Lecture on dada, Tristian Tzara

1922

You already know that for the general public, and for you society people, a dadaist is the equivalent of a leper. But that's only a manner of speaking. When people talk to us at close quarters, they still treat us with the remains of elegance that they owe to their habit of believe in progress. But from ten metres away, their hate starts up again. That's dada. If you ask me why, I wouldn't be able to answer you.

Another characteristic of Dada is that we are always parting from our friends. We part, and we resign. The first person to resign from the Dada Movement was I. Everyone knows that Dada is nothing. I parted from Dada and from myself the moment I realised the true implication of nothing.

If I continue to do something, it's because it amuses me. or rather because I have a need for activity which I exert in all directions. In actual fact, the real dadas were always apart from Dada. Those people to whom dada was still important enough for them to part from it with éclat, were only acting with a view to their own personal advertisement, and proved that counterfeiters have always insinuated themselves with filthy worms amongst the purest and most lucid adventures of the spirit.

I know you're expecting some explanations about Dada. I'm not going to give you any. Explain to me why you exist. You've no idea. You'll say: I exist to make my children happy. But you know it's not really true. You'll say: I exist to protect my country from barbaric invasions. That's not enough. You'll say: I exist because God wants me to . That's a tale to tell the children. You'll never know why you exist, but you'll always allow yourselves to be easily persuaded to take life seriously. You'll never understand that life is a ply on words, because you'll never be alone enough to refuse hate, judgements, and everything that needs a great effort, in favour of an even, calm state of mind in which everything is equal and unimportant.

Dada isn't at all modern, it's rather a return to a quasi-buddhist religion of indifference. Dada places an artificial sweetness on things, a snow of butterflies which have come out of a conjuror's head. Dada is immobility and doesn't understand the passions. You'll say that this is a paradox because Dada manifests itself by violent actions. Yes, the reactions of individuals contaminated by destruction are fairly violent, but once these reactions have been exhausted and annihilated by the continuous and progressive satanic insistence of a "what's the use?", what remains and predominates is indifference. I could, what's more, with the same air of conviction, maintain the contrary.

I admit that my friends don't approve of this point of view. But this Nothing can only be expressed as a reflection of an individuality. That is why it will be useful to everybody, as no one accords any importance to anything but himself. I'm speaking of myself. That's already too much. How could I dare to speak of everyone at the same time and please everybody?

Nothing is more pleasant than to baffle people. The people one doesn't like. What's the use of explaining to them things that can only interest their curiosity? For people only like their own person, their income and their dog. This state of affairs derives from a false conception of property. If one is poor in spirit one possesses a sure and unshakeable intelligence, a ferocious logic and an immutable point of view. Try to become empty and to fill you brain cells haphazard. Go on destroying what you have in you. Indiscriminately. You could understand a lot of things, then. You aren't any more intelligent than we are, and we aren't any more intelligent than you.

Intelligence is an organisation like any other, social organisation, the organisation of a bank, or the organisation of a gossip-session. A society tea-party. Its purpose is to create order and introduce clarity where there is none. Its purpose is to create a hierarchy within a state. To make classifications for a rational piece of work. To separate questions of a material order from those of a moral order, but to take the former extremely seriously. Intelligence is the triumph of good breeding and pragmatism. Life, fortunately, is something different, and its pleasures are numberless. Their price cannot be evaluated in the currency of liquid intelligence.

These observations about everyday conditions have led us to a knowledge that constitutes our minimum of understanding, apart from the sympathy that links us, which is mysterious. We couldn't base it on principles. For everything is relative. What are Beauty, Truth, Art, Good, Liberty? Words which have a different meaning for every individual. Words which claim to make everybody agree, which is why they're usually written with capital letters. Words which do not have the moral value and the objective force that people are used to giving them. Their meaning changes from one individual to another, from one country to another. Men are different, it's their diversity that gives them their interest. There is no common basis in humanity's brains. The unconscious is inexhaustible and uncontrollable. Its strength is beyond us. It is as mysterious as the last particle of the brain cell. Even if we are familiar with it, who would dare state that we could reconstruct it as a viable generator of thoughts?

