Our era has no anonymity! Here is me, downtown at the Last Book Store, reading a poem that I was convinced might never see the light of day again:
Thanks again to Justin Maurer for putting this event together! It was a serious inspiration.
manifestos.net June 14, 2008
My friend DJ Algonquin just clued me into this amazing site, wherein are listed hundreds of manifestos, many of them accessible via various links. Of course, me, I’ve got a lot of art manifestos in book form at home, but not so many political or religious ones. This site has everything, from Rayonism to Luigi Russolo to Valerie Solanas to Pat Buchanan’s Core Values manifesto.
There’s so much to delve into here, but today I’m having a lot of fun with Tristan Tzara’s how i became charming, likeable and delightful:
I sleep very late. I commit suicide at 65%. My life is very cheap, it’s only 30% of life for me. My life has 30% of life. It lacks arms, strings and a few buttons. 5% is devoted to a state of semi-lucid stupor accompanied by anaemic crackling. This 5% is called DADA. So life is cheap. Death is a bit more expensive. But life is charming and death is equally charming.
Marcel Duchamp and Theresa Stern May 5, 2008
Okay, so we visited the Norton Simon today, and to be honest, the Duchamp exhibit was a bit small. All the stuff was from the museum’s permanent collection, and though his twirling paintings-in-motion that had not been exhibited since 1963 were pretty incredible (perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle, actually), I think the leeches at the Tate Modern probably stole all the good Duchamp stuff for their Duchamp/Man Ray/Picabia exhibit going on in London right now.
However, the lecture we went to was illuminating, as it touched upon Duchamp’s personal life and his ability to predate many of the concepts of Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism without officially joining any of those movements (apparently he even told Tristan Tzara to “fuck off”). In particular, I was intrigued by the female persona he had created in the twenties, Rrose Sélavy, whose name appeared along with his own on the program of his 1963 retrospective.
Adopting a feminine persona in such a stark, non-comedic way was hardly normal back in those days, and I love how Man Ray’s photograph here really glams it up and makes him look so womanly. Like everything Duchamp did, it’s visionary and revolutionary. It seems to hint at the gender-bending so common in art of the past few decades, it hints at the glam rock look adopted by Bolan and Bowie in the seventies, and it even hints at the “artist as art” phenomenon that Gilbert and George (and to a lesser extent, Warhol) have milked for decades.
And the fact that Duchamp wrote from the perspective of Sélavy and attributed sculptures to her reminds me quite a bit of one of my favorite seventies rock icons and his alter-ego:
Actually, to be fair, this is not one but two icons: Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine. It’s a composite of their two faces, and taken before they formed the Neon Boys who became Television.
But it was Hell who wrote a book of poetry in the guise of their creation Theresa Stern. From the point of view of this fictitious Jewish and Puerto Rican prostitute, Hell as Stern did interviews, wrote reviews and poetry, and served in a way as Hell’s own inspiration in times of strife when he needed to make decisions about his own life. Until this exhibit, I assumed Hell stole the idea from the drag queens he was surrounded by in New York, but the adoption of a completely new female persona that exists outside of one’s self without merely completing or superceding it seems to be pure Duchamp. Hell certainly was hip to Duchamp’s use of chance in creating art, and Rrose must have must have must have been his inspiration for Theresa.
Marcel Duchamp Redux at the Norton Simon May 3, 2008
The Marcel Duchamp Redux exhibit is showing at the Norton Simon right now, the museum that once was the Pasadena Art Museum and which hosted Duchamp’s spectacular first retrospective in 1963. And this Sunday at 4 there’ll be lectures and fun to be had, so I’m definitely going.
They’re showing a dozen pieces from Duchamp’s history, including some “rotoreliefs” from 1953: motor-driven constructions with rotating color disks that haven’t been exhibited since that first retrospective 45 years ago.
They’re also going to be showing memorabilia from the time of his trip, but I doubt they’ll be recreating the famous image of Duchamp playing chess with a nude:
When you go to the museum, they may tell you some bullshit story about this photo, that it was taken as a visual pun in response to a 1922 Francis Picabia book cover.
But actually Duchamp had almost nothing to do with it: the concept for the photo came from photographer Julian Wasser. The model was writer and art-groupie Eve Babitz, who apparently met Duchamp and Wasser guerilla-style, in the early hours of morning, partly to get revenge on the curator, who snubbed her at a party, and partly because of the Beach Boys!
