lumière le titre de la pièce  : le corps-caractère se fait incarnation de la chute du « e » dans le passage de la « chute » à « chut ». La transmédiation opère ainsi une mise en équivalence du corps et de la lettre, renouant d’une certaine façon avec un lieu devenu commun de la tradition typographique et graphique (de Champ fleury du typographe humaniste Geoffroy Tory aux nombreux alphabets anthropomorphes10), ici réinvesti par le corps du poète même, mais aussi mis en mouvement : « J’écris le texte / je le mets en page : / caractères et graisses, / espaces et corps // Je le mets en forme : / geste et corps / (en forme physique) / et en forme sonore : / voix et timbre ».11

8 Titre d’un livre du poète paru en 2001 aux éditions Al Dante. 9 Les images de la performance figurent dans un film réalisé par Sarenco, En attendant la troisième guerre mondiale, et ont été reprises dans Julien Blaine, l’éléphant et la chute, réalisé par Marie Poitevin, en 2006. 10 Voir Massin, La Lettre et l’image, Paris 1993. 11 « Berrante berçante », in: Comment sortir la phrase de sa gangue ?, Romainville 2001, n.p.

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Fig. 55 : « Lili von paradise » – Processus de déculturalisation, un itinéraire, Paris 1972, 67-74.

L’équivalence posée dans cette citation incarne la métaphore typographique du corps de caractère placé sur l’espace de la page dans le corps du poète et la transpose dans un espace-temps qui est celui de l’expérience du spectateur. Ce paradigme de la lettre-corps se retrouve à de nombreux niveaux de l’œuvre, selon des modalités proches, dès les années 1960, comme dans une version photogra-



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phique des alphabets anthropomorphes où chaque partie du corps forme une lettre parue dans la revue Approches,12 ou encore dans la série de 1972, « Lili von paradise » (fig. 55), où la planche anatomique révèle, au delà des viscères et du squelette, la lettre comme principe fondamental de la corporéité. La lettre est donc littéralement incarnée, mise en chair, et exploitée dans sa dimension plastique davantage que comme graphème. Traitée comme corps en action, la lettre l’est par exemple dans les projections lumineuses de l’installation-performance La Guerre (1964) (fig. 56)13 Cette performance repose sur un récit narrant l’opposition de « deux camps qui se battaient pour faire un mot : d’une part les ballonnistes, c’est-à-dire toutes les lettres rondes qui tournent autour du O  ; d’autre part les fléchardes, c’est-à-dire toutes les lettres anguleuses qui tournent autour du I ».14 Si la morphologie propre du graphème est mise en jeu, en ce qu’elle fournit la matière à la construction des personnages et sa matrice à la fiction, la projection lumineuse des lettres et leur mise en mouvement dans un carrousel où le poète évolue au cours de la performance, est primordiale. À l’instar de Chute/ Chut, la performance connaît aussi une version imprimée, cette fois en offset  : le recours à un procédé de fixation utilisant la lumière permet de rendre sensible le mouvement auquel la lettre était soumise lors de la performance, ce qu’une transposition en typographie n’aurait pas permis.

Fig. 56 : La Guerre (extrait), Ailleurs n° 5, décembre 1964, 28.

12 Approches, sept. 1966, n° 2, 51. 13 La Guerre, présentée en 1962 lors de la Biennale de Paris, version imprimée parue dans Ailleurs, déc. 1964, n° 5, 26-37. 14 La Guerre.

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Corps animé, mis en mouvement, la lettre peut aussi, dans son incarnation, se faire corps déchiré : le poème « U » soumet ainsi la lettre à divers modes d’incarnation : expectoré à l’issue d’une longue inspiration lors de la performance, travaillé par la voix et le souffle propre à la cavité phonatoire du poète, le phonème devenu graphème se voit, dans la version imprimée en offset, traité comme un tissu, devenant « demi-U » mal cousu dans Comment sortir la phrase de sa gangue (2001). Si l’œuvre comporte également un travail important sur le mot pris pour unité, nous passerons directement de la lettre, envisagée comme unité minimale du poème, au livre, considéré comme unité supérieure du poème dans la poésie imprimée, en ce que sa matérialité propre y est également largement exploitée à l’intérieur du paradigme corporel.

Livre du corps et corps du livre Le recours à la performance, la volonté de produire une poésie « en chair et en os », implique une sortie de l’espace du livre, considéré par le poète à ses débuts comme un medium inerte, et mortifère. À l’instar de nombreux poètes du courant expérimental, Julien Blaine juge en effet, dans les années 1960, le temps du livre révolu, ce dont témoigne un texte manifestaire particulièrement virulent à son égard, où le livre est désigné comme lieu d’enfermement, voire instrument de coercition soumettant la poésie à des contraintes marchandes dont elle n’a que faire : Notre poésie nous fait au moment où nous la faisons. Notre action n’est rien sans les réactions qu’elle provoque. […] Elle ne peut être différée – ce qui nous érige contre la séduction du livre, et, plus généralement, de l’objet dont l’objet-livre (Gallimard, Le Seuil, Maeght), au même titre que le livre-objet (Le Soleil-Noir, Givaudan) n’est qu’une variante mystifiée, une marchandise canonifiée [sic]. Qu’est-ce en effet que le livre, sinon une entreprise de réduction, d’enfermement et de POLICE des langages, sinon le grommellement d’une société aphasique parce qu’elle est opprimée ? 15

Pourtant, force est de constater que ce medium n’est pas abandonné par le poète qui continue de publier des livres, nombreux, depuis ces années. Ce constat n’a du paradoxe que l’apparence : loin d’être mis en congé, le livre est mis en ques15 Julien Blaine, Alain Schifres et Jean-Claude Moineau, « La poésie hors du livre hors du spectacle hors de l’objet », in: Robho, 1971, n° 5/6.



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tion, voire mis à la question par un certain nombre d’opérations qui le font retrouver une matérialité pleine : un corps. La performance créée en 1967 Quant au livre de l’échec  en témoigne, que Blaine présente comme « un manifeste contre le livre tel qu’il était considéré à l’époque : unique support de l’écrit, inerte et intouchable… ».16 Dans cette version performée et retournée du projet mallarméen, le poète se met en scène jouant aux échecs sur un damier géant, à l’aide de pièces constituées de fragments d’imprimés. Lorsque la partie arrive à confusion, le poète prend le damier, fait « corps avec lui comme dans une lutte, en déchire les cases, les mêle aux pièces, les relie entre elles pour fabriquer un nouveau livre. Ce dernier est voué à être lu, mais également à être détruit ».17 En jeu, une lutte avec le livre et ses composants, qui laisse voir une relation charnelle, physique à un objet présenté ici comme tel, et non comme medium transparent, visant, donc, en le mettant en action, à lui redonner corps c’est-à-dire, également, à lui redonner vie, et mort. Telle semble aussi être la visée du poète dans son second livre publié, Essai sur la sculpturale (fig. 57), daté lui aussi de 1967, où le livre, objet d’expérimentations, se fait corps selon des modalités différentes. Dans ce poème-livre se voient synthétisées des recherches sur les possibles qu’offre le livre comme objet, à commencer par la mobilité, des perforations faisant jouer les surfaces des pages entre elles pour créer un effet de cinétisme. Ces perforations effectives des pages sont justifiées par les images qui constituent l’essentiel du poème : chacune correspond à un orifice corporel. L’avancée dans la lecture de l’ouvrage s’apparente alors à une pénétration, ce que thématise le texte : « à la première perforation = la pénétration. » / « aux suivantes perforations = la progression > création ». Le livre, qui met en scène le corps, se met en scène comme corps, corps féminin, ce que la couleur rouge ou rosée de la plupart des fonds de pages amplifie. Dans ce livre-corps se donne également à voir le corps de la lettre. Le sous-titre de l’Essai est à la recherche de l’intégralité du O, ce rond pouvant représenter une lettre, un chiffre ou un trou. On retrouve un travail sur la matérialité de la lettre, où se fonde une méditation sur les origines mêmes de l’écriture. Dans la progression proposée par le livre, on observe en effet un passage de l’image au signe : aux dessins d’orifices succède une suite de pictogrammes ou pseudo-hiéroglyphes, dans ce qui s’offre alors comme la figuration d’une renaissance de l’écriture. Des multiples pénétrations effectuées dans la chair du livre sort une écriture neuve. « Élémentaire  », la poésie de Julien Blaine l’est également en ce qu’elle se compose, potentiellement, de tous les éléments du monde, le poète refusant de

16 Blaine, Blaine au MAC, 87. 17 Blaine, Blaine au MAC, 89.

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se limiter « au seul vocabulaire alphabétique ».18 Dans la performance, bien sûr, mais aussi dans ses versions imprimées, le poème intègre ainsi à titre constitutif des éléments considérés comme hétérogènes à la littérature, offrant une poésie que l’on qualifiera d’intersémiotique.

Fig. 57 : Essai sur la sculpturale (extrait), Paris 1967, n.p.

Signe-corps et corps-signe 13427 Poëmes métaphysiques  (1986) se fonde ainsi sur l’idée selon laquelle le monde est saturé de signes que le poète s’entend à « restituer »,19 comme l’annonce l’un des textes qui jalonnent l’ouvrage :

18 « Entretien avec Julien Blaine et Jean-François Bory », in: Poésure et peintrie, 346. 19 « le monde peut être entièrement lu ; en vertu de ce postulat, au lieu de penser et traduire le monde nous le restituons. » (Julien Blaine, Agentzia, 1969, n° 11/12, reproduit dans Blaine au MAC : un tri, 2009, 51).



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Simplement pour dire qu’en ouvrant l’œil […] Vous verrez des Poëmes Métaphysiques – quotidien – partout : dans des trains, dans les aéroports, dans les hôpitaux, dans les forêts, sur les routes... dans les notices, les modes d’emploi, les posologies, les plans, les lexiques, les cartes, les guides... et ailleurs encore...

L’usage de la photographie, et, surtout, de l’offset comme moyen de reproduction, permet la mise en présence de cette diversité de signes au sein du poème imprimé, selon un dispositif immuable, divisant la page en deux espaces rectangulaires inégaux séparés par une ligne grasse. À la confrontation des signes iconiques et des signes linguistiques induite par la mise en page apparemment classique de type image / légende20 se substitue bientôt une série de glissements venant interroger le statut même de ces signes : l’image prend alors la place traditionnellement réservée au texte, et vice versa. Outre les variations de place, ces perturbations sont dues à l’infraction massive d’une autre catégorie : les « signes plastiques ».21 La couleur, la qualité du trait, la nature de la trame, le cadrage, sont autant d’éléments plastiques mis en avant par la reproduction en offset qui vient accuser, et mettre en œuvre dans la constitution du sens, la plasticité du support, la plasticité de l’image et de l’écriture envisagée comme image : « c’est là qu’on voit entrer […] la totalité des signes : si, sur un texte, il y a du sang qui coule ; si, sur un texte, il y a une tache d’encre ; si, sur un texte, il y a une larme qui efface un bout de mot ; trois exemples très simples pour te montrer que le texte est modifié  ».22 Le fonctionnement des PO.M23 se fonde ainsi sur la mise en relation de ces trois niveaux et les glissements intersémiotiques de certaines unités, provoquant une instabilité sémiotique pourvoyeuse de sens. Ainsi dans le « PO.M n° 50 », le texte imprimé sur la page de journal qui sert de support au dessin de Mickey Mouse griffonné alterne entre le statut de trame (signe plastique) et le statut de texte (signe linguistique). La lecture des zones pointées par les extrémités du dessin ou entourées par le dessin des yeux du personnage est en effet indispensable à la saisie du sens du poème : les expressions « animaux », 20 Le poète convoque ici un agencement propre au livre illustré : « Je me suis d’abord souvenu de cette “image” dans nos vieux et précieux livres qui comportent en “légende” un fragment du chapitre illustré... » (Julien Blaine, Sortie de quarantaine (perron), Ventraben 1992, n.p.). 21 Groupe Mu., Traité du signe visuel, Paris 1992. 22 « Entretien avec Julien Blaine et Jean-François Bory », in: Poésure et peintrie, 346. 23 C’est l’abréviation qu’en donne le poète au sein même du recueil.

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« maître chien », et « commerce » ainsi pointées entrent en résonnance avec la légende «  Fable  », amenant elle-même à interpréter la figure de Mickey Mouse comme le personnage d’une fable moderne et dégradée, soumise à des impératifs commerciaux. Le poème se fait objet sémiotique total que le lecteur devenu herméneute est invité à décoder. À cette intersémioticité s’associe, ici également, une forme d’intermédialité, les PO.M étant eux aussi des lieux de circulation de l’imprimé à la performance et de la performance à l’imprimé : certains présentent des photographies tirées de performances (comme « Reps éléphant » dont une photographie est reprise dans les « PO.M n° 18 » et « PO.M n° 19 »), ou des textes lus lors de performances (« claustrophobie » reproduit dans le « PO.M n° 13419 & 203 » [sic]), d’autres deviennent à leur tour des performances. La relation entre les différents modes de manifestation du poème élémentaire a été jusque là envisagée sur le mode de la circulation intermédiatique et intersémiotique. C’est maintenant à leur articulation que nous voudrions nous intéresser, de façon à mettre au jour sinon une unité, du moins un fil conducteur au sein d’une œuvre foisonnante et hétéroclite. Cette cohérence nous est donnée, nous semble-t-il, par le paradigme de l’empreinte qui permet de relier la performance aux productions imprimées et de mettre en évidence ce qui en fonde la profonde cohérence : la recherche d’une écriture.

De l’empreinte à l’écriture Pour Georges Didi-Huberman, faire une empreinte, c’est toujours produire un tissu de relations matérielles qui donnent lieu à un objet concret [...], mais qui engagent aussi tout un ensemble de relations abstraites, mythes, fantasmes, connaissances, etc. C’est en quoi l’empreinte est à la fois processus et paradigme .24

Envisagée comme processus, l’empreinte permet de penser l’articulation entre le moment de la performance et les multiples productions que Blaine a coutume de qualifier de « résidus », qui n’en sont pas de simples traces à valeur documentaire mais plutôt des œuvres possédant une valeur indiciaire. Ce qui ne se joue pas dans la performance est de l’ordre du différé, de l’empreinte en tant que résultat d’un geste :

24 Georges Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance par contact, archéologie, anachronisme et modernité de l’empreinte, Paris 2008, 27 (nous soulignons).



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Fig. 58 : Breuvage épandu, 1968 – reprod. dans Blaine au MAC : un tri, Limoges 2009, 58. Pour moi, ce qui importe est la geste, la dimension physique de la poésie, qu’elle soit réactive, vivante. La fin, l’aboutissement, ne m’intéressent pas […]. Les traces que je peux laisser, qui balisent ma trajectoire : publications, enregistrements, objets…, sont à prendre

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pour ce qu’ils sont, c’est-à-dire des résidus de cette poésie élémentaire, des déchets… justes bons à donner des indications, à offrir des indices de ce qui se passe “en vrai”.25

Cette dimension processuelle est particulièrement à l’œuvre dans la série des Breuvages épandus (fig.  58), où l’objet esthétique obtenu par empreinte n’est jamais présenté seul mais comme l’aboutissement d’un geste qui en lui-même fait œuvre (l’action consistant ici à déverser un ensemble de lettres en plastique sur une surface, puis à recouvrir les lettres avec de la peinture à la bombe afin d’en garder l’empreinte), que ce soit par une suite de photogrammes associés à une légende ou par la présentation, à son côté, du broc rempli des lettres ayant servi à sa fabrication. Lorsque le processus n’est pas documenté, d’autres indices nous orientent, comme ce titre de 1962, « À la pliure, à la découpe, à l’acide »26 qui met l’accent sur l’action à laquelle le texte a été soumis davantage que sur le contenu du texte. Les poèmes qui en résultent comportent la trace d’une action en amont sur le matériau d’impression, ici le bloc de plomb attaqué à l’acide. Plus généralement, chez Julien Blaine, la réflexion même sur l’écriture envisagée dans sa matérialité s’articule autour de la notion d’empreinte, qui se fait alors paradigme. Celle-ci se retrouve tout d’abord à plusieurs reprises dans l’œuvre, en tant que technique, que ce soit dans les multiples poèmes réalisés à la bombe ou dans des performances comme Surimpression / Impression (1972) ou Les Mains négatives (1986). Mais cette technique immémoriale  fonctionne également, au sein de l’œuvre, comme paradigme pour envisager d’autres modes de production modernes, comme la photographie et la reproduction en offset pensées dans « la matérialité de leur arché  »27 et comme signes, dans leur dimension indicielle. Ainsi des PO.M où le poème-empreinte se fait écriture du monde. Cette manière d’envisager les techniques modernes de reproduction à travers le paradigme de l’empreinte est à mettre en relation avec une autre constante de l’œuvre de Blaine  : la recherche d’une écriture primordiale, originelle, qui se traduit notamment par la publication entre 2002 et 2005 des Cahiers de la 5e feuille, où le poète entreprend une enquête partant de la période aurignacienne et des traces laissées dans les grottes préhistoriques. La recherche s’assortit d’un intérêt pour l’écriture prise dans son histoire longue que le poète relie par ailleurs aux recherches des avant-gardes historiques (mots en liberté, zaoum, poèmes phonétiques, etc.), qu’il qualifie de « rebâtisseurs de langues oubliées ». L’empreinte apparaît comme paradigmatique au sein d’une telle recherche, en 25 Blaine, Blaine au MAC, 51. 26 Les Carnets de l’Octéor, 1962. 27 Jean-Marie Schaeffer, L’Image précaire : du dispositif photographique, Paris 1987, 49.



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ce qu’elle en vient à concerner la lettre même, dans ce qui peut être lu comme une tentative pour penser l’écriture sans solution de continuité, de ses origines à ses manifestations modernes : ainsi dans le « Poëme métaphysique n° 13420 » (fig. 59) l’équivalence est-elle posée entre l’empreinte la plus sommaire, la typographie, et la photographie elle-même par laquelle l’empreinte est reproduite.

Fig. 59 : « Poëme métaphysique n° 13420 », in: 13427 Poëmes métaphysiques, Paris 1986.

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Or, envisager l’écriture au prisme de l’empreinte suppose de considérer la lettre comme corps matériel, seul référent auquel l’indice peut renvoyer. Ainsi pour Georges Didi-Huberman «  l’empreinte transmet physiquement – et pas seulement optiquement – la ressemblance de la chose ou de l’être “empreintes”  »28 et le philosophe de souligner son analogie avec la reproduction sexuelle : « son processus suppose l’embrassement étroit par pression, voire par pénétration, du substrat par l’objet qui vient s’imprimer ». Son résultat « naît littéralement en tant que corps produit par l’opération de l’empreinte ».29 Quittant alors son caractère de signe arbitraire pour basculer dans un régime sémiotique indiciel, la lettre devient indice d’elle-même comme corps agissant. L’empreinte redonne corps à la lettre. C’est alors aux origines mêmes de l’écriture que nous sommes renvoyés, envisagée non comme tracé mais d’abord comme lecture d’empreintes. La performance La Pythie claustrophobe (fig.  60), créée en 1969, nous semble à cet égard primordiale pour aborder cette clé de voûte de l’œuvre de Blaine. Celle-ci se décompose en une suite d’actions qui l’apparente à un rituel oraculaire : après avoir rampé sur un lais de papier enduit de peinture en lisant un poème intitulé « Claustrophobie », le poète oralise les traces laissées par le hasard du jeté de lettres en plastique passées à la bombe de peinture, délivrant un message d’abord glossolalique, avant de le rendre peu à peu intelligible, assumant ainsi à la fois le rôle de la Pythie et celui du prêtre. Nulle vision, nul message de vérité ne se délivre pourtant ici. Le poète-oracle ne fait qu’y dire l’instant présent, le hic et nunc de sa présence au monde et à autrui, ou, plutôt, il interroge les spectateurs sur cette co-présence, s’en assure : « Est-ce que je suis ici avec vous ? ». « Le poète-Pythie livre sa propre interprétation du poème et le traduit à l’auditoire comme la manifestation de son existence présente, c’est-à-dire l’expression de sa fonction parmi les autres ».30 Mais ce qui nous intéresse davantage ici est le rôle fondamental qu’y tient l’empreinte : à la trace laissée par le corps du poète rampant s’adjoint bientôt l’empreinte négative des lettres bombées. Corps de la lettre et corps du poète se rejoignent sur une surface commune. Ne peut-on pas dès lors voir dans cette surface et ce qui s’y produit une réactivation des origines mêmes de l’écriture ? Anne-Marie Christin31 nous rappelle en effet que l’écriture trouve son origine dans l’art de la divination, qui consiste à identifier et interpréter des signes supposément déposés par les dieux sur une surface préalablement

28 Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance par contact, 53. 29 Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance par contact, 53. 30 Blaine, Blaine au MAC, 176. 31 Anne-Marie Christin, L’Image écrite ou la déraison graphique, Paris 1995.



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délimitée (traces de pas ou ciel étoilé), et Leroi-Gourhan32 considère les mains négatives laissées sur les parois des grottes préhistoriques comme une origine de l’écriture. Nous pourrions alors voir, dans cet ensemble de gestes, une tentative pour opérer poétiquement la jonction du signe naturel (celui de la trace laissée) et du signe conventionnel que sont les lettres de l’alphabet. Dépouillée dans un premier temps de son statut de signe, la lettre se voit traitée comme un vulgaire objet en plastique, jeté au hasard sur la surface. Ce n’est que par le biais de la fabrication de l’empreinte négative, puis de son interprétation et oralisation par le poète, qu’elle recouvre ce statut.

Fig. 60 : La Pythie claustrophobe, performance – photographie reprod. dans Blaine au MAC : un tri, Limoges 2009, 176.

32 André Leroi-Gourhan, Le Geste et la parole, Paris 1964.

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De chair et d’os, l’œuvre de Julien Blaine s’incarne ainsi dans des medias multiples, convoquant, par là même, une grande diversité de matérialités et de fonctionnements associés. Le travail incessant de circulation intermédiatique à laquelle il se livre autorise une mise en relation de ces matérialités, réunies sous le signe du corps : chair, souffle, voix, mouvements, lettre, signe, livre s’y manifestent comme autant de corporéités à l’œuvre, qui ne sauraient être dissociées dans le fonctionnement du poème. Car il s’agit bien là de poésie, assumée, et affirmée comme telle. Formellement inclassables, les poèmes ainsi créés ne possèdent plus que de manière très partielle les caractéristiques qui permettraient de les identifier comme tels, nous incitant par la même à repenser les paradigmes avec lesquels nous abordons le champ, et à rechercher la poésie ailleurs que dans le texte.

Pavlos Antoniadis

Corps, que me veux-tu? Embodiment and Visuality in Post-1950 Music Cultural anthropologist Jean-Jacques Courtine captures the history of discourse on the body in one sentence: “Where once we had subjects without bodies, now we find bodies without subjects”.1 According to Courtine, following the early 20thcentury movement away from the Cartesian denigration of the body in favour of the res cogitans, poststructuralist discourse has seen a reversal of the relation between body and subject.2 The body is “carried away by the flow of desire or held in the tight grip of power”, leaving a “subject that is nothing more than an ‘avatar’, a ‘residue’, a ‘spare part’ of the body”, be it in Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s desiring machines or in Michel Foucault’s genealogical turn to body and power.

Corpo-Reality in Music: State of the Art Courtine’s schema, which moves from a bodiless subject to a body-centric objectification, seems to describe the evolution of contemporary discourses in the field of post-1950s music equally well. Discourse on the body in music increasingly appears to be inextricably bound up with discourse on body images; musical corporeality is conceived of visually. In his recent book Körper-Medien-Musik Stefan Drees takes the turn from language to performance in theatre studies and anthropology as his starting point to organize a mosaic of central paradigm-shifts in musical corporeality in terms of a gradual liberation of the musical body and a quintessentially visual objectification of it.3 Where the esoteric experiences of classical performers and the notion of playing or singing technique as an invisible medium serving compositional ideas left little room for discourse on the body, more recent developments outline a strong foregrounding of the musical body. The body has gradually turned into a medium for the exploration of new expressive 1 Jean-Jacques Courtine “The Body”, in: L. D. Kritzman (ed.), The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought, New York 2006, 165-167. Here and below 166. 2 Courtine mentions Freudian psychoanalysis, phenomenology from Edmund Husserl to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Mauss’s observations of the body as social construction, as the defining moments in the reconstitution of the relationship between body and subject. 3 Stefan Drees, Körper-Medien-Musik: Körperdiskurse in der Musik nach 1950, Hofheim 2011.

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sonic possibilities, which, before, would have been compositionally unthinkable. The body has become an indispensable part of musical theatre, in which visually conveyable gestures are valued as much as sound (paradigmatically manifested in the work of Mauricio Kagel and Dieter Schnebel), and eventually a vital part of intermedial constellations and trans-humanist aspirations, as is the case in Nam June Paik’s installations or Stelarc’s performances. According to Drees, “the body is set on stage not only in terms of the sonic outcome of performative acts, but also with regard to its visual aspects as artistically relevant object. This results in the conception of the body as a medium [...]”.4 In this respect, the liberation of the body from the performative restrictions of the past coincides with a liberation from the monopoly of disembodied sonic ideals. Through the visual perception of bodily actions and images, music becomes an affair of the eyes as much as of the ears. For Drees this implies that musicology can expand to include previously neglected genres, such as installations and performance art. This shift from the bodiless compositional subjectivity of the past to an audiovisual projection of the musical body corresponds to Courtine’s schema. Given such an ocularcentric constitution of corporeality in modern music, it is not surprising that Drees not only focuses on instances of intermedial art, such as musical theatre or sound installations, but also excludes a vast repertoire of absolute music, which thematizes corporeality in distinctly different, even invisible ways. Thus, the promised expansion of the field amounts to a shift towards multi-medial art forms. In the context of what he calls “the digital revolution of music” (Die digitale Revolution der Musik),5 Harry Lehmann refers to this evolution as the emergence of relational music. Absolute music is explicitly judged to be irrelevant in a digital culture, and advanced music is understood as forging relations to images, performative actions and words, or what Lehmann describes as the strategies of visualisation, theatralisation, semanticisation (Visualisierung, Theatralisierung and Semantisierung). A shift from the traditional musicological dichotomy between absolute and programmatic music towards a new one, between visible and invisible music, seems to have emerged.6 Examples of such a shift are plentiful in current practice. The output of composers such as Johannes Kreidler, Stefan Prins, Simon Steen-Andersen, and Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri increasingly demonstrates an organic and successful 4 Drees, Körper-Medien-Musik, 13. My translation and italics. 5 Harry Lehmann, Die digitale Revolution der Musik: Eine Musikphilosophie, Mainz 2012. See 115-126. 6 The term “visible music” (sichtbare Musik) originates in Dieter Schnebel’s lecture in Darmstadt in 1966 (Dieter Schnebel, Anschläge – Ausschläge. Texte zur Neuen Musik, München 1993, 262-300).



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micro-integration7 of elements of a substantially audio-visual (or more accurately multi-modal), media-based culture in musical praxis, in which the body assumes an explicit association with body images.8 This chapter asks to what extent the modality of vision is a conditio sine qua non for the formulation of musical corporeality. Is absolute music indeed a redundant art form today? And, if not, could a music-specific corporeality, one which does not privilege visuality, take its place in the post-1950 discourse on the body? I will argue that some answers are to be found in the work and writings of the renowned British composer Brian Ferneyhough.9 Rather than focus on antiocularcentric discourse, this chapter will attempt to complement the attempted expansion of the field outlined by Drees.10 Musical corporeality will be considered beyond a potential reduction to body images and intermedial constellations, as well as beyond the Cartesian dichotomies of technique and interpretation, body and subject.

A Glance at Performativity Before I move forward to the absolute music of the post-war era and its relationship to corporeality, let me first look at exactly how similar questions concerning the relation of body and visuality are being raised in the context of theatrical studies and performance art, on which Drees draws. In her book on a renewed aesthetic of the performative, Erika Fischer-Lichte attempts an analysis of the performative turn in theatre from the notion of the work to that of the event, and from the notion of representation to that of presence.11 In a chapter on bodily presence, Fischer-Lichte observes the historical development of the notion in three stages. First, in what she calls “the soft concept” of presence, the sheer appearance of the phenomenal (as opposed to the script-related, semiotic) body of the actor and its co-existence with that of the

7 Micro-integration as opposed to mere multi-medial juxtaposition. For further analysis see Marc Leman, Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Technology, Cambridge, MA 2008, 140. 8 A good example would be Simon Steen-Andersen’s Run Time Error, whereby video documentation of the performance in and, crucially, of a labyrinthine space enters in dialogue with the historical genre of Musique concrète. See Lehmann, Die Digitale Revolution, 119-120. 9 It would also be interesting to look into the work of Iannis Xenakis, Helmut Lachenmann and Klaus K. Hübler. 10 For a comprehensive account of anti-ocularcentric discourses in French thought, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in 20th-Century French Thought, Berkeley 1993. 11 Erika Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetik des Performativen, Frankfurt am Main 2004.

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spectators, is a sufficient condition for an effect of presence to arise. Later on, it is not the sheer bodily presence, but rather the theatrical space and the spectators’ active attention which grants the event an enhanced quality of Gegenwärtigkeit. This constitutes a “hard version of presence”. In the last twist of her argument, a “radical concept” of presence consists in the activity of actually sensing the embodied mind in its unity and the production and distribution of performative energy through techniques of the body.12 She concludes that “[a]n aesthetics of the performative is in this sense an aesthetics of presence, not of presence effects, an aesthetics of emergence, not of appearance”.13 If, in the very field of theatrical studies, the definition of bodily presence disengages from visuality as a sheer appearance of the body or of gesture in favour of an emphasis on energy, then it’s ironic that approaches to musical corporeality in the post-war era focus on the body via theatrical categories and spotlight intermedial and iconic elements. Equally problematic appears to be the exclusion of a large range of absolute music, the alleged mutual exclusiveness between absolute music and embodiment, and the identification of embodiment with visuality. Building on Fischer-Lichte’s radical concept of presence as circulation of energy, I will focus on how the bodily element strategically radiates through the musical communicative chain (performance, reception, composition) in Brian Ferneyhough’s work.14 Through complex processes of transformation and transition of energy, a visually imperceptible body becomes the common denominator in all three fields: body as meaning in composition, body as psychophysical presence in reception, and body as thinking gesture in performance. At the same time, and as a side-effect, another pervasive visualization in music is undermined: the notion of sound-image.

12 “In Grotowski it was the concurrence of impulse and reaction, in Wilson there were the techniques of slow motion, rhythmicization and repetition, which evoke to the spectators the impression of a specific Gegenwärtigkeit and enable them to energize themselves” (Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetik des Performativen, 170). My translation. 13 Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetik des Performativen, 171, 175. My translation and italics. 14 More obvious manifestations of corporeality in post-war absolute music include performative “energetic striving” as an expressive factor in virtuosic music by Xenakis or the “New Complexity” composers, and Helmut Lachenmann’s Musique concrète instrumentale, which reverses the focus between sound as result and action as generative, in order to speak of sound as a testimony of material presence.



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Brian Ferneyhough’s Somatics Ferneyhough’s work might initially appear as a rather paradoxical choice for exploring the notion of a music-specific corporeality that transcends visuality. As far as visuality is concerned, both his scores, which have granted him the reputation of hyper-intellectual “bogeyman” of the “New Complexity” movement because of their their notorious, impenetrable graphic thickness,15 and his theoretical writings and interviews, seem to freeze any argumentation in favour of iconoclasm in its tracks. His writings, in particular, are pervaded by persistent iconologies crucial to his compositional process,16 central concepts with an obvious visual origin (such as the “figure”), as well as explicit influences from the visual arts, predominantly the work of Francis Bacon and Giambattista Piranesi.17 At the same time, he explicitly criticizes the naturalist framework of “bodily comportment”, in which properties are meant to generate meaning in the form of expressive musical gesture, as the royal way to stylistic regression.18 How, then, could it be claimed that corporeality is central to Brian Ferneyhough’s music, transcending and problematizing at the same time the notion of visuality? This chapter’s arguments revolve around three distinct themes, with their epicentres located in three theoretical texts by Ferneyhough’s. First I will explore the development of a perpetually refinable navigational model and the psychologising of virtuosity on the part of the performer, as a result and ideological trait of notational complexity.19 Second I will concentrate on the poetics and perception of time as palpable somatic presence against musical events or objects.20 15 “His name is widely known and spoken of, but too often as a token of some ill-defined insufficiently known peripheral musical discourse. He is, for many, a bogeyman”. Jonathan Harvey, Foreword, in: J. Boros and R. Toop (eds.), Brian Ferneyhough: Collected Writings, London 1998, ix. I will henceforth use CW to refer to this work. 16 A telling example: “One point of departure for an iconology of compositional activity: the representation of the act of composition as a polyphonic membrane, whose scale of resonance encompasses and reflects the common ground linking the several interlocking connotational complexes making up the nature of composition as signifying action in the widest sense of the term” (Ferneyhough, “Aspects of Notational and Compositional Practice”, CW, 3). 17 Next to works like La Terre est un Homme, based on a canvas by Matta, or Lemma-Icon-Epigram, stemming from Walter Benjamin’s emblem speculations, and many more: “Many of my works of the last fifteen years have been engendered by contact with some form of concrete image” (Ferneyhough, “Carceri d’Invenzione”, CW, 131). 18 A sort of “pavlovian semanticism”, characterized by “transparency of the musical sign [...] to emotive intentionality” (Ferneyhough, “Form – Figure – Style: an Intermediate Assessment, CW, 23). 19 In Ferneyhough, “Aspects of Notational and Compositional Practice”, 2-13. 20 In Ferneyhough, “The Tactility of Time”, CW, 42-50.

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And third I deal with the poetics of discursive, form-generating energy and its perception, as exemplified in Ferneyhough’s discussion of the figure in relation to the gesture – in other words, with the nature of musical events or objects themselves.21 Although a thorough synthesis of those three domains goes beyond the scope of this chapter, I argue that they constitute major manifestations of an invisible somatics. This endows Ferneyhough’s work with a paradigm-shifting position in the recent history of discourse on the body in music, and necessitates the inclusion of absolute music in this discourse.