What use have philosophical theories been to us? Have they helped us to take a single step forward to backward? Where is "forward", where is "backward"? Have they transformed our forms of contentment? We are. We quarrel, we fuss, we struggle. The intervals are sometimes pleasant, often mixed with a boundless tedium, a swamp adorned with the beards of moribund shrubs. We have had enough of the considered actions that have swollen beyond measure our credulity in the blessings of science. What we want now is spontaneity. Not because it is more beautiful or better than anything else. But because everything that comes from us freely without any intervention from speculative ideas, represents us. We must accelerate this quantity of life that spends itself so readily here, there and everywhere. Art is not the most precious manifestation of life. Art does not have the celestial, general value that people are pleased to accord it. Life is far more interesting. Dada boasts of knowing the exact proportion that is to be given to art; it introduces it with subtle, perfidious means into the acts of everyday fantasy. And vice versa. In art, Dada brings everything back to the initial, but relative, simplicity. It mingles its caprices with the chaotic wind o creation and with the barbaric dances of savage tribes. It wants logic to be reduced to a personal minimum and literature to be primarily intended for the person who creates it. Words have a weight, too, and are used for an abstract construction. The absurd doesn't frighten me because, from a more elevated point of view, I consider everything in life to be absurd. It is only the elasticity of our conventions that makes a link between disparate acts. Beauty and Truth in art don't exist; what interest me is the intensity of a personality, transposed directly and clearly into its work, man and his vitality, the angle under which he looks at the elements and the way he is able to pick these ornamental words, feelings and emotions, out of the basket of death.

Dada tries to find out what words mean before using them, not from the point of view of grammar, but from that of representation. Objects and colours also pass through the same filter. It isn't a new technique that interests us, but the spirit. Why do you think we should bother about a pictorial, moral, poetic, social or poetic renovation? we all know that these stylistic renovations are only the successive uniforms of different historical eras, uninteresting questions and fashions and facades. We know very well that the people in Renaissance clothes are more or less the same as the people of today, and that Dchouang-Dsi was a dada as we are. You are making a mistake if you take Dada for a modern school, or even for a reaction against present-day schools. Several of my assertions have seemed to you to be old-fashioned and natural; this is the best proof that you were dadaists without knowing it, and perhaps even before the birth of dada.

You will often hear it sad: Dada is a state of mind. You can be gay, sad, distressed, joyful, melancholy or dada. Without being literary, you can be romantics, you can be dreamers, weary, whimsical, shopkeepers, thin, convicts, conceited, pleasant or dada. Later, in the course of history, when Dada has become a precise, everyday word, and when its popular repetition has given it the meaning of an organic word with its necessary content, people will be dada with neither shame nor prejoration, for who today still thinks of literature in terms of calling a lake, a landscape, or a character, romantic? Slowly but surely a dada character is being formed.

Dada is more or less everywhere, just as it is; with its defects, with the differences between people which it accepts and regards with indifference.

We are very often told that we are incoherent, but people intend this word to convey an insult which I find rather hard to grasp. Everything is incoherent. The man who decides to have a bath but who goes to the cinema. The other man who wants to keep quiet but who says things that don't even come into his head. Another one who has an exact idea about something but who only manages to express the opposite in words which for him are a bad translation. No logic. Relative necessities discovered a posteriori, valid not from the point of view of their exactitude, but as explanations.

The acts of life have neither beginning nor end. Everything happens in a very idiotic fashion. That's why everything is the same. Simplicity is called dada.

To try to reconcile an inexplicable and momentary state with logic seems to me an amusing game. The convention of spoken language is amply sufficient, but for ourselves alone, for our inner games and our literature we don't need it any more.