MS. BABITZ: Yeah. At the Pasadena Art Museum, [Wasser] said he had this great idea that I should play chess naked with Marcel Duchamp and it seem to be such a great idea that it was just like the best idea I’d ever heard in my life. It was like a great idea. I mean, it was, not only was it vengeance, it was art, and it was like a great idea. And even if it didn’t get any vengeance, it would still turn out okay with me because, you know, it would be sort of immortalized. I would be this, you know, here’s this Nude Descending the Staircase guy and now he’s going to be The Nude in the Pasadena Art Museum. But, of course, I said, you know, I didn’t think that the Pasadena Art Museum old ladies would go along with this. So-
MR. KARLSTROM: Was that part of what attracted you to the idea?
MS. BABITZ: Yes. Yeah, because it was like the Little Old Ladies from Pasadena, you know that Beach Boys’ song.
Luigi Russolo’s intonarumori April 24, 2008
Another great purchase I got at Amoeba this weekend was Musica Futurista: The Art of Noises, a compilation of Futurist speeches, original recordings, and recreations of music and noise composed by the Italian Futurist ringleader F.T. Marinetti, as well as Silvio Mix, Franco Casavola, Francesco Balilla Pratella, and a bunch of other crazy Italian artist types. These guys dominated the avant-garde there from 1909 until the twenties, leaving Russian Futurism, Dadaism, Fascism, and a host of other more famous isms sprouting up in the fields they first sowed.
The spoken word portions of this CD are fascinating (Marinetti sounds like a mad scientist, even in Italian!), and the Futurism scholar and musical enthusiast Daniele Lombardi did a good job of playing a variety of pieces from different composers, including Marinetti’s fantastic “Five Radio Sintesi,” a pioneering sound collage that included random radio sounds, water sploshing, babies crying, drilling noises, and several large portions of pure silence, preempting John Cage by 20 years.
But the best stuff on here by far is something we only get a snippet of: the works of Luigi Russolo and the acoustic sound generators he constructed, called “intonarumori” or noise-intoners, that you see there on the CD cover. These were playable noise instruments with adjustable pitch, created to perform the new vocabulary of sounds that Russolo mapped out in his “Art of Noises” manifesto.
Here are the 6 families of noises of the Futurist orchestra which we will soon set in motion mechanically:
1 2 3 4 5 6 Rumbles Whistles Whispers Screeches Noises obtained by percussion on metal, wood, skin, stone, tarracotta, etc. Voices of animals and men: Roars Hisses Murmurs Creaks Shouts Explosions Snorts Mumbles Rustles Screams Crashes Grumbles Buzzes Groans Splashes Gurgles Crackles Shrieks Booms Scrapes Howls Laughs Wheezes Sobs
This chart was only a small-scale model of the thousands of sounds produced by animals, men, and machine, but Russolo was able to create sound boxes for most of them, with names like “gurgler,” “buzzer,” “howler,” “crackler,” et cetera that described exactly what the boxes sounded like. Despite several performances in Italy and London, all Russolo’s own compositions’ recordings and even full sheet music are lost, and gramophone recordings of orchestral music composed by his brother Antonio use the intonarumori only as sound effects, like the sound of thunder and rain punctuating an overture, rather than as intruments of their own. But Daniele Lombardi reconstructs one original fragment that has survived of Luigi Russolo’s “Awakening of a City” on this CD, as well as plays samples of recreations of some intonarumori, including an “enharmonic bow” that sounds like a wiggly saw meets a washtub bass!
“Awakening of a City” as a fragment is short but profound. Not only does it perfectly capture the soundscape of man-produced machinery (truly industrial music if there ever was), but the pitch-bending of these sound boxes and the rasps and clangs and catgut and buzzes predict everything from Silver Apples to Sonic Youth, LaMonte Young to Led Zeppelin to just plain old zeppelins. This was music truly ahead of its time, which perhaps explains why the Fascists condemned it so vehemently when they rose to power.
The fantastic site Theremin Vox has a great article on Russolo’s intonarumori, and in fact has some sound samples to rival the performances on “The Art of Noises” CD. Whereas the CD sounds more abrasive, like how they described early early Stooges live music, the MP3′s here show the sonorous beauty that this new style of music could have brought to the world, had its musicians not been destroyed by war (almost literally, in the case of Russolo’s WWI headwound) and by the Mussolini minions that followed. Take a listen and you’ll see how incredible this lost early noise music really was.
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