Performance: Notational Complexity and Corporeal Navigation I start the exploration of somatics in Ferneyhough’s work with some reflections on the implications of his notational ideology for performance and, in particular, for performative corporeality.22 Complex notation is a startling graphic feature of Ferneyhough’s scores, but its quantitative aspect should not be misleading as to the qualitative aspect of this compositional choice. As Richard Toop puts it, complexity is a state, in which “there are not necessarily many things, yet in which I sense many levels of relationships between the few or many things”.23 The distinction is crucial for performance. A sheer focus on graphic impenetrability would – and often does! – result in the type of “heroic” performative attitudes to complexity, which Frank Cox has characterized as “energetic striving”.24 Yet Ferneyhough’s “total textural homogeneity”, “degree of performative difficulty as relativizing filter” and “internal polyphony” explicitly invite a radical rethinking of performance.25 As an alternative to the traditional sequence of understanding, technique and interpretation – in which the body is assumed to be the tool for realizing a concrete sonic image, the execution of which allows for some fluctuating degree of personal ‘interpre-

21 In Ferneyhough, “Il Tempo della Figura”, CW, 33-41. 22 “An adequate notation must (should) incorporate [..] an implied ideology of its own process of creation” (Ferneyhough, “Aspects of Notational and Compositional Practice”, 4). 23 Richard Toop, “On Complexity”, in: Perspectives of New Music, 31, 1993, 42-57, here 48. 24 “The raw gestural energy and the large-scale vectors and formal shapes” assumed to be more powerfully realized through intuitive rather than analytic (or navigational as I will be suggesting) approaches. See Frank Cox, “Notes Toward a Performance Practice for Complex Music”, in: C.-S. Mahnkopf, F. Cox and W. Suhrig (eds.), Polyphony and Complexity, New Music and Aesthetics in the 21st Century Vol. 1, Hofheim 2001, 70-132, here 80. 25 Ferneyhough, “Aspects of Notational and Compositional Practice”, 5-7.



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tation’ – Ferneyhough suggests a refined navigational model and an embodied exploration of notational affordances on the part of the performer: A notation which demands of the performer the formulation of a conscious selection-procedure of [...] the information [...] and a determination of the combination of elements (strata) which are to be assigned preferential status at any given stage of the realization process.26

Although Ferneyhough’s description never fails to stress the internal, mental, conscious component of this performative approach, there is a muted but crucial implication I want to bring to light. When the causal chain between understanding, technique and interpretation is explicitly problematized in the ways described above, both qualitatively (as multiplicity of “paths”, layers and relationships to be performatively explored) and quantitatively (as sheer informational explosion in the problematized notational interface, inviting “energetic striving”), then the performative body can no longer assume the traditional role of a transparent means to a disembodied end. The breaking of this chain automatically questions the distinction between the mind and the body of the performer and, practically as well as ideologically, it demands performance to be reconceived according to an embodied cognitive model in which:27 The skilled body is not only executor, but also assumes the functions of: i) a locus of information for energy-saving; ii) an interface for information processing; iii) a vehicle of navigation inside the work.28

In such a model, which I have previously described as “corporeal navigation”, the suggested exploration of paths, layers and multi-parametrical relationships

26 Ferneyhough, “Aspects of Notational and Compositional Practice”, 4. 27 Not only performance studies and phenomenology, but also a number of scientific fields, from developmental psychology and neuroscience to robotic design, currently shape the field of embodied cognition. Lawrence Shapiro suggests three themes unifying this field of research: a) Conceptualization: The concepts an organism develops rely on the types of environments they inhabit and on the types of bodies they possess. b) Replacement: Bodily interactions with the environment can partly replace mental representations, assumed to be at the core of traditional cognitive science. c) Constitution: The body or world plays a constitutive rather than causal role in cognitive processing ( Lawrence Shapiro, Embodied Cognition, London and New York, 2011, 4). 28 Pavlos Antoniadis, “Physicality as a Performer-Specific Perspectival Point to Iannis Xenakis’s Piano Work. Case-Study: Mists”, held at the Iannis Xenakis International Conference, Goldsmiths University, Londοn, 2011, (15.03.2013).

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is realized by thinking bodies and embodied minds alike. The body becomes a unique perspectival point in relation to complex notation.

Poetics and Perception 1: Time as Psychophysical Presence Ferneyhough’s Darmstadt lecture “The Tactility of Time”, in which he affirms the validity of “talk about music”,29 presents the composer’s unique strategies in producing and manipulating a physical (and, interestingly enough, tactile as opposed to visible) presence of time. Ferneyhough justifies the metaphorical use of the term “tactile” for temporal perception with reference to common practice: “We have sufficient frequent recourse to physical, bodily analogies when referring to musical events, for such an extension to have some inherent intuitive plausibility”. By way of example, he points to the commonplace association of high amplitude with weight and the less-known definition of silence as a contextually-defined empty class by Webern.30 According to Bob Snyder, in a chapter of his Music and Memory dedicated to musical metaphor, such ways of speaking about music are far from arbitrary rhetorical tropes to aid communication.31 Research in cognitive linguistics has argued that metaphorical language is constitutive of our concepts and not a mere embellishment. This indicates the firm grounding of musical phenomena in “fundamental embodied cognitive structures generalized from recurring physical experiences, especially the experience of our own bodies”.32 Those are often referred to as “image schemas” and, importantly, “they are different from either visual images or abstract concepts [because] they can have a kinesthetic component and represent muscular sensations in relation to particular experiences; they can have a particular physical ‘feel’ to them”.33 Although Snyder refers to basic image schemas central to musical experience, it is significant to note that Ferneyhough’s strategy of producing and exploiting the suggested tactility of time relates to a basic form of experience, to “the relationship established between the body’s somatic condition and the mediating metric lattice”.34 Ferneyhough 29 A defence against “the virulent spread of the peculiarly aggressive assertion that one cannot really talk about music at all [..]” (Ferneyhough, “The Tactility of Time”, CW, 42). 30 Ferneyhough, “The Tactility of Time”, 43. 31 Bob Snyder, Music and Memory: An Introduction, Cambridge, MA 2000, 107-120. 32 Snyder, Music and Memory, 108. 33 Snyder, Music and Memory, 108. 34 Gravity and tension, centrality, motion-linkage-causation, path and goals and containment, are the basic image-schemas according to Snyder (after Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind, Chicago 1987).



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explains that “[w]e perceive this latter as being ‘fast’ or ‘slow’ according to our bodily condition”.35 It is this fact that fuels his interest in “the creation of fore-, middle- and background transformations, which would evince different somatic densities”, through the complex layering of temporal frames in relation to sovereign, resistant musical objects.36 The nuts and bolts of Ferneyhough’s techniques, as employed in his work Mnemosyne, for bass flute and tape, reveal a dazzling interplay between those three layers in transformation: the slow-moving temporal background of the tape, the subcutaneous rhythmic models of the live flute part – a click track constantly clarifying this sort of metric contextualization for the performer – and the interruptive nature of three independently notated lines to be pursued by a monophonic instrument. The metaphorically described result of the “time frame becoming rather gluey, standing apart and offering relentless resistance to linear energies”, is further explicated through resort to an even more specific form of bodily experience: “[...] a dream of attempted escape from some unnameable fear in which our feet are caught in some substance such as glue or molasses, so that it’s a tremendous, step by step effort to keep moving”.37 A unique element of Ferneyhough’s aesthetic agenda may by now be clear: the organizational vigour of his materials and the array of strategies for stratification and deconstruction seem to fervently avoid the impasse of a neo-serialist, disembodied and abstracted obsession for order and for sonic exploration per se. He pulls this off by grounding his explorations in temporal perception as a psychophysical presence. This implies a corporeality utterly disengaged from visuality. The production of a particular ‘feel’ is not intuitively pursued, but is consciously triggered and manipulated through the most sophisticated and often artificial compositional tools (for example, a three-voice polyphony to be accomplished by a monophonic instrument). One might even go as far as to say that Ferneyhough does not invent another new musical language, but fosters new understandings of what sort of an experience music can be, while never leaving the basic ground of “music itself [as] one form of metaphor that may express image schematic implicit knowledge”.38 And that is why he can and does speak about his music: because of its explicitly embodied background.

35 Ferneyhough, “The Tactility of Time”, 43. 36 Ferneyhough, “The Tactility of Time”, 44. 37 Ferneyhough, “The Tactility of Time”, 45. 38 John Blacking, Music, Culture and Experience, Chicago 1995, 239-242. In: Snyder, Music and Memory, 109.

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Poetics and Perception 2: Musical Objects as Diffused Bodies After the focus on corporeal navigation fostered by notational complexity and the perceived tactility of temporality in its interaction with musical objects, the last text I deal with might be the most difficult and elusive of all three. I focus on an explicitly graphic notion (the figure) – or, more accurately, on the musical object itself and its figural characteristics – and argue that it thematizes the dissolution of the deictic quality of musical gesture (as a derivative of physical gesture) into a diffused, constantly present somatics, in the form of lines of force and energy circulation. The compositional transfiguration of the creative potential into discursive, form-generating energy is the central theme in “Il Tempo della figura”. Its main vehicle is the explicit distinction between the notion of the gesture and the notion of the figure. This distinction, along with a haunting image from a poem by John Ashbery, sets the tone for Ferneyhough’s thinking on how music means. Talking about dreams, Ashbery writes: They seemed strange only because we couldn’t actually see them And we realized this only at a point where they lapse Like a wave breaking on a rock, giving up Its shape in a gesture that expresses that shape.39

Ferneyhough uses this wave metaphor for differentiating between the “natural, unformed undertow of creative potential” as sheer physical force in music and the discursive energy produced when this force is applied to what he calls “a resistant musical object”. The first type of energy unleashing seems to correspond to gesture: the sonically imperceptible surface of a physical performative act, which acquires meaning through extra-musical “symbolic conventions – either artificially established ones, or those deriving, by means of abstraction and analogy, from species of bodily comportment”.40 According to Ferneyhough, this sort of semanticity can easily degenerate to the status of an open-ended act, “a meaningless maneuvring in an uncaring, arbitrary void” of self-contained, semantically “burnt-out” gestures.41 This sort of problem is drastically superseded by what he calls the “figural” activity, by which he understands the above-mentioned application of force to a resistant musical object that is one structurally coherent, parametrically derived 39 John Ashbery, Selected Poems, London 1987. Quoted in Ferneyhough, “Il Tempo della Figura”, 33. 40 Ferneyhough, “Il Tempo della Figura”, 35, 33. 41 Ferneyhough, “The Tactility of Time”, 41.



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process. This renders lines of force and energy circulation between successive gestures palpable, or as he puts it, it achieves “the liberation of a surplus of discursivity / volatility hitherto locked in the interstices of the sonic object”.42 This “surplus of discursivity” refers in his case to the astonishing amount of notational details – immanently physical tokens – comprising the individual gesture. Their contextual disposition, rather than their innate referential capacity, produces meaning as process, not as a frozen stylistic trigger. In Ferneyhough’s phrasing: “The synchronic is replaced by diachronic successivity as the central mode of ‘reading’ musical states”.43 The point that is crucial for our analysis of a musicspecific anti-visual corporeality is once more the circulation of energy along the aforementioned lines of force. The trajectory of this circulation extends from the physical performative gesture, via its abstraction into musical gesture, to the gesture’s figural potentials. In “Il Tempo della figura” as well as in other texts Ferneyhough remains ambivalent as to the question whether the “wave” refers only to the composer’s still unformed intuitions or to the sheer physical energy in music-making.44 My suggested interpretation is that the transfer of a force and energy-based terminology to the realm of composition refers indiscriminately to both: composition is defined not as invention of forms, but as management of tensions and energies, which are immanently physical tokens as well as abstracted processes.45 What in music is music-specific, its fragile and indeterminate state of being between “dead material” (gesture) and “abstract form” (the process which generates figures from gestures),46 manifests itself here as a unique resonance between the physicality of performance and the act of composition and its reception. In that sense, Ferneyhough’s terminology may be considered not as metaphoric, stressing similarities between the independent domains of performance, composition, perception, but rather as metonymic, stressing the actual contiguity and selfstructuring feedback loop between the three domains. In extension, one can consider his meaning-production contiguous to corporeality.

42 Ferneyhough, “Il Tempo della Figura”, 36. 43 Ferneyhough, “Il Tempo della Figura”, 34. 44 See for example Ferneyhough, “Form – Figure – Style: An Intermediate Assesment”, 21-28. 45 The Deleuzian influence becomes explicit in many points in Ferneyhough’s writings: “En art, et en peinture comme en musique, il ne s’ agit pas de reproduire ou d’inventer des formes, mais de capter des forces” is the paradigmatic epigram of Ferneyhough’s “Form-Figure-Style: An Intermediate Assesment”, originally to be found in: Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation, Paris 1981, 39. 46 “Music is not dead material, nor yet abstract form” (Ferneyhough, “The Tactility of Time”, 41).

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A Shimmering Web of Energy Exchange We have thus far explored three different manifestations of invisible somatics in Ferneyhough: a corporeal navigational model in performance, resulting from notational complexity and transcending the surface of performative and expressive gesture; the creation of a psychophysical body of time versus the imperceptible surface of objects and events in composition and perception; and the diffused and discourse-generating somatics of the figure. Ferneyhough’s sensual poetics may be approached as something more than a perpetually expanding and representational metaphor. From the sheer performative gesture, to corporeal navigation, to musical gesture, to figurality of the objectified gesture, to physical presence of time, an endless feedback loop, a “shimmering web of energy exchange”47 unifies the domains of performance, perception and composition, and stresses their invisible bodily contiguity. Ferneyhough compares his poetics to the Piranesi etchings: “It is precisely this interlocking of incompatible (but somehow co-extant) perspectival fields which generates the necessary energy to project this self-enclosed experience beyond the physical limits of the page, into the world outside”.48 In the light of this statement, one is tempted to approach authenticity in Ferneyhough as embodied and extended cognition: deeply rooted in the world, his music returns to it, even if through the most convoluted and abstract paths. In conclusion, somatics in Brian Ferneyhough’s work refers to his explicit and conscious conceptualization of aspects of the performance, composition and perception of musical phenomena in terms of an immanent invisible body. At the same time he attempts to disengage musical meaning from any of the trivial association with types of bodily comportment (such as expressive gesture per se). While on the surface this double project might appear paradoxical, to my mind it accurately highlights the fine line between a visual constitution of corporeality (as it appears in the strategies of visualization, theatrilization and medial expansion exposed by Lehmann) and the concept of a music-specific corporeality. Musical corporeality is not to be seen, but rather to be sensed in a compound manifestation, which supersedes the “peepholes of the senses” and addresses questions into the relationship between matter and energy – discursive energy, psychophysical matter, physical energy.49 The body becomes the common 47 “At such velocities of figural dissolution and re-formation the gestural object itself threatens to break up, being replaced with a shimmering web of energy exchange” (Ferneyhough, “Il Tempo della Figura”, 36). 48 Ferneyhough, “Carceri d’Invenzione”, 132. 49 E.T. Gendlin, “The Primacy of the Body, not the Primacy of Perception”, Man and World, 25,



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denominator in a loop between physical presence, feeling and form, or performance, reception and composition. In addition, the notion of a sound-image is undermined. A double negation, of a borrowed constitution of corporeality as image and of sound as disembodied image, is then compensated for by the exploration of a music-specific corporeality. To Brian Ferneyhough and to Danae Stefanou.

1992, 3-4, 341-353.

 Subjectivities

Agata Jakubowska

M/Paternal Meanings in the Neo-AvantGarde In recent years much attention has been paid to the various dimensions of motherhood that have been addressed by neo-avant-garde women artists. This chapter derives from the continuously and dynamically developing field of maternal studies but proposes an interpretation that isn’t restricted to the maternal. My analysis of two neo-avant-garde artworks in which artists used their babies as a kind of art material also takes into consideration paternal meanings. In 1967 Günter Brus performed his Aktion mit Diana (Action with Diana). The setting was the corner of a white room with in it the artist and a four-month-old girl, his daughter Diana. She lay naked on a pillow, on her back or belly. Around them was, initially, a range of carefully placed objects. Kurt Kren’s thirteen photographs of the performance show the artist changing position, as if he is trying out different ways of relating to his baby. A very similar picture of a child lying between carefully arranged objects is presented in Działania z Dobromierzem (Activities with Dobromierz) by Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek, who were working as KwieKulik at the time. The photos presented here as fig. 61, however, weren’t several out of thirteen but several out of roughly nine hundred, taken by the artists over a period of approximately two years (1972-1974). The pictures are very diverse but what they have in common is that they show Dobromierz, their son, in situations arranged by his parents in their apartment and on walks. Today they are presented in the form of a slideshow installation set up by Kulik. In the 1970s they were usually shown either as a selection of strips of slides or as a selection of photos, sometimes in a frame made from packaging paper. Although my two examples come from two different sides of the Iron Curtain I don’t consider them to be instances of respectively Western and Eastern European art. I rather see them as examples from two different places in Central Europe, places with different traditions and socio-political situations that I explore further on. One of the crucial points of the two works of art have in common is that although both feature the artists’ children, the issue of parenting isn’t directly addressed. In both cases the children appear as material that was in a way “at hand” and their presence in their parents’ art was the result of a consistent artistic development. At the same time both artworks show how artistic subjectivity is related to maternal/paternal subjectivity – be it in relation to different principles.

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Fig. 61: KwieKulik (Zofia Kulik & Przemysław Kwiek), Activities with Dobromierz (I), 1972-1974. black and white photographs © Zofia Kulik & Przemysław Kwiek

Günter Brus began his artistic career as a painter, Kwiek and Kulik as sculptors. Both Brus and KwieKulik started by creating traditional art objects, paintings or sculptures, but abandoned them in favour of actions documented in films and photographs. After graduating from the Arts and Crafts School in Graz in 1957, Brus enrolled at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna. He soon dropped out, however, and started concentrating on abstract expressionism and painting per-



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ceived as event. In 1960 he wrote: “it has always seemed odd to me that people don’t paint with both hands at once”. By his account, “you have got to live in painting. All round painting”.1 It was important for him to go beyond the defined plane of the canvas. In 1964 he made his first action in which he thematized the process of painting: Ana. During this performance he covered the whole room, the equipment contained in it, himself and his wife Anna in white paint. After Ana he slightly modified his approach and started making so-called ‘self-paintings’, tableaux vivants based on preparatory notes and documented by a photographer. Monika Faber aptly sums up the style of these works: “no excess, just concentration”.2 It is in this style that Action with Diana was done. Kwiek and Kulik were students at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (Kwiek 1963-1970, Kulik 1965-1971) when they were introduced to the importance of process and of documenting this process. At first, their interest in process implied a particular attention to documenting the various stages of emerging sculptures. Gradually, and under the influence of the idea of the Open Form created by Oskar Hansen,3 they began focusing on the execution of a series of operations in which they used whatever material was available. These operations were documented photographically or filmed. An example of an early work is a film titled Open Form (1971, with a group of other students and graduates). In an episode titled “Game on an Actress’ Face”, “the players” gathered around an actress (while remaining out of the camera’s sight) to perform “moves” on her face, each move had to relate to the “existing facts” (in this case the move made by the previous actor). The artists further explored their interest in this kind of performance by studying logic and mathematics, which resulted in the idea of relating “mathematics and logic operations (which use the intangible characters, e.g. x, y, z), to similar artistic operations but using material forms (objects, textures, colours), including the already existing particular condition of life”.4 Their son was one of these material forms – when he appeared in their lives he was added to the other variables.5 1 Günter Brus, in: Monika Faber, “Painting Excess. From Action Painting to Body Art”, in: Günter Brus: Nervous Stillness on the Horizon, ed. Monika Faber, Barcelona 2005, 6. 2 Faber, “Painting Excess”, 9. 3 Oskar Hansen, Towards Open Form, Frankfurt/Main 2005. 4 KwieKulik Events, in: KwieKulik. Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek, eds. Łukasz Ronduda and Georg Schöllhammer, Warsaw-Wrocław 2013, 131. 5 Dobromierz is their son’s middle name (the first name being Maksymilian). As Zofia Kulik says: “Another version of the title was ‘Dobrze mierz X’ (trans. “measure X well”). Moreover, for this reason we chose our son’s name. We were fascinated by Tadeusz Kotarbiński’s praxiology. Praxiology, that is a good work”. In: Katarzyna Rakowska and Jędrzej Słodkowski, “Wywiad z Zofią Kulik. Rozmawiali: Katarzyna Rakowska, Jędrzej Słodkowski” (An Interview with Zofia Kulik by Katarzyna Rakowska and Jędrzej Słodkowski), in: Gazeta Wyborcza. Gazeta Stołeczna

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Günter Brus’s Action with Diana (1967) In 1966 Günter Brus wrote about his actions that each one, each “total action”: is the unprejudiced examination of all the materials that make up reality. […] It takes place in a consciously delineated area of reality with deliberately selected materials. […] Anything may constitute the material: people, animals, plants, food, space, movement, noise, smells, light, fire, coldness, warmth, wind, dust, steam, gas, events, sport, all art forms and all art products. All the possibilities of the material are ruthlessly exhausted. As a result of the incalculable possibilities for choices that the material presents to the actor, he plunges into a concentrated whirl of action, finds himself suddenly in a reality without barriers, performs actions resembling those of a madman and avails himself of a fool’s privileges.6

In his first action, Ana, he was accompanied by his wife. Her role in this performance, and in the other performances by the Vienna Actionists, is described as that of a “model”. Yet, in view of the above quote, we should consider his wife Anna as one of “all the materials that make up reality”. When providing examples of materials he mentions “people” but he doesn’t specify and neither does he seem to take the emotional aspect of relationships into consideration. Such sensory aspects of reality as noise or warmth are mentioned, but not feelings or emotions. Yet Monika Faber’s interpretation of Kren’s film documentation of Ana draws attention to one particular moment between two parts of the performance: a “slow preparation of the painting action with Anna allows a glance ‘behind the scenes’, telling of their intimacy and concentration on each other and permitting a new definition of the role of ‘model’ as the action continues”.7 I want to add that the glance of intimacy adds a new kind of immaterial material, emotions, to Brus’s list. Concerning Action with Diana, in which it is Brus’s daughter who appears as one of the materials, a similar observation can be made. What the photos (figs. 62-67) show is a small white room, or a corner of a bigger room, without any furniture. All we see is two people and some objects in different arrangements. Unlike Brus, the baby isn’t painted white. She appears in her “natural” condition, like the other materials used in the action, such as rattles and nails, a breast pump and corkscrew, an empty glass and a deep plate with dark liquid. And just like the other materials she too is manipulated by “the actor”. Not yet able to move herself, she is put on a pillow in different positions, among the other objects. SimŁódź, 29-30 Nov. 2008, 10. 6 Günter Brus, in: Wiedeński Akcjonizm: Przeciwny biegun społeczeństwa. Prace z Kolekcji Essle, Austria/Viennese Actionism: The Opposite Pole of Society. Works from The Essl Collection, Austria, ed. Stanisław Ruksza, Cracow 2011, 56. 7 Faber, “Painting Excess”, 10.



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ilarly to Monika Faber’s observation, I see more than “materials” and a “model” when I look at the photos documenting the action. At some point an extra diaper appears on the pillow. This triggers an emotional response, as it seems to indicate that there’s someone there who cares. Although my first impression was that it couldn’t be the father, curled up as he is in the corner, after some thought I had to acknowledge that it might be him. Because the photos of this performance (contrary to Ana) don’t present the whole action, we’re left to guess what happens between the documented scenes.

Figs. 62-67: Günter Brus. Photo documentation: Kurt Kren. Aktion mit Diana, 1967. Thirteen part, Edition 12/35, 2005. B/w Photograph © Collection Essl Private Foundation. Essl Museum Klosterneuburg / Vienna.

The appearance of the diaper makes it clear that Diana’s status is different from that of the other materials. What is more, it encourages a more careful examination of the relationship between father and daughter. The first photo shows the father in an upright position, facing the pillow, which bears traces of someone or something having lain on it.8 In the other pictures there is a baby girl on the pillow. What is important is that Brus quickly abandons the straight, dominant 8 I am referring to the way Action with Diana was exhibited at the MOCAK in Cracow in 2011 during the exhibition “Viennese Actionism: The Opposite Pole of Society. Works from The Essl Collection, Austria”.

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position. He comes down to the level of the child and imitates her position. The surrounding objects – potential instruments of care, but also of crime – disappear. After a while we see a happy (or at least satisfied) child in the middle of an empty room and a man cringing in the corner, as if defeated, punished or ashamed. The last photo shows the man lying on the floor, face down, alone again. Action with Diana wasn’t the first performance in which Brus presented himself as vulnerable man rather than a medium of authoritative masculinity – a position that has been described as an instance of resistance to the social contract.9 Action with Diana can be interpreted in this way, but there is more at stake than a subversion of traditional masculinity. The daughter’s presence makes it clear that what is addressed isn’t only the position of the man, but more precisely the position of the father. The work can be read as a contestation of the Austrian government’s family policy and conservative beliefs in the strong position of the father. Concerning the Austrian situation in the late 1960s, Maria Mesner writes that enormous disruptions of gender relations during World War II and its aftermath “were followed by a nearly ubiquitous presence of the nuclear family with its bi-polar, complementary gender roles”.10 The policy of the ruling parties – especially the Catholic, conservative People’s Party – was to increase the birth rate and to revalue the importance of the family by strengthening its traditional structure. The law endorsed the position of the father as the head of the family, with the wife and children subjected to him. It is worth mentioning that in 1966 the People’s Party (ÖVP) won an absolute majority and ruled alone for the next four years. This is when Action with Diana was created. Brus’s action, then, may be read as a resistance to what was expected from men in a repressive, conservative society that invested in strong father figures. The vulnerability of his position, in other words, shows that he doesn’t want to contribute to the reproduction of the fatherly symbolic order. Interesting as such a reading is, however, it ignores the emotional relationship between father and daughter and the fact that, in spite of her more or less static position, Diana is a living and active being that establishes contact with what is around her. Crucial here is that what makes the father appear even more vulnerable is the fact that the baby doesn’t pay him any attention. She is looking at the camera

9 See, for example, Cecilia Novero, “Painful Painting and Brutal Ecstasy: The Material Actions of Günter Brus and Otto Muehl”, in: Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 43, 2007, n° 4, 453-468; or Philip Ursprung, “‘Catholic Tastes’ Hurting and Healing the Body in Viennese Actionism in the 1960s”, in: Performing the Body/Performing the Text, eds. Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson, London and New York 1999, 138-152. 10 Maria Mesner, “‘Family Values’: Discourses and Policies in Postwar Austria”, 1999, , (09.02.2013).



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(probably at Kurt Kren), at the pillow or at other things, but not at her father.11 He is the one who forges a relationship between them, but only to the extent that he adopts different positions in relation to her. First, he echoes her position (she looks away), then he turns his back to her and then he gradually moves away from her. The child remains alone. There are no signs that she is either afraid of him or drawn to him. The father, as I have already mentioned, presents himself as someone rejecting the position of the omnipotent, Oedipal Father. Although the first picture shows a moment that could have made it possible for him to transform into an authoritative figure, the following photographs deny that possibility. The emotions that his subsequent positions seem to express are negative, but not aggressive. He is the one who suffers, not the one causing the suffering. Although we can point to the situation of fathers in Austrian society’s governmental politics as a source for Brus’s negative emotions, it is also interesting to consider them in relation to his personal story. An interview with Anna Brus, conducted by Johanna Schwanberg, gives us some insight into how this family, and Brus as a husband and father, functioned.12 We find out, for example, that Anna was the breadwinner (working first as a seamstress, then as a shop assistant in a lingerie department), while simultaneously participating in Viennese Actionism. We also find out that in 1966 she withdrew from any collaborations with Brus and his colleagues. She explains: “[t]he birth [of Diana] definitely played a role. A birth means considerable change in a woman’s life – and it is better than any action men succeed in pulling off!”.13 Obviously, the birth of one’s child means a considerable change in a man’s life as well. What is more, as Judith Trowell has observed, fathers often find it more difficult to deal with the emotional highs and lows that are inevitably part of parenthood.14 That is why I think Brus’s work shouldn’t only be seen as a political commentary on father figures, but also as a private confession on the process of becoming a father. In line with psychoana11 I assume there was another person present during the performance, yet there are no signs indicating that this person is the mother. 12 Johanna Schwanberg, “Female Performers in Actionism. Anna Brus and Carola Dertnig in a Conversation with Johanna Schwanberg”, in: Carola Dertnig. Nachbilder einer ungleichzeitigen Gegenwart/Afterimages of a Non-Simultaneous Present, ed. Silvia Eiblmayr, Innsbruck 2006, 81-85. 13 Schwanberg, “Female Performers in Actionism”, 83. Anna Brus added: “But also the way the actions of Brus and of Muehl developed was such that I no longer wanted to take part in them. When the extreme actionism became more pronounced – with self-mutilations and mutilations of others I had enough! I don’t like this martyrdom in Catholicism and certainly not in Islam, so I didn’t understand why we should mutilate ourselves and nail ourselves onto the ground. (Brus started using razor blades to really cut his skin only in 1968 – AJ.) At the time there were also major conflicts between my husband and me”. 14 Judith Trowell, “Setting the Scene”, in: The Importance of Fathers: A Psychoanalytic Re-Evaluation, eds. Judith Trowell and Alicia Etchegoyen, London 2002, 3-19.

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lytical theories I argue that he shouldn’t only be seen as the one whose role it is to protect the mother and child and prevent their relationship from becoming too close but also as a subject that has to rediscover himself in the changed situation, in the new relationship with the child’s mother and with the child herself.15 Brus’s emotions expressed by the posture of his body are very much related to the difficult process of becoming a father.16

KwieKulik’s Activities with Dobromierz (1972–1974) Activities with Dobromierz shows a different kind of relationship between the artists/parents and their material/their child. Przemysław Kwiek and Zofia Kulik don’t present themselves as “actors”, but they do emphasize their position as the authors of what is shown. They rarely appear in the photos but when they do it is never together; one of them is always behind the camera and the other is either arranging the scenes or also taking pictures. While Brus examined materials and his own position in relation to them, they attempted to position themselves outside the photographed scenes. Where Brus, moreover, created special circumstances – a white room detached from everyday reality – they registered their everyday reality. The photos were taken in their apartment or during walks in their neighbourhood. They’re not, however, spontaneous snapshots of family life. What we are presented with are a series of carefully thought out, arranged and performed activities with selected materials. The photographs, in other words, aren’t meant to document the everyday but to register and archive the multiple variations created by sets of objects. Each variation was photographed and called an “Aesthetic Time-Effect”, and was to be used in further works. In an obvious sense of course the photos include the particulars of family life. As Kulik says: “When we received onions from someone, we photographed onions. When after queuing for many hours we bought tangerines, we used tangerines”.17

15 Mary Target and Peter Fonagy, “Fathers in modern psychoanalysis and in society: The role of the father and child development”, in: The Importance of Fathers, eds. Trowell and Etchegoyen, 45-66. 16 See for example Martin Greenberg, The Birth of a Father, New York 1985, and Phyllis W. Berman and Frank E. Pedersen (eds.), Men’s Transitions to Parenthood. Longitudinal Studies of Early Family Experience, Hillsdale, NJ 1987. 17 Rakowska and Słodkowski, “Wywiad z Zofią Kulik”, 10.



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Dobromierz is shown in diverse situations with each set of activities registering a new situation. As I have already mentioned, one of them is quite similar to the one in which Diana was presented: Dobromierz is naked, lying on the floor and surrounded by carefully arranged objects, different vegetables and fruits. In another he is shown in a similar situation, but dressed. There are several sets in which we see him in different combinations with a bucket (next to it, on it, in it, etc.), in a bath tub and around a toilet bowl. In most cases Kwiek and Kulik photographed their son in much less comfortable positions than Diana’s. Even in the first activity mentioned above he is lying directly on the floor, not on a cushion. Commenting on the way the activities developed, Zofia Kulik said: “I think we were treating him as we were treated by the system, like objects”.18 This interpretation of the relationship between the artists and one of their materials – their son – is strengthened by the usage of elements related to communist propaganda or slogans referring to the situation of artists in a communist country.19 I have taken Kulik’s comment as quoted above from an essay by Maud Jacquin in which she compares Activities with Dobromierz to Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document from the same period.20 For her these works are an illustration of the different versions of motherhood on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Although she focuses on Kulik as the author of Activities with Dobromierz (unjustly ignoring Kwiek), this comparison is interesting. Kelly’s and KwieKulik’s works have much in common. Both are indebted to the neo-avant-garde/conceptual spirit of the time. The emphasis on theory, logical operations, and precise organisation of material allowed to hide what is emotional. “The affective dimension of these images was rigorously controlled by the diagrams and text Kelly inscribed on them”, writes Rosemary Betterton.21 Yet Betterton also confesses that when she first saw this work she was touched by some of its parts, “by the impress of the child’s hand, and specific soft tactile quality of the white plaster clay combined with the maternal words typed onto the torn fragments of her child’s comforter, his ‘blankie’” (Document IV). Moreover, she “felt frustrated by the prohibition on

18 Maud Jacquin, “Motherhood Across the Iron Curtain: on Zofia Kulik and Mary Kelly”, , (09.02.2013). 19 For example, during the exhibition “Pictures, Graphics, Sculptures; Non-Pictures, Non-Graphics, Non-Sculptures” in 1973 at the Galeria Teatru Studio in Warsaw, strips of slides were put in between the windowpanes with slogans such as “If you are a young, talented, inquisitive artist nobody will help you”, “Get down to work! The enemy is quicker!” written on them. 20 Jacquin, “Motherhood Across the Iron Curtain”. 21 Rosemary Betterton, “Maternal Embarrassment: Feminist Art and Maternal Affects”, in: Studies in the Maternal, 2, 2010, n°  1 and 2, , (08.02.2013).

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my pleasurable response to them”.22 I don’t know of any similar report dealing with the reception of Activities with Dobromierz in the 1970s (I saw it for the first time only a couple of years ago), but the tension Betterton experienced holds for this work as well. KwieKulik attempted to grasp parenthood in a highly rational process. They wanted to act as the universal artistic entity made up of two identical components, driven by reason and formulating an objective artistic statement in a quasi-scientific language. Yet when one looks at these photos it becomes clear that there are some emotional elements that burst into this universalistic discourse. Mainly this is Dobromierz himself, his gestures and, above all, the expression on his face, which sometimes shows happiness and sometimes uneasiness. The main difference between Kelly’s Post-Partum Document and KwieKulik’s Activities with Dobromierz lies in the fact that Kelly thematized motherhood. Her work is about how the mother-child relationship constitutes the mother’s subjectivity. Activities with Dobromierz can also be read in this way – as documenting the process of Kwiek’s and Kulik’s transformation from a couple into a motherfather-child triad. Nevertheless, we have to remember that Kulik and Kwiek didn’t explicitly analyse this process, as Kelly did. They weren’t equipped with insights from psychoanalysis because it had not developed in Poland during communism. As Sarah Wilson has noted, the Eastern Bloc was subjected to “the Soviet eradication of the introspective, post-Romantic, post-Freudian subjectivity that was all Europe’s heritage before 1939”.23 Especially interesting in this process of constituting parental subjects is the fact that the artists created Activities with Dobromierz as KwieKulik. This artistic duo emerged at exactly that time. It was, moreover, a duo that tries to deny gender differences. It is as if they created a hybrid in defence against stereotypical gender roles. In order to create such a pair, constituting the Same rather than Difference, Kulik tore up the primary dyad and set her child aside. This withdrawal of the mother wasn’t followed by the entrance of the Father, since Dobromierz was too young to enter the Symbolic realm and be introduced to the Name-of-the-Father functions. It strikes me as very important that they decided to end the project when he was a toddler and old enough for that to happen.24 22 Betterton, “Maternal Embarrassment: Feminist Art and Maternal Affects”. 23 Sarah Wilson, “Discovering the Psyche: Zofia Kulik”, in: Zofia Kulik. From Siberia to Cyberia, ed. Piotr Piotrowski, Poznań 1999, 53-73, here 66. She added that it was “one of the Eastern bloc’s greatest tragedies”. 24 In 1977 they organized an exhibition entitled “Using Our Own Child in Our Own Art” which was, in fact, a solo exhibition of drawings by their son Maksymilian Dobromierz. The exhibition was organized in their private apartment, in which they ran the “Studio of Activities, Documentation and Propagation” (PDDiU).