In painting, things happen in the same way. Painters, technicians who do very well what a camera records much better, will carry on with the game. We'll play ours. We don't know why, nor how. With everything that comes to hand. It will be badly done, but we don't care.

The beginnings of Dada were not the beginnings of an art, but those of a disgust. Disgust with the magnificence of philosophers who for 3000 years have been explaining everything to us (what was the use?), disgust with the pretensions of those artists who were god's representatives on earth, disgust with passion, with real, morbid malice applied in cases where it isn't worth while, disgust with a new form of tyranny and restriction, which only accentuates men's instinct for domination instead of allaying it, disgust with all the catalogued categories, with the false prophets behind whom financial interests must be sought, with pride or with illness, disgust with people who separate good from evil, beauty from ugliness (for why is it more estimable to be red rather than green, left or right, tall or short?), disgust, finally, with the jesuitical dialectic that can explain everything and insert into people's poor brains oblique and obtuse ideas with neither roots nor base, all this by means of blinding artifices and the insinuating promises of charlatans.

Dada, after having again attracted the attention of the whole word to death, to its constant presence amongst us, works by destroying more and more, not in extent but in itself. Moreover it takes no pride in these disgusts, they bring it neither advantage nor profit. It doesn't even fight anymore because it knows that there is no point in doing so, that none of this is of any importance. What interests a dadaist is his own way of living. But here we are reaching the places reserved for the great secret.

Dada is a state of mind. That is why it is transformed according to races and events. Dada is applicable to everything, and yet it is nothing, it is the point where yes and no meet, not solemnly in the castles of human philosophies, but quite simple on street corners like dogs and grasshoppers.

Dada is as useless as everything else in life.

Dada has no pretensions, which is how life ought to be.

Perhaps you'll understand me better if I tell you that dada is a virgin microbe that insinuates itself with the insistence of air into all the spaces that reason hasn't been able to fill with words or conventions.

television manifesto of the spatial movement, ambrosini, burri, crippa, deluigi, de toffoli, dova, donati, fontana, giancarozzi, guidi, joppolo, la re

Television Manifesto
of the Spatial Movement


For the first time throughout the world, we Spatialists are using television to transmit our new forms of art based on the concepts of space, to be understood from two points of view:

the first concerns spaces that were once considered mysterious but that are now known and explored, and that we therefore use as plastic material:

the second concerns the still unknown spaces of the cosmos - spaces to which we address ourselves as data of intuition and mystery, the typical data of art as divination.

For us, television is a means that we have been waiting for to give completeness to our concepts. We are happy that this Spatial manifestation of ours is being transmitted from Italy - a manifestation destined to renew the fields of art.

It is true that art is eternal, but it was always tied down to matter, whereas we want it to be freed from matter.

Through space, we want it to be able to last a millennium even for a transmission of only a minute.

Out artistic expressions multiply the lines of the horizon to the infinite and in infinite dimensions. They are a research for an aesthetic in which a painting is no longer painted, a sculpture no longer sculpted, and in which the written page leaves behind its typographical form.

We Spatialists feel ourselves to be the artists of today, since the conquests of technology are by now at the service of the art we profess.

Signed by,

AMBROSINI, BURRI, CRIPPA, DELUIGI, DE TOFFOLI, DOVA, DONATI, FONTANA, GIANCAROZZI, GUIDI, JOPPOLO, LA REGINA, MILENA MILANI, MORUCCHIO, PEVERELLI, TANCREDI, VIANELLO.

Milan, May 17, l952

above copied from: http://www.391.org/manifestos/televisionmanifesto.htm

futurist manifesto of lust, valentine de saint-point

11th January 1913

A reply to those dishonest journalists who twist phrases to make the Idea seem ridiculous;
to those women who only think what I have dared to say;
to those for whom Lust is still nothing but a sin;
to all those who in Lust can only see Vice, just as in Pride they see only vanity.

Lust, when viewed without moral preconceptions and as an essential part of life’s dynamism, is a force.