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KwieKulik seems to have been a perfect fulfilment of the communist ideal of the undifferentiated couple. Their activities corresponded with the communist model family, where subjects were encouraged to renounce their sensuality and useless emotions in order to concentrate on productivity.25 KwieKulik worked with scientific formulas not only in their art, but also in their lives. In interviews especially Kwiek mentions his desire to derive life itself out of scientific principles.26 It is a well-known fact that the founders of the communist states promised social, political and economic equality for women. They even tried to introduce it, especially during the Stalinist period. In Poland in 1945, as the result of a unified legistation and its adaptation to the new socialist reality, regulations levelling the positions of man and woman in marriage, also in relation to children, were introduced. The post-Stalinist period makes for an interesting comparison with Brus’s situation in Austria. With the waning of the Stalinist terror in the 1950s came a return to traditional gender roles. In Poland the popular slogan “Women on tractors” was replaced by “Irene, go home!” (after the title of a film that had been made in 1955). Paradoxically, this didn’t mean that the role of the father was reinforced. Communist states are often described as “socialist paternalist” or “neo-paternalist”. The latter term, as Padraic Kenney has observed, denotes “the replacement of traditional forms of paternalist authority by a similar authority embodied in the state. All these terms depict the state acting as the head of a family, providing protection and stability in return for obedience”.27 In this respect it is very important to observe that the state, acting as the head of the family, to a certain extent deprived fathers of their status. As I see it, Kwiek refused the position of father/male partner in order to be able to deal with his difficult situation and encouraged Kulik to distance herself from the position of the mother/woman partner. The revolutionary communist ideal of an undifferentiated couple seemed an obvious model. Combinatorics – however absurd this may sound – was an alternative form of communication within this family. Yet reality being unavoidable, this proved hardly a watertight plan. By “reality” I don’t mean the life conditions (such as available objects and

25 It is worth remembering here that Kwiek and Kulik were partisans of socialism and wanted to join the Communist Party, but they were denied access because of their revisionist attitudes. See more in Łukasz Ronduda, “Soc Art, or The Attempt at Revitalising Avant-Garde Strategies in the Polish Art of the 1970s”, in: 1,2.3… Avant-Gardes. Film/Art. Between Experiment and Archive, eds. Łukasz Ronduda and Florian Zeyfang, Warsaw and Berlin 2007, 40-57. 26 See, for example, Tomasz Załuski, “KwieKulik Anatomy. An interview with Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek by Tomasz Załuski”, in: Ronduda and Schöllhammer, KwieKulik, 535-545. 27 Padraic Kenney, “The Gender of Resistance in Communist Poland”, in: The American Historical Review, 104, 1999, n° 2, 399-425, here 405.

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spaces) that were incorporated into the Activities but the emotional dimension of the relationship between the artists and their material.28 Concluding, in both works of art – Action with Diana and Activities with Dobromierz – the child was to be one more type of material. Yet, obviously, one’s child cannot be just one more type of material. Intentionally or not, Brus and KwieKulik introduced into their art not only “new material”, but also the parental meanings it evokes – meanings that can be read both politically, as a reaction to family policy, and psychoanalytically, indicating the difficult process of becoming a parental subject.

28 It is also worth noticing the other “irrational” aspects of this project as mentioned by Zofia Kulik: “Przemek said that, according to his opinion back then, everything should be systematic, like clockwork. But this was his system, he imposed it, getting up at 1 p.m., etc. and others had to comply. So it wasn’t about efficiency, this praxiological efficiency, the Activity’s effectiveness. All was supposed to be subordinated to his psychophysiological rhythm, arranged coldly as in a factory” (Załuski, KwieKulik Anatomy, 540).

Hélène Thiérard

Raoul Hausmann et le montage de matériau textuel : Hylé I Hylé signifie matière en grec – c’est le titre retenu par Raoul Hausmann pour le projet d’écriture qu’il commence en 1926 et auquel il travaillera jusqu’à la fin des années 1950. Le texte se présente sous la forme d’un montage d’unités textuelles hétérogènes plus ou moins longues ; le contenu est fortement autobiographique. La première partie, Hylé I,1 couvre la période 1926-33 et s’arrête sur l’exil, Hausmann quittant l’Allemagne définitivement en 1933.2 Il s’agit d’une forme longue, infiniment plus longue que les quelques romans que l’on a coutume de présenter comme dadaïstes dans le domaine allemand, que l’on pense au Tenderenda d’Hugo Ball (un peu plus d’une soixantaine de pages) ou à Sekunde durch Hirn de Melchior Vischer (cinquante pages). La version finale de Hylé I atteint, elle, 402 pages tapuscrites, soit une centaine d’unités textuelles ; sa genèse aura duré près de 25 ans, avec des interruptions.3 L’accumulation du matériau textuel au fur des années rend toujours plus épineuse la question de son organisation et fait de ce «  roman  » un objet textuel à la lisibilité problématique. Sans revenir davantage sur l’attitude paradoxale des avant-gardes historiques envers le genre romanesque ou la prose narrative,4 je souhaite envisager une éventuelle continuation du projet dadaïste dans la conceptualisation même du projet Hylé par Hausmann. Puis je m’attacherai aux deux aspects sous lesquels ce « roman » relève du montage textuel : au niveau structurel d’abord, en réfléchissant au mode de constitution général du texte  ; puis sur le plan plus ponctuel de l’auto-collage, c’est-à-dire la propension de Hausmann à réutiliser ses propres textes.

1 Mes recherches s’appuient sur le tapuscrit inédit conservé aux archives de la Berlinische Galerie sous la cote BG-RHA-1732. Toutes les citations et indications de pages dans le texte principal sont données d’après ce document. 2 Il existe une seconde partie de Hylé qui couvre les années 1933-36, publiée sous le titre Hylé. Ein Traumsein in Spanien une première fois en 1969 chez Heinrich Heine Verlag (Francfort/Main) avec des coupes, puis en version complète en 2006 chez Belleville Verlag (Munich). 3 Hausmann y travaille vraisemblablement jusqu’à fin juillet/début août 1950, voir correspondance, BG-RHA-167 et BG-RHA-171. 4 Sur le rôle de la prose fictionnelle narrative dans le dadaïsme berlinois et zurichois, voir Hubert van den Berg, « Fiktional-narrative Prosa im dadaistischen Projekt », in: Walter Fähnders, Expressionistische Prosa, Bielefeld 2001.

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Hylé, un projet dadaïste ? Physiologisme et « coincidencia oppositorum » Pour désigner son projet dans sa correspondance, Hausmann parle indifféremment de son « livre » ou de son « roman ». Cependant, dans l’appel à souscription publié en juillet 1931 dans Gegner,5 la revue de Franz Jung, Hausmann prend clairement ses distances par rapport au genre romanesque : « Ce livre est à part. Ce n’est pas un roman, pas la description littéraire d’un quelconque milieu moderne ».6 Le projet se construit donc sur un net refus de l’illusion fictionnelle romanesque. Mais Hausmann ne se propose pas simplement d’attaquer les codes traditionnels de la mimésis pour dénoncer leur convention. C’est dans la question du rapport du sujet à la réalité que s’origine le projet Hylé,7 partant du flux constant la réalité extérieure du quotidien qui sans cesse assaille le sujet. C’est la vie, le vécu (« Leben », « Erleben ») qui doit constituer la matière du texte. En revendiquant la «  lenteur  » contre le «  tempo  » effréné de ses contemporains, Hausmann dit vouloir donner à sentir le présent et rendre sensible  «  les états physiologiques, le bain de temps et d’espace dans lequel trempe l’homme ».8 La fable des romans disparaît dans un changement d’échelle radical, les « états physiologiques » passant au premier plan d’une « épopée héroïque » qui doit chanter « la grandeur microcosmique des processus physiques ».9 Il n’est pas difficile de reconnaître, derrière ce «  physiologisme  »,10 le programme post-dadaïste formulé par Hausmann sous le nom de « Présentisme » à partir de 1921, après la première foire Dada en juillet/août 1920 dans laquelle on s’accorde à voir à la fois le point culminant et la fin du mouvement berlinois.11 5 Le livre porte alors le titre « Heute und Übermorgen », voir Raoul Hausmann, Texte bis 1933, Band 2, München 1982, 216-217 [Gegner, H2, Berlin Juli 1931]. 6 «  Dieses Buch steht abseits. Es ist kein Roman, keine literarische Schilderung irgendeines modernen Milieuproblems  », Hausmann, Texte 2, 216.  Ma traduction (idem pour les citations suivantes). 7 Sur les différentes conceptions de la réalité et du sujet au sein de Dada-Berlin et Dada-Zurich, voir Hubert van den Berg, Avantgarde und Anarchismus. Dada in Zürich und Berlin, Heidelberg 1999, 399-407. 8 «  Das Erfahren der physiologischen Zustände, das Umspültsein des Menschen durch Raum und Zeit wird ganz deutlich » (Hausmann, Texte 2, 216). 9 «  […] die mikrokosmische Größe der körperlichen Abläufe ist das Heldenepos, das es zu singen gilt » (Hausmann, Texte 2, 217). 10 « [den] von mir sogenannten Physiologismus (den ich in meinem Roman auch aufzeige) », lettre à Adolf Behne du 2.5.1930, BG-RHA-612, voir Eva Züchner (éd.), Scharfrichter der bürgerlichen Seele: Raoul Hausmann in Berlin, 1900-1933, Berlin 1998, 281-282. 11 Voir van den Berg, Avantgarde und Anarchismus, 63, et Hanne Bergius, Das Lachen Dadas. Die Berliner Dadaisten und ihre Aktionen, Giessen 1989, 126-128.



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Dans son manifeste du Présentisme,12 Hausmann oppose à l’idéologie futuriste de la vitesse une idéologie du moment présent qu’il développe parallèlement, au début des années 1920, à sa théorie de l’historicité de la perception sensorielle.13 C’est en effet à partir d’une conception évolutive de l’appareil sensoriel humain que Hausmann comprend alors la «  fonction politique  » de l’artiste, qui doit « mettre [les hommes] en état d’améliorer leur appareil perceptif »,14 de manière qu’ils puissent appréhender véritablement le réel. Notre hypothèse de travail est donc la suivante  : Hausmann changerait avec Hylé de mode d’expression artistique – passant de modes essentiellement visuels15 à un mode d’expression écrit caractérisé par son déroulement dans le temps (la forme longue en prose ou « roman ») – mais garderait un projet (post-) dadaïste relativement inchangé. En d’autres termes, s’agit-il encore, dans Hylé d’une « augmentation et [d’]une conquête de tous nos sens »?16 La question de la mise en forme apparaît plus tard. Dans l’avertissement au lecteur de Hylé  I, rédigé vraisemblablement en 1951,17 Hausmann place son « livre » sous le signe de la coïncidence des contraires de Nicolas de Cuse.18 Au-delà de la référence à Cusanus, le concept de « coincidencia oppositorum » fait écho à celui d’ « indifférence créatrice » qui influença les dadaïstes berlinois.19 Les photomontages de Hausmann, nous dit Hanne Bergius, en superposant les couches de sens, mettent en œuvre un « mouvement de balancier entre les contraires qui s’inspire du principe de polarité de “l’indifférence créatrice” de Salomo Friedländer  ».20 Concernant Hylé  I, la succession des unités textuelles paraissant faire peu de sens sur le plan narratif, Eva Züchner, en 1994, pose la question : faut-il lire ces fragments d’action, de rêves et ces longues réflexions théoriques comme des îlots se répondant à distance, pris dans un réseau d’oppositions polaires qui laisserait le sens en suspens dans son mouvement de balancier sans résolution 12 « Présentismus. Gegen den Puffkeismus der teutschen Seele », in: Hausmann, Texte 2, 24-30. 13 Arndt Niebisch, Distorted Media. The Noise Aesthetics of Italian Futurism and German Dadaism, thèse, John Hopkins University, Baltimore 2006, 182-204. 14 Voir Erlhoff, « Sehen ist ein zauberhafter Vorgang », in: Hausmann, Texte 2, 224-225. 15 Ou, pour être plus précis, verbo-visuel pour les poèmes-affiches, et visuel-sonore dans le cas de la poésie optophonétique. 16 «  Wir fordern die Erweiterung und Eroberung all[er] unserer Sinne  !  » (Hausmann, «  Présentismus », 28). 17 Voir correspondance, BG-RHA-176 et BG-RHA-178. 18 Voir correspondance, BG-RHA-1732. 19 Sur les différentes appropriations du concept d’ « indifférence créatrice » par les dadaïstes zurichois et berlinois, voir van den Berg, Avantgarde und Anarchismus (359-378). Sur la proximité du « Erleben » de Hausmann et de l’indifférence créatrice de Friedlaender, voir Timothy O. Benson, Raoul Hausmann and Berlin Dada, Ann Arbor, MI 1987, 110, 161, 179 notamment. 20 Bergius, Lachen Dadas, 121-122.

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dialectique  ?21 D’abord sceptique, Eva Züchner fournit ensuite (en 1996) une convaincante lecture comparée de quatre unités textuelles de Hylé I regroupées autour de la figure du danseur et du dandy,22 mettant en évidence le jeu subtil des oppositions polaires dans cette série. Mais combien de séries se laisseraient-elles étudier de la sorte au sein de la centaine d’unités textuelles qui composent Hylé I ? Et, problème plus radical : si, avec le photomontage ou la poésie visuelle, Hausmann parvient à donner à lire dans tous les sens, c’est que la simultanéité est induite visuellement et que l’objet ramassé sur une page permet une lecture dynamique.23 Or Hylé  I, avec ses 402 pages tapuscrites, tombe nécessairement sous le coup de la succession linéaire de l’écriture.24 Si Hausmann pratique bien le montage, technique dadaïste par excellence, dans le cadre d’une forme écrite longue, cette technique n’est pas transposable d’un mode d’expression à l’autre (du visuel à l’écrit), elle doit être réinventée. Nous nous proposons donc d’aller voir d’un peu plus près les caractéristiques de cet « anti-roman-montage-expérimental ».25

Montage textuel : mosaïque dénarrativante et renarrativation tardive Le mode de fonctionnement textuel que reconnaît Eva Züchner est celui d’un texte en réseau, anti-linéaire, anti-narratif, peut-être effectivement sous le signe de la polarité : c’est ce que je nommerai ici le montage « mosaïque »,26 qui correspond à une première phase du projet Hylé. À un stade plus avancé de la genèse en effet, la nature du montage a été modifiée dans le but de réintroduire une certaine

21 Eva Züchner, «  Hyle – weil wir nur Stoff sind. Hausmanns morphologischer Roman  » in: « Wir wünschen die Welt bewegt und beweglich », Raoul-Hausmann-Symposium der Berlinischen Galerie (1994), éd. Eva Züchner, Berlin 1995, 94-105. 22 « Dandy und Tänzer – Ein Spiel der Gegensätze in Hausmanns Anti-Roman Hyle », in: Dossier 10 : Raoul Hausmann, éds. Kurt Bartsch et Adelheid Koch, Graz 1996, 67-88. 23 Voir l’analyse de Michael Erlhoff sur les poèmes statiques (en particulier «  Dadadégie  ») in: Raoul Hausmann, Dadasoph: Versuch einer Politisierung der Ästhetik, Hannover 1982, 92-100. 24 Sur les limites de la simultanéité par le biais du montage dans les formes longues, voir Adam J. Bisanz, « Linearität versus Simultaneität im narrativen Zeit-Raum-Gefüge. Ein methodisches Problem und die medialen Grenzen der modernen Erzählstruktur », in: Erzählforschung: Theorien, Modelle u. Methoden der Narrativik, éd. Wolfgang Haubrichs, Göttingen 1976, 184-223. 25 Züchner, « Dandy und Tänzer », 67. 26 Je reprends ici la terminologie de Wolfgang Seibel in: Die Formenwelt der Fertigteile: künstlerische Montagetechnik und ihre Anwendung im Drama, Würzburg 1988, 77-120, ici 81-82.



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dimension narrative. Nous sommes donc en présence de deux modes de constitution textuelle qui a priori s’excluent mutuellement. Wolfgang Seibel distingue deux grandes tendances au sein des pratiques de montage en littérature. Soit le matériau textuel préfabriqué est inséré ponctuellement (« einmontiert ») dans un texte d’accueil fluide, narratif par exemple, et entre ponctuellement en collision avec celui-ci, alors on a un montage à effet explosif ; soit les pièces préfabriquées sont montées sans qu’il y ait de texte d’accueil (« zusammenmontiert ») et forment un tout mosaïque : les unités se trouvent alors dans une grande autonomie les unes par rapport aux autres, mais l’effet de contraste s’en trouve diminué puisqu’il n’y a interruption d’aucune continuité préalable. Dans Hylé I, nous sommes dans le deuxième cas de figure : le montage est un principe constitutif du texte, il a une importance non pas ponctuelle mais structurelle ; son potentiel de choc est donc faible. C’est dans le premier quart du « roman » que le montage mosaïque s’observe le mieux, les unités textuelles se succédant sans qu’aucune transition ne soit aménagée entre elles. Aucun rapport de type causal, temporel ou spatial n’est établi. L’autonomie des unités sur le plan temporel est quasiment complète : dans une unité donnée, le contenu des unités passées ou à venir n’est pas évoqué. De plus, un marquage stylistique fort du contour des unités souligne encore leur clôture textuelle. Cette impression de juxtaposition sans relation, qu’on appellera « mode matériel » ou « narration médiale »27 (c’est-à-dire sans l’intermédiaire d’une instance narrative), a pour corrélat l’impression d’ensemble que les unités fonctionnent en réseau. Comme dispositif, le montage mosaïque a pour effet de provoquer une attitude active chez le lecteur.28 Face à cet ensemble textuel dont la cohérence pose problème, c’est au lecteur que revient de mettre effectivement en relation les unités les unes avec les autres. On peut donc considérer qu’il assume de ce fait en partie la fonction dévolue à l’instance narrative dans une narration classique. Dans Hylé I, l’hétérogénéité d’ensemble est relativisée par le fait que toutes les unités textuelles sont plus ou moins directement liées au vécu du « personnage autobiographique », Gal, qui donne ainsi un cadre fictionnel très lâche au texte. Un protocole d’écriture particulier, que je nommerai ici « microscopique » en raison de l’effet de grossissement qu’il induit, domine. Il procède à la fois d’une focalisation interne adoptant le point de vue de Gal presque en permanence (cette focalisation interne glissant régulièrement vers le monologue intérieur et la nar27 « Materialmodus » ou « medialen Erzählprozess », Seibel, Fertigteile, 84-85. 28 Viktor Žmegač, dans son article «  Montage/Collage  » in: Moderne Literatur in Grundbegriffen, éds. Dieter Borchmeyer et Viktor Žmegač, Tübingen 1994, 286-291, souligne le « travail du récepteur » qui devient « le véritable héros du collage ou du montage ».

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ration à la première personne) et d’une quasi-absence de condensation du temps. L’écriture microscopique privilégie le mode lent de l’instant vécu, de la perception en train d’avoir lieu,29 sans ellipse. Le rendu des perceptions sensorielles et multi-sensorielles de Gal, parfois synesthésiques, donne parfois lieu à un ralenti infini du temps, sans qu’on puisse parler de « pause descriptive ». À ce titre, Gal est à peine un personnage, il permet qu’ait lieu l’épopée des états physiologiques annoncée en 1931. Au niveau du contenu des scènes rapportées, les 84 premières pages de Hylé I donnent essentiellement à lire des moments de la vie quotidienne de Gal et de sa femme en compagnie d’amis vacanciers sur l’île de Sylt  : ils font à manger, passent à table, parlent, prennent des bains de soleil, s’adonnent parfois à la boisson, vont se coucher, rêvent, se réveillent, etc. Gal se livre à des réflexions en solitaire, ou encore couche par écrit le résultat de lectures et recherches éclectiques. Ce parti pris de s’en tenir au quotidien n’est cependant pas suffisant pour parler de dénarrativation. C’est la portée événementielle30 de l’action décrite qui est très faible. Ou pour le dire avec Paul Ricœur, c’est l’absence d’une « mise en ordre des événements  »,31 ou «  mise en intrigue  », qui est en cause, opération qui «  consiste en un “prendre ensemble”, autrement dit dans une synthèse de l’hétérogène » qui donne une intelligibilité particulière à la succession des événements au-delà de la « contingence initiale de l’événement ».32 Or, dans Hylé I, principalement en raison de la rigueur du « mode matériel » du montage, tout ce qui pourrait donner de la tension ou du relief à la succession des unités est évité, et ce pendant tout le premier quart du texte. Après les 84 premières pages situées en bord de mer, le style microscopique domine encore dans les 29 pages suivantes,33 consacrées à la vie berlinoise du personnage. Il est nécessaire de bien distinguer deux niveaux textuels pour ne pas congédier hâtivement l’instance narrative dans Hylé I. S’il est en effet difficile de parler

29 Cornelia Frenkel a bien décrit cette dimension «  phénoménologique  » de l’écriture dans Hylé  I, in: Raoul Hausmann, Künstler – Forscher – Philosoph, St. Ingbert 1996 («  Das epische Experiment Hyle », 91-128), mais elle semble considérer que ce protocole d’écriture s’étend à la totalité du texte de Hylé I, et que l’ensemble textuel n’est pas descriptible en termes de macrostructure. 30 Pour la notion de «  portée événementielle  » (Ereignishaftigkeit, eventfulness) comme critère de narrativité (par opposition à la simple présence d’événements dans un texte), voir l’article de Mathias Aumüller, « Narratif, descriptif », in: Théorie du récit : l’apport de la recherche allemande, éd. John Pier, Villeneuve d’Ascq 2007, 227-244. 31 Paul Ricœur, « Contingence et rationalité dans le récit », in: Ernst Wolfgang Orth, Studien zur neueren französichen Phänomenologie. Ricœur, Foucault, Derrida, Freiburg 1986, 11-29, ici 12. 32 Ricœur, « Contingence et rationalité dans le récit », 11-12. 33 À l’exception des pages 85-86.



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d’histoire ou de narration au niveau de l’ensemble textuel (surtout dans le premier quart, où le processus de dénarrativation est le plus sensible), en revanche à l’intérieur des unités textuelles prises individuellement, il est le plus souvent possible de faire une analyse narratologique du texte. L’incroyable ambition d’authenticité inhérente au protocole d’écriture microscopique fait souvent basculer la narration ultérieure au prétérit en une narration simultanée au présent de l’indicatif (le plus souvent via le monologue intérieur). La narration évolue alors simultanément à l’histoire (si réduite soit-elle) et l’instance narrative, mobile, livre le vécu en tant qu’il est en train d’être vécu. Sont ainsi écartées les opérations logiques de synthèse et de tri des informations nécessaires à un récit rétrospectif, lequel donnerait l’illusion de contrôler une action figée dans le passé. On reconnaît dans ce parti pris mobiliste pour ce qui devient (« werden ») plutôt que pour ce qui est, une certaine répugnance devant le « prendre ensemble » ou « synthèse de l’hétérogène » dont parle Ricœur, mais cette fois au niveau de l’unité textuelle. Le rejet de l’illusionnisme rétrospectif de la prose narrative classique fait partie intégrante du projet d’éducation de la perception au présent exprimé dans l’appel à souscription de 1931. Une des unités textuelles (45-49) semble très justement illustrer cette difficulté de faire correspondre les deux logiques, du devenir et du récit, en soulignant le caractère arbitraire de tout commencement. L’unité s’ouvre sur cette phrase sentencieuse : « (Même) la plus petite chose qui advient colore et inquiète à l’avance son espace à-venir ».34 Il est question d’une maison qui a pris feu sur l’île un soir d›été : le narrateur (omniscient, une fois n’est pas coutume) cherche en vain à définir le début de l’événement « incendie », se demandant s’il faut le faire commencer par les quelques étincelles qui se sont propagées à la paille, lorsque le vieux Sorensen a allumé sa pipe dans la remise ce soir-là, ou en amont par l’interdiction qui avait été faite au vieil homme de boire – qui explique qu’il aille cacher sa bouteille dans la remise – à moins qu’il ne faille faire remonter le début de l’événement aux conditions météorologiques qui régnaient ce jour-là, car c’était le vent qui avait soufflé sur les braises tombées de la pipe du vieux. « Était-ce un événement ? Allait-ce en devenir un ? ».35 La question est réitérée à travers toute l’unité. « Était-ce un événement ? Allait-ce en devenir un ? ». Le lecteur lui-même, pendant les 115 premières pages du roman, se pose la question, d’unité en unité, et il pourrait répondre comme le narrateur parlant des braises qui hésitent à prendre feu  : «  La chose elle-même n’en savait rien  ».36 Il faut attendre l’unité 34 « Das (selbst) kleinste Geschehen färbt und beunruhigt seinen zukünftigen Raum voraus ». 35 « War dies nun ein Ereignis ? wollte es erst eines werden ? ». 36 « Das Ding wusste es selbst nicht ».

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des pages 115-116 pour que quelque chose fasse office de commencement sur le plan narratif. La mort du beau-père, qui jusque-là finançait le couple, vient en effet bouleverser la vie de Gal. À partir de ce moment-là, la facture du montage change : le montage mosaïque est certes maintenu, mais le « mode matériel » se fait moins strict. Les unités textuelles gardent des contours très marqués, mais leur autonomie temporelle n’est plus aussi systématique, l’action à venir est quelquefois préparée par une prolepse (par exemple 309-311). Le style microscopique cède parfois la place à des comptes rendus synthétiques rétrospectifs, en focalisation interne (115-116) ou zéro (178). Deux fils narratifs sont désormais reconnaissables dans la mosaïque des unités textuelles : d’une part, l’histoire d’amour entre Ara et Gal, qui va connaître les rebondissements d’usage – querelles et réconciliations – dans le cadre moins usuel du ménage à trois. D’autre part, l’  «  histoire de l›optophone  », ou «  histoire de l›inventeur  », qui traduit la tentative du personnage autobiographique d’atteindre à une certaine reconnaissance sociale en faisant breveter son invention, l’optophone, une machine à convertir les ondes visuelles en ondes sonores et réciproquement. La mort du beau-père agit comme catalyseur de cette histoire car Gal, qui jusque-là revendiquait son statut de marginal, connaît alors des difficultés financières. Dans l’ensemble, on peut donc parler pour décrire la macrostructure de Hylé I d’une renarrativation tardive du montage mosaïque, celle-ci advenant par un relâchement du « mode matériel » strictement observé dans le premier quart du roman. On insistera sur le fait que la dimension narrative n’évince pas graduellement la dimension mosaïque du texte, mais que les deux types de constitution textuelle – linéaire et en réseau – coexistent jusqu’à la fin. Que penser de cette coexistence paradoxale des deux modes de constitution textuelle dans Hylé I ? Certaines pressions éditoriales ont pu pousser Hausmann à retravailler l’ensemble tardivement dans un sens plus narratif, c’est-à-dire plus lisible. Faut-il pour autant considérer la renarrativation comme un abandon, au fil de la genèse du texte et dans Hylé  I même, du projet présentiste de 1931  ? C›est une lecture possible, mais elle ne doit pas occulter le fait que Hylé I, avec cette contradiction au niveau macrostructurel, transcende les oppositions catégorielles entre forme textuelle longue (l’ensemble textuel) et courte (les unités textuelles relativement autonomes), entre intégration et non-intégration des parties à un tout. Pour ce qui est d’un éventuel abandon du projet présentiste initial, nous allons voir que l’histoire de l’optophone, loin de nous en éloigner, nous y ramène.37 37 Ce qui serait également démontrable, à un autre niveau, pour l’histoire d’amour entre Ara et Gal, mais la problématique spécifique à notre contribution ne nous permet pas de développer cet aspect ici.



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L’auto-collage : types de matériau textuel importé et modes d’intégration La pratique de l’auto-collage dans Hylé I est récurrente : elle consiste en un recyclage de textes écrits à une autre occasion et se situe donc au niveau de l’intertextualité interne (ou intratextualité).38 Je commencerai par donner un aperçu des différents textes concernés pour ensuite revenir au degré d’intégration de ce matériau textuel. On trouve dans Hylé I des textes poétiques comme « Leitner Josef »39 (18-19), « Baumschulen »40 (29) ou « Die 3 Tännchen »41 (202-207), tous trois datés de 1926 par Hausmann,42 mais aussi des manifestes de la période post-dada, comme « Sieg Triumph Tabak mit Bohnen ! »43 (37-42), publié dans Zenit en 1921, ainsi que le manifeste « Maikäfer flieg ! »44 (87-91), envoyé au journal Zenit à la même époque. Plusieurs extraits de l’article « Die Überzüchteten Künste: Die neuen Elemente der Malerei und der Musik  »45  se retrouvent dans différentes unités textuelles du roman (342-349 et 108-109). L’article avait paru dans Gegner en 1931, la même année que l’appel à souscription, dont on retrouve également un extrait dans le roman (350).46 Il faut aussi considérer la présence d’un intertexte autographe majeur constitué par un corpus à caractère théorique et scientifique rédigé entre 1922 et 1931 et resté inédit jusqu’à peu.47 Hausmann y développe une théorie du cosmos qui 38 Nathalie Limat-Letellier, « Historique du concept d’intertextualité », in: Nathalie Limat-Letellier et Marie Miguet-Ollagnier, L’Intertextualité, Besançon 1998, 17-64, ici 26-27. 39 Voir Hausmann, Texte 2, 113. 40 Il s’agit ici d’une version sensiblement différente de celle reproduite in: Hausmann, Texte 2, 112. 41 [Trois petits sapins] Hausmann, Texte 2, 105. 42 Malgré les réticences de Michael Erlhoff à accréditer cette date (Hausmann, Texte 2, 211212, et Erlhoff, Dadasoph, 224-225), elle ne nous paraît pas du tout invraisemblable. Plusieurs versions de « Baumschulen » se trouvent parmi les manuscrits conservés à la Berlinische Galerie (BG-RHA-1578 et 1612). De plus, le poème figure déjà dans un fragment de Hylé I confié à Hannah Höch en 1931 (Hannah-Höch-Archiv, BG-HH-2179). 43 [Victoire, triomphe, tabac et haricots] Hausmann, Texte 2, 32-35, 203 [Zenit, Jg. 1, H.9, Zagreb, November 1921, 10-11]. 44 [Hanneton vole !] Hausmann, Texte 2, 63-68, et 207. 45 [Les arts surdéveloppés  : les nouveaux éléments de la peinture et de la musique] Hausmann, Texte 2, 133-144 [Gegner, H1, Berlin, Juni, 1931, 14-17]. 46 L’extrait reproduit dans le roman n’est pas identique et correspond à une version antérieure du texte publié, voir BG-RHA-1541-1542. 47 Publication récente de ces textes, présentés et annotés par Arndt Niebisch, in: Raoul Hausmann, Dada-Wissenschaft, Wissenschaftliche und technische Schriften, Berlinische Galerie, Ham-

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consolide sa conception d’une histoire de la perception sensorielle en ceci qu’elle rend plausible l’optophonie : « voir avec les oreilles et entendre avec les yeux ».48 Dans Hylé I, c’est sur l’histoire de l’inventeur que se greffent les unités présentant un contenu scientifique similaire à celui de ce corpus : Gal se livre à des recherches de physique optique et acoustique, de biologie animale, mais étudie aussi les lois de la mécanique et de l’électro-magnétisme. Il compare différentes théories de la lumière et de la matière et soupèse leurs présupposés théoriques respectifs depuis les présocratiques jusqu’à Einstein. La conception de l’optophone constitue l’aboutissement de ces recherches. Mais s’agit-il encore d’auto-collage ? Dans la mesure où Hausmann, dans son ébauche de théorie cosmique, s’approprie les théories et les concepts d’autres auteurs en les recopiant et en les modifiant en partie, ces « collages théoriques »49 devraient être considérés comme des textes auto-allographes. Le projet physiologique de Hylé  I – porté par le style microscopique et le dispositif du montage mosaïque – d’une éducation de la perception au présent, se voit redoublé sur le plan fictionnel par l’histoire de l’inventeur et le matériau textuel importé qui s’y greffe. Il s’agit bien, là encore, d’une entreprise visant l’augmentation de la perception, mais centrée sur la technologie et les sciences. Pour ce qui est du mode et du degré d’intégration des textes importés, nous constatons qu’aucun n’est repris comme unité à part entière du montage mosaïque. Leur intégration a lieu au niveau d’une unité textuelle uniquement, et ce selon trois modes d’insertion différents : citation franche, collision et dissolution des coutures. Le plus évident, en terme de reconnaissabilité, reste la citation franche avec des guillemets : l’extrait de texte est signalé comme étant importé, la source exacte nommée. Cette solution est relativement peu utilisée, c’est le cas de l’intégration de Drei Tännchen à l’intérieur d’une scène clef du roman (202-207), conversation au cours de laquelle Gal évoque ses productions de poèmes phonétiques de l’époque Dada et explique « qu’il ne s’agit pas de faire des textes brefs, mais d’écrire des livres longs et volumineux »,50 puis va chercher un livre dans sa bibliothèque et lit le poème à haute voix pour illustrer ce qu’il dit, à savoir que « [l]es textes brefs sont très simples à faire. Ils tiennent debout tous seuls ».51 L’insertion franche de

burg 2013. 48 Hausmann, « Die Überzüchteten Künste », 133-144. 49 Arndt Niebisch, «  Bodies of Theory. Raoul Hausmann’s Theory Collages  », in: conférence Body Montage, Institut Max Planck, Berlin, 27-29 mai 2010. 50 «  [...]  es handelt sich nicht drum, kleine Stückchen zu machen, sondern sehr lange, umfängliche Bücher zu schreiben », 204. 51 « Kleine Stücke sind recht leicht. Das steht von selbst für sich selbst da », 204.



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Drei Tännchen est donc l’occasion d’introduire dans le roman un commentaire méta-textuel qui nous mène au cœur de la problématique essentielle du montage mosaïque, le dépassement de l’opposition entre forme longue et forme brève. Elle situe aussi le roman dans une continuation et un dépassement de la production textuelle dadaïste, constituée uniquement de formes brèves. En second lieu, il peut y avoir collision du texte importé avec l’unité d’accueil, sans aucune mise en situation, mais avec un effet explosif garanti ; cela ne se produit qu’une fois dans Hylé I, avec le manifeste « Sieg Triumph Tabak mit Bohnen ! » (37-42). Tronçonné en paragraphes, le texte du manifeste est inséré tel quel entre les paragraphes d’une unité textuelle au contenu narratif relativement fluide, ce qui produit un effet de choc déconcertant, puisque la scène de chasse aux canards sur l’île de Sylt n’a a priori rien à voir avec le propos du manifeste. J’insiste sur le fait qu’il s’agit d’un cas unique dans le roman : la pratique iconoclaste me semble utilisée ici par dérision par Hausmann, pour montrer ce qu’il ne fait pas. En règle générale en effet, l’insertion est motivée et le texte ou extrait replacé dans une situation vécue, avec les modifications nécessaires. On pourrait appeler « montage dissimulé »52 cette intégration totale qui constitue le cas le plus répandu dans Hylé I, car il y a dissolution des coutures entre le texte d’accueil et le texte importé. L’intégration peut se faire dans une conversation, dans un flux de conscience ou dans une scène d’écriture. Un passage sur la perception visuelle extrait de l’article « Die Überzüchteten Künste » (343-345) apparaît par exemple au cours d’une conversation entre Gal et son ami Colonn, alors qu’ils sont à table. Le texte de « Leitner Josef » (18-19) apparaît lui aussi dans un contexte convivial, après le repas : Gal raconte l’histoire de Leitner Josef, c’està-dire qu’il la mime, car c’est une performance. Le manifeste « Maikäfer flieg ! » est quant à lui distillé avec beaucoup d’habileté dans une unité (87-91) où le personnage promène sa mauvaise humeur dans les rues de Berlin et où le rendu de sa perception du monde extérieur alterne avec le rendu de ses pensées en flux de conscience. L’intégration est si complète qu’il est difficile de savoir si c’est le texte du manifeste qui a été réutilisé dans le roman ou l’inverse. Mais cette intégration sans couture des textes étrangers au roman a moins pour but de dissimuler ses sources, qui par ailleurs sautent aux yeux,53 que de montrer l’intrication de la production artistique (et réflexive) et du vécu. L’inséparabilité des perceptions sensorielles et du travail de l’esprit est davantage encore soulignée dans la mise en scène de l’acte d’écriture lui-même. C’est ainsi que sont 52 La critique spécialisée distingue entre montage « dissimulé » et « ouvert » (« verdeckte » vs « offene Montage »), voir Žmegač, « Montage/Collage », 287. 53 L’extrait de « Überzüchteten Künste » est par exemple intégré sans coutures aux pages 342349, mais la source exacte est donnée dans l’unité suivante, 350.

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intégrés divers extraits de textes théoriques sur les propriétés de la lumière, etc. ainsi qu’un autre passage de l’article «  Die überzüchteten Künste  » (108-109). Le personnage autobiographique est régulièrement montré « en lisant, en écrivant » (23-24 ou 53-58), scènes où l’accent porte sur le processus d’écriture plutôt que sur son résultat : on peut suivre les interruptions, les reprises, les ratures, le va-et-vient entre lecture et écriture, va-et-vient entre rêverie intérieure et fixation des pensées par écrit, entre inspiration et baisse de concentration. Tout cela sur un arrière-fond de perceptions visuelles et auditives involontaires ou d’états physiques intérieurs (besoin d’uriner, etc.). Le mode d’intégration du matériau textuel dans la mise en scène de l’écriture déconstruit l’objet textuel fini pour redérouler sa production dans la durée. L’état final du tapuscrit de Hylé I témoigne de ce que la forme longue a continué à poser problème à Raoul Hausmann tout au long de son projet de « roman ». Il surmonte ce problème par le biais du montage, en créant un mode de constitution textuel paradoxal, entre autonomie et intégration des unités textuelles à l’ensemble. Il faudrait, bien sûr, appuyer sur une étude de génétique textuelle ma thèse des projets successifs selon laquelle au premier projet présentiste anti-narratif autour de l’idée de la perception au présent, succéderait une phase où l’ensemble textuel aurait été renarrativisé.54 Quant à l’auto-collage, nous avons vu qu’il permet, d’une part, en se greffant sur l’histoire de l’optophone, d’élargir le projet présentiste (physiologiste) de départ aux domaines scientifique et technologique, et d’autre part, de continuer le premier projet présentiste par une intégration du matériau textuel qui redéroule le processus de la pensée dans le vécu, avant qu’elle ne se fixe par écrit.

54 Cette étude de la genèse du texte de Hylé I est en cours de réalisation et figurera dans ma thèse de doctorat sur « Les textes autobiographiques de Raoul Hausmann : Hylé I et Hylé II ». D’une manière générale, il est difficile de vouloir interpréter Hylé I et Hylé II séparément, c’est pourquoi mon travail de recherche repose sur l’étude comparée des deux textes, dans la perspective d’une évolution du projet d’avant-garde dadaïste.

Cosana Eram

Georges Hugnet’s Surrealist Monsters and Women The purpose of this chapter is to capture the dynamic of avant-garde influences and interactions in Georges Hugnet’s posthumous book The Love Life of the Spumifers/ La Vie amoureuse des Spumifères, a belated surrealist testimony of visual and textual creativity.1 Hugnet developed a taste for subversiveness during his years spent within the circles of the French avant-garde, for, after his prolonged exposure to counter-cultural epistemology and what he called “spiritual revolt”, everything was perfectly Dada for him (“tout cela m’est parfaitement dada”).2 This claim ends his autobiographical article in the first critical anthology dedicated to international dadaism. A gifted author, graphic artist, editor, cinematographer, and art dealer, Hugnet published several volumes of poetry, made the script of a surrealist film called La Perle (1929), in which he also starred, authored critical articles, and created collages, photomontages, découpages, and decalcomanias. He also bonded with important artists of his time, including Georges Auric, Jonathan Calder, Jean Cocteau, Robert Desnos, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Éluard, Max Jacob, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, and Tristan Tzara (who facilitated his acquaintance with André Breton). Hugnet started Les Éditions de la Montagne in order to publish himself and his friends, such as Gertrude Stein, whom he translated in French, and he enthusiastically joined surrealism from its inception. But, like many others, he was subjected to the lightning strikes cast by the Olympian Breton, and excluded from the movement in 1939. As a bookbinder (in his own workshop called Le Livre-Objet), he continued to work on livres d’artiste (in collaboration with Pablo Picasso, Jean Arp or Oscar Dominguez), as well as on collages and objects inspired from his own surrealist experimentations, and, as editor and writer, he became deeply engaged in the Résistance. In spite of setbacks, before, during, and after World War Two, Hugnet maintained his characteristic sense of humor. One of his books, with drawings by none other than Salvador Dalí, is devoted to the god Onan and echoes the importance to him of sexual parody underlined many times in his titles, such as the licentious Le feu au cul (1943), an allusion to Duchamp’s famous mustached Mona Lisa called L.H.O.O.Q from 1919. 1 Georges Hugnet, The Love Life of the Spumifers, trans. Michael Fineberg, New York 2011 (La Vie amoureuse des Spumifères, Paris 2010). The Fineberg translation is hard to get hold of so I will be referring to the French text, which is more widely available. 2 Georges Hugnet, L’Aventure Dada. 1916-1922, préface de Tristan Tzara, Paris 1971.

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The subversive spirit mentioned above never left Hugnet and it comes to us today from the pages of The Love Life of the Spumifers. It consists of Hugnet’s manipulation of forty vintage nudes whom he inextricably connects with the “foamers”: colorful painted surreal creatures sumptuously draped in their own limbs. Each work, a crafted photograph of the original erotic postcard and added gouache, is accompanied by a story on a counter page as well as a heavy mat and label, identifying the corresponding monster with a name as bizarre as its appearance. As we discover from the preface written by his wife, Myrtille, Hugnet created these images in 1947-1948, although he never finished the whole series (four of the original spumifers have never been found; one of the existing thirty three texts is for a missing image). The anecdotes were written later, in the early 1960s, and consist of brief singularizing portraits recounted in the present tense. As they pull away from the narrative temporality of a story and into the now, they can be read as a characterization of these creatures, which are defined by their enactment of the amorous experience. Overall, their collective consciousness features prominently a compulsive obsession with women and the multifarious ways in which they fill the world. Hugnet’s recipe is always the same: each story first renders emblematic features for the given spumifer; second, stylistically with the use of the hyperbole, he adds an imagery of positive or negative excess; third, he mixes in ironic ingredients. The writing is finally ornamented with puns, verbal play, and a creative use of the French language. My particular focus is on Hugnet’s use of collage and his representation of couples in a typographic space that generates tensions between the visual and verbal. Each page is reminiscent of several surrealist topoi, such as the exaltation of love, desire, woman as automaton or female body as object. Between the 1930s and 1960s, the illustrated press such as Allo Paris, Paris Magazine or Paris Sex Appeal, with its inventive typeset and new manner of treating iconography, provided Hugnet with inspiration for his laboratory of visual research.3 Taking advantage of the esthetic value of such photographs (sometimes signed by famous names, such as Brassaï, Imre Kertész or Jean Moral), he focused on the erotic quality of his subjects. His calibrations of human and non-human elements question and unsettle identity, masculinity, femininity, and the very idea of relationship. The alliance between text and image in surrealist books has been extensively analyzed. Chronologically speaking, among the first livres d’artiste/ livres de peintre/ livres illustrés we can count Francis Picabia’s Poèmes et dessins de la fille née sans mère (1918), Fernand Léger’s La fin du monde (1919), and Hans Arp’s 3 Sam Stourdzé, “Détournement d’Images”, in: Georges Hugnet. Collages, Paris 2003, 166177, here 168.



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Die Wolkenpumpe (1920). Female artists associated with the movement, such as Claude Cahun, Bona de Mandiargues or Gisèle Prassinos, combined writing with photography or painting all throughout their respective careers. As Vincent Gille notes, surrealists deliberately imitated conventional or popular literary forms and subverted their technical and stylistic rules. The model of the amorous encounter sometimes governed the work on a book between two authors or between a writer and an illustrator.4 Such artistic adventures, created by individual artists or in collaboration, stand at the intersection between words and image, writing and visual art. In this time-space continuum, the figurative and the literal are confronted and merge into an implicit dialogue and mediation between two genres. Andrea Oberhuber states in her article “Livre surréaliste et livre d’artiste mis en jeu” that, in this new textual and graphic paradigm, the reader has to decode the text while simultaneously being aware of its interpretation insinuated by the visual artist. In other words, a plural reading is born between reading and watching, which resides in the acknowledgment of someone else’s vision and the integration of one’s own comprehension. The books-objects that the avant-garde artists created subscribe to this new avenue opened by the revision of the concept of representation at the beginning of the 20th century.5 Therefore, without further elaboration on the rich history of the livre d’artiste,6 we have to say that Hugnet’s volume has its rightful place among late surrealist visual experiments and works published after World War Two, among which we can count Ghérasim Luca’s cubomanies and Le Vampire passif (1943), Péret and Ernst’s La Brebis galante (1949), Éluard and Miró’s A toute épreuve (1958), as well as Le Livre de Leonor Fini (1975). In turn, Hugnet participates in the construction of this new reading practice that engages attention and reconstructs meaning through the interplay of words, photographs and drawings, for he enhances the tension between fictional and descriptive, between our need to reconstruct in a narrative manner the static image we see and the way this particular image challenges the lack of contextual specification. However, he does not follow the rules of automatic writing, as his portraits do not result from haphazard unconscious word choice or a pool of dream-like imagery, but are carefully crafted and fully

4 Vincent Gille, “Love of Books, Love Books”, in: Surrealism. Desire Unbound, ed. Jennifer Mundy, Princeton 2001, 125-136, here 128-131. 5 Andrea Oberhuber, “Livre surréaliste et livre d’artiste mis en jeu”, in: Mélusine: À Belles Mains. Livre surréaliste – Livre d’artiste, 2012, n° 32, 9-30, here 13. 6 Elza Adamowicz gives two excellent overviews of chronology and interpretive methodology in her articles “État présent: The livre d’artiste in Twentieth-Century France”, in: French Studies, 63, April 2009, n° 2, 189-198, and “Les yeux la bouche: Approches méthodologiques du livre surréaliste”, in : Mélusine: À Belles Mains. Livre surréaliste – Livre d’artiste, 2012, n° 32, 31-42.

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individualized compositions. Intensely allegorical and redolent with pique, his characterizations mimic a catalogue description or a fake dictionary entry. As I mention elsewhere, the spumifers may be placed in the iconographical tradition of the demons in the work of the Belgian illustrator Félicien Rops, dark specters of the Austrian printmaker Alfred Kubin, fetish objects of the German symbolist painter Max Klinger, and the spiders and spirits of the forest painted by Odilon Redon. Georges Hugnet’s beasts look more like creatures from the depths of the ocean, deprived of light and having evolved strange limbs and excrescences. They bear interjectional names that relate to their libidinal drive and features.7 A few examples would suffice: The Conceited Woolleton / Le Purlaine Orgueilleux, The Puyu-Puyu / Le Pouyou-Pouyou, The Hesitant Minosis / Le Minoseur Hésitant, The Odoriferous Matricoll / Le Matricol Odorant, The Sugary Gypsop / La Romanèche Sucrée, The Cave Bopstarch / L’Opamidon des Cavernes, The Corsetted Oru-Boru / L’Oru-Boru à Corset, The Night Frimmage / La Firouillette Nocturne, The Foopoo / Le Foulpougne.8 The bizarre tentacled creatures defy any categorization other than the one given by their author. As Myrtille Hugnet contends in the preface, her husband originally conceived forty spumifers as a tongue-in-cheek allusion to the set number of members in the prestigious Académie française and viewed the book as a roman à clef, meant to describe his friends, acquaintances and enemies alike.9 In the acid description of The Conceited Woolleton/Le Purlaine Orgueuilleux, we infer the portrait made for André Breton, who incarnates the “average spumifer in all its splendor and believes that he has a calling for the highest moral and political destiny”.10 Fundamentally execrable, he is an intransigent specialist of imposture who likes to convoke a special tribunal from time to time in order to degrade and calumny the others. Among his other features: pride, conformism, sanitary sexual preoccupations, lack of imagination, and his belief that he is a dangerous revolutionary. Other accounts are not sarcastic and retain a matterof-factly humorous tone. For instance, The Rapiered Rottlebom / Le Torindon à Rapières, who proudly illustrates the cover of the volume, insinuates himself in the life of respectable women, commiserates with them about their difficulties,

7 Cosana Eram, “Hugnet, Georges, La Vie amoureuse des Spumifères ... The Love Life of the Spumifers”, in: Dada/Surrealism, 19, 2012, n.p. , (15.06.2013). 8 English translation by Michael Fineberg (New York 2011). 9 Myrtille Hugnet, “Préface”, in: La Vie amoureuse des Spumifères, Paris 2010, 10-11. 10 Hugnet, La Vie amoureuse des Spumifères, 26.



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becomes indispensable, offers them a rose, and gently persuades them to commit adultery.11 Under Hugnet’s telescopic gaze, the spumifers are a coherent collection of beasts inserted in the social fabric of our everydayness, who either work for the state or entrepreneurially for themselves, and who feel at best when they disappear in a cloud of powder or attend women in dressing rooms, boudoirs or theater loges in order to impudently engage in mysteriously revived bacchanalia. The readers may not respect the authorial intention and simply prove unfit to the task of identifying the real person behind the monster guise; this phantasmatic world lends itself as a vehicle for moral commentary nonetheless. The personalized vignettes in The Love Life of the Spumifers are reminiscent of the social satire in La Bruyère’s Caractères, La Fontaine’s fables and J. J. Grandville’s political caricatures of 19th-century Parisian mores. In his search for the perfect surrealist object, Hugnet also resembles Joseph Cornell, the recluse New Yorker who created mise-en-abîme boxes comprising of the poetic debris of the contemporary world. The possible juxtapositions between the two artists are in fact signaled in an exhibition devoted to “European and American Affinities” at the Barbara Mathes Gallery in New York in 1985. Cornell was interested in the famous Belle Époque dancer and demi-mondaine Cléo de Mérode and other Victorian actresses, ballerinas and opera singers while Hugnet did not individualize his popular culture feminine figures, which belong either to erotic postcards or are extracted from illustrated magazines of his day. In the rare edition of the catalogue, Hugnet’s photomontage L’Energie moderne (1936) is placed on the counter page with Cornell’s collage Echo of Silence (dated mid1960s), the former featuring a telephone booth garnished with two women, one inside and the other one outside, on a beach with foamy waves, and a huge calla flower looming against a grey horizon. An unexpected and strong similarity is revealed in the visual vocabulary of both artists. These contiguities between apparently distant authors correspond to a circulation of motifs on both sides of the Atlantic during the late phases of surrealism due to the porosity of various visual culture influences. Of interest here is the manner of Hugnet’s recontextualization of female photographs taken from postcards or magazines into new visual/fictional structures. In his double position, as creator and theorist, Hugnet was well aware of one of the foundational artistic modes of the avant-garde: the collage. This artistic device now has a history stretching over a century, but it nevertheless retains an uncertain generic status. Between high and low due to its technique and hybrid materials, it absorbs the external world and gives expression to an enriched and 11 Hugnet, La Vie amoureuse des Spumifères, 20.

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intensified type of reality, such as Lautréamont’s chance encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table. In a collage, several realities morph into one and create the effect of surprise by the image they render and by the perspective they entice, and in so doing they evoke entirely new worlds. Among the surrealists, Max Ernst was the first to create full-fledged collages that juxtaposed fortuitous and distant realities in his book of 19th-century etchings and personal drawings called La femme 100 têtes (1929). In the Dictionnaire du Dadaïsme, 1916-1922, Hugnet gives several details about his own art of the collage. He states that, as they are cut with scissors and reassembled, magazine images lose their initial purpose and their banal signification and are manipulated in a manner that turns (or detours) everydayness into a land of wonder (merveilleux in the original).12 The law of de-localization or disorientation (loi du dépaysement), which he then invokes, corresponds to Breton’s directives for the search for convulsive beauty in the First Manifesto of Surrealism. In a similar way to surrealist poetry, where certain combinations of words, semantically incompatible, are subjected to the law of objective chance, Hugnet’s images rely on hazardous encounters. Timothy Baum has divided Hugnet’s collages into three categories: juxtaposed images without words; word and image, the so-called poème-collage; and photomontages with gouache or decalcomania.13 The Love Life of the Spumifers is the last of Hugnet’s illustrated books after the La Septième face du dé (1936) with a cover by Marcel Duchamp, which contains twenty poèmes-découpages, as the author calls them; Huit jours à Trébaumec: journal de vacances orné de 82 photographies prises par l’auteur en 1947 (1969), in which the invented name literally means “good looking guy”/ “très beau mec”, and was a parody of a Michelin guide with a montage of photos taken in 1947; and the volume of poetry and photomontages called 1961, printed in the same year. In all, Hugnet manages to capture the image-equivalent of Rimbaud’s “alchemy of the verb” and shows the influence of Apollinaire and Mallarmé in his creative use of spacing and different type-sizes. For the sake of differentiation, in his collages he mainly uses a technique of composition by pasting various materials onto a single surface, such as newspaper headline clippings, parts of photographs and old engravings, whereas in his photomontages he combines several photographs joined together for artistic effect or to show more of the subject than can be shown in a single photograph. His favorite subjects are female faces or figures, usually associated with sexually allusive objects reminiscent of works by Man Ray or Marcel Duchamp. 12 Georges Hugnet, Dictionnaire du Dadaïsme. 1916-1922, Paris 1976, 9. 13 Timothy Baum, “La Septième face de Georges Hugnet”, in: Georges Hugnet. Collages, Paris 2003, 158-163, here 159-160.



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Hugnet also frequently deployed fragments of original photographs or disparate images from magazines. If his collages have Ernst as their mandatory precursor, his photomontages continue the tradition inaugurated by the German dadaists, especially by Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch and Johannes Baader, and followed the more politically-inspired projects of George Grosz and John Heartfield. To them, the photomontage had two basic functions, political propaganda and commercial publicity. But in Hugnet’s works images that appear almost like film stills have a more spectacular plastic development. Most of his early photomontages capture female bodily details, such as faces, nostrils, lips, eyes, or fullfledged nudes in postures of abandonment. On the page, these women belong to the same realm as cork-tipped cigarettes, giant shells, and disparate sentences cut and pasted out of an Exquisite Corpse game. If we look for traces that prefigure the world of the spumifers, we discover that Hugnet’s pre-World War Two female representations are sometimes surrounded by looming creatures, usually land predators or marine monsters with tentacles, which stand alongside them as a silent presence of the uncanny. A different perspective emerges out of Hugnet’s late collages and photomontages made in the 1960s. Like an evil demiurge, he mixes various female body parts with animal heads and limbs. The resultant trespassing quality is no longer furnished by the nakedness of the body or the juxtaposition of two disjunctive realities, but lies in the misplacement of gestures and figures in a sadomasochistic enactment of desire. In fact, he retains the sadomasochist component in the interaction between spumifers and women: the former cover any orifice they reach, such as eyes and ears, or blindfold women, sit on them in strange bondage positions, sucking out their every breath like an insatiable desiring machine. One single photomontage from 1946 openly announces The Love Life of the Spumifers. It is a plate that introduces us to several of these gaudy creatures, probably before they found the woman of their dreams, gathered in front of the restaurant Le Catalan in Paris. In this fashionable venue on Rue des Grands-Augustins in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, many artists of the day regularly met. By adding this location to his spumifer panoply, Hugnet celebrates a place of which he decorated the bar and façade, and where he organized an exhibition of drawings made by clients on paper tablecloths. All the contextual and artistic elements discussed above are melded together in the vocabulary of The Love Life of the Spumifers. Georges Hugnet obeys the letter of the art of the collage, which, as we have seen, involves the juxtaposition of two apparently incompatible elements, but not the spirit. At play is a process in which the two elements – in this case the woman and the spumifer – accept each other’s proximity. Their coupling does not show the unexpected but becomes the very expected part of Hugnet’s enterprise. In the edition of Hugnet’s Collages pub-

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lished in 2003, we notice that full-fledged photographs of women appear very seldom in Hugnet’s work. However, his posthumous book contradicts this notion, as all the plates feature real postal cards from Les Années folles with seductive women in their boudoirs, participants in the general atmosphere of liberation and relaxation of mores after the Great War, who appear as coquettes / cocottes, intelligent seductresses unafraid to enact their desire in front of the mirror. Each portrayal is based on the exploitation of a vintage erotic picture postcard from the 1920s-1930s. Nudes were sold as postcards but not intended to be sent as such by post. Hand-tinted or sepia toned, they were meant for tourists or any amateur of erotica. The photographs with no clear author chosen by Hugnet are artfully composed with a very careful use of lighting that shows a particular texture created by shadow. In the light of such representations, what is Hugnet’s personal creative response to the surrealist view of the feminine principle? Surrealists valued their own projections of the woman and addressed issues such as love, pleasure, desire, and contemplated the spiritual advancement that could be achieved in the fusion with the feminine. Theorizing the couple was not necessarily accompanied by an increased empathy towards women or their own sense of agency, as this male-dominated context was charged with misogyny. As Robert Belton puts it, surrealism was not about women but about “men and their relationship with the hegemonic masculinity of their time”.14 However, my position is closer to Katharine Conley’s Automatic Women (1996), in which she demonstrates that, while some surrealist attitudes were condescending, gradually, many members of the movement, including Breton, changed their perspective, which became more palatable and closer to the feminist angle today. As Conley contends, “with the automatic writing project, Breton sought to discover a linguistic myth of origin within the self that had a universal value outside of the male-dominated philosophic (phalogocentric) tradition”.15 Hugnet has eroticism and the feminine at the center of his enterprise. But since the book in question is a posthumous publication, any attempt to include it in any of the specific phases of surrealism is defied by time. The surrealists saw woman as an inspirational enigma “with one hundred heads”, to paraphrase Ernst’s title, as goddess, muse, victim, femme-enfant, praying mantis, desiring machine, or seductress. In turn, Hugnet identifies women as objects and as vehicles for spumifers to achieve their purposes. Each creature preemptively needs one or two women in order to fulfill their needs and agenda and, while the latter 14 Robert J. Belton, The Beribboned Bomb: The Image of Woman in Male Surrealist Art, Calgary 1995, 13. 15 Katharine Conley, Automatic Woman. The Representation of Woman in Surrealism, Lincoln and London 1996, 144.



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have bodies, they are embodied with meaning only in this privileged interaction. Impossible to place within any of the specific phases of surrealism and their corresponding experimentation with graphics and the attitude towards the feminine, The Love Life of the Spumifers is the inheritor of multiple influences and perspectives, within and outside of the movement. The author’s perspective is ambivalent: his innovation may be considered to lie in the transfer between the wild and uncontrollable nature of the animal and the feminine image. The couple, moreover, gains primacy in front of the more traditional surrealist emphasis on the female body and the feminine principle versus the male spirit and the masculine principle. By means of his focus on intimacy as it develops, Hugnet departs from the cliché of the female body as an object of desire. For in the same way that Breton goes beyond archetypes in his writing style, Hugnet breaks traditional surrealist boundaries in his visual representation of the androgynous figure of the woman-spumifer or, we could equally say, spumifer-woman. Conley aptly notices that the figure of the androgyne is a good model for surrealists’ ideal of mutual love. She continues: Absolute harmony with one’s Other could be achieved only by surprising a hidden part of the self usually buried in the unconscious and then liberating it […] The result is a mirror relation with the beloved or the substitute for the beloved’s body (her corps), the corpus of the text, which reflects back from the page the poet’s uncensored thoughts in a process that ideally comes closer to oscillation leading to insight that to appropriation of one by the other.16

The spumifer is the one who desires the woman and we desire only his desire, never directly reaching her, as his body and lust visually and metaphorically overwhelm her and us. A consumer of images, the reader has no other chance but to become a scopophiliac. The power of suggestiveness in both text and image opens a door towards a dynamic rendering of the woman-spumifer couple, whose value lies in its performative quality. The image therefore articulates desire insofar as it constitutes the representation of an active relationship that is in itself a response to the written word on the counter page. Without any direct statement on the part of the spumifers as to their desires and means of achieving them, Hugnet takes on the role of formally introducing them, acting as an unctuous spokesperson who offers an embellished and extravagant rendition of someone else’s acts. On the one hand, the detailed description of each spumifer emphasizes the impossibility of dialogue and lack of verbal communication between the creature and the women. On the other hand, the image transcribes the relation as a language of desire, left for readers to interpret according to their own expectations. 16 Conley, Automatic Woman, 9.

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This process of showing and hiding bodily parts and loving gestures confirm bizarre mating rituals. All the deictic apparatus of the here and now of enunciation and the visual-rhetorical structures create for us effects of presence. We lack the context; the relation, the circumstances of the meeting, and the motives of the characters are obscure. Subsequently, this is not a specific or generic celebration of woman’s erotic body but a transgressive and non-conformist exaltation of physical pleasure. However, Hugnet imagines present excitements and future acts in a visual/writerly manner that vividly conveys the trouble of spumifer love. Through difference and repetition, he creates an unstable couple, whose indeterminacy is intensified by each of the two participants’ lack of subjectivity. Neither the woman, nor the spumifer is given the power to express themselves in any way other than via their body language. The impression they ultimately give is that of a unitary entity that puts in danger the very idea of the couple, always on the verge of materializing itself and never becoming one as such. Graphically, this relationship that is never achieved seems to haunts them, and Hugnet captures the same act from forty possible angles, like a Kama-Sutra parody. Each plate thus looks like yet another letter in an indecipherable vocabulary of love, and this cohabitation of limbs and brains presents a threat to the ontological status of the two actors. They are caught in a morphic posture designed to threaten their individuality and keep them forever caught in a frozen embrace, which turns them into a double creature with no place in any given order, real or imaginary. Its possible real qualities – intimacy and communion – are thwarted by ontological incompatibility. Hugnet’s hieroglyph of desire exists only in the indeterminate territory of interstitial companionship, outside social rules and mores. The erotic value of the encounter can only be read as a parody. This is not the vision of desire as a guiding force against death. What we have instead is the erasable gouache monster whose passion, which cannot be legitimized, retains a distorted, caricatured dimension. The power fantasy of the absolute control of the protective dominant male over the object of one’s desire is still fertile today. Hugnet’s spumifers have an honorary place in the panoply of monsters that snatch women and take advantage of their lack of volition. As such they can be read today as representations multiplied ad infinitum of the popular culture myth of the Beauty and the Beast, their postures resembling stills from category B horror movies such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or adaptations after Frankenstein, Dracula or King Kong. For instance, a typical image of the monster who carries a motionless woman, like a ragdoll in his arms, is the poster showing Bela Lugosi from the 1955 movie Bride of the Monster. Therefore, several disjunctions are at play in The Amorous Life of the Spumifers: the first, and least ambiguous, appears at the graphic level in the visual partition between the left page of the text and the right page of the illustra-



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tion. The bi-dimensional surrealist object “woman-spumifer” has écarts on multiple levels inscribed within its own symbiotic nature: between real and virtual, subject and object, human and non-human, drawing and photograph, colorful and sepia, masculine and feminine, gendered and non-gendered, serious and humoristic. Fundamentally, Hugnet establishes a close kinship between the amorous encounter and the poetic image, born of the unexpected juxtaposition of two realms, alien to each other. The Love Life of the Spumifers can be read as a summum of allusions and cultural quotations, more precisely, as a map of interconnectedness and capillarity among surrealism, dadaism, and popular culture influences, such as postcards, comics, illustrated magazines, and even cinema.

Sami Sjöberg

From Material Meaningless to Poetics of Potentiality The Religious Dimension of Lettrist Visual Poetry Messiah is he who will render all men perfect and happy (Jews), will lead the Jews to Jerusalem and will assure that normal men (Jews) dominate in the world ever more. The Messiah is called Isidore Isou?1

The influence of Judaism in lettrism, a Parisian avant-garde movement founded by the Romanian Jewish Isidore Isou (Ion-Isidor Goldstein, 1925-2007) in 1945, has resurfaced sporadically in the margins of avant-garde studies.2 The studies tend to regard the relationship between the two in compliance with western literary canons and avant-garde aesthetics and overlook the features that make the Jewish tradition unique, such as its dynamics, open-endedness, focus on language and conception of the text. This chapter suggests an alternative interpretation by placing Isou’s poetics in dialogue with the Jewish tradition. When the poetics of lettrism are under scrutiny, it is commonplace to focus on Isou’s Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique (Introduction to a New Poetry and to a New Music, 1947) and neglect his other, and simultaneous, Gallimard publication Agrégation d’un Nom et d’un Messie (Aggregation of a Name and a Messiah, 1947, hereafter Agrégation). This is understand-able, as the latter does not explicitly address aesthetics ‒ at least not aesthetics that are derived from European styles (e.g. renaissance, romanticism) and their highlighted position in the canons of western art and literary history. However, Agrégation is arguably equally important to Isou’s poetics and should be taken into account, especially when analysing the impact of Judaism on his poetics. In the book Isou suggests a relation between lettrism and medieval messianic Kabba1 Isidore Isou, Agrégation d’un Nom et d’un Messie, Paris 1947, 273. All translations by the author. Subsequent references to this work will be indicated in brackets. 2 See instances such as David W. Seaman, “French Lettrisme: Discontinuity and the Nature of the Avant-garde”, in: Discontinuity and Fragmentation, ed. Henry G. Freeman, Amsterdam 1994, 159-169; Jerome Rothenberg and Harris Lenowitz, Exiled in the Word: Poems & Other Visions of the Jews from Tribal Times to Present, Port Townsend 1989; Gavin Bowd, “Isidore Isou, lettrisme et roumanité”, in: La Francopolyphonie: Langues et identités, Chisinau 2007, 132-139. A welcome recent addition to these studies is Jean-Jacques Thomas, “Isidore Isou’s Spirited Letters”, in: Paris-Bucharest, Bucharest-Paris: Francophone writers from Romania, ed. Anne Quinney, Amsterdam and New York 2012, 225-252.



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lah, which he distincts from, among others, later forms of Jewish mysticism (Hasidism) and the philosophy of Jewish enlightenment (Haskalah). As a theorist, Isou was aware of the various Jewish ideological currents and wanted to pinpoint a certain tenet in the kabbalistic tradition by identifying with Abraham Abulafia (1240-ca.1291), a preeminent kabbalist and philosopher (355). Admittedly, Isou’s account of the Kabbalah is fragmentary at best and rather opaque throughout. Bearing this in mind, one can initiate the analysis with a quote that crystallises his poetics and the aims of his poetry. As Isou states in Agrégation, the “Jewish God is the centre of unknowing […] around which we build the world” (259). The interdependence of divinity and unknowing is derived from Kabbalah and is crucial for the Isouian world-making, the means of which is language. Isou adopts a kabbalistic definition of God as the unknown (l’Inconnu), which asserts God beyond rational inquiry (264).3 Moreover, he discusses divinity according to anterior Jewish formulations. Firstly, the Jewish God is invisible and conceptually unattainable. Secondly, due to God’s hidden nature, culminated in the second commandment, the role of language in Jewish exegesis, both rabbinic and mystical, is emphasised. These factors are favourable for the avant-gardist desire to “transgress” language.4 Against this backdrop, the aim of Isou’s world-making is inconceivable without an account of the kabbalistic conception language, which necessitates a return to a conception of semiosis that predates modern semiotics and is theological in character. Accordingly, for the Kabbalists and Jewish mystics in general, language seems to be accorded a special ontological status, at once material and transcendental, at once physical and metaphysical, at once attribute and essence […]. This is perhaps best illustrated by the practice in ecstatic Kabbalism that centers on God’s name in Hebrew, which is literally (physically) unsayable; the word standing in for God thus embodies the unknowableness of God.5

The above-described pansemiosis denotes the interdependency of letters (names) and things. The divine origin of language guarantees that the word becomes flesh, in other words, language has the ability to create things.6 Therefore, the means 3 Instead of denoting any particular school in philosophy, in this essay rational(istic) thinking denotes certain positivistic mode of thought in mainstream philosophies, the counterforce of which is anti-rationalism. 4 According to George Steiner, the abstract character of the Jewish God played a part in the creation of literary motifs, such as silence, blankness and abstraction, in Jewish thought. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, London 1976, 65, 297, 474. 5 Stephen B. Katz, “The Epistemology of the Kabbalah: Toward a Jewish Philosophy of Rhetoric”, in: Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 1995, n° 25, 117. 6 Things are not here regarded as merely exterior objects in terms of modern phenomenolo-

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of world-making is language and in both the Kabbalah and Isou’s poetics special attention is paid to individual letters. He adopted the technique of kabbalistic letter permutations and proceeded to employ invented signs (hypergraphics).7 In addition to the technical dimension of language, the recurring use of the term à venir (to-come) suggests that Isou configured lettrism with Jewish messianism.8 Paragons for these techniques and structures were readily available in the Kabbalah. In spite of Isou’s appropriation of kabbalistic techniques, the relationship between lettrism and religious mysticism is not straightforward. The above quote by Isou can be regarded as mere rhetorics, but that is an unfruitful explication. A similar dilemma between the secular and religious was at work in German expressionism, because the expressionists’ “attempts to replace Jewish and Christian doctrines with a new path to a new kind of redemption mobilised so frequently the structures (messianism), language (prophecy, proclamation), and motifs (paradise, […] apocalypse) of Judeo-Christianity that their project often reads more like a resacralisation than a secularisation”.9 Hence, the tension between secularisation and resacralisation caused a syncretism of these tendencies. Lettrism seems ambiguous on the issue of such syncretism, because an outwardly secular aspect of Isou’s theory maintains that the artist could become godlike through a successful messianic quest.10 However, this is not incongruent with the fact that Isou affirms the Jewish God and supports monotheism.11 This aspect suggests that

gy or reism. Pansemiosis is opposite to reism that suggests only the existence of objects and their respective names. Therefore, a reist avoids abstract words denoting feelings, cognitive states and so on. 7 See Sami Sjöberg, Anterior Future, Essays on Messianism, Anti-Rationality, and Mystical Language in Lettrism, Helsinki 2012. 8 Messianism denotes a movement, or a system of ideas and beliefs, centered on the anticipation of the advent of a Messiah. Messianism has been pervasive in modern Jewish philosophy, for instance in the works of Emil Fackenheim, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin and Emmanuel Levinas. 9 Lisa Marie Anderson, German Expressionism and the Messianism of a Generation, Amsterdam and New York 2011, 17. 10 In Isou’s theory, messianism likewise plays an important role in creation. Both Isou and Abulafia comprehend creation as an act that, once fulfilled, would allow the creator (mystic or artist) to come into contact with God. This is somewhat incongruent with Isou’s decision to discard the “romanticist I” due to similar, but not identical, deification of the artist. 11 According to Isou, lettrism “defended the monotheism of the Old Testament, necessary for the unification of spiritual and practical mechanisms, open to a permanent messianic revelation, that is to say, evolution, pending the unveiling of messianism” (Isidore Isou, Critique de Mahomet et du Coran suivie de note supplémentaire sur Mahomet et le Coran et de critique des dirigeants actuels de l’État d’Israël, Paris 1975, 21).