Lust is not, any more than pride, a mortal sin for the race that is strong. Lust, like pride, is a virtue that urges one on, a powerful source of energy.

Lust is the expression of a being projected beyond itself. It is the painful joy of wounded flesh, the joyous pain of a flowering. And whatever secrets unite these beings, it is a union of flesh. It is the sensory and sensual synthesis that leads to the greatest liberation of spirit. It is the communion of a particle of humanity with all the sensuality of the earth.

Lust is the quest of the flesh for the unknown, just as Celebration is the spirit’s quest for the unknown. Lust is the act of creating, it is Creation.

Flesh creates in the way that the spirit creates. In the eyes of the Universe their creation is equal. One is not superior to the other and creation of the spirit depends on that of the flesh.

We possess body and spirit. To curb one and develop the other shows weakness and is wrong. A strong man must realize his full carnal and spiritual potentiality. The satisfaction of their lust is the conquerors’ due. After a battle in which men have died, it is normal for the victors, proven in war, to turn to rape in the conquered land, so that life may be re-created.

When they have fought their battles, soldiers seek sensual pleasures, in which their constantly battling energies can be unwound and renewed. The modern hero, the hero in any field, experiences the same desire and the same pleasure. The artist, that great universal medium, has the same need. And the exaltation of the initiates of those religions still sufficiently new to contain a tempting element of the unknown, is no more than sensuality diverted spiritually towards a sacred female image.

Art and war are the great manifestations of sensuality; lust is their flower. A people exclusively spiritual or a people exclusively carnal would be condemned to the same decadence—sterility.

Lust excites energy and releases strength. Pitilessly it drove primitive man to victory, for the pride of bearing back a woman the spoils of the defeated. Today it drives the great men of business who run the banks, the press and international trade to increase their wealth by creating centers, harnessing energies and exalting the crowds, to worship and glorify with it the object of their lust. These men, tired but strong, find time for lust, the principal motive force of their action and of the reactions caused by their actions affecting multitudes and worlds.

Even among the new peoples where sensuality has not yet been released or acknowledged, and who are neither primitive brutes nor the sophisticated representatives of the old civilizations, woman is equally the great galvanizing principle to which all is offered. The secret cult that man has for her is only the unconscious drive of a lust as yet barely woken. Amongst these peoples as amongst the peoples of the north, but for different reasons, lust is almost exclusively concerned with procreation. But lust, under whatever aspects it shows itself, whether they are considered normal or abnormal, is always the supreme spur.

The animal life, the life of energy, the life of the spirit, sometimes demand a respite. And effort for effort’s sake calls inevitably for effort for pleasure’s sake. These efforts are not mutually harmful but complementary, and realize fully the total being.

For heroes, for those who create with the spirit, for dominators of all fields, lust is the magnificent exaltation of their strength. For every being it is a motive to surpass oneself with the simple aim of self-selection, of being noticed, chosen, picked out.

Christian morality alone, following on from pagan morality, was fatally drawn to consider lust as a weakness. Out of the healthy joy which is the flowering of the flesh in all its power it has made something shameful and to be hidden, a vice to be denied. It has covered it with hypocrisy, and this has made a sin of it.

We must stop despising Desire, this attraction at once delicate and brutal between two bodies, of whatever sex, two bodies that want each other, striving for unity. We must stop despising Desire, disguising it in the pitiful clothes of old and sterile sentimentality.

It is not lust that disunites, dissolves and annihilates. It is rather the mesmerizing complications of sentimentality, artificial jealousies, words that inebriate and deceive, the rhetoric of parting and eternal fidelities, literary nostalgia—all the histrionics of love.

We must get rid of all the ill-omened debris of romanticism, counting daisy petals, moonlight duets, heavy endearments, false hypocritical modesty. When beings are drawn together by a physical attraction, let them—instead of talking only of the fragility of their hearts—dare to express their desires, the inclinations of their bodies, and to anticipate the possibilities of joy and disappointment in their future carnal union.