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even though lettrism included a socio-political aspect that was entwined with messianism, Isou did not merely utilise kabbalistic techniques to serve his own ends such as, for instance, German romanticism did.12 Hence, the end to which Isou aims at with the means derived from the Kabbalah is at least quasi-religious.

Materialism and Meaninglessness All of Isou’s religious speculations were rooted in language or, to be more accurate, language-oriented Kabbalah had delved with similar issues earlier on. At the heart of lettrist poetics is a notion of the insufficiency of ordinary language, which does not concern only the divine sphere but also individual manifestations of the poet’s consciousness (such as feelings and mental states). In order to “overcome” words as such, Isou suggests that the sign should be the new material of poetry. The first lettrist poems were Dada-like multilingual sound poems, but soon Isou produced poetry based on letter permutations akin to those recurring in the Kabbalah.13 During the early 1950s, Isou introduced hypergraphics that amalgamated all known writing systems with signs invented by the poet.14 This led to the inevitable protrusion of visuality and materiality in lettrist poetry. As an instance of such a shift from “transparent” ordinary language, the work La Phrase (The Phrase, 1983, see fig. 68) by the lettrist Alain Satié is distinctly visual.15 Notably, it renders the distinction between poetry and painting arduous, if not impossible. La Phrase includes elements of both writing (markings advancing horizontally from left to right or vice versa) and painting (the execution, painterly effects and ornamentality). Yet, the title suggests literary representation. Satié’s piece illustrates features common to the majority of lettrist visual poetry. Even though the point of departure is ordinary language, and the poems 12 Friedrich Schelling and Franz Molitor were key figures in the incorporation of the Kabbalah into German philology and idealistic philosophy. Giulio Busi, “Beyond the Burden of Idealism: For a New Appreciation of the Visual Lore in the Kabbalah”, in: Kabbalah and Modernity. Interpretations, Transformations, Adaptations, eds. Boaz Huss, Marco Pasi and Kocku von Stuckrad, Leiden and Boston 2010. 13 Early 20th-century avant-gardes and seminal poets such as Ardengo Soffici, Raoul Hausmann and Kurt Schwitters wrote letter poetry – poetry consisting of, often nonsensical, combinations of letters. These experiments functioned as sources of inspiration for Isou. 14 See Roland Sabatier, Le Lettrisme, les créations et les créateurs, Nice 1989. 15 Reason to use Satié’s work instead of a piece by Isou derives from the fact that Satié was the only lettrist schooled in fine arts and, arguably, his works present hypergraphics in their most refined form.

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suggest a relation with writing, lettrist poems overwrite the basic functions of language. Language, and writing as its material manifestation, is no longer regarded as a primarily communicative (at least not in any conventional sense) and transparent medium: language no longer names nor objectifies, neither does it separate or mediate.16 In lettrism, writing assumes concrete qualities, the pictoriality of writing being one of its most obtrusive characteristics. Simultaneously, as language seems to cease to signify, its material and visual aspects become foregrounded. Hypergraphics utilises the visual appearance of writing by interpolating elements of visual arts into writing. However, as writing hypergraphics undermines its own medium: if hypergraphics mediates, how and what does it mediate?

Fig. 68: Alain Satié’s work La Phrase.

In order to answer this question, one must acknowledge Isou’s emulation of the Kabbalah. In both Abulafian Kabbalah and Isou’s thinking unknowability marks the inability of language to describe the unknown. Moreover, hypergraphics is fundamentally connected with this unknowability, with the aim formulated by Isou of “the discovery of an unknown representation”.17 However, hypergraphics still maintains a relationship with writing. Isou positions himself against pure visuality by pertaining to the materiality of writing: because he adopts the letter instead of pure abstraction, he retains an affinity with the real world. Yet, by letters Isou appears to designate signs more generally, especially the invented ones. His pseudo-letters evoke the unknowable by suggesting the existence of meaning while leaving the meaning itself hidden. In a similar fashion, hyper16 See Sjöberg, Anterior Future. 17 Isidore Isou, Mémoires sur les forces futures des arts plastiques et sur leur mort (1950), Paris 1998, 25, 54.



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graphics at once both denotes the hiddenness of the experiential information, because there is no explicit referent, as well as reveals the very hiddenness itself via the emphasised materiality of writing. Even though hypergraphics appears to be simply highlighting the materiality of writing, it is inseparable from the Kabbalah. Hypergraphics establishes no referential relation in the way ordinary language does. This is to say that the extra-linguistic object is lost and, hence, hypergraphics preserves the unknowable intact. Neither does hypergraphics replace the object, even though the materiality of language is highlighted. The loss of the object renders hypergraphics autonomous from representation, but the material aspect of language does not replace the loss. To summarise, lettrist poetics emphasises the materiality and presence of the text that is considered to conceal the divine. In Isou’s case, hypergraphics seems to conceal the unknown by manifesting the limits of language. This means that hypergraphics designates the unknown by standing in for something that cannot be made an object of thought. A poetic principle can be extracted from this: for instance, Satié’s poem, with its sheer materiality, can be seen to highlight the boundary between the known (conceptualised) and the unknown (which cannot be conceptualised). In other words, it is impossible to know what the poem designates ‒ or whether it designates anything at all. Even though the unknown marks the limits of language and the phenomenal world, its repercussions in Isou’s poetry and world-making are seminal. In his thought, the unknown is a topos for an aspect to which divinity and hiddenness are attributed. By calling God the unknown, Isou’s poetics question how that which cannot be known can be expressed. In my interpretation, God’s unknowability in Isou’s writings should be interpreted in experiential terms. In this light, Isou’s unknown means a situation where the individual experience of the poet cannot be conceptualised and professed by language. This is basically a mystical experience, which seeks to transgress the boundaries of language but is simultaneously an experience about language. The unknown is the experiential logos that underlines the limits of language. Isou’s poetry is simultaneously a language-like medium and a visual and material surface that is seemingly impenetrable. There is, however, a promise of meaning behind the immediacy of the letter.

Poetics of Potentiality The key to the Isouian world-making is that the unknown will not be left completely untouched. By directing his interest towards the unknown, Isou encapsulates the teleological vector of his poetics: “To me, the Truth (Vrai) seems insuf-

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ficient as acquired and unknown as future (inconnu comme avenir)”.18 Obviously, Isou’s poetics should be considered not only in terms of the dialectics between knowability and unknowability but also of temporality. Isou straightforwardly states that his “messianic structure is keen to make contact with God”, that is, with what he designates the unknown.19 His statement illustrates that lettrism’s literary theory requires messianism in order to become meaningful. This messianic quest is identical with that found in Abulafian Kabbalah. In classic Jewish messianism the Messiah is considered not yet to have come and, as with all messianisms, the Messiah will bring about the eschatological end. Abulafia refashioned classical messianism by taking it from a historical into a psychological sphere, which is to say that the Messiah the Jew waits for is not external to her- or himself. Abulafia emphasised inner spiritual processes and the inwardness of redemption. This redemption was conceived as an intellectual development rather than any historical and external apocalyptic event. This is illustrated, for instance, by Abulafia’s claim that every Jew is a Messiah in potentia.20 What is particular to Abulafia’s thinking is that the Messiah is regarded as an unknown potential within oneself. This potentiality signifies that the Messiah exists as a “transcendent entity” prior to the eschatological performance.21 In Isou’s thinking this signifies that there is an unknown (inconnu) part in oneself that is identified with the future.22 The messianic suspension between the present and the future is fundamentally connected with the unknown. Isou’s future-orientedness can be apprehended as both stressing an expected future actuality (to-come) and a lack or absence in the present.23 This formulation exemplifies the messianic structure in Jewish thinking: it projects into the future that what eludes definition and cognition in the present. In the vein of pansemiosis, the temporal structure applies both to divinity as well as hypergraphics. The temporal aspect is essential for lettrist visual poetry and the seemingly meaningless signs. The lacunae of meaning recurring in hypergraphics are 18 Isidore Isou, La Créatique ou la novatique, 1941-1976, Romainville 2003, 966. 19 Isou, La Créatique ou la novatique, 1209. 20 Moshe Idel, Messianic Mystics, New Haven and London 1998, 61, 69. 21 Abulafia acquired this messianic definition from Maimonides, who temporalised the Messiah as being subject to not-yet-being. See Martin Kavka, Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy, Cambridge 2004, 11. Later, Hermann Cohen interpreted the Maimonidean doctrine to mean that the Messiah will always be subject to the not-yet; that s/he will never actually arrive. Susan A. Handelman, Fragments of Redemption. Jewish Thought & Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem & Levinas, Bloomington and Indianapolis 1991, 162. 22 Isou, La Créatique ou la novatique, 966. 23 See Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, Hemel Hempstead 1990, 88.



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key poetic elements with respect to meaning. In the messianic framework, the lacunae evoke the potentiality of meaning. Such potential meaning differs radically from conventional conceptions of textual meaning through its temporal suspension. This suggests that Isou’s poetics adapts the future-orientedness of messianism on a linguistic level. Moreover, this potentiality evokes literary structures that circumvent dualisms based on any straightforward presence or absence of meaning. In other words, the lack (of meaning) in the present is integrated into a framework of the poetics of potentiality, by which the lack becomes meaningful as such. Instead of a semiotic void, the lack is “saturated” with potentiality. It becomes evident that what Isou designates the unknown, is unknown only in the present. At the level of writing and language, it necessitates that language is not regarded simply as a medium of and a substitute to a phenomenal realm, but as ‒ due to pansemiosis ‒ a structure that has the potential to supplement this realm. That what is possible is what is not yet actual, which concerns everything that is yet to actualise its potential.24 The threshold of the phenomenal realm is to be grasped in temporal terms, designating that anything beyond this realm is not yet. As was noted above, in Isou’s case the “not yet” is simultaneously a future actuality and present lack. Hence, the meaning-to-come in hypergraphics is a projection of the future in the present. Lettrism adopts this messianic potential, designated by the à venir, and makes it manifest in a linguistic framework. Hypergraphics is based on the “universe of the elements of ideographic, lexical, syllabic and alphabetical notation, which are past and to come (à venir), acquired and imaginary”.25 This is to say that lettrist poetics is not based on transparent language, but neither is it fundamentally opaque. Rather, the potential is a third option ‒ a stipulation ‒ and in the linguistic framework it is manifested as a potential meaning, which may be opaque in the present but contains an aspect of change projected into the future. This is to say that hypergraphics includes a vector of potentiality, crystallised in the term à venir. The à venir entails openness to a future that is characterised as an “infinite qualitative temporal intensification” and “a passion for the impossible”.26 The à venir puts into question the meaningfulness of the present, the here and now, by subjecting it to both anticipation and open-endedness. It

24 At the level of being, the yet unrealised potential also defines the present self in its actions that are directed towards a future perfection – the eschaton or something similar. 25 Armand Robin, Essai d’histoire comparée du lettrisme, de l’informel-a-signes et de quelques peintres-a-signes indépendants, Paris 1963, 27. Emphasis added. 26 John D. Caputo, “Temporal Transcendence. The Very Idea of à venir in Derrida”, in: Transcendence and Beyond. A Postmodern Inquiry, eds. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, Bloomington and Indianapolis 2007, 13, 191, 197.

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exemplifies the desire to go beyond the present and the rational. Hypergraphics unravels the linguistic cobweb of meaning and grammar, and can be understood only from the perspective of potentiality.27 For instance, any clear-cut limits between the absence and presence of meaning, or the transparency and opaqueness of meaning, are effaced. Temporality, as an aspect of poetics, defies the centrality of presence in meaning production, such as it is commonly seen in disciplines ranging from hermeneutics to linguistics and semiotics. Instead of revoking the omnipresent categorical dualisms of the disciplines, potentiality evades these very dualisms by an opposing move. The poetics of potentiality does not ground meaning as long as presence is considered as the measure of meaning. The teleological “arc” suspended between the present and the future causes an anachronistic grounding: the meaning of hypergraphics ‒ their ability to signify ‒ derives from the future. As such, it is a structural promise of meaning.28 Isou underlined the poetic potentiality by stating that hypergraphics “sends a total message towards the future”.29 Hence, the potential meaning is not merely a lack in the present moment, nor is it something objectifiable. The meaning needs to be, in a manner of speaking, redeemed. Isou’s messianism suggests that hypergraphics would become readable at the eschaton. In other words, the Messiah is able to erase the boundary between unknowability and knowability. This idea signifies the belief that the Messiah is able to transgress the inevitable limits of language. Isou’s Messiah is yet to come, but will not always remain in this state. Isou does not consider the unknown as absolute, but instead as something that can be assimilated into oneself at a transhistorical eschatological moment. The redemption would actualise the potential meaning in hypergraphics. This is the aim of Isou’s poetics of potentiality: “We will become that Almighty or unite ourselves with Him: that is perhaps the meaning of the messianic message”.30 To summarise Isou’s poetics in accordance with kabbalistic rhetorics, hypergraphics is the means with which one may reach the eschaton, when its inert (dormant) meaning will be revealed to all by the Messiah and the unity with God will be restored.

27 The potential is not yet determined in any way and, hence, it is aporetic. 28 The question is who is making the promise and to whom? In Isou’s case, due to his affirmation of God, the promise is biblical and a theological pre-construct that is carried in language. The promise of meaning and the affirmation of God are also the key differences between Isou’s poetics and theological noncognitivism, which suggests that religious language in general is without content, because, for instance, the word “God” has no cognisable contents. 29 Isou, Mémoires, 31. 30 Isou, La Créatique ou la novatique, 2234.



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It is crucial that hypergraphics be defined as writing and that we engage with it as such. By collapsing the representation and thus the possibility of interpretation, hypergraphics preserves the unknown as unknown. In other words, hypergraphics succeeds in expressing that which cannot be conceptualised by concealing it. Yet by doing so, hypergraphics manages to point out the unconceptualisable and thus shows the limits of language ‒ given that concepts are regarded as the basic components of language. The effect the Kabbalah-derived conception of language produces in the framework of lettrism requires a shift of interpretation. Lettrist poetry is not, first and foremost, occupied by meaninglessness or even by the meaning of meaninglessness, where the refusal of meaning becomes the meaning per se, such as the Beckettian continually communicated efforts not to mean anything. Instead, the religious dimension of lettrism includes an idea of divine presence in letters and invented symbols, which may restore the unity with God. The intermingling of transhistorical redemptive efforts and the sheer materiality of lettrist works evokes the potential meaning. This potential is not any linguistic Bedeutungswandel but rather a temporally-laden ambiguity at the limits of language. In the present the temporal axis of Isou’s poetics is manifested as ongoing anticipation based on a promise of a meaning-to-come. Due to this anticipation, based on the promise of the coming of the Messiah, ontology (measured in terms of presence) proves to be inadequate, requiring messianic faith as its supplement. It is precisely this supplementation that has previously been regarded in various terms, such as syncretism. It is also the reason why Jewish thinking is often inseparable from transhistorical doctrines, such as messianism and its structurally homological counterparts: libertarian utopianism and the avantgarde, which are both motivated by a will to radically reform the present for the sake of a preferable future.

Ariane Mildenberg

A “Dance of Gestures” Hyperdialectic in Gertrude Stein’s Compositions

An Empress without Clothes? Gertrude Stein’s writing has been accused of being repetitious, nonsensical and “inscrutable”.1 The most recent addition to this resistance in Stein reception is Elaine Showalter’s description of Stein’s work as “incomprehensible, selfindulgent, and excruciatingly boring” topped off with a remarkable dismissal of the writer’s experimental compositions: “Stein seems more and more like the Empress Who Had No Clothes ‒ a shocking sight”.2 Readers who encounter Stein for the first time would agree that there is an element of “shock” in reading her work, but, in order to decipher what Stein herself called her “complicated simplicity”,3 we need to step back a little to see clearly where her “simplicity” lies. Like a practical phenomenologist and epistemologist, Stein clearly knew “what power language has for shocking us back into experience”.4 As I have pointed out elsewhere, the cushion covers, boxes or concealing garments in Stein’s Tender Buttons refer to our usual mode of discourse, a form of clothing in itself, which Stein’s radical compositions loosen, so that the usually concealed “thing [...] contained within itself”5 ‒ the thing as immediately perceived ‒ can show itself.6 Thus, the “nakedness” exposed in Stein’s writing is not a dead end, as suggested by Showalter, but one that displays the usually invisible framework for all the wrapping and trappings of words which, according to Stein, had “lost 1 See David Lodge, “The Language of Modernist Fiction: Metaphor and Metonymy”, in: Modernism: 1890-1930, eds. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, London 1976, 481-496, here 488. B.F. Skinner is one of the early critics who claimed that the nonsense of Stein’s Tender Buttons was resistant to interpretation, in “Has Gertrude Stein a Secret?”, in: Atlantic Monthly, 1934, n° 153, 50-57. 2 Elaine Showalter, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, New York 2009, 253, 254. 3 Gertrude Stein, “A Transatlantic Interview 1946”, in: A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas, Los Angeles 1971, 11-35, here 34. 4 Maurice Natanson, Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks, Evanston 1973, 92. 5 Gertrude Stein, “Portraits and Repetition”, in: Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures 1909-45, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz, London 2004, 98-122, here 119. 6 See my article “Seeing Fine Substances Strangely: Phenomenology in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons”, in: Studia Phænomenologica, 2008, n° 8, 259-282.



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their value” towards the end of the 19th century.7 Hence, if Gertrude Stein, the empress, wears no clothes, it is to liberate our gaze from preconceived notions about reading and language, to make us see like “the child in the Andersen story [who] uncovers the self-deception that empowers the system”8 – and in Stein that is the system of language itself. Stein performs, as Jo Anna Isaak comments, “an epistemological investigation into the conditions of its visibility”.9 Through the recursive patterns of her compositions, Stein perpetually interrogates language, shifting the reader’s attention to the usually hidden condition of possibility of our taken for granted medium of communication, challenging us to “recapture the value of the individual word [...] and act within it”.10 So, if the crowds watching this empress without clothes are laughing, this is not a laughter that ridicules. Rather, it is the “revolutionary laughter”11 of relief and release, of viewing the familiar in a new light, of being liberated from the ready-made obviousness of objectivising interpretation. The following pages elaborate upon this observation and argue that Stein’s interrogation of language approximates Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s late notion of “hyperdialectic”, a dialectic without synthesis grounded in our continual interrogation of perceptual experience. Whereas Stein’s experimental work is often considered as “language” writing, focusing on the purely linguistic “play” and “momentary con-struction” of the composition,12 which, as Douglas Messerli has claimed, is “grounded [...] in the notion that language is the engenderer of experience”,13 it is my conviction that Stein’s unusual compositions seek to reclaim the pre-predicative ground of experience from which language arises, “the hither side of human experience [...] the invisible component of meaning”,14 that is, the pre-reflective bond between an embodied consciousness and world, which forms the basis for language itself. In other words, this chapter is an attempt at writing the materiality of the body back into Stein’s language games.

7 Stein, “A Transatlantic Interview”, 17. 8 D. Franco Felluga, “The Critic’s New Clothes: ‘Sartor Resartus’ as ‘Cold Carnival’”, in: Criticism, 37, 1995, n° 4, 583-599, here 584. 9 Jo Anna Isaak, The Ruin of Representation in Modernist Art and Texts, Ann Arbor 1986, 95. 10 Stein, “A Transatlantic Interview”, 18, emphasis added. 11 Isaak, The Ruin of Representation, 96. 12 Neil Schmitz as cited in Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage, Princeton 1981, 101. 13 Douglas Messerli, Introduction to “Language” Poetries: An Anthology, ed. Douglas Messerli, New York 1987, 1-11, here 2. 14 Michael Berman, “The Hyperdialectic in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of the Flesh”, in: Philosophy Today, 47, 2003, n° 4, 404-420, here 418.

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Borderline Experience It is true that the endless repetitions with difference in Stein’s Three Lives, the endless etymological word games in Tender Buttons or her “portraits” of people, presenting us with a radical disruption of traditional constructions of meaning, throw us off centre. And yet, the challenge and pleasure of Stein’s aesthetic concerns lie precisely in the disappointment of our expectations of a text. What we are left with are rhythmic pieces of a very particular kind, such as The Making of Americans in which Stein “was up against the difficulty of putting down [...] the complete rhythm of a personality that [she] had gradually acquired by listening seeing feeling and experience”.15 In “Poetry and Grammar” she writes of wanting to express a similar rhythm of things: “I remember in writing An Acquaintance with Description looking at anything until something that was not the name of that thing but was in a way that actual thing would come to be written”.16 Stein’s desire to capture in language this “rhythm of the visible world”17 is not dissimilar to what Gilles Deleuze has referred to as the “rhythm [that] runs through a painting just as it runs through a piece of music”. Much like the heartbeat cycle, Deleuze explains, “[i]t is a diastole-systole: the world that seizes me by closing in around me, the self that opens to the world and opens the world itself. Cézanne, it is said, is the painter who put a vital rhythm into the visual sensation”.18 Here Deleuze is indebted to existential phenomenology and its emphasis on experience as praxis. Maurice Merleau-Ponty insisted on grounding philosophy in the lived and therefore open-ended experience of what he termed “flesh” (la chair)19 ‒ his idea of materiality as the “intertwining” (entrelacs) of the body and the world ‒ and proposed that Paul Cézanne’s compositions was the embodiment of this phenomenological perspective: “Cézanne’s difficulties are those of the first word. He considered himself powerless because he was not omnipotent, because he was not God and wanted nevertheless to portray the world, to change it completely into a spectacle, to make visible how the world touches us”. Cézanne’s relentless approach to painting ‒ “[h]e needed one hundred working sessions for a still life, one hundred and fifty sittings for a portrait” ‒ evidences that he

15 Gertrude Stein, “The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans”, in: Look at Me Now and Here I Am, 82-97, here 89. 16 Gertrude Stein, “Poetry and Grammar”, in: Look at Me Now and Here I Am, 123-145, here 139. 17 Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, London 1966, 130. 18 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, New York 2003, 42. 19 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Evanston 1968, 139, 248, 249.



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anchored his work in the perpetual interrogation of what he actually perceived. He knew that “[e]xpressing what exists is an endless task”.20 Existential phenomenology deals with this non-totalising existential process of lived experience, which is always grounded in what Edmund Husserl called “things themselves”, that is, the “emotive coloration or “boundary” character” of an experience. This pre-reflective “‘borderline’ experience”21 laid bare through the method of phenomenological “reduction” is an abstention from conventional or objective ways of seeing in order to attend to phenomena as they present themselves to consciousness. Through reduction, “[t]he phenomenon is seen, but it is seen in the sense that what is seen discloses the very possibility of the phenomenon”.22 This process of self-reflection highlights what William James, Stein’s teacher in experimental psychology at Radcliffe College, famously termed the “fringe of the object”, the “dimly perceived” and still “unarticulated affinities about [a thing]”, that pre-conceptual dimension of experience which is peripheral to what he called “the mind’s object” and what phenomenologists would call the noema, the object of consciousness. For James the “mind’s object” ‒ whether that is the object of a sentence, a real object or an imaginary object ‒ is never perceived in isolation but is always circumscribed by a “dimly perceived” “fringe”, an indeterminate framework of relatedness which can never be pinned down in its totality.23 James’s thought process regarding the “fringe” or “horizon” of experience is echoed thirteen years later in Husserl’s observation that concrete objects are surrounded by a “distinct or indistinct co-present margin, which forms a continuous ring around the actual field of perception”: “What is actually perceived, and what is more or less clearly co-present and determinate [...] is partly pervaded, partly girt about with a dimly apprehended depth or fringe of indeterminate reality”. The flow of consciousness, according to Husserl, is immersed in an infinite “misty horizon”,24 figuring the infinity and continuity of the world, which exists before reflection and can never be fully expressed, and yet it is the “horizon”, that is to say, the very background against which all acts and expressions stand out. The meaning of any object of experience, then, does not stem from the object in itself but from its spatial-temporal horizon, the framework of relatedness within 20   Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt”, in: Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, Evanston 1964, 9-25, here 19, 9, 15. 21 Maurice Natanson, The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature, Princeton 1998, 9-10. 22 Bruce Wilshire, William James and Phenomenology: A Study of The Principles of Psychology, London 1968, 160. 23 William James, The Principles of Psychology, I, New York 1950, 258, 259, 275-276. 24 Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. R. Boyce Gibson, London 1931, 11, 102.

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which it comes into being. In other words, whenever we experience, we experience within a temporal horizon of unlimited possibilities that we never reflect on but are pre-predicatively aware of. Although the relationship between William James’s work on what he termed “pure experience”25 and European phenomenology has been explored since the 1960s and proved to be of “great philosophical significance” for new developments within phenomenological thought,26 similar developments have not been sufficiently examined within the kind of modernist literature that, like Stein’s, returns us to the structure of experience itself. “[I]t is startling”, writes Bruce Wilshire, “that [James’s] pioneering work in phenomenology and his influence on Husserl went without proper notice for seventy years and has only recently gained recognition”.27 This might explain why the related patterns between phenomenological thought and Stein’s work have received little attention. Rejecting the traditional mind/body and subject/object splits that inform Cartesian dualism, phenomenology lays bare pre-reflective perceptual experience of the embodied subject, that is, the primordial bond between subject and world. James also rejected Descartes, but his exploration of “pure experience” lacked an analysis of the reflexivity of the body subject that would become the focus of MerleauPonty’s notion of “flesh”. In the working notes of The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty reflects on how we are all caught up in the “flesh of the world” as both seeing/touching and seen/touched beings, at once distanced from and intertwined with experience.28 Where a Jamesian reading of Stein would help shed light on the primordial dimension of pure experience and its “fringes” that Stein, paradoxically, tried to express through words, phenomenology can help us write the reflexive body back into Stein in an entirely different way. Stein repeatedly challenges her reader to develop a certain phenomenological attentiveness open to the movement between pre-reflective, corporeal experience and reflec-

25 William James, Essays in Radical Experience, ed. Ralph Barton Perry, New York 1938, 39-91. 26 James M. Edie, “William James and Phenomenology”, in: Review of Metaphysics, 23, 1970, n° 3, 481-526, here 486. See also Wilshire, William James and Phenomenology; Hans Linschoten, On the way Toward a Phenomenological Psychology, The Psychology of William James, trans. Amedeo Giorgio, Pittsburgh 1968; and James M. Edie, William James and Phenomenology, Bloomington 1987. 27 Wilshire, William James and Phenomenology, 4. Wilshire points out that although James never called his method phenomenological, “his actual practice points in the direction of what Husserl later explicated” (6). See also Wendy Steiner, Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein, New Haven and London 1978. Steiner notes but leaves unexplored the fact that “[t]he influence of William James is probably the significant factor in any relation between Stein and the phenomenologists, since he is in part their precursor” (54). 28 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 248.



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tion, the pre-linguistic essence of things and language: “As I say a noun is the name of a thing, and therefore slowly if you feel what is inside that thing you do not call it by the name by which it is known”.29 Stein’s preoccupation in Picasso (1938) with the objects of immediate experience ‒ “not the things interpreted but things really known at the time of knowing them”30 ‒ is one of the many examples demonstrating that her thoughts on the modernist composition, which were influenced by James, can be incorporated into the larger framework of European phenomenology. Significantly, when Husserl wrote about the “crisis of European existence”31 that, according to the philosopher, had hit philosophy in the first third of the 20th century, the Paris-based Gertrude Stein was preoccupied with a “mimetic crisis”.32 Through encrusted forms of representation, meaning, Stein felt, had become detached from its original foundation. Thus Stein described the 20th century as “a time when everything cracks, where everything is destroyed, everything isolates itself”.33 Yet neither to Husserl, for whom the philosopher was a “beginner as he reflects upon himself”,34 nor to Stein, for whom “[b]eginning again and again” in composition was “a natural thing”, was the crisis of modernity “an obscure fate, an impenetrable destiny”. Rather, both saw it as a “cry for origin”,35 for getting back to the pre-conceptual ground of experience from which man had become estranged, resulting in the loss of the idea of philosophy (according to Husserl) and the loss of the value of words (according to Stein). In their search for radical new beginnings, a pre-requisite for recapturing the “primal ground”36 for perception and expression alike, the modernist projects of the phenomenologists and Stein can be considered as attempts to reconstruct a European world in crisis.

29 Stein, “Poetry and Grammar”, 126. 30 Gertrude Stein, Picasso, New York 1984, 36. 31 Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man”, in: Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer, New York 1965, 149-192, here 191. 32 The term “mimetic crisis” is Adam Katz’s in “From Habit to Maxim: Eccentric Models of Reality and Presence in the Writing of Gertrude Stein”, in: Anthropoetics, 15, 2010, n° 2, , (15.04.2013). 33 Stein, Picasso, 49. 34 Husserl, Ideas, 17. Husserl thought of phenomenology as a “first philosophy”, a philosophy of a “radical beginning” (27). 35 Natanson, Edmund Husserl, 172, 207. 36 Edmund Husserl, Husserl’s Shorter Works, eds. Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston, Notre Dame 1981, 10.

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Rhythms of the Visible World One of the building blocks in Stein’s project of reconstruction was to reconnect, through writing, with the “rhythm of the visible world”, the idea of which chimes with Husserl’s ever-present horizon of continuity in which our linguistic gestures are inscribed. We must, Stein claims, examine the experiencing of experience itself through a language that is reflexive: “And it is necessary if you are to be really and truly alive it is necessary to be at once talking and listening, doing both things, but doing them, well if you like, like the motor going inside and the car moving, they are part of the same thing”.37 The moving car in this example represents the word which is what James M. Edie would call a mere “vehicl[e] of meaning”, whereas the “motor going inside”, its “rhythm”, refers to its pre-predicative meaning rooted in experience and “transcend[ing] all of its expressions [...] which will always escape exhaustive analysis”. For, as Edie puts it, “since all language refers to experience, the meanings incarnate in verbal expression are hardly ever simple ‘closed’ ideas [...] There is a multiple relativity in all linguistic expression and therefore in all thought about experience”.38 Disclosing the very “motor” that makes language possible, Stein’s strange writing seeks to express the rhythm of this infinite framework of relatedness, which, when one observes it more closely, opens onto infinite possibilities and becomes surprisingly fascinating, as Stein herself notes: I […] began again to think about the bottom nature in people, I began to get enormously interested in hearing how everybody said the same thing over and over again with infinite variations but over and over again until finally if you listened with great intensity you could hear it rise and fall and tell all that there was inside them, not so much by the actual words they said or the thoughts they had but the movement of their thoughts and words endlessly the same and endlessly different.39

Due to boundless variation in expression, “repetition” is not possible. This leads Stein to highlight “insistence” as opposed to “repetition”: “insistence […] in its emphasis can never be repeating, because insistence is always alive and if it is alive it is never saying anything in the same way because emphasis can never be the same”. This is lived experience, that is, experience as we live through it, forever new, moment by moment. “Repetition”, on the other hand, is not lived,

37 Stein, “Portraits and Repetition”, 101. 38 James M. Edie, “Expression and Metaphor”, in: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 23, 1963, n° 4, 538-561, here 544. 39 Stein, “The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans”, 84, emphasis added.



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as “[t]here is only repetition when there are descriptions being given of […] things not when the things themselves are actually existing”.40 Descriptive art, Stein elaborates in Picasso, “is reconstruction from memory and painters have nothing to do with reconstructions, nothing to do with memory, they concern themselves only with visible things”. Suspending any objective forms of representation or “description”, which concerns “the habit of knowing”, the “appearance” that one knows is there,41 and derealising the usual hierarchical status of words, Stein’s writing performs a phenomenological reduction of sorts. Rejecting the separation of subjectivity and objectivity that informs Cartesian rationalism, Stein’s modernist project should not be read as a collapse of our usual ground for knowledge, but as a means towards a fresh starting-point from which to examine our relationship with it. We must, Stein seems to say, lose the world and the word as we know them in order to gain them. Stein’s compositions have “no beginning or middle or ending”,42 for “[e] ven the very master-pieces have always been very bothered about beginning and ending because essentially that is what a master-piece is not”.43 On the contrary, a “master-piece” according to Stein ‒ and here she takes her bearings from Cézanne who “impressed [her] enormously” ‒ is a non-hierarchical composition promoting “words of equal value” in which “one thing is as important as another thing”.44 Such a composition has a non-totalising function that highlights the lived and therefore decentred organisation of sense impressions and the gradual emergence of meaning. Like Cézanne’s paintings in which inanimate people with stiffened faces and plump apples “hesitate as at the beginning of the world”,45 calling attention to the origin of the painter’s creative process, Stein’s cry for origin evokes man before the fall in the Garden of Eden, which is “not a place, but a stage of consciousness ‘prior’ to the introduction or development of reason”.46 The eating from the apple occasioned the insurmountable divide between primal man and reflective man, the experiential world and human understanding, pre-linguistic meaning and representational language. All of this offers an apt context for reading the first half of “Apple” from the “Food” section of Tender Buttons: “Apple plum, carpet steak, seed clam, colored wine, calm seen, 40 Stein, “Portraits and Repetition”, 101. 41 Stein, Picasso, 15, 18, 19. 42 Gertrude Stein, “Lecture 2”, in: Narration: Four Lectures, Chicago 1935, 20. 43 Gertrude Stein, “What are Master-Pieces and Why Are There so Few of Them”, in: Look at Me Now and Here I Am, 146-156, here 150. 44 Stein, “A Transatlantic Interview”, 17, 15. 45 Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt”, 16. 46 Roland Paul Blum, “Emmanuel Levinas’ Theory of Commitment”, in: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 44, 1983, n° 2, 145-168, here 159-160.

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cold cream, best shake, potato, potato and no gold work with pet, a green seen is called bake and change sweet is bready, a little piece a little piece please”.47As we take our bite out of “Apple”, its pre-linguistic essence or “appleyness” gradually unfolds, like “the impression of an emerging order”, as Merleau-Ponty has it, “an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes”.48 As we gradually get involved in the “complicated simplicity” of this composition, we discover that meaning is made through the movement of reading, as long as we are open to suspending our preconceived notions about representation As we read, Stein’s “Apple” is experienced as “fringed”, that is, from related perspectives. Employing parataxis, her poem highlights the relationality and interdependence not only between seer and seen, reader and words, but also between the single words, their sights and their sounds: each word, sight, sound is as important as another. What our reading of this unusual combination of words allows for is a form of free imaginative variation as Husserl thought of it,49 challenging us to play with variations of the essential characteristics of the phenomenon. “Apple” is primarily described by what it is not: “Apple plum, carpet steak, seed clam”. “Apple plum” makes one think of small apples that look like plums and “carpet steak” recalls the unusual recipe for carpet bag steak, the kind of steak that is slit through the middle, opens like a book and is filled with oysters, just as the clam, to which the oyster is related, is filled with seeds. The shells of clams are made up of two halves, which can open like a book, each of which contains seeds, just as the two halves of an apple contain the seeds of the same core. But, just as Stein claims that in order to be “really and truly alive” one must be “at once talking and listening, doing both things”, so should we, the readers, listen while reading and pay attention to the sonorous interdependence of words through alliteration: “apple plum” or “carpet”, “clam”, “colored”, “calm”, “cold cream”; through assonance as in “seed clam”, “calm seen” and “cold cream”; and through rhyme: “carpet steak” and “best shake”. This multiple relativity at a purely sonorous level is part of the fringe of possibilities of “Apple”, forming the spatial-temporal “misty horizon that can never be completely outlined” but which we never lose sight of through the durational event of reading this prose poem. The word “potato” brings to mind, as Marguerite Murphy notes, the French “pomme de terre, apple of the earth”.50 But, as soon as this meaning seems to have emerged, it extends the phenomenological “horizon” of another possible meaning through a repeti47 Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons, New York 1997, 187. 48 Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt”, 14. 49 Husserl, Ideas, 198. 50 Margueritte S. Murphy, A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery, Amherst 1992, 145.



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tion of “potato” in a new context: “potato and no gold work with pet”. The “little piece” recalls “a green seen is called bake and change sweet is bready”, implying yet another framework of relatedness for “Apple”, the “green seen”, which becomes the ingredient of a “sweet” and “bready” “bake”, a cake. We could go on and on. What the flow of words exactly refers to remains necessarily uncertain, but what Stein’s poem does make us reflect on is how “the single mind […] directs an apple”, as she puts it in “Rooms”, for “[a]ll the coats have a different shape”,51 suggesting that the ever changing meaning of this “composition” depends on how it is “directed” by the single mind of each reader. Just as “the horizontal structure of experience always implies more than itself”,52 there is always more to be said about this “word-object”.53 The insistence and assonance in “a little piece a little piece please” reinforces that we could “piece” together the poem, again and again, in an infinite number of ways, revealing possible and multiple variants of this fruit, the “invisible component of meaning” of the object presented.54 Significantly, when Cézanne told his son that “it is all a question of putting in as much interrelation as possible”, he spoke of incorporating, in his compositions, not only the “interrelation” between himself and his object-world, but also the “interrelation” between objects.55 He explained this further to Joachim Gasquet: “Those glasses and plates are talking to each other, endlessly exchanging secrets […] They do not stop living [...] They spread imperceptibly around each other, through intimate reflections, as we do through glances and words”.56 It is like this in Stein’s “Apple”. Between the metonymically linked words in “Apple”, as in each part of Tender Buttons, there is an existential communication as words “endlessly exchange secrets”, the full meaning of which can never be exhaustively expressed. The contours, sight and sound of each word is being caressed in the poem; each word is at some point centre stage, at some point the guest of honour at this party. Stein’s open-ended, decentralised and non-hierarchical composition, in which words have equal value, promotes “meaning as an ‘open structure’ [...] which can be approached perspectively from an indefinite number of possible viewpoints but which can never be ‘possessed’ wholly and completely

51 Stein, Tender Buttons, 46. 52 Enrique Lima, “Of Horizons and Epistemology: Problems in the Visuality of Knowledge”, in: Diacritics, 33, 2003, n° 3/4, 19-35, here 30. 53 The term “word-objects” is Frederick J. Hoffman’s, as cited in: Bruce F. Kawin, Telling it Again and Again. Repetition in Literature and Film, Ithaca and London 1972, 127. 54 Berman, “The Hyperdialectic”, 418. 55 Paul Cézanne, Cézanne’s Letters, ed. John Rewald, Oxford 1976, 323. 56 Isabelle Cahn, Paul Cézanne: A Life in Art, London 1995, 71.

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under any one aspect”.57 What emerges from this, then, is that Stein’s phenomenological interaction with “word-objects” grew out of an urge to “re-capture the value of the individual word” in a manner that would not reflect possession: “Was there not a way of naming things that would not invent names, but mean names without naming them?”58 The rhythms of the visible world cannot be possessed for “we are always already in [ … and] of it”.59

Hyperdialectic The horizon, the simultaneous joining and separation of earth and sky, is an imaginary line which seems to move away from us as we approach it. This is also how we should think of the phenomenological metaphor of the horizon. As perceptual consciousness is subject to change and “remoulding us every moment”,60 as James would have it, the spatial-temporal horizon is never fixed and remains beyond our grasp. This is one of the epistemological dilemmas central to phenomenology which also challenged both James and Stein. The former proposed the following: “The condition of the experience is not one of the things experienced at the moment; this knowing is not immediately known. It is only known in subsequent reflection”.61 A passage from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception takes James’s idea one step further: “If the thing itself were reached, [ … i]t would cease to exist as a thing at the very moment when we thought to possess it. What makes the ‘reality’ of the thing is therefore precisely what snatches it from our grasp”.62 One of the doctrines the philosophers seem to have in common, then, is what we may call the fate of perception. Theorised reflection, such as writing, is grounded in the “unreflective life” of experience,63 but because of the temporal distance between experience and expression, it cannot grasp it as such. Reflection, Merleau-Ponty proposes, is aware of and cannot overcome what he terms “écart”, the unperceived temporal distantiation between the “perceptual meaning” of pre-reflective experience and “language meaning”. Although we do not perceive it as it is prior to our ability to reflect on and speak about the world, 57 Edie, “Expression and Metaphor”, 544. 58 Stein, “Poetry and Grammar”, 139. 59 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 248. 60 James, The Principles of Psychology, 234. 61 James, The Principles of Psychology, 304. 62 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, London 1962, 233. 63 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, xiv.



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“[t]his separation (écart) [...] forms meaning”. Hence reflection can only ever be “hyper-reflection (sur-réflexion)” which “must seek in the world itself the secret of our perceptual bond with it. It must use words not according to their pre-established signification, but in order to state this prelogical bond. It must plunge into the world instead of surveying it [...]. It must question the world”.64 From the “hyperreflection” that highlights our pre-predicative, corporeal “bond” with the world emerges a “hyperdialectic”, “a dialectic without synthesis” grounded in our continual questioning of experience: What we call hyperdialectic is a thought that [...] is capable of reaching truth because it envisages without restriction the plurality of the relationships and what has been called ambiguity [...] . Being is not made up of idealizations of things said, as the old logic believed, but of bound wholes […] what we seek is a dialectical definition of being that can be neither the being for itself nor the being in itself [...] that must rediscover the being that lies before the cleave operated by reflection, about it, on its horizon, not outside of us and not in us, but there where the two movements cross, there where “there is” something.65

As it arises out of our ever changing perceptual experience, for Merleau-Ponty, dialectic is not a process of reconciliation of polarised terms in dialectical tension. Rather, it is what he sees as a perpetual process of emerging and questioning where “experience is not ‘in between’ (dia) Being and beings, but rather ‘throughout’ it”.66 Reflection, he tells us, is never terminated but always keeps the passage between the pre-reflective and the reflective open, for this is the very passage ‒ the “there where ‘there is’ something” ‒ where meaning is produced. The lack of synthesis or closure in hyperdialectic, then, should not be taken as a sign of futility or inconclusiveness but, rather, as a reminder of the perpetual genesis of lived (corporeal) experience on which our reflexive cognition rests. “Beginning again and again”, Stein’s writing lays bare the usually unperceived divergence between the “unreflective” experience and articulation where “hyperdialectic” occurs, a passage that cannot be closed as it remains an “écart”, the divergence which is the condition for the production of meaning. Commenting on Tender Buttons, Ellen E. Berry has noted that Stein’s reader must adopt “a paradoxical split of attention ‒ a relaxed hyperattention, an unconscious hyperconsciousness, a borderline state of awareness a little like insomnia”. Drawing upon what Fredric Jameson, following Jean Baudrillard, thinks of as a “postmodern hyperspace”, the perplexing space of late capitalism, producing constantly 64 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 176, 216, 38-39. 65 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 94-95, emphasis added. 66 Hugh J. Silverman, “Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty: Interpreting Hegel”, in: Research in Phenomenology, 1977, n° 7, 209-224, here 222.

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bewildered subjects incapable of locating themselves, Berry reads Stein’s project as a postmodern “new aesthetics of fragmentation” and places emphasis on the “cognitive incapacity” of Stein’s reader,67 thus joining forces with what extant Stein scholarship interprets as postmodern groundlessness, fragmentation or indeterminacy.68 By contrast, “hyperdialectic” sheds new light on the auto-critical “hyper” attentiveness of Stein’s reader and grounds her compositions in the “unreflective” but material life of embodied experience. Examining the experiencing of experience itself, the non-totalising function of Stein’s decentralised compositions produces not postmodern bewilderment but continual questioning, inviting us perpetually to see the world/word anew. Freeing her compositions from the overlay of descriptive knowledge, she seeks to “express not the things seen in association but the things really seen, not things interpreted but things really known at the time of knowing them”,69 an impossible project, some may argue, as her emulation of immediate pre-thematic experience – an indivisible self-presence ‒ relies on the virtues of a language that is always already a belated version of the actual experience. And yet, “to attempt to express immediate experience is not to betray reason but, on the contrary, to work toward its aggrandizement”.70

“If I Told Him” and Shutters Shut As pre-reflective engagement with the world is always rooted in the materiality of the body, what better way to draw together this discussion and demonstrate the occurrence of “hyperdialectic” in Stein than to turn briefly to Paul Lightfoot & Sol León’s 2003 dance production Shutters Shut as performed by Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT) to the remarkably soothing voice of Gertrude Stein reading her own “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso” (1923).71 One dance review sums up the essence of the production beautifully:

67 Berry, Curved Thought and Textual Wandering, 18, 30, 9, 30. 68 See Neil Schmitz, “Gertrude Stein as Post-Modernist: The Rhetoric of Tender Buttons”, in: Journal of Modern Literature, 3, 1974, n° 5, 1203-1218; Marianne DeKoven, A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing, Madison 1983; and Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy. 69 Stein, Picasso, 36. 70 Jack Reynolds, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity, Ohio 2004, 22. 71 See the NDT production at: , (13.05.2013).



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The text of a Gertrude Stein poem, “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso”, is painted on stage in front of us in Shutters Shut as the text is mixed up and mashed in the style of a most virtuosic disc jockey [...] or a Picasso painting. This particular dj, Gertrude Stein, is the sole serenader of a man and a woman gradually making their way from stage right to stage left as they paint in a Picasso fashion every nuance of a poem with their bodies as conceived by Paul Lightfoot and Sol Léon.72

Like Stein’s “Apple”, “If I Told Him” expresses the relationality and interdependency of words as they oscillate between shaping and re-shaping meaning, reflecting the dynamic nature of perceptual experience. Once again, the phenomenological horizon is perpetually extended and meaning is constantly decentred as language is being interrogated: If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him. Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it. If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him would he like it would he like it if I told him. Now. Not now. And now. Now. Exactly as as kings. Feeling full for it. Exactitude as kings. So to beseech you as full as for it. Exactly or as kings. Shutters shut and open so do queens. Shutters shut and shutters and so shutters shut and shutters and so and so shutters and so shutters shut and so shutters shut and shutters and so. And so shutters shut and so and also. And also and so and so and also. Exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance as exact as a resemblance, exactly as resembling, exactly resembling, exactly in resemblance exactly a resemblance, exactly and resemblance. For this is so. Because.73 72 Adrienne Jean Fisher, “Dance Review: The Aspiration of Freedom”, in: Danz.net: The Social Network Where Dancers Live, 15 April 2009, , (13.05.2013). 73 Gertrude Stein, “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso”, in: Look at Me Now and Here I Am, 218-220, here 218.

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If we think we are going to get a literary portrait about Picasso, then we’re mistaken. Likewise, Shutters Shut is not about anything but the movement of two bodies, a modern day Adam and Eve of a pre-linguistic, purely gestural world who have not yet eaten the apple. Stein is not interested in description, that is to say, objectivising interpretation. Instead her composition is eidetic, expressing essence as opposed to external identity. For instance, the essence of Picasso resembles that of Napoleon who is mentioned several times. Much like Napoleon and “[e]xactly or as kings”, “Picasso ha[d] his splendour”, Stein tells us in Picasso, and, much like Napoleon, Picasso was the embodiment of imaginative greatness and took risks ‒ he was a genius and had “another vision than that of all the world [which] is very rare”. But if Picasso is the modernist “king” of visual portraiture, Stein is the “queen” of an inverted vision of verbal portraiture, which is equally rare; “I was alone in understanding [Picasso]”, Stein stresses, “perhaps because I was expressing the same things in literature”.74 The variations of inverted parallelisms or rhetorical chiasms that characterise “If I told Him” in the first six lines ‒ “If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him. Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it” ‒ is mirrored by the dancers in Shutters Shut whose synchronised movements mirror each other chiastically in inverted parallels that are almost “exactly resembling”. Significantly, Merleau-Ponty also uses the notion of the “chiasm” as a key figure in The Visible and the Invisible. The body, MerleauPonty tells us, has a twofold being that locates it at once apart from other body subjects as a seeing/touching subject and among them as a seen/touched “thing”. We are all caught up in the flesh of the world as both perceiving and perceived beings, at once active and passive, both “talking and listening”, as Stein would say. The structure of all experience is therefore an intertwined “chiasm”, indicating an event that is neither a complete separation nor a complete unity between mute perception and speech, the sentient and the sensible. Rather, it is a “general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea”.75 It is because Shutters Shut, like Stein’s portrait, unfolds in this usually unperceived midway passage that it seems at once absurd and truthful. As one journalist put it, this “dance of gestures” was “making sense in the same way its text score, Gertrude Stein’s ‘If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso’, does: not at all, and completely”.76 “[M]ean[ing] names without naming them”, in a truly Steinian manner the dancers are literally moving through the écart, the temporal space of distantiation in which hyperdialectic is inscribed, between purely gestural meaning 74 Stein, Picasso, 50, 16, 43. 75 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 264, 139. 76 Claudia La Rocco, “The Fires of Youth on a Restless Night”, in: The New York Times, 10 April 2009, , (15.04.2013).



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and language meaning. But, as “one thing is as important as another thing”, so too are the processes of watching Shutters Shut and of reading Stein’s text tantamount to a passing through the écart which perpetually opens onto meaning and yet shuts out totalising meaning: “Shutters shut and shutters and so shutter shut and shutters and so and so shutters and so shutters shut and so shutter shut and shutters and so”. Underlining that “insistence is alive” and that “exact resemblance”, the mimetic representation known from 19th-century realism, bringing into being an “exact” portrait of reality, can never be attained, the rhythm of Stein’s words is, as pointed out in “The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans”, “endlessly the same and endlessly different”: “Exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance as exact as a resemblance, exactly as resembling, exactly resembling”. Knowing that the flow of perceptual consciousness is “remoulding us every moment” and that we cannot escape the fate of perception, the “now” of portraiture is always already a belated “not now”: “ Now. / Not now. / And now. / Now”. As already noted, Merleau-Ponty’s “hyperdialectic” emphasises the importance of experience as praxis: experience is not “‘in between’ (dia) Being and beings, but rather ‘throughout’ it [ … F]or Merleau-Ponty, philosophy moves toward and becomes the experience of the world”.77 Visualising Stein’s modernist project, expressing the “rhythm of the visible world” and literally “acting within [the word]”,78 Shutters Shut is the physical experience as the bodies live through the rhythm of Stein’s words. Just as the meaning of the portrait emerges through the different levels of “insistence” placed on each word as Stein reads it ‒ thus taking her bearings from Cézanne and allowing each part of the composition to be as important as the whole ‒ so does meaning emerge through the moving bodies. The NDT performance is truly a presentation of “the speaking word” (la parole parlante), as Merleau-Ponty called it, “in which the significant intention is at the stage of coming into being”.79 Shutters Shut is the flesh of the world laid bare. The purely “fleshy” communication of the dancers in Shutters Shut expresses beautifully how Stein’s portrait of Picasso pulls the protective layer off our everyday world of communication, opening onto the silent but expressive life of the bare bodies inhabiting them. Thus, presenting us with an anti-intellectualism directed against static and formal aspects of knowledge, the aim of Stein’s modernist composition is to embrace language from within. Stripped of the “clothes” of ready-made reality, the words of this empress of the modernist composition reveal, as Stein puts it, “how you are feeling inside you to the words that are coming out to be outside you”.80 77 Silverman, “Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty: Interpreting Hegel”, 222. 78 Stein, “A Transatlantic Interview”, 18. 79 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 197. 80 Stein, “Poetry and Grammar”, 125.

Tania Ørum

Conceptual Frames of Life The material changes in the art of the 1960s and 1970s are inseparable from changes in subjectivity, in the notions of reality and realism and in the definition of politics. The social and technological conditions of post-World War II societies differed from pre-war Europe inhabited by the so-called historical avant-garde, and the avant-garde movements which arose in the 1950s and 1960s changed their approaches accordingly. These shifts in the conception of subjectivity, reality and materiality constitute the difference between the politics and the modes of realism at the start of the 20th century and that of the post-war period. This chapter aims to highlight these changes by cutting across examples and theories from both literature and the visual arts. The Hungarian literary critic György Lukács famously criticised modernist and avant-garde literature for being too unfocused and inclusive.1 Instead of depicting the main forces, actors and oppositions in society, the modernist novel would deal with what Virginia Woolf described as “the ordinary mind on an ordinary day” as it “receives a myriad impressions trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel […] an incessant shower of innumerable atoms”.2 Lukács saw this as remaining on the immediate surface of things without a critical analysis of the underlying structures of society or consciousness. In a properly realist epic each object (whether person or event) assumes its appropriate position and weight, its subjective and objective importance, only in relation to the wider context, since their individual existence “cannot be distinguished from their social and historical environment”.3 Modernism and avant-gardism, in contrast, portray the world as a flux of subjective perceptions ungrounded in objective class oppositions and hence without history or direction, peopled by characters without an 1 Under the heading of “Die weltanschaulichen Grundlagen des Avantgardeismus” Lukács discusses writers like Joyce, Kafka, Beckett, Musil and others as opposed to Thomas Mann. “Die Gegenwartsbedeutung des kritischen Realismus 1957” (457-603) is one of the “Essays über Realismus” (in: Probleme des Realismus I, Werke Band IV). I quote from the English translation of the essays: “The Ideology of Modernism” (17-46) and “Franz Kafka or Thomas Mann?” (47-92), in: György Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander, London 1963. 2 Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction”, in: Collected Essays, II, London 1972, 103-110, here 106. Lukács in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (51) comments: “the modernist writer identifies what is necessarily a subjective experience with reality as such, thus giving a distorted picture of reality as a whole (Virginia Woolf is an extreme example of this)”. Characteristically this is the only time he mentions a woman writer. 3 Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, 19.



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ontological core or a stable sense of normality and with no means of distinguishing between the virtual and the possible.4 Lukács’ description of modernist literature is, of course, a negative evaluation advocating a return to the structure of the so-called realism of the 19th century or its continuation in the bourgeois realism of writers like Thomas Mann in the 20th century. But similar to Michael Fried’s later condemnation of minimal art5 ‒ an extremely accurate, although negative, diagnosis of the performative and interactive turn which took place in the visual arts in the 1960s ‒ Lukács’s denunciation pinpoints some of the central issues and changes which differentiate modernism and the avant-garde from 19th-century art. I shall trace these aesthetic-political changes from Lukács’s position to the feminist art of the 1970s and try to move from literary into art history in order to show the interdependence and material consequences of these shifts.

The Material of Realism Lukács saw the opposition between 19th-century realism and what he called “modernist anti-realism” not as a matter of style and literary technique, but as a question of world view and artistic intention. Thus, Joyce’s stream of consciousness technique was “no mere stylistic device”.6 I think Lukács was quite right, the stylistic changes are undoubtedly to be read as statements of changes in world view and artistic position. But while Lukács interpreted stream of consciousness with its “perpetually oscillating patterns of sense- and memory-data, their powerfully charged – but aimless and directionless – fields of force” as giving “rise to an epic structure which is static, reflecting a belief in the basically static character of events”, I view it differently.7 After World War I many modernists no doubt looked for a common humanity at an existential level rather than at the political and social level, as Erich Auerbach has argued.8 However, that doesn’t make them “anti-realists” as Lukács suggested. It does imply completely different criteria of realism. Modernist representation of reality is close to phenomenology in its description of human perception 4 Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, 24. 5 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood”, in: Artforum, June 1967. Reprinted in: Minimal Art, ed. Gregory Battcock, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1995, 116-147. 6 Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, 18. 7 Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, 18. 8 Erich Auerbach, “The Brown Stocking”, Mimesis. The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), Princeton 1974, 525-553.

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and consciousness.9 Virginia Woolf among others argued that modernism was in fact far more realistic than the 19th-century convention usually labelled realism, since the orderliness of the lives and fates of characters in conventional realist novels were very far from the mess of daily life as experienced by ordinary minds. And the effort of providing “comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole” was a conventional straight-jacket limiting the writer’s sensibility towards “life or spirit, truth or reality [… which] has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments”.10 Today it seems odd to describe Joyce’s “perpetually oscillating patterns of sense- and memory-data” as static, but by static Lukács of course referred to the lack of political direction and historical development, and to the general absence of overall narrative structures indicating the relative importance of events. This kind of narrative patterning was exactly what the modernists were trying to avoid in order to give a more realistic impression of lived experience, and for this purpose they refrained from describing longer spans of time or complete lives of individuals, and focused instead on a fuller probing of the moment in its complexity and processual flow. For avant-garde artists the modernist work of art was still too far removed from everyday life and too deeply embedded in the art institution. In order to approach life directly the avant-garde typically made a point of deploying trivial everyday material – whether in Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, the everyday bric-a-brac of Kurt Schwitters’s collages in his home (the Merzbau), or the foodstuffs and other ordinary items on Daniel Spoerri’s kitchen table on October 17, 1961 which provided the content of his book An Anecdoted Topography of Chance.11 In Spoerri’s book there is not even the minimal plot structure of a modernist novel, just a simple listing of objects accompanied by a sketch of the thing and a brief account of how it came to be on his table in Paris. As Lukács has pointed out, such a shift is not just a question of aesthetics, but of ideology and intention: a major change had taken place in art and in the conception of the material of realism. The concepts of reality, of the subject and of politics had undergone a radical transformation. It is no coincidence that Spoerri belonged to the avant-garde group of neo-realists called nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany. Spoerri’s book can be read as an autobiography, since the anecdotes accompanying each item relate to his personal life and artis9 See Carole Bourne-Taylor and Ariane Mildenberg (eds.), Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond, Bern 2010. 10 Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction”, 105-106. 11 Daniel Spoerri, Topographie anecdotée du hasard, Paris 1962; An Anecdoted Topography of Chance, New York 1966.



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tic work, but it can also be read as a material history of the early sixties, since we get some product history, some information about nearby shops and other local places, and an impression of living conditions for artists in Paris at the time. In that sense, Spoerri’s work can be said to fulfil Lukács’s criterion of realism, that the “individual existence” of the objects cannot “be distinguished from their social and historical environment”, even though the reader is not guided through the work by a narrative which distinguishes the important features from the irrelevant digressions, but has to figure out for him/herself what this collection of ephemera adds up to. This was not immediately evident to the first readers of the work who tended to dismiss this and similar works by for instance Georges Perec as too trivial or meaningless, too life-like and realistic to count as art. The lack of distinctions between supposedly “major” social relations and “minor” personal and product details is in fact programmatic: it signals the collapse of the social and mental hierarchies assumed by Lukács. This kind of one-to-one realism was pursued by Spoerri for instance in an exhibition in Arthur Köpcke’s small gallery in Copenhagen in 1961 which showed only items bought at the local supermarket and stamped with the warning “attention oeuvre d’art” (“attention artwork”). Moving the real objects into the gallery instead of depicting or representing them is a kind of literalism which goes beyond what Michael Fried diagnosed as the literalism of minimalism. Fried deplored this literalism because it did not aspire “to defeat or suspend its own objecthood, but on the contrary to discover and project objecthood as such”. Fried saw this as the opposite of modernist art whose crucial feature was exactly to “defeat or suspend its own objecthood” and thus demonstrate its difference from “everything material that was not art”, in other words, art’s superiority to ordinary objects. He argued that “the literalist espousal of objecthood amounts to nothing other than a plea for a new genre of theatre, and theatre is now the negation of art”.12 The minimalist object is theatrical, he explained, because “it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work”.13 Fried quotes the sculptor Robert Morris to the effect that whereas in previous art the aesthetic value was located within the work, “the experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation” which “by definition, includes the beholder”.14 A view which might be said to entail a more realistic appraisal of that which goes on in the exhibition room. The performative turn in art and society in the late 1950s and early 1960s noted by Fried, brought about both a greater awareness of the materiality of the 12 Fried, “Art and Objecthood”, 120, 124. 13 Fried, “Art and Objecthood”, 125. 14 Fried, “Art and Objecthood”, 125.

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artwork and of its relation to a beholder (or a reader). In minimalist and post-minimalist art, moreover, the spectator was seen as not just an observing mind, but as a physical body moving about in the social space surrounding the art object. This physical and material approach to art entailed changes in the conception of the artist, who tended either to disappear behind his work or to appear as a performing body. In minimalism as well as in pop art and conceptual art, the artist was no longer seen as the central source of the interpretation of the work, nor did he or she wish his/her work to express subjective emotion or metaphysical reflection. What Roland Barthes has called “the death of the author” in literature,15 the disappearance of the writer (or artist) behind the work, implied the birth of the reader (or beholder) as the decisive instance perceiving and interpreting the artwork. This interactive approach, which Fried has called theatricality in the visual arts, corresponds to the heightened awareness of the reader in relation to literature, as developed in Umberto Eco’s concept of “the open work”16 and in reader response theory.17

The Subjective and the Political While the subjective and expressive role of the artist was minimised, and the beholder was becoming an active presence in the space surrounding the increasingly physical art object, deprived of its psychological and metaphysical content, the whole notion of subjectivity took a new turn as discursive and performative ideas were introduced. Once again, it may be useful to start from Lukács to see how things changed. Lukács criticised modernism for its subjectivism and for not distinguishing between potential and actual life and thus mistaking imagined possibilities for the actual complexity of life: “The concrete potentiality cannot be isolated from the myriad abstract potentialities. Only actual decision reveals the distinction”.18 Realist literature must therefore demonstrate that once the character has made his choice, “his abstract potentialities will appear essentially inauthentic”.19 Lukács’s position here is inseparable from his wish to preserve a concept of normality and thus of enlightened personal agency. He is critical 15 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1968), in: Image–Music–Text, trans. Stephen Heath, London 1977, 142-148. 16 Umberto Eco, The Open Work (1962, 1964 and 1968), London 1989. 17 Reader response theory developed a little later, from the early 1970s onwards. See Susan Suleiman and Inge Crossman (eds.), The Reader in the Text, Princeton 1980. 18 Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, 22. 19 Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, 23.



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not only of what he sees as the cult of the pathological in modernism, but also of Freud’s attempt to find the key to the “understanding of the normal personality in the psychology of the abnormal”.20 Literature, says Lukács, “must have a concept of the normal if it is to ‘place’ distortion correctly; that is to say, to see it as distortion”.21 The pervasive cultural influence of psychoanalysis as well as the experiences of World War II made many people less certain of the exact borders dividing fantasy from reality, and normality from the abnormal than Lukács was, even in 1955 when he wrote the essay on realism quoted here. Lukács does not mention the surrealists, but their cult of madness and the occult as subversive practices would certainly fall under his critique, along with later subcultural movements such as the Beats and the hippies. Later feminist and queer movements, moreover, would also be uncomfortable with the concept of a clear division between the normal and the abnormal, and most theorists and victims of colonial and postcolonial suppression would find it hard to stomach Lukács’s conviction that only those who act have authentic potential for change and liberation. “I have a dream”, Martin Luther King said in August 1963, and dreams of a better society came to play a powerful part in the civil rights movements and youth movements of the 1960s. Indeed, the discursive and performative concepts of subjectivity which emerged in the post-war period tended to see “normal” behaviour in terms of gender, social acceptability and sanity not as springing from a secure individual personality core, but rather as enforced by social and cultural pressure. And in the 1960s distortion of normal behaviour came to be seen as a means to evade the conventional mindset dictated by capitalist society, while the virtual possibilities of imagination helped discover crevices in society opening out to entirely different visions of freedom and community. Around the same time, the romantic idea of the individual genius creating unique artworks gave way to more collective ideals of artistic processes, as practised by the groups of musicians in jazz, rock and pop music who became countercultural idols. As John Cage suggested, “we have another way of making art that is less individual and more social … Art instead of being an object made by one person becomes a process set in motion by a group of people”.22 Subjectivity came to be seen as something more processual and dynamic both in terms of individual psychology and in terms of merging into larger groups and communities. 20 Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, 30. 21 Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, 33. 22 Quoted in Frances Dyson, Sounding New Media. Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture, Berkeley 2009, 71.

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The central perspective on subjectivity, determining what is the authentic core of the individual and what is merely abstract, and hence inauthentic potentiality, upheld by Lukács seemed less evident to young people in the 1960s who faced greater opportunities of education, social mobility and consumption. These young people saw no problem in combining an interest in the pop music and youth culture of the day with an interest in avant-garde poetry, visual art or music – a mix of interests seen as positively schizophrenic by the critical Left of the 1950s and early 1960s. This dynamic concept of subjectivity was encouraged in Scandinavia by new notions of cultural democracy. One example is the debate on “trolöshet” (faithlessness) which took place during the first half of the 1960s in Sweden. The attitude of faithlessness, advocated by the author Björn Håkanson, was a critique of conventions and traditional values of consistency. As the Swedish professor of literature Beata Agrell has argued, the Swedish critique of conventions in the sixties was not a critique of conventions as such, but of unreflected conformity to conventional standards.23 Håkanson emphasised that a relativist attitude was a necessity in a truly democratic state, in which it is up to the citizens themselves to discover the conventions and decide what to preserve and what to replace.24 This stance represents an openness to democratic discussion and cultural/political democracy which is at a far remove from the correct political analysis authoritatively laid down by Lukács and the Marxist tradition of the Third International. Another Scandinavian example is the discussion of “attituderelativisme” (attitude relativism) in Denmark, which was a continuation of the Swedish debate. The term was launched by the writer Hans-Jørgen Nielsen in 1967 as part of a programmatic statement arguing that fixed borders between high and low culture, nature and technology could no longer be taken for granted. Nielsen’s argument for artists crossing the border between high and low was based on a performative concept of subjectivity as a flexible construction determined by interrelation with others in the changing social situations of everyday life.25 Taken together, the debates on “trolöshet” and “attituderelativisme” signify completely different concepts of reality, politics and the subject from those assumed by Lukács. And 23 Beata Agrell, Romanen som forskningsresa/Forskningsresan som roman: Om litterära återbruk och konventionskritik i 1960-talets nya svenska prosa (The Novel as Research Journey/the Research Journey as Novel: On Literary Adaptation and Critique of Convention in the New Swedish Novel of the 1960s), Göteborg 2003, 133. 24 Björn Håkanson, “Till trolöshetens lov” (In Praise of Faithlessness), 1963. I quote from Christer Ekholm, “The Social Avant-Garde: The ’Democratisation’ of Literature in the Early 1960s in Sweden”, in: The Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1950-1975, eds. Tania Ørum, et al. (forthcoming). 25 Hans-Jørgen Nielsen, “What’s Happening, Baby?”, in: ta’ (Copenhagen), 1967, n° 1.



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this opened the way for new kinds of art practices and materials. Evidently, the authoritarian political analysis laid down by the Third International would not do for experimental artists working together on open-ended projects. And the collapse of the borders Lukács insisted on – between the virtual and the possible, the normal and the abnormal, and between the paradigms of the separate art forms – brought on an entirely different conception of politics. As the American art historian Thomas Crow has argued, experimental intermedial artists, collective cultural action, and social experimentation in the 1960s put these new concepts into practice, as “artists, writers, dancers, and musicians […] poured their energies into hybrid events, dubbed Happenings, where the play of chance and group improvisation took over from the authority of any single artistic intentions. Begun for the sake of an aesthetic liberation, that activity too found its way to an overt connection with politics”, as the artists’ performances merged with civil rights movements, youth movements and protest movements against nuclear armament and the Vietnam war. This “moved social radicalism away from the terrain of industry and mass parties towards the realm of conscience, symbolic expression, and spontaneous organisation from below. The dissenting experiments of artists thus found an energizing congruence with the most exciting and successful forms of dissenting politics”.26 This was true, not only of the American art scene that Crow describes, but also of the Scandinavian art scene which I shall now go on to discuss.