Physical modesty, which varies according to time and place, has only the ephemeral value of a social virtue.

We must face up to lust in full conciousness. We must make of it what a sophisticated and intelligent being makes of himself and of his life; we must make lust into a work of art. To allege unwariness or bewilderment in order to explain an act of love is hypocrisy, weakness and stupidity.

We should desire a body consciously, like any other thing.

Love at first sight, passion or failure to think, must not prompt us to be constantly giving ourselves, nor to take beings, as we are usually inclined to do so due to our inability to see into the future. We must choose intelligently. Directed by our intuition and will, we should compare the feelings and desires of the two partners and avoid uniting and satisfying any that are unable to complement and exalt each other.

Equally conciously and with the same guiding will, the joys of this coupling should lead to the climax, should develop its full potential, and should permit to flower all the seeds sown by the merging of two bodies. Lust should be made into a work of art, formed like every work of art, both instinctively and consciously.

We must strip lust of all the sentimental veils that disfigure it. These veils were thrown over it out of mere cowardice, because smug sentimentality is so satisfying. Sentimentality is comfortable and therefore demeaning.

In one who is young and healthy, when lust clashes with sentimentality, lust is victorious. Sentiment is a creature of fashion, lust is eternal. Lust triumphs, because it is the joyous exaltation that drives one beyond oneself, the delight in posession and domination, the perpetual victory from which the perpetual battle is born anew, the headiest and surest intoxication of conquest. And as this certain conquest is temporary, it must be constantly won anew.

Lust is a force, in that it refines the spirit by bringing to white heat the excitement of the flesh. The spirit burns bright and clear from a healthy, strong flesh, purified in the embrace. Only the weak and sick sink into the mire and are diminished. And lust is a force in that it kills the weak and exalts the strong, aiding natural selection.

Lust is a force, finally, in that it never leads to the insipidity of the definite and the secure, doled out by soothing sentimentality. Lust is the eternal battle, never finally won. After the fleeting triumph, even during the ephemeral triumph itself, reawakening dissatisfaction spurs a human being, driven by an orgiastic will, to expand and surpass himself.

Lust is for the body what an ideal is for the spirit—the magnificent Chimaera, that one ever clutches at but never captures, and which the young and the avid, intoxicated with the vision, pursue without rest.

Lust is a force.

above copied from: http://www.391.org/manifestos/valentinedesaintpoint_futuristmanifestooflust.htm

manifesto for a new poetry visual and phonic, pierre garnier

1962

Once we lived safely beneath our stratum of air. Now we are waves spouting in the cosmos. How can we expect our words to remain wrapped up in the atmosphere of the sentence?

Let them be reunited, like ourselves, to cosmic space--word constellations on the white page.

Every word is an abstract picture.

A surface. A volume.

A surface on the page. A volume when spoken.

Gamier emphasized the necessity for a break with the old rhythms:

The rhythms of poetry have succeeded in deadening the reader's mind.

We listen to the purring of Racine but do not understand it. In poetry we become aware of the universe--for it to be based upon the enumeration of feet is an absurdity.

It makes no difference whether FER or AVION have one or two syllables. What counts is their meaning, the space which the words themselves occupy upon the printed page,

the vibrations they set up in fact the volume which they enclose-immense and horizontal in the case of FER, infinite but with a note of disquiet for AVION

The structure of the sentence would also have to go:

The structure of the sentence has caused the same damage as the rhythms of poetry. What a difference there is between: "The tiger is coming to drink at the river bank" and the single name: TIGER!

The poet is left with words stripped of all worn out structural trappings:

Words are as hard and as scintillating as diamonds.

The word is an element.

The word is a material.

The word is an object.

For those who know how to look at them, some words possess a remarkable topography.

TRANSATLANTIQUE, for instance, rocks and seas, peaks and abysses--why, even the moon cannot be any richer in craters and parched valleys, in rhythms and beauties.

Words are the visible aspects of ideas just as the trunk and the foliage are the visible aspects of a tree.

Underneath are the roots, the ideas.

We must grind our well-worn language to dust--in other words, make the individual words scintillate.

We must do away with imprecise terms, adjectives, for example--or again use them as nouns, as substance, that is to say, as material.

But the word cannot be set on the page unless it is in harmony with the atmosphere of the poem.

What is more, the value of each word is modified by the fact that the poem belongs no longer to a flux but to a static system.

above copied form: http://www.391.org/manifestos/pierregarnier_manifesto.htm

What is an Author? Michel Foucault

From Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977. pp. 124-127.

Michel Foucault on the "Author Function"

From Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977. pp. 124-127.
For the purposes of this paper, I will set aside the sociohistorical analysis of the author as an individual and the numerous questions that deserve analysis in this context.... For the time being, I wish to restrict myself to the singular relationship that holds between an author and a text, the manner in which a text apparently points to this figure who is outside and precedes it.
....
[T]he writing of our day has freed itself from the necessity of "expression"; it refers only to itself, yet is not restricted to the confines of interiority. On the contrary, we recognize it in its exterior deployment. This reversal transforms writing into an interplay of signs, regulated less by the content it signifies than by the very nature of the signifier... Thus, the essential basis of this writing is not the exalted emotions related to the act of composition or the insertion of a subject into language. Rather, it is primarily concerned with creating an opening where the writing subject endlessly disappears.

....
It is obviously insufficient to repeat empty slogans: the author has disappeared; God an man died a common death. Rather, we should reexamine the empty space left by the author's disappearance; we should attentively observe, along its gaps and fault lines, its new demarcations, and the reapportionment of this void; we should await the fluid functions released by this disappearance

.....
In dealing with the "author" as a function of discourse, we must consider the characteristics of a discourse that support this use and determine its differences from other discourses. If we limit our remarks only to those books or texts with authors, we can isolate four different features.

First, they are objects of appropriation; the form of property they have become is of a particular type whose legal codification was accomplished some years ago. It is important to notice, as well, that its status as property is historically secondary to the penal code controlling its appropriation. Speeches and books were assigned real authors, other than mythical or important religious figures, only when the author became subject to punishment and to the extent that his discourse was considered transgressive. In our culture and undoubtably in others as well discourse was not originally a thing, a product, or a possession, but an action situated in a bipolar field of sacred and profane, lawful and unlawful, religious and blasphemous. It was a gesture charged with risks before it became a possession caught in a circuit of property values. But it was at the moment when a system of ownership and strict copyright rules were established (toward the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century) that the transgressive properties always intrinsic to the act of writing became the forceful imperative of literature. It is as if the author, at the moment he was accepted into the social order of property which governs our culture, was compensating for his new status by reviving the older bipolar field of discourse in a systematic practice of transgression and by restoring the danger of writing which, on another side, had been conferred the benefits of property.

Secondly, the "author-function" is not universal or constant in all discourse. Even within our civilization, the same types of texts have not always required authors; there was a time when those texts which we now call "literary" (stories, folk tales, epics and tragedies) were accepted, circulated and valorized without any questions about the identity of their author. Their anonymity was ignored because their real or supposed age was a sufficient guarantee of their authenticity. Text, however, that we now call "scientific" (dealing with cosmology and the heavens, medicine or illness, the natural sciences or geography) were only considered truthful during the Middle Ages if the name of the author was indicated. Statements on the order of "Hippocrates said..." or "Pliny tells us that..." were not merely formulas for an argument based on authority; they marked a proven discourse. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a totally new conception was developed when scientific texts were accepted on their own merits and positioned within an anonymous and coherent conceptual system of established truths and methods of verification. Authentication no longer required reference to the individual who had produced them; the role of the author disappeared as an index of truthfulness and, where it remained as an inventor's name, it was merely to denote a specific theorem or proposition, a strange effect, a property, a body, a group of elements, or a pathological syndrome.