The New Material of Conceptual and Feminist Art One of the political currents in art and society which emerged from the social radicalism of the 1960s was feminism. While the more traditional left groups focused on international politics and class struggle, the youth movements of the 1960s and the feminist movements of the 1970s insisted on a concept of the political which included everyday life and personal matters and which was organised from below. The conceptual art of the late 1960s and early 1970s was eminently suited to the projects of women artists. Encouraged by the feminist movement, which insisted that “the personal is political”, women artists expanded the conceptual strategies to include other, often minor, arts and genres and all sorts of materials ranging from ephemeral objects of personal everyday life to critique of the art scene and to political matters. Conceptualism in fact opened the door to a wide variety of materials. Contrary to the de-materialis-ation which was Lucy 26 Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties, London 1996, 11.

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Lippard’s diagnosis of the conceptual art of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (1973), I posit that there was a heightened awareness of the materials and the materiality of artwork in all the arts from the late 1960s onwards. What Lippard noticed was a move away from commercial and permanent art objects, but that does not necessarily imply a de-materialisation of art. I will consider it here as a move towards the inclusion of a far more heterogeneous range of material. My examples will be drawn from Danish feminist art in the 1960s and 1970s. In the introduction to her later collection of “feminist essays on women’s art”, From the Center, Lippard focuses on the inclusion of “de-materialised” items such as the “personal”, the “confessional, vulnerable, autobiographical, even embarrassing” as marking the departure of feminist art from the formal canon of modernism or avant-garde whose claim was that “important art had to show a formal ‘advance’ over the art preceding it”.27 As far as I can see, it is exactly the formal conceptual strategies which the feminist artists of the 1970s inherited from the late 1960s art scene that enabled them to pick up a wider range of subject matter, material contexts and political perspectives. I tend to disagree with the feminist theorists of the 1970s and 1980s who, like Lippard, positioned feminist art as opposed to the alleged formalism of the avant-garde.28 From this perspective modernist and avant-garde art was seen as focused on the art scene, while feminist art was supposed to be about something real and substantial. I think that is both a misrepresentation of modernism and especially the avant-garde as well as an unnecessary marginalisation of women artists, banishing them from the art history where they belong. Indeed, from today’s vantage point it is evident that feminist art has a lot in common with the avant-garde art tradition of the 20th century, if not with the Greenbergian kind of modernism. Feminist art is definitely a new stage in the post-war avant-garde, but, as I shall indicate, feminist art of the late 1960s and early 70s was closely related to the preceding experiments of the 1960s avant-garde. Indeed, the critical, deconstructive strategies and the ephemeral everyday materials cannot be seen as unique to feminist art. One example is the Danish artist John Davidsen and the flyer he produced for his first separate exhibition in Copenhagen in January 1966, called “Playboy of the Month” (fig. 69). Although Davidsen was not a feminist by personal persuasion, his photograph of the artist posing nude as “Playboy of the Month” could definitely be defined as subversive, political, feminist art, mapping female stereo27 Lucy Lippard, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art, New York 1976, 2, 4. 28 In From the Center Lippard talks of feminist artists exchanging “stylistic derivation for a convincing insight into a potential female culture” as against the “formal anti-content tradition that has been prevalent in the last fifteen years of esthetics and criticism of abstract art” (7).



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types on to the body of the male artist. It shows the artist in the typical pose of the young women on the centrespread of Hugh Heffner’s Playboy Magazine, modestly hiding their genitals behind a book. The text on the back of the flyer also mimics the kind of information offered by Playboy Magazine about the physical measurements and the personal interests of the pin-up girls. Note also the pink paper. The male artist here is no longer the master whose active gaze dominates the passive female model. He has taken on the female pose and thus opened the door to less stereotyped gender positions ‒ like the ones explored for instance in the female artist Kirsten Justesen’s slightly later work. Justesen’s sculpture (fig. 70) is a reflection on sculpture and gender. As the title indicates, it is nothing if not formal in its examination of the basic properties of sculpture. It consists of a cardboard box (50 x 60 x 60 cm) which corresponds to the base of a traditional sculpture – although it playfully converts the traditional material of marble or stone into a lightweight everyday brown box which can be collapsed or hung on the wall. This gesture can be read as a way of debunking traditional sculpture, its costly materials and its function as an expensive and prestigious embellishment of an official institution or the private home of some wealthy male owner. It is also a demonstration of the transformation which has taken place from classical sculpture to minimalism. Like much classical sculpture, it depicts a woman, a nude, in this case again a photograph of the artist herself. But whereas the woman in classical sculpture usually displays her body on top of the base, here she seems to be crouching inside the box. This could be read as a critique of the captivity of women in art: boxed up and fixed in the passive role of a spectacle of the male gaze. Or perhaps she is getting ready to jump out of her confinement? In this work there is no opposition between the formal and the feminist, one depends on the other. Both dimensions moreover indicate that this is a work of its time, as do the everyday materials. One way to break out of the marginalisation of women in the art world was to form a group and work collectively, as a consciousness-raising group, while incorporating and analysing material from the mass media and everyday life. This strategy, however, was not a feminist invention either. The most important experimental artists in Denmark in the 1960s belonged to mostly self-organised groups such as the Experimental Art School, which was established in 1961 as an unofficial counter-organisation to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. This heavily male-dominated group was from its start engaged in collective and anonymous work intended to deconstruct the heroic role of the artist, to evade the commercial art market and to ensure a continual process of experimentation. The group staged collective exhibitions, often in very humble backstreet locations, as well as interventions into public spaces. The experimental artworks produced in the process were often destroyed after having been exhibited. Many

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Fig. 69: John Davidsen as Playboy of the Month, leaflet accompanying the exhibition in Copenhagen 1966.



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Fig. 70: Kirsten Justesen, “Sculpture II”, 1968. Cardboard box (50 x 50 x60 cm) and photograph.

works were performative, and such happenings could not be preserved and were often not even photographed for later documentation, since they were part of the processual development of the group and their ongoing discussions. By the end of the 1960s many artworks, installations and performative events were considered political gestures which should not be recuperated by the art institution and were therefore not to be documented.29 Kirsten Justesen belonged to the so-called “Canon Club”, a group of students at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen united by the shared possession of a Canon camera. These art students, who had formed their own self-organised 29 For the Experimental Art School, including John Davidsen, see my book De eksperimenterende tressere (The Experimental Sixties), Copenhagen 2009. For English texts see Tania Ørum, “Means and Metaphors of Change”, in: Avant-Garde/Neo-Avant-Garde, Avant-Garde Critical Studies, n° 17, ed. Dietrich Scheunemann, Amsterdam and New York 2005, 311-324; Tania Ørum, “Minimal Requirements of the Post-War Avant-Garde of the 1960s” in: Neo-Avant-Garde, Avant-Garde Critical Studies, n° 20, ed. David Hopkins, Amsterdam and New York 2006, 145-160.

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department without a professor, were a part of the anti-authoritarian student revolt of the 1960s, and, like Kirsten Justesen, several of them were seasoned political activists. Just when the feminist movement was starting in Denmark, Justesen and other women from the Canon Club mounted the collective exhibition “Damebilleder/Kvindebilleder” (Images of Girls / Images of Women) in April 1970 in the students’ union’s rooms in the basement of the Academy facing one of the main squares of Copenhagen. This exhibition was a series of tableaux in continuation of the performative strategies characteristic of the avant-garde, the youth movements and the general political scene of the 1960s. And like Kirsten Justesen’s “Sculpture II”, it was eminently capable of capturing the social, artistic and gender context of the moment: Within the formal conceptual framing of the exhibition the most pressing feminist questions of the day could be discussed.

Fig. 71: First tableau of The Canon Club’s exhibition Images of Girls: “The Hooker”, Copenhagen April 1970.

The first tableau was “The Hooker” (fig. 71), for which the women took turns at sitting in their underwear wearing a blonde wig in the pose of a prostitute, displayed in a shop window in the Dutch fashion. The second tableau made an exhibition of all the dirty dishes collected from the households of the women. The third one was called “Beauty” and included demonstrations of beauty products by the large cosmetics firm Max Factor in the rooms, now redecorated in pink plastic. The fourth tableau, “The Wedding Cake” (fig. 72), converted a small exhi-



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bition building, often used for experimental exhibitions, into a wedding cake, complete with bride and groom on top.

Fig. 72: Fourth image of the Canon Club’s exhibition Images of Girls: “The Wedding Cake”, Copenhagen April 1970.

After these images of traditional femininity, the exhibition series changed direction as well as title – from “Images of Girls” to “Images of Women” ‒ and turned into “Actions”: Action number five, called “Defence”, consisted of a two-day course in self defense for the artists and spectators. Action number six, “The Gowns”, transformed the exhibition rooms into a textile factory producing red gowns and bed linen. And for the final tableau, “The Camp”, the women and their children, all dressed in red, moved into the now completely red rooms for several days of feasting, thus embodying a utopian image of a new life of solidarity – all in red – as a sign of “enthusiasm, will power, love and revolt”.30 In its conception, as well as in its materials and the blending of private lives and public art, this was a highly experimental series of art installations, thus fulfilling both the avant-garde demand mentioned by Lippard that “important art had to show a formal ‘advance’ over the art preceding it”, and her feminist 30 For Kirsten Justesen and the “Images of Women” exhibition series see my chapter “Kirsten Justesen: sammenhænge i perioden” (Kirsten Justesen: interconnections in the 1960s) in: De eksperimenterende tressere, 665-686, here 682.

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requirements as to the personal and political relevance of the content. And more than most of the contemporary Danish art installations and happenings, this series managed to communicate its messages to the press and the public. The exhibition created quite a stir, especially since it coincided with the first marches of the Danish Women’s Movement, who made use of similar artistic strategies, marching in grotesquely exaggerated women’s clothing, with bras and suspenders on top of their clothes, and issuing militant declarations and rumours of plans to attack the Royal Guards on their daily route through the city. These exhibition series could be said to summarize the new strategies and materials of feminist art in the 1970s: They were an application of avant-garde experimental strategies on the personal lives, media exposure and everyday experience of the women artists. As Kirsten Justesen describes the events, they made it possible to frame a whole new area as art. And they worked not only as a political manifestations, as media events directed at the public, but also as a personal consciousness-raising experience for the women involved – an experience that revealed new areas to be explored in their work while simultaneously changing their lives: the personal is political is art. Art could now be used also as a political weapon. “Billedet som kampmiddel” (Image as Weapon) was the title of the large exhibition of women artists organised in one of the most prominent art centres in Copenhagen in 1975, which marked both the culmination and the end of the effort to establish a concerted feminist art scene in Denmark.31 The feminist art of the early 1970s – and this goes for literature and the performing arts as well – thus represents a continuation and expansion of the characteristic features of the avant-garde of the 1960s. Paradoxically, the continued political radicalism of the 1970s led to the re-introduction of Marxist strategies and theory, based on the largely mistaken idea of the working class as the active agent in what had been a predominantly youth-based revolt. The ambition to put art into the service of revolution, whether of a socialist or feminist kind, inevitably led to demands for art with a clearer and more unambiguous political message, able to communicate to a broader section of the population and thus using more traditional means to depict the main forces, actors and oppositions in society, as Lukács had advocated, and discarding the anti-narrative open structures and processual flow criticised by Lukács. Ironically, this re-introduction of Lukács’s aesthetic notions of realism on behalf of political radicalism heralded the general re-traditionalisation, in art as well as politics, which took place during the later 1970s and the 1980s in Scandinavia.

31 See Lilith (ed.), Billedet som kampmiddel (Image as Weapon), Copenhagen 1977.

Claire Leydenbach

Passage du sujet dans la « matière mentale » surréaliste La « matière mentale », un oxymore contre des dualismes Dans la philosophie aristotélicienne, le bloc de marbre du sculpteur n’est que matière avant que le sculpteur ne mette la main à la pâte ; ce n’est qu’une fois qu’une forme lui est attribuée par son travail qu’il acquiert une valeur. Le passage de la matière à la forme nécessite ainsi l’intervention d’un sujet. Mais avec le terme de « matière mentale », lâché dans le premier manifeste du surréalisme que constitue Une Vague de rêves,1 c’est ce soubassement théorique que vient miner Aragon. Ce syntagme est antinomique  : c’est normalement l’esprit, le mental, c’est-à-dire ce qui fonde le sujet cartésien qui donne forme à la matière qui en était dépourvue. Et lui confère du sens aussi. La réunion de ces deux termes déchoit le sujet et son esprit de leur privilège ; cet oxymore déconstruit radicalement la hiérarchie où l’esprit a préséance sur la matière. Et si la « phase intuitive » du surréalisme a pu insister sur la croyance en la « toute puissance de la pensée » et ainsi parfois accréditer « le sentiment de primauté de la pensée sur la matière », voilà qui est jugé « très fâcheux »2 par André Breton lorsqu’il revient sur la genèse du mouvement en 1945. S’il y a donc une telle chose que de la matière mentale qui vient réduire à néant un certain dualisme ainsi que la hiérarchie dans laquelle s’inscrivait l’Homme donnant la forme, sur le modèle d’un Dieu, où se situe donc le sujet, et quel est son champ d’action ? Cette question est rendue plus aiguë encore par la proclamation d’automatisme même : le sujet se déprend de la raison qui le gouverne et le censure arbitrairement pour se faire passif. L’activité même du sujet est battue en brèche, cette activité censée lui faire transformer la matière brute. La pensée de la matière relève généralement de la logique du matériau face à la résistance duquel s’éprouve un sujet. Elle distingue « un objet type, repoussoir d’un sujet-type » dans une conception « transformiste »3 de l’art. L’assimi-lation 1 Louis Aragon, Une Vague de rêves (1924), in: Œuvres poétiques complètes, I, Paris 2007, 79-97. 2 André Breton, « Le Surréalisme », conférence prononcée le 20 décembre 1945 à Port-au-Prince, publiée dans la revue Conjonction, bulletin de l’Institut français (Port-au-Prince), janvier 1946, n° 1, reprise in: Alentours I, Œuvres complètes, III, Paris 1999, 150-167, ici 162. L’auteur souligne. 3 Gérard Dessons, L’Art et la manière – Art, littérature, langage, Paris 2004, 155.

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du langage à un matériau ou à un instrument n’est pas nouvelle. Elle aboutit, comme le rappelle Benveniste, à poser le sujet face à ce qui se donne à lui, extérieurement, comme objet, et à nier le fait que le langage soit une donnée proprement anthropologique : « C’est dans et par le langage que l’homme se constitue en sujet ».4

L’écriture automatique sur le modèle du « frottage » ? Le matiérisme surréaliste et l’écriture automatique ont également souffert de la comparaison avec la technique du frottage inventée par Max Ernst et consistant à poser une feuille sur une surface quelconque, à la frotter avec une mine de plomb et à laisser surgir les formes ainsi obtenues. De cette technique, le peintre écrit en 1936 : Le procédé de frottage, ne reposant donc sur autre chose que sur l’intensification de l’esprit par des moyens techniques appropriés, excluant toute conduction mentale consciente (de raison, de goût, de morale), réduisant à l’extrême la part active de celui qu’on appelait jusqu’alors « l’auteur » de l’œuvre, ce procédé s’est révélé par la suite le véritable équivalent de ce qui était déjà connu sous le terme d’écriture automatique.5

Si dans le frottage comme dans l’écriture automatique le sujet cartésien est congédié, le parallèle introduit cependant un biais épistémologique : celui de prendre la langue pour un outil à l’instar des couleurs pour un peintre, et de postuler des sémiotiques spécifiques pour chacun de ces médias. Mais la langue est bien le système sémiotique générique, l’interprétant des autres, et les couleurs ne sont pas un langage. On peut penser un homme indépendamment de son usage des couleurs ; on ne peut penser le sujet hors du langage. Penser qu’ « [a]vec le langage, [on] puis[se] sortir du langage »6 est une vue de l’esprit, rappelle Wittgenstein, et c’est donc sur le statut même du langage que la comparaison entre l’écriture automatique et le frottage achoppe. Ce qui découle nécessairement de ces réflexions, c’est désormais l’impossibilité de se situer dans les dualismes engendrés par la 4 Émile Benveniste, « De la subjectivité dans le langage » (1958), in: Problèmes de linguistique générale, Paris 1966, 258-266, ici 259. 5 Max Ernst, «  Au-delà de la peinture  » (1936), cité in: Il y aura une fois – Une anthologie du Surréalisme, éd. Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron, Paris 2003, 168-173, ici 169. L’auteur souligne. 6 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarques philosophiques (1964), Paris 1975, 55. Cité par Dessons, L’Art et la manière, 159.



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pensée traditionnelle de la matière lorsqu’on l’envisage dans l’automatisme surréaliste : la matière mentale est irréductiblement une « matière-manière ».7

Sortie du paradigme de l’expression Mais il nous faut maintenant tirer les conséquences de cette dernière assertion quant à la pensée du sujet promue par ce matiérisme spécifique. Avec l’intériorisation de la matière, la redéfinition de la matière comme matière-manière, la subjectivation ne peut plus se comprendre comme expression, comme passage d’un dedans vers un dehors, puisque ce dehors est déjà dedans, et que le dedans habite déjà le dehors. Voilà qui nous ramène à l’image fondatrice de l’automatisme, convoquée par Breton dans le Manifeste lorsqu’il revient sur la genèse de l’automatisme : celle de l’ « homme coupé en deux par la fenêtre ».8 Cette image propose de fait une redistribution des catégories d’intérieur et d’extérieur.9 Il nous semble même qu’elle participe d’un certain monisme puisque la compénétration des deux sphères dans le sujet finit d’annuler la pertinence de cette partition. D’un présupposé dualiste découle cependant le paradigme de l’expression dans lequel se comprend généralement l’activité artistique. Il reste tributaire d’une psychologie du sujet, d’un sujet compris comme intériorité et qui ferait sortir de lui une matière devenue forme. Or c’est une conception avec laquelle l’automatisme surréaliste fait dès l’abord rupture, par sa proclamation même d’automatisme. On ne saurait plus comprendre l’expression en tant que manifestation sensible, à l’instar de Hegel qui part du phénomène des larmes. Le substitut du sujet empirique que l’on pourrait chercher dans l’automatisme et qui serait alors l’automate10 consomme en effet la rupture en tant que la ressemblance psy7 Dessons, L’Art et la manière, 159. On prend le terme de manière tel qu’il est employé par Gérard Dessons, chez qui il est un des mots de l’individuation. 8 Breton, Manifeste du surréalisme, 324-325. 9 C’est la thèse que développe Laurent Jenny dans « L’automatisme comme mythe rhétorique ,» in: Une pelle au vent dans les sables du rêve, éds. Michel Murat et Marie-Paule Berranger, Lyon 1992, 27-32. Cette image nourrit cependant chez Jenny une lecture dualiste qui ne fait pas rupture avec une approche expressive. 10 Il faut souligner cependant les dangers qu’on courrait à insister sur l’automate, sujet de l’automatisme, en ce qu’il pourrait se faire l’avatar spécifiquement surréaliste du « sujet énonciateur  », du «  sujet parlant  » de la linguistique du XIXe siècle ou du «  locuteur  » des linguistes de la communication. Le problème de ces catégories de pensée étant, pour Dessons, qu’elles travaillent à une assimilation de ce sujet au sujet de l’énonciation, au sujet du discours « de la même façon que le poète-artisan se fait passer pour le sujet du poème. Le sujet énonciateur est le masque linguistique du sujet cartésien. Aucun des deux n’a besoin du langage pour être le sujet

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chologique et physiologique de l’automate avec le sujet s’arrête justement à certaines caractéristiques physiologiques, et à l’émotivité même. L’automatisme psychiatrique avec ses échappées hystériques et ses écritures automatiques entend, lui, la manifestation sensible sur le mode d’une « fonction de reconstitution psychique »11 – c’est celle que confère Freud au délire – c’est-à-dire comme venant suppléer à un défaut ou une insuffisance psychique du sujet. Dessons souligne qu’il est d’autant plus difficile de rompre avec la notion d’expression créatrice que c’est le modèle épistémologique bien vivant dans le domaine de la psychiatrie. Et l’automatisme surréaliste a souffert de – mais aussi soufflé sur – une comparaison avec l’art des fous et un automatisme pathologique. Dans L’Immaculée conception,12 Éluard et Breton imitaient ainsi la folie avec leurs « Essais de simulation de la débilité mentale », « Essais de simulation de la manie aiguë », « Essais de simulation du délire d’interprétation » et « Essais de simulation de la démence précoce  ». Lier la pensée de l’automatisme surréaliste à celle de l’automatisme psychiatrique ou à l’expression créatrice exercée dans les ateliers d’art-thérapie ne revient pas à rompre avec les définitions cartésienne et psychologique du sujet. En l’y posant comme sujet de l’absence de raison, ou sujet de l’inconscient, cette lecture conserve, négativement, la raison et la psyché comme modèles de pensée du sujet.

Le « nominalisme radical » (Aragon) contre une « métaphysique de l’art » Il est d’autant plus difficile de considérer la matière mentale sur le mode du matériau, c’est-à-dire indépendante d’un sujet duquel elle n’est pas constitutive, que les surréalistes se réclament d’un nominalisme en forme de sortie radicale du dualisme platonicien de l’Idée et de la chose mondaine. Le mot n’est pas une abstraction qui renverrait à une idée se tenant, toile de fond, derrière la chose sensible auquel on l’applique : toute sensation, toute pensée à en faire la critique, nous la réduisions à un mot. Le nominalisme absolu trouvait dans le surréalisme une démonstration éclatante, et cette matière

qu’il est. » (Dessons, L’Art et la manière, 159). 11 Dessons, L’Art et la manière, 153. 12 André Breton et Paul Éluard, L’Immaculée conception (1930), in: Breton, Œuvres complètes, I, 839-884, 850-854 et 857-863 pour les chapitres cités ci-dessous.



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mentale dont je parlais, il nous apparaissait enfin qu’elle était le vocabulaire même : il n’y a pas de pensée hors des mots.13

Ce nominalisme revendiqué finit de saper une «  métaphysique de l’art pour laquelle la matière corrompt l’idée en imposant des particuliers en place des universaux  ».14 C’est ainsi qu’il faut comprendre la critique aragonienne des philosophes, ces hommes qui « ont cru faire un grand pas en rejetant l’idée vulgaire de réalité pour lui préférer la réalité en soi, le noumène, ce piètre plâtre démasqué ».15 Le nominalisme aragonien soutient simplement que tout mot est une image, et réciproquement ; que la médiatisation du langage vers le réel est obligatoire, et que cette idée remet même en question le terme de médiatisation : il n’y a pas de réel hors du langage. Se dire nominaliste, c’est se mettre toujours et absolument du côté du particulier et se dégager de la sorte du dualisme platonicien de l’Idée, d’une part, et de la chose sensible dans le monde matériel, d’autre part, et qui nécessairement trahirait la première. Les universaux – l’espèce par exemple – n’ont pas d’existence, seuls les particuliers en ont. Les mots sont ces particuliers, ils ne renvoient pas à quelque chose qui se tiendrait derrière eux, extérieur. Breton s’insurge ainsi contre «  quelqu’un d’assez malhonnête  » qui entendait traduire les images de Saint-Pol-Roux : Lendemain de chenille en tenue de bal veut dire : papillon. Mamelle de cristal veut dire : une carafe.

Et Breton de s’indigner : Non, monsieur, ne veut pas dire. Rentrez votre papillon dans votre carafe. Ce que Saint-PolRoux a voulu dire, soyez certain qu’il l’a dit.16

Cette indignation correspond à une lecture que l’on peut qualifier de « palimpsestique » , commandée par une approche sémiotique. La « mamelle de cristal » est une réalité spécifique, elle a une existence qui manque à l’ « Idée » de carafe. Elle ne renvoie pas à autre chose qu’à elle-même, et en ce sens, ne « désigne » pas. Les mots sont la matière du réel qui ne saurait leur préexister. Attenter aux mots, c’est dès lors redéployer ce réel, le changer :

13 Aragon, Une Vague de rêves, 87. L’auteur souligne. 14 Dessons, L’Art et la manière, 147. 15 Aragon, Une Vague de rêves, 84-85. 16 Aragon, Une Vague de rêves, 277. Les italiques sont de l’auteur.

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les mots, de par la nature que nous leur reconnaissons, méritent de jouer un rôle autrement décisif. Rien ne sert de les modifier puisque, tels qu’ils sont, ils répondent avec cette promptitude à notre appel. Il suffit que notre critique porte sur les lois qui président à leur assemblage. La médiocrité de notre univers ne dépend-elle pas essentiellement de notre pouvoir d’énonciation ?17

Nul besoin de faire porter les efforts sur le mot, d’en créer de nouveaux. C’est par leur combinaison, par leur ordre que l’on peut influer sur celui du monde. Pour les surréalistes, la syntaxe est toute politique.

Le « bluff du génie » : une « écriture sans sujet » ? Le nominalisme surréaliste qui s’inscrit contre une métaphysique de l’art, a pour corollaire sa remise en cause de l’existence d’un créateur face à sa création. Si tout est déjà contenu dans la matière mentale, qu’il n’y a pas de réalité qui lui soit extérieure et qu’elle ne ferait que signifier, si l’expérience est qualifiée d’automatique et le paradigme psychologique sacrifié, on ne peut plus penser, on l’a vu, l’écriture sur le modèle de l’expression. Dès lors, il y a rupture d’avec un modèle théologique qui, rappelle Dessons, concevait l’ « artiste à l’image de Dieu, qui a donné forme à la matière informe ».18 Cette antithéologie s’oppose à une pensée de la transcendance en art, à la réactivation de l’ « Inspiration » romantique, ou son avatar, le « Génie ». L’idée de « Génie » est d’ailleurs explicitement récusée : Ils [Breton et Soupault] aperçoivent soudain une grande unité poétique qui va des prophéties de tous les peuples aux Illuminations et aux Chants de Maldoror. […] la morale qui se dégage pour eux de cette exploration, c’est le bluff du génie ; ce qui s’emparera d’eux alors c’est l’indignation devant cet escamotage, cette escroquerie qui propose les résultats littéraires d’une méthode et dissimule cette méthode, et dissimule que cette méthode est à la portée de tous.19

On peut lire cette attaque contre la transcendance du créateur sur sa création, contre la hiérarchie qui place la forme, et la main qui la confère, au dessus de la matière, comme un matiérisme politique, démocratique, qui œuvre à la déconstruction du mythe de l’auteur. Lier cette « grande unité poétique » à la négation du génie – liaison à laquelle la structure même du texte travaille par la proximité qu’il leur impose – fait en effet comprendre ce discours, non comme soulignant 17 Aragon, Une Vague de rêves, 275-276. 18 Dessons, L’Art et la manière, 148. 19 Aragon, Une Vague de rêves, 85-86. L’auteur souligne.



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une parenté des textes en questions – leurs manières, leurs poétiques sont bien diverses –, mais comme mettant en valeur l’analogie des processus de subjectivation qu’ils promeuvent. De la matière à la manière, dans la subjectivation, Aragon ne voit, chez les illustres prédécesseurs que le mouvement se reconnaît, qu’une même non-transcendance du sujet sur son œuvre. On l’aura compris, le matiérisme surréaliste interroge fondamentalement la notion de sujet, en minant les présupposés sur lesquels elle est fondée : que celle-ci soit indexable sur le paradigme psychologique, rationnel, logique n’est plus envisageable. De manière générique, tous ces attributs du sujet qui lui sont récusés ne permettent plus de l’identifier à l’individu. Rapporter le sujet de cette œuvre à l’individu empirique qui lui préexiste ferait manquer les enjeux de l’automatisme qui résident dans sa pensée de la subjectivation.20 La matière mentale promeut-elle finalement une « écriture sans sujet » ?21 Est-ce à dire que le sujet se retire et annonce, par la voix de l’automate, sa propre mort ? Il semble cependant bien plus fertile de comprendre cette assertion bretonienne comme une attaque contre le tout puissant paradigme psychologique régnant dans la littérature  : «  Pour moi se dérober, si peu que ce soit, à la règle psychologique équivaut à inventer de nouvelles façons de sentir ».22 Et c’est bien là l’enjeu du surréalisme, inventer l’inconnu. Il faut dès lors se résoudre à tirer toutes les implications du projet surréaliste quant à sa pensée du sujet que le point de vue de la matière renouvelle en s’opposant à sa conception transcendantale. Pourrait-on identifier ce sujet à la figure de l’automate ? À trop insister sur l’automate de l’automatisme, on risquerait de réintroduire subrepticement un sujet, contrepoint de ce sujet rationnel qui s’absente, indexé donc, bien que négativement, sur un paradigme cartésien. Et de conserver ainsi le dualisme du sujet et de l’objet, et la préexistence du sujet sur la matière.

20 Et la subjectivation n’est pas l’individualisation ; ce dernier terme renvoie à l’individu auquel on rattache « un domaine privé, une sphère d’autonomie, en ce sens que c’est à lui, s’il le veut et s’il le peut, de fixer les principes et les règles de sa conduite dans ce domaine qui lui est réservé » (Vincent Descombes, « Individuation et individualisation », in: Revue européenne des sciences sociales, XLI-127, 2003, 27, , (06.02.2013)). L’indivi-duation renvoie, elle, à la manifestation du sujet dans le texte, c’est-à-dire au « passage de l’individu empirique à la fonction de sujet en lui, qui seule compte en art » (Arnaud Bernadet, « La rhétorique en procès », 50, , (15.02. 2013)). 21 Lettre d’André Breton à Jacques Doucet du 15 janvier 1921, citée par Marguerite Bonnet dans la notice au Manifeste du surréalisme, Œuvres complètes, I, note 1, 325, 1354. 22 André Breton, Les Pas perdus (1924), in: Œuvres complètes, I, 197.

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« [D]evant ce fleuve »23 : vers une pensée de la subjectivation avec la métaphore aqueuse C’est dans une veine psychologisante qu’est souvent glosé le titre des Champs magnétiques, œuvre du duo Breton-Soupault  : il illustrerait l’écriture à deux, entre deux pôles. Mais ce que l’image même de « champs magnétiques » met en valeur, ce sont moins ces deux pôles individuels préexistant à l’écriture et qui figureraient des sujets face à un langage objet qui ne leur serait pas consubstantiel, que la circulation même qui advient alors. C’est cette circulation qui illustre le processus de subjectivation et, avec lui, la notion de trans-sujet.24 C’est dans une tension vers ce même trans-sujet, en forme de désindexation du sujet de l’œuvre collective sur le sujet personnel ou individuel que l’on peut entendre la dédicace que Breton et Éluard portent sur un prospectus glissé dans un exemplaire de L’Immaculée conception : « Être deux à détruire, à construire, à vivre, c’est déjà être tous, être l’autre à l’infini et non plus soi ».25 Car on ne saurait congédier le sujet sous prétexte que l’écriture automatique et son matiérisme ne permettent plus de le penser selon des catégories connues. Si le sujet en tant que référant à un individu devient problématique, il y a cependant bien du sujet à l’œuvre, une fonction sujet, de la subjectivation. La « matière mentale » propose un monisme de la matière et de la forme, du sujet et de l’objet, dans une matière-manière dont il nous semble que la métaphore de la source ou du flux d’eau, récurrente dans les écrits automatiques, souligne les enjeux. Contrairement à la métaphore de l’alchimie où l’artiste transforme la vile matière en or, la métaphore aqueuse ne postule pas de changement d’état entre une source et le cours d’eau qui en découle. Elle propose au contraire une solution de continuité qui permet de penser la mise en œuvre et l’individuation du sujet de l’œuvre hors du paradigme de l’expression. Dans le cours d’eau, tout est toujours déjà là en puissance : et la source, et le flux qui en est issu. Chez Aragon, la métaphore du fleuve est une remise en question de la définition du sujet comme conscience : « La maîtrise de soi est une martre qui suit lentement les cours d’eau ».26 23 André Breton et Philippe Soupault, Les Champs magnétiques, in: Breton, Œuvres complètes, I, 54. 24 Henri Meschonnic définit le trans-sujet comme «  le passage même du langage entre sujets » in: Un coup de Bible dans la philosophie, Paris 2004, 175. 25 Lot 114 de la collection Annette Campbell-White chez Sotheby’s à Londres, , (17.02.2013). 26 Louis Aragon, « Une Leçon de danse » (1919), in: Écritures automatiques. Œuvres poétiques complètes, I, Paris 2007, 325.



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On saisit ce que l’idée même de maîtrise de soi, de rigidification d’un continu peut avoir de négatif dans la théorie surréaliste. Car la maîtrise peut être prise dans son sens propre  : maîtriser quelqu’un, c’est l’empêcher de se mouvoir, le bloquer, arrêter sa course. Mais paradoxalement, la fixité de l’image est opposée au cours d’eau renvoyant, lui, au continu. On peut y entendre une critique de la conception traditionnelle de l’individuation comme conscience. Chez Breton et Soupault dans Les Champs magnétiques, la métaphore aqueuse est imprégnée d’une dimension lacunaire  venant illustrer la dessaisie des sujets individuels, auctoriaux, empiriques, vis-à-vis de ce flux-fleuve qui leur échappe comme ces « paroles s’échappent de nos bouches tordues ».27 Un fleuve auquel ils font face : « Ce soir, nous sommes deux devant ce fleuve qui déborde de notre désespoir ».28 Cette position d’extériorité renvoie à celle des sujets individuels face à la subjectivation qui ne leur est pas réductible. La fixité, l’identité du sujet individuel s’oppose au passage du sujet que la circulation de l’eau, son flux, illustre. De la matière à la manière, il y a, comme de la source au flux, continuité, et non transsubstantiation ou passage d’une matière à une forme.

De la matière à la manière, ou de la sémiotique à une sémantique Il faut finalement se questionner sur le lieu de cette subjectivation  : le flux et le courant renvoient également au discours, soit aux mots, à l’énonciation, au mouvement du texte, à son rythme. La « matière » mots se fait matière-manière, c’est-à-dire qu’elle s’enrichit de la subjectivation, d’un « passage du sujet »,29 lorsqu’elle sort d’un régime purement sémiotique pour se faire système sémantique, toujours spécifique. Lorsqu’elle propose, pour reprendre les termes de Benveniste, une «  sémantique sans sémiotique  »,30 comme si, à la manière des couleurs, les mots n’avaient qu’une signifiance,31 à savoir une signification relative, 27 Breton et Soupault, Les Champs magnétiques, 54. 28 Breton et Soupault, Les Champs magnétiques, 54. 29 Henri Meschonnic parle de « passage du sujet dans la signifiance » in: Critique du rythme – Anthropologie historique du langage, Lagrasse 1982, 102. 30 L’idée de sémantique sans sémiotique est développée par Benveniste dans « Sémiologie de la langue » (1969), in: Problèmes de linguistique générale, II, Paris 1974, 43-66. On lira avec profit l’article que consacre Henri Meschonnic à cette question  : «  Benveniste  : sémantique sans sémiotique », in: Linx, 1997, n° 9, , (12.02.2013). 31 Meschonnic définit la signifiance comme une «  sémantique généralisée, fonction de l’ensemble des signifiants ». Elle est le produit d’un « rythme sens et sujet » (Critique du rythme, 72).