At the same time, however, "literary" discourse was acceptable only if it carried an author's name; every text of poetry or fiction was obliged to state its author and the date, place, and circumstance of its writing. The meaning and value attributed to the text depended upon this information. If by accident or design a text was presented anonymously, every effort was made to locate its author. Literary anonymity was of interest only as a puzzle to be solved as, in our day, literary works are totally dominated by the sovereignty of the author. (Undoubtedly, these remarks are far too categorical. Criticism has been concerned for some time now with aspects of a text not fully dependent upon the notion of an individual creator; studies of genre or the analysis of recurring textual motifs and their variations from a norm other than author. Furthermore, where in mathematics the author has become little more than a handy reference for a particular theorem or group of propositions, the reference to an author in biology or medicine, or to the date of his research has a substantially different bearing. This latter reference, more than simply indicating the source of information, attests to the "reliability" of the evidence, since it entails an appreciation of the techniques and experimental materials available at a given time and in a particular laboratory).

The third point concerning this "author-function" is that it is not formed spontaneously through the simple attribution of a discourse to an individual. It results from a complex operation whose purpose is to construct the rational entity we call an author. Undoubtedly, this construction is assigned a "realistic" dimension as we speak of an individual's "profundity" or "creative" power, his intentions or the original inspiration manifested in writing. Nevertheless, these aspect of an individual, which we designate as an author (or which comprise an individual as an author), are projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we extract as pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we practice. In addition, all these operations vary according to the period and the form of discourse concerned. A "philosopher" and a "poet" are not constructed in the same manner; and the author of an eighteenth-century novel was formed differently from the modern novelist.

....
Further elaboration would, of course, disclose other characteristics of the "author-function," but I have limited myself to the four that seemed the most obvious and important. They can be summarized in the following manner: the "author-function" is tied to the legal and institutional systems that circumscribe, determine, and articulate the realm of discourses; it does not operate in a uniform manner in all discourses, at all times, and in any given culture; it is not defined by spontaneous attribution of a text to its creator, but through a series of precise and complex procedures; it does not refer, purely and simply, to an actual individual insofar as it simultaneously gives rise to a variety of egos and to a series of subjective positions that individuals of any class may come to occupy.

....
I am aware that until now I have kept my subject within unjustifiable limits; I should also have spoken of the "author-function" in painting, music, technical fields, and so forth.

....
We can easily imagine a culture where discourses could circulate without any need for an author. Discourses, whatever their status, form, or value, and regardless of our manner of handling them, would unfold in a pervasive anonymity. No longer the tiresome repetitions:

"Who is the real author?"
"Have we proof of his authenticity and originality?"
"What has he revealed of his most profound self in his language?"

New questions will be heard:

"What are the modes of existence of this discourse?"
"Where does it come from; how is it circulated; who controls it?"
What placements are determined for possible subjects?"
"Who can fulfill these diverse functions of the subject?"

Behind all the questions we would hear little more that the murmur of indifference:
"What matter who's speaking?"

above copied from: http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/Foucault-AuthorFunction.html

American Surrealism and View Magazine (Sect. 1)

© Andrew Otwell, 1996

The young poet Charles Henri Ford started View magazine in his New York apartment in 1940. Ford considered himself a Surrealist, and had been encouraged in his work by André Breton, the leader of that movement in Paris in the 1930's. When Ford returned to the United States, he started View as an avant-garde literary magazine. The magazine ran from September 1940 through March 1947, appearing quarterly and monthly as circumstances permitted. Ford initially intended View as a journal of contemporary events compiled of writings by his literary friends in Europe. The magazine soon evolved into much more. Ford wrote to his mother in 1945 that "our prestige grows by leaps and bounds. View is now the world's leading journal of avant-garde art & literature. And I'd like to hold the position won. . . ."[1] His statement was not an exaggeration. By 1945 View had published writing by Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Henry Miller, Paul Bowles, and Surrealists Breton, Nicolas Calas, and Benjamin Peret. It had also produced special issues on artists Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Marcel Duchamp, with covers commissioned from each. View reproduced works by other contemporary artists had been reproduced in its pages as well. The magazine also ran columns on contemporary jazz and theatre.