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valant au sein d’un système spécifique, interne à l’œuvre même. L’indice de ce passage d’une signification à une signifiance est l’indication, paradoxale puisque nous avons auparavant semblé nous élever contre cette idée, d’une transmutation de cette matière mentale dans Une Vague de rêves. De cette matière mentale, Aragon écrit en effet : Nous la voyions passer d’un état dans un autre, et c’est par ces transmutations qui nous en décelaient l’existence, que nous étions également renseignés sur sa nature. Nous voyions, par exemple, une image écrite qui se présentait premièrement avec le caractère du fortuit, de l’arbitraire, atteindre nos sens, se dépouiller de l’aspect verbal, pour revêtir des modalités phénoménales que nous avions toujours crues impossibles à provoquer, fixes, hors de notre fantaisie.32

Ce n’est pas là nier que le langage soit le système sémiotique générique, l’interprétant des autres. C’est ici inventer une matière,33 prendre les mots, qui font la pensée, et les « dénaturaliser », ne plus leur attribuer une correspondance nécessaire dans un système sémiotique fixe et figé, anhistorique, inventer une nouvelle langue par les efforts qui sont portés sur l’énonciation. C’est faire de la pensée et de la langue surréaliste comme réalisation particulière du langage, un système sémantique, donc toujours spécifique. Ce n’est qu’ainsi que l’on peut comprendre la paradoxale comparaison que fait Breton entre le langage écrit et les couleurs par exemple, qui se nourrit au passage d’un usage flou de l’acception du terme de langage : L’automatisme mental, loin d’être un leurre, est le moyen idéal qui s’offre à nous d’agir sur la vie par l’intermédiaire du langage, que ce langage soit le langage oral ou écrit, le langage graphique, aussi bien que celui du chant et de la danse.34

Il y a ici changement de paradigme et translation de ce langage dans le champ de l’art, ce qui implique sa transformation en un système sémantique. Ce parallèle entre la matière mentale, les mots ou les couleurs par exemple, ne revient pas à faire de ces dernières un langage. Car la couleur verte, ainsi, n’a pas de signification, quand le mot « vert », lui, en a bien une, unique, codifiée. Cette affirmation indique bien plutôt que le langage surréaliste se fait, à l’instar des couleurs dans une œuvre spécifique, système de signifiance, spécifique, propre au sujet de l’art La signification, elle, est du côté de la sémiotique. 32 Aragon, Une Vague de rêves, 87. 33 Pour Gérard Dessons, « L’introduction de la notion de matériau dans la pensée de l’art impose l’idée que l’art est la transformation d’une matière, alors qu’il est l’invention d’une matière. Une matière qui est indissociablement une manière, une matière-manière » (L’Art et la manière, 159). 34 Breton, « Le Surréalisme », 160.



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qui s’y érige et ne lui préexiste pas. Dessons insiste ainsi sur la différence entre « système sémiotique à visée généralisante et système sémantique, à visée singularisante ».35 Par un jeu d’écho, par un automatisme prosodique, le texte automatique développe un réseau de signifiance irréductible à un code sémiotique préalable et dont il se laisserait déduire. C’est avec la promotion de cette sémantique dans le rythme du discours que passe le sujet, qu’advient l’individuation, et que la matière se fait matière-manière.

La matière-manière ou l’immédiateté On a vu qu’avec la « matière mentale », le surréalisme entend mettre « à la portée de tous » une méthode qui ne relève pas d’une pensée transcendante du génie, et activer un matiérisme politique. Mais si la littérature, l’écriture automatique en particulier, est à la portée de tous, il n’en reste pas moins que tous les produits n’ont pas la même valeur, ce dont témoigne le volume sans cesse décroissant d’écrits publiés dans la section « Textes surréalistes » de La Révolution surréaliste. La valeur n’est pas innée, elle est l’enjeu du passage d’une matière à une manière, l’enjeu de la subjectivation, et la pratique éditoriale à l’œuvre dans cette rubrique discrimine, d’entre les textes automatiques, ceux auxquels on reconnaît une valeur, ceux que l’on en pense dénués. Toute « matière mentale » n’est ainsi pas bonne à lire, la spontanéité avant-gardiste n’est pas la seule garante de la valeur de l’œuvre. La pratique paradoxale de la correction, niée dans les principes, mais dont la pratique est avérée, devrait nous permettre d’affiner notre compréhension de cette problématique et d’en tirer quelques ultimes conclusions : cette matière mentale faite de mots renvoyant toujours à des images spécifiques et permettant de redéployer le réel, il s’agit de la donner à lire, sans la médiation d’un sujet psychologique ou rationnel, d’un « génie » ou de l’ « Inspiration ». Mais la médiation que le surréalisme cherche à éviter peut prendre d’autres formes : celles du connu, du poncif, de ce qui ne respecterait pas les promesses du verbe : « Le Verbe, s’il a été mis “au commencement”, doit garder le pouvoir de tout recréer ».36 Dans Les Champs magnétiques, la correction supprime des liaisons, œuvre à rendre plus étrange les connections entre diverses phrases, comme le relève 35 Dessons, L’Art et la manière, 161. 36 Breton, «  Le Surréalisme  », 163. L’auteur souligne. La référence au prologue de l’Évangile selon Saint Jean est claire. Avec la majuscule conférée au « Verbe », Breton joue et détourne cette sentence de sa référence divine, transcendante, comme lorsque, dans cette même conférence, il convoque l’athéisme d’Éluard auquel il fait dire qu’ « Il y a assurément un autre monde, mais il est dans celui-ci. » (« Le Surréalisme », 162).

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Marguerite Bonnet dans sa notice.37 Poétiquement, Breton se targue aussi d’avoir supprimé le mot « comme ». La spontanéité ne peut plus être comprise sur une base temporelle  ; elle peut nécessiter la correction pour être atteinte, et il faut désormais l’entendre comme immédiateté. Le terme est défini par Dessons pour lequel il vient affiner la catégorie éthique de la spontanéité qui sert à qualifier l’entreprise avant-gardiste. L’immédiateté, dans le sens d’une non-médiation, est peut-être ce qui permet le mieux de comprendre les enjeux du matiérisme surréaliste, celui de sa pensée d’une matière-manière et d’un passage du sujet hors du paradigme de l’expression.

37 Voir la notice aux Champs magnétiques, 1142, pour le cas de « Barrière ».

List of Contributors Pavlos Antoniadis – Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber David Ayers – University of Kent Susan Best – University of New South Wales Sascha Bru – University of Leuven, MDRN Lori Cole – Brandeis University Clément Dessy – FNRS / Université libre de Bruxelles Jim Drobnick – OCAD University, Toronto Cosana Eram – University of the Pacific Vladimir Feshchenko – Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow Lidia Głuchowska – Institute for Visual Culture, University of Zielona Góra Christiane Heibach – Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe Gunilla Hermansson – University of Gothenburg Benedikt Hjartarson – University of Iceland Agata Jakubowska – Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań Eveline Kilian – Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Gregor Langfeld – University of Amsterdam Claire Leydenbach –McGill University Eleni Loukopoulou – University of Kent Ariane Mildenberg – University of Kent Magali Nachtergael – Université de Paris 13-Sorbonne Paris Cité (CENEL EA 452) Tania Ørum – University of Copenhagen Lisa Otty – University of Edinburgh Ileana Pintilie – West University, Timişoara Sarah Posman – FWO / Ghent University Jed Rasula – University of Georgia, Athens Anne Reverseau – FWO / University of Leuven, MDRN Andrea Sakoparnig – Freie Universität Berlin Tabea Schindler – University of Bern Sami Sjöberg – KONE Foundation / University of Leuven, MDRN Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe – Stockholm University Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam – Aarhus University Gaëlle Théval – Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3 Hélène Thiérard – University of Osnabrück / Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3 Tomaž Toporišič – University of Koper / University of Ljubljana Claire Warden – University of Lincoln Emma West – Cardiff University

 Index

Index 

Abela, Eduardo 189, 190, 191, 192 Abulafia, Abraham 371, 372, 374, 376 Ades, Dawn 30 Adler, Jankel 54 Adorno, Theodor 5, 9, 114, 115, 116, 117 Adrian-Nilsson, Gösta 20, 207, 208, 210 Aesopus 246 Agrell, Beata 402 Akhmatova, Anna 165 Albers, Josef 66 Aldington, Richard 134, 138, 142 Allen, Gwen 183 Allgood, Sara 127 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence 244 Altman, Nathan 161 Andersen, Hans Christian 381 Andre, Carl 295, 296 Antoniadis, Pavlos 12, 319, 325 Apollinaire, Guillaume 35, 36, 65, 364 Appia, Adolphe 90, 160 Aragon, Louis 31, 32, 33, 85, 133, 138, 140, 175, 411, 414, 415, 416, 417, 418, 420 Arensberg, Walter 272 Aristotle 112, 278, 279 Arns, Inke 164 Arocena, Berta 191 Arp, Hans 31, 198, 359, 360 Artaud, Antonin 12, 163 Arvatov, Boris 78 Ashbery, John 328, 388 Attridge, John 259 Auden, Wystan Hugh 8, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 91, 92, 93 Auerbach, Erich 397 Auric, Georges 359 Auslander, Philip 159 Axel, Gabriel 290 Ayers, David 122 Baader, Johannes 365 Baargeld, Johannes Theodor 31 Bacon, Francis 323 Bal, Mieke 27 Balázs, Béla 39 Ball, Hugo 161, 347

 427

Balla, Giacomo 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 75, 76, 81 Balzac, Honoré de 145 Banting, John 140 Baranoff-Rossiné, Vladimir 45 Barlach, Ernst 198 Barr, Alfred 190, 191, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205 Barthes, Roland 25, 295, 400 Bartol, Vladimir 161 Baßler, Moritz 207, 208 Bataille, Georges 107 Baudelaire, Charles 249, 250, 251, 260 Baudrillard, Jean 7, 391 Baum, Timothy 364 Bauman, Zygmunt 250, 258 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 112 Bausch, Pina 160, 163 Beach, Sylvia 126 Bechstein, Ludwig 277, 278 Beckett, Samuel 138, 142, 379, 396 Belling, Rudolf 198 Belmood 227 Belton, Robert 366 Benjamin, Walter 4, 23, 76, 146, 177, 249, 260, 323, 372, 376 Bennett, Arnold 134 Bennett, Jane 4 Benton, Megan 130 Benveniste, Émile 412, 419 Berger, Matjaž 161 Bergius, Hanne 348, 349 Bergson, Henri 30, 258 Berkeley, George 30 Berlewi, Henryk 8, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66 Bernea, Horia 223 Berry, Ellen E. 391, 392 Best, Susan 13, 292 Betterton, Rosemary 343, 344 Beuys, Joseph 108, 166, 277, 287, 289 Biermé, Maria 236, 237, 238, 244, 246 Bird, Bill 138 Blaine, Julien 13, 302, 303, 304, 305, 308, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314, 316, 317, 318 Blanco, Rafael 189

428 

 Index

Blanco Fombona, Rufino 191, 192 Blixen, Tanja 290 Blok, Alexander 165 Boccioni, Umberto 19, 69, 71 Bois, Yve-Alain 107, 293, 295, 299 Boltanski, Christian 155 Bolter, Jay David 6 Bomberg, David 136, 137 Bønnelycke, Emil 207, 208, 210, 211, 212 Bonnet, Marguerite 422 Boudaille, Georges 223 Bourriaud, Nicolas 167, 178, 179 Brancusi, Constantin 3 Brassaï 360 Brecht, Bertolt 76, 85, 163 Breton, André 8, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 133, 140, 219, 268, 359, 362, 364, 366, 367, 411, 413, 414, 415, 416, 417, 418, 419, 420, 421, 422 Brik, Osip 77 Brillat-Savarin, Jean-Anthèlme 285 Brown, Bob 138 Brown, Ford Madox 244 Brucz, Stanislaw 48, 51, 53, 338 Bruguière, Francis 215 Brus, Anna 337, 338, 341 Brus, Diana 335, 337, 338, 339, 340, 341, 343, 346 Brus, Günther 14, 335, 336, 337, 338, 339, 340, 341, 342, 345, 346 Bruyère, Jean de La 363 Brynhildsvoll, Knut 215, 219 Bryson, Norman 27 Burchartz, Max 214, 217 Bürger, Peter 67, 168, 179, 189 Burke, Peter 120, 122 Burle Marx, Roberto 298 Burne-Jones, Edward 238, 244 Busoni, Ferrucio 46 Bute, Mary Ellen 47 Butts, Mary 133 Byrne, John Francis 126 Caffin, Charles 46, 47 Cage, John 401 Cahun, Claude 361 Calder, Jonathan 359

Canudo, Ricciotto 42 Carlyle, Thomas 255 Carpentier, Alejo 188 Carrà, Carlo 19, 69, 71 Casanovas, Martí 188, 190 Castaño, Gabriel 189 Caughie, Pamela 259 Cavell, Stanley 37 Cellini, Benvenuto 265 Cennini, Cennino 147 Černigoj, August 161 Cézanne, Paul 3, 382, 383, 387, 388, 389, 395 Chagall, Marc 20 Chaimowicz, Marc 230, 233 Chamberlain, Neville 82 Chandler, John 292 Chanel, Coco 75 Chapman, Dinos 167, 170, 171, 174, 177 Chapman, Jake 167, 170, 171, 174, 177 Chausson, Ernest 238 Cheney, Seldon 41, 42 Chomsky, Noam 227, 229 Christin, Anne-Marie 316 Churchill, Winston 82 Clair, René 46 Clark, Lygia 13, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301 Clésinger, Auguste 147 Cocteau, Jean 359 Cole, Lori 11, 183 Colombo, Luigi 286, see also Filia Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de 279, 280 Conley, Katharine 366, 367 Corbin, Alain 266, 273 Cornell, Joseph 363 Courbet, Gustave 266 Courtine, Jean-Jacques 319, 320 Cox, Frank 324 Craig, Edward Gordon 90, 136 Crane, Walter 242, 246 Crevel, René 133 Crow, Thomas 403 Crowder, Henry 142, 143 Čufer, Eda 159, 160 Cunard, Nancy 83, 131, 133, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143

Index 

Curtin, Adrian 119 Cuse, Nicolas de 349 d’Affry, Adèle 147, see also Marcello Dalí, Salvador 169, 189, 359 Davidsen, John 404, 406, 407 de Fiori, Ernesto 198 Delacroix, Eugène 244 Delak, Ferdo 161 Delaunay, Robert 43, 45 Delaunay, Sonia 43, 67 Deleuze, Gilles 12, 14, 319, 329, 382 Delville, Jean 248 Demarco, Richard 223, 224, 228, 234 Demuth, Charles 186 Derrida, Jacques 107, 159, 352, 377, 392 Descartes, René 384 Desnos, Robert 34, 359 Dessons, Gérard 411, 412, 413, 414, 415, 416, 420, 421, 422 Dessy, Clément 11, 235 Diaconu, Mădălina 273, 283 Didi-Huberman, Georges 33, 146, 147, 156, 312, 316 Diktonius, Elmer 207, 210, 219 Dillon, Kathleen 136 Dix, Otto 198, 200 Djurberg, Nathalie 178 Dobrinsky, Isaac 298 Dominguez, Oscar 359 Donatello 147 Doone, Rupert 84 Dos Passos, John 189 Douglas, Norman 138 Dove, Arthur 186 Drees, Stefan 319, 320, 321 Dreier, Katherine 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200 Drobnick, Jim 12, 263, 265, 266, 267, 268, 270, 272, 273, 276 Duchamp, Marcel 12, 33, 37, 43, 152, 166, 175, 194, 195, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 288, 359, 364, 398, see also Sélavy, Rrose Dumont-Wilden, Louis 236, 237, 241, 244 Dürer, Albrecht 199

 429

Duve, Thierry de 265 Eco, Umberto 400 Eddy, Arthur Jerome 42 Edie, James M. 386 Eggeling, Victor 8, 44, 46, 48, 49, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 62, 63, 65, 66 Einstein, Albert 30, 44, 356 Einstein, Carl 43, 44 Eisenhower, Dwight David 205 Elgström, Anna Lenah 207, 208, 210 Eliot, Thomas Stearns 84, 85, 86, 118, 121, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 133 Elsen, Albert Edward 149 Éluard, Paul 31, 32, 140, 359, 361, 414, 418, 421 Engels, Friedrich 30 Enríquez, Carlos 189 Epstein, Mikhail N. 163 Eram, Cosana 14, 359, 362 Erjavec, Aleš 158, 161, 162, 163 Erkko, Eero 215 Ernst, Max 31, 32, 33, 34, 38, 149, 168, 169, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178, 189, 198, 202, 352, 361, 364, 365, 366, 412 Exter, Alexandra 72, 75, 78 Faber, Monika 337, 338, 339 Fabian, Jo 162, 163 Fabre, Jan 160, 161 Fedorov-Davydov, Aleksei 73 Fer, Briony 45 Ferneyhough, Brian 13, 321, 322, 323, 324, 325, 326, 327, 328, 329, 330, 331 Feshchenko, Vladimir 8, 94 Feuillade, Louis 34 Fillia 286, see also Colombo, Luigi Finnan, Carmel 218 Fischer-Lichte, Erika 108, 111, 321, 322 Fischinger, Oskar 47 Flach, Hannes 214, 216 Flottenheimer, Frantz 167, 171, 172, 176, 178 Fontaine, Jean de la 363 Ford, Ford Madox 11, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260 Foucault, Michel 295, 319, 352

430 

 Index

Fox, William Henry 196 Fraenkel, Théodore 31, 35 Franco, Francisco 73, 83, 381 Freud, Sigmund 13, 14, 30, 35, 120, 319, 344, 401, 414 Fried, Michael 4, 397, 399, 400 Friedländer, Salomo 349 Friedrich, Caspar David 160 Frisby, David 249 Fry, Roger 45 Gance, Abel 36 García Canclíni, Néstor 190 Gasquet, Joachim 389 Gattorno, Antonio 189, 190 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri 133 Gauguin, Paul 46, 266 Geimer, Peter 156 Giacometti, Alberto 149, 151 Giacometti, Diego 149 Gibbons, Luke 123 Giersdorf, Jens 162 Gille, Vincent 361 Giżycki, Marcin 60, 61, 62 Głuchowska, Lidia 8, 48 Goldstein, Ion-Isidor 370, see also Isou, Isidore Goncharova, Natalia 19 Goncourt, Edmond de 245 Goncourt, Jules de 245 Gooding, Mel 234 Goodman, Nelson 101 Gorky, Maxim 166 Grandville, J.J. 363 Greenberg, Clement 5, 6, 42, 177, 342, 404 Grimm, Jacob 278 Grimm, Wilhelm 278 Grossman, Wendy 142, 143 Grosz, George 198, 365 Grünewald, Isaac 20 Grünewald, Matthias 199 Grusin, Richard 6 Gržinič, Marina 160, 319 Gumilyov, Nikolay 165 Haftmann, Werner 204, 205 Hajek-Halke, Heinz 213

Håkanson, Björn 402 Hankar, Paul 248 Hansen, Oskar 337 Hartley, Marsden 185, 186 Hartmann, Sadakichi 43 Hartwig, Edward 63, 64 Hatoum, Mona 178 Hausmann, Raoul 14, 26, 54, 63, 347, 348, 349, 350, 352, 354, 355, 356, 357, 358, 365, 373 Haver, Phyllis 34 Hayman, David 119 Heartfield, John 365 Heffner, Hugh 405 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 9, 30, 112, 113, 114, 116, 120, 122, 128, 146, 391, 395, 413 Heibach, Christiane 12, 277, 284 Herder, Johann Gottfried 284 Hermansson, Gunilla 11, 207 Heusinger von Waldegg, Joachim 144, 149, 152, 154, 156 Hilberseimer, Ludwig 51, 52, 56, 58 Hindsgavl, Louise 167, 170, 171, 176, 178 Hirschfeld-Mack, Ludwig 46 Hirst, Damien 167, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178 Hitler, Adolf 82 Höch, Hannah 33, 365 Hoel, Sigurd 207, 208 Hoffmann, Josef 247 Holbein, Hans 199 Holst Henckel, Peter 167, 171, 172, 173, 178 Honeysuckle 227, 228, Horace 33 Horta, Victor 248 Howe, Jeffery 235 Hughes, Dusty 165 Hughes, Langston 189 Hugnet, Georges 14, 359, 360, 361, 362, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369 Hugnet, Myrtille 360, 362 Husserl, Edmund 319, 380, 383, 384, 385, 386, 388 Huszár, Vilmos 52, 56 Ibsen, Henrik 85 Ichaso, Francisco 188, 189 Ingvarsson, Annelie 28

Index 

Isaak, Jo Anna 381 Isherwood, Christopher 8, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 91, 92, 93 Isou, Isidore 14, 302, 370, 371, 372, 373, 374, 375, 376, 377, 378, 379, see also Goldstein, Ion-Isidor Jacob, Max 359 Jacquin, Maud 343 Jaffe, Aaron 118, 121 Jakobson, Roman 94 Jakubowska, Agata 14, 335 James, William 383, 384, 385, 390 Jameson, Fredric 161, 391 Janco, Marcel 57 Jankélévitch, Samuel 35 Johnson, Philip 200 Jolas, Eugene 192 Jones, Amelia 274 Josef, Leitner 357 Joselit, David 271 Joyce, James 10, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 396, 397, 398 Judovitz, Dalia 271, 274, 276 Jung, Carl Gustav 120 Jung, Franz 348 Justesen, Kirsten 405, 407, 408, 409, 410 Kafka, Franz 207, 396 Kagel, Mauricio 320 Kahn, Elizabeth Louise 217 Kandinsky, Wassily 8, 19, 20, 44, 45, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 161, 195, 197, 198, 210 Kant, Immanuel 112, 265, 280, 283 Kapoor, Anish 230 Keats, John 253, 255 Kelly, Mary 343, 344 Kenney, Padraic 345 Kermode, Frank 136 Kertész, Imre 360 Khlebnikov, Velimir 94 Khnopff, Fernand 11, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248 Kiefer, Anselm 155 Kilian, Eveline 11, 249 King, Martin Luther 401

 431

Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 201, 202 Klee, Paul 19, 201 Klein, Melanie 300 Klein, Yves 164 Klingberg, Gunilla 178 Klinger, Max 362 Kokoschka, Oskar 19 Kolbe, Georg 198 Köpcke, Arthur 399 Kosovel, Srečko 161, 162 Kracauer, Siegfried 38, 249 Krauss, Rosalind 31, 107 Kreft, Lev 162 Kreidler, Johannes 320 Kren, Kurt 335, 338, 339, 341 Kresnik, Johann 163 Kristensen, Tom 207, 210 Kubicki, Margarete 52 Kubicki, Stanislaw 52, 54 Kubin, Alfred 362 Kuczkowski, Felix 62 Kulik, Zofia 335, 336, 337, 342, 343, 344, 345, 346 Kupka, František 42, 43 Kwiek, Dobromierz 335, 336, 337, 342, 343, 344, 346 Kwiek, Przemysław 335, 336, 337, 342, 343, 344, 345 KwieKulik 14, 335, 336, 337, 342, 343, 344, 345, 346 Laban, Rudolf 40 Lagerkvist, Pär 207, 209, 210, 219 Laillet, Hélène 236, 237, 238, 241, 244, 246 Lamanova, Nadezhda 68, 72, 79, 80, 81 Langfeld, Gregor 11, 194 Larsocchi 227 László, Alexander 45 Latham, Sean 118 Latour, Bruno 7, 8, 9, 12, 18 Laurencin, Marie 213, 217, 218 Lautréamont 131, 175, 364 Leeming, Glenda 84 Léger, Fernand 37, 46, 298, 360 Lehmann, Hans Thies 159 Lehmann, Harry 320, 330 Lehmbruck, Wilhelm 201, 202

432 

 Index

Léon, Sol 392, 393 Léonard, Anne 242 Leroi-Gourhan, André 317 Lessing, Gotthold 103 Lethaby, William Richard 137 Levine, Sherrie 174 Lewis, Wyndham 133 LeWitt, Sol 295 Leydenbach, Claire 14, 411 Lightfoot, Paul 392, 393 Lippard, Lucy 292, 404, 409 Lissitzky, El 49, 52, 54, 55, 57, 58, 62, 66, 161 Liszt, Franz 39 Lizaso, Félix 188, 189 Loti, Pierre 245 Loukopoulou, Eleni 9, 118 Loy, Mina 3 Luca, Ghérasim 361 Lugosi, Bela 368 Lukács, György 4, 396, 397, 398, 399, 400, 401, 402, 403, 410 Lye, Len 140 Macdonald-Wright, Stanton 43, 45 Machado, Gerardo 189 MacNeice, Louis 84 Magritte, René 33, 169 Mahrenholz, Rolf 215 Malevich, Kazimir 52, 76, 108, 161, 164 Mallarmé, Stéphane 31, 132, 136, 241, 269, 309, 364 Mañach, Jorge 188, 191 Mandelstam, Nadezhda 165 Mandiargues, Bona de 361 Mann, Thomas 397 Manuel, Víctor 189, 190 Marc, Franz 20, 197, 198 Marcello 147, see also d’Affry, Adèle Marcks, Gerthard 198 Marin, John 185, 186 Marinello, Juan 188 Marinetti, Filippo 4, 44, 72, 128, 160, 285, 286, 287 Martí, José 189 Matelli, Tony 174 Matisse, Henri 151, 152, 185, 192, 270, 271, 273, 274, 276

Mayakovsky, Vladimir 53, 165 McCarthy, Patrick 119 McGavran, Sarah 157 Medley, Robert 91 Meizoz, Jérôme 242 Mendelson, Edward 84 Méndez Capote, Renée 191 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 299, 319, 381, 382, 383, 384, 387, 388, 390, 391, 392, 394, 395 Mérode, Cléo de 363 Mesner, Maria 340 Messerli, Douglas 381 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 160, 165 Mildenberg, Ariane 14, 380, 398 Miró, Joan 359, 361 Möbius, August Ferdinand 216, 293, 294 Moholy-Nagy, László 52, 54, 57, 66 Mondrian, Piet 44 Moore, George 138 Moral, Jean 360 Moreau, Gustave 244 Morris, Robert 399 Morris, William 128 Morrison, Mark 192 Mosley, Oswald 82 Muche, Georg 214 Münter, Gabriele 19 Murphy, Dudley 46 Murphy, Marguerite 388 Murphy, Richard 177 Musidora 34 Nachtergael, Magali 8, 29 Napoleon, Bonaparte 393, 394 Nash, John 124 Nazimova, Alla 34 Neagu, Anton 228, 234 Neagu, Edward 228 Neagu, Paul 11, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, see also Belmood, Honeysuckle, Larsocchi, Paidola Neel, Alice 189 Neruda, Pablo 83 Neuländer-Simon, Else 213, 217, see also Yva Neverow, Vara 258

Index 

 433

Nielsen, Asta 214 Nielsen, Hans-Jørgen 402 Niemeyer, Erna 58, 66, see also Soupault, Ré Novero, Cecilia 286, 287, 288, 340

Prešeren, France 159, 160 Prins, Stefan 320

Oberhuber, Andrea 361 Offenbach, Jacques 270 Ogden, Charles Kay 121, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127 Oiticica, Hélio 294, 296, 300, 301 O’Keeffe, Georgia 183, 185, 186, 187 Olson, Charles 4 Olsson, Hagar 207, 208, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219 Orioli, Pino 138 Ørum, Tania 14, 167, 176, 178, 396, 402, 407 Otty, Lisa 10, 128 Overbeck, Johann Friedrich 145 Overy, Paul 227, 230

Radford, Anna 28 Radway, Janice 125, 129 Rainey, Lawrence 68, 69, 70, 78, 118, 128, 130 Rasula, Jed 8, 39 Ray, Man 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 142, 143, 267, 268, 359, 364 Redon, Odilon 362 Renger-Patzsch, Albert 213 Restany, Pierre 398 Reverdy, Pierre 33 Richards, Ivor Armstrong 122 Richardson, Dorothy 253, 258 Richter, Hans 8, 37, 44, 46, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 63, 272 Ricœur, Paul 352, 353 Riding, Laura 140 Riefenstahl, Leni 162 Rimbaud, Arthur 364, 381 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai 41 Ripoll, Carlos 189 Robinson, Perry 231, 233 Rockefeller, Abby 196 Rodchenko, Alexander 53 Rodin, Auguste 10, 144, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 156, 185 Rodker, John 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 142 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 201, 205 Rops, Félicien 362 Roslund, Nell 20, see also Walden, Nell Rossetti, Christina 247 Rosso, Medardo 148, 149, 151 Russell, Morgan 43, 45 Russolo, Luigi 19, 69, 71 Ruttmann, Walter 46, 255 Rydelius, Ellen 24

Paavolainen, Olavi 213 Paganini, Niccolò 39 Paidola 227 Paik, Nam June 320 Palazzeschi, Aldo 69 Papalexandri-Alexandri, Marianthi 320 Pascal, Blaise 267 Patou, Jean 75 Pedrosa, Mário 301 Pelseneer, Édouard 242 Perec, Georges 399 Péret, Benjamin 31, 361 Pešánek, Zdeněk 45 Peterson, Elmer 271 Picabia, Francis 33, 34, 37, 46, 360 Picasso, Pablo 5, 30, 31, 33, 172, 185, 192, 359, 385, 387, 392, 393, 394, 395 Pintilie, Ileana 11, 221 Piper, John 90 Piranesi, Giambattista 323, 330 Plato 35, 111, 112, 114, 414, 415 Platt, Len 122 Podbevšek, Anton 161 Pollock, Jackson 108 Popova, Liubov 72, 73, 76, 77, 79 Pound, Ezra 5, 121, 133, 134, 136, 138 Prassinos, Gisèle 361

Quintyn, Olivier 33

Saatchi, Charles 177 Sacks, Oliver 272 Sadoul, George 138, 140 Sainsbury, Hester 136, 137

434 

 Index

Saint-Pol-Roux 415 Sakoparnig, Andrea 9, 107 Sanouillet, Michel 271 Sartre, Jean-Paul 151 Satié, Alain 373, 374, 375 Saunders, Max 252 Saunders, Nina 178 Schad, Christian 32 Schiaparelli, Elsa 67 Schindler, Tabea 10, 144 Schlemmer, Oskar 198 Schnebel, Dieter 320 Schrimpf, Georg 198 Schultze, Bernard 115 Schwanberg, Johanna 341 Schwitters, Kurt 198, 303, 373, 398 Scott, Cyril 42 Segal, George 10, 144, 148, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156 Seibel, Wolfgang 350, 351 Sélavy, Rrose 270, 272, see also Duchamp, Marcel Sell, Mike 10 Serres, Michel 282, 284, 290 Seuphor, Michel 44 Seurat, Georges 295 Severini, Gino 19, 25, 69, 71 Shakespeare, William 84 Shaw, George Bernard 43, 46, 67, 121 Sheeler, Charles 37 Showalter, Elaine 380 Sibelius, Jean 41 Sidnell, Michael 90, 91 Sidovov, Vladimir 76 Sigurdsson, Sigrid 155 Simmel, Georg 4, 67, 68, 71, 73, 249 Sintenis, Renée 198 Sjöberg, Sami 14, 370, 372, 374 Sjöholm Skrubbe, Jessica 8, 17 Skovbjerg Paldam, Camilla 10, 167 Slater, Julia 157 Słonimski, Antoni 51 Smithson, Robert 108 Smole, Dominik 160 Snyder, Bob 326, 327 Södergran, Edith 211, 213, 219 Soupault, Philippe 416, 418, 419

Soupault, Ré 66, see also Niemeyer, Erna Spender, Stephen 8, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93 Spinoza, Baruch 5 Spoerri, Daniel 277, 287, 288, 289, 398, 399 Steen-Andersen, Simon 320 Stefanou, Danae 331 Steichen, Edward 184, 185 Stein, Gertrude 3, 4, 5, 14, 359, 380, 381, 382, 383, 384, 385, 386, 387, 388, 389, 390, 391, 392, 393, 394, 395 Stelarc 320 Stella, Frank 296 Stepanova, Varvara 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80 Stephens, James 125 Stern, Anatol 63 Stern, Radu 77 Stevens, Wallace 189 Stieglitz, Alfred 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 192 Stokowski, Leopold 41 Stramm, August 19 Strand, Paul 186 Strzemiński, Władysław 52 Stuck, Frans 238 Survage, Leopold 44 Swift, Jonathan 267 Symons, Arthur 136 Szczuka, Mieczysław 48, 51, 54, 59, 60, 61, 62 Tanguy, Yves 140 Tatlin, Vladimir 4, 76, 161 Taxidou, Olga 3, 4, 13, 85 Théval, Gaëlle 13, 302 Thiérard, Hélène 14, 347 Toller, Ernst 85 Tomkins, Silvan 166, 294 Toop, Richard 324 Toporišič, Tomaž 10, 158 Tory, Geoffrey 138, 305 Treip, Andrew 120 Trowell, Judith 341, 342 Tzara, Tristan 3, 32, 36, 57, 83, 85, 359 Vaché, Jacques 35 Valentiner, Wilhelm 204

Index 

van der Rohe, Mies 54 Van de Velde, Henry 248 van Doesburg, Theo 26, 54, 56, 57, 58 van Heemskerck, Jacoba 19, 20 Varèse, Edgard 41 Vasarely, Victor 65 Vautier, Ben 164 Vico, Giambattista 9, 10, 120, 121, 122, 123 Vietinghoff-Scheel, Anatol 45 Vinci, Leonardo da 244 Vischer, Melchior 146, 347 Vogel, Lucien 38 Vogel, Ludwig 145 Vogelnik, Borut 158 Volt 78 Wadsworth, Edward 133, 134, 137 Wagner, Monika 155 Wagner, Richard 42, 43, 46, 144, 145, 155, 160, 286 Wägner, Harald 24 Walden, Herwarth 8, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 51 Walden, Nell 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, see also Roslund, Nell Warburg, Aby 27 Warden, Claire 8, 82 Wat, Aleksander 48 Wat, Andrzej 49, 53

 435

Webern, Anton 326 West, Emma 8, 67 West, Shearer 17 Whistler, James McNeill 245 Whitman, Walt 216 Wilfred, Thomas 40, 41, 42, 47 Williams, Raymond 131 Williams, William Carlos 4 Wilshire, Bruce 383, 384 Wilson, Robert 160, 161, 163 Wilson, Sarah 344 Winkiel, Laura 143 Wischnitzer-Bernstein, Rachel 51, 52, 53, 63 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 412 Wols 115 Woolf, Virginia 4, 5, 11, 101, 124, 249, 250, 251, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 396, 398 Worthen, William 85, 88, 93 Yeats, William Butler 84, 124 Yunkers, Adja Madlein 189 Yva 213, 218, see also Neuländer-Simon, Else Żarnower, Teresa 48, 54, 59, 60 Zayas, Alfredo 187, 189 Živadinov, Dragan 159, 163, 164, 165, 166 Züchner, Eva 348, 349, 350