Ford later noted that "we did launch and sponsor the Surrealists in America. They had nothing else going for them during the war. . . ."[2] Though his initial interest in Surrealism was strong, View never became an official Surrealist magazine like the French magazines Minotaure or La Révolution Surrealiste. Ford's interests were too broad for him to submit to the strict guidelines enforced on Surrealist publications by its French leaders, and he regularly published authors who had no interest in Surrealism. Ford's independence even led to a violent break with Nicolas Calas, a Surrealist who had contributed to early issues of View.[3]

The problem was that Ford had no intention of producing an obscure avant-garde magazine. Rather, he wanted to establish what he called a "popular front" in the arts.[4] Ford recognized not only that Surrealism had potential as an artistic philosophy, but that he could exploit its fashionable visual appeal in his magazine. Parker Tyler, Ford's lifelong friend and assistant editor of View remarked in 1967 that Ford's "practical vision grasp[ed] the strategy of making a cultural popular front between fashionable transatlantic elements and neglected aspects of American talent. . . ."[5]

Dickran Tashjian has pointed out that Ford's talents as an editor were matched by his "gravitation toward the wealthy for their patronage and privilege. . . ."[6] Increasingly in the middle 1940's Ford used his considerable social connections to reach a wider audience for the magazine. Even the subtitle of View changed from "Through the eyes of the poet" in the early issues to "The Modern Magazine" to reflect the magazine's broad presence in art, music, theatre, and literature. In letters to his parents, Ford often showed great enthusiasm for the business of publishing a successful magazine and recognized the importance of his role as editor. He wrote in 1943 to thank his father for buying shares in the newly organized View, Inc., "I know that View will be paying dividends before long. . . .There's more glory in being a poet [than a doctor], I think. . . . I admire the heroes of art above all!"[7] A year later he wrote to his mother that "I really think it has a chance to make a commercial success - which is what it must do if it's to last a long time."[8]

The year 1942 was a crucial one both for View magazine and for Surrealism in the United States. View's second series began with a special issue on Max Ernst in April. This issue was the first in a magazine format with color cover and many reproductions inside. This change indicated the magazine's increased commitment to becoming a prominent art periodical.[9] In that year, Pierre Matisse held the first one-man shows in this country of newly arrived European Surrealist painters André Masson, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, and Matta. Matisse also held an exhibition of "Artists in Exile" that introduced the work of many artists to a wider audience. Peggy Guggenheim's "Art of this Century" gallery, which eventually brought together and influenced the young Abstract Expressionists, opened in 1942 with a great deal of publicity. Just days later, André Breton's landmark "First Papers of Surrealism" exhibition also opened in New York. Marticia Sawin has described these exhibitions as "extraordinary showcases for the works [the Surrealists] . . . continued to produce, complete with a press response American painters had not even begun to dream of."[10]

This paper will discuss several of the important art events of 1942, and focus on View's first attempts at defining its own identity as distinct from European Surrealism. A strong reaction to European Surrealism is apparent in the May 1942 special issue on Russian-born artist Pavel Tchelitchew. The writing in that issue informed Ford's editorial position in the "Americana Fantastica" issue in January 1943, in which he defined a new "Fantastic" art.[11] This paper will show how the magazine promoted Tchelitchew, who also had a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in September of 1942, as an example of its unique concept of American art.

[1] Ford to his mother, May 9, 1945, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Resource Center, University of Texas at Austin, hereafter HRC.

[2] Clive Philpot and Lynne Tillman, "An Interview with Charles Henri Ford," Flue (Franklin Furnace), December, 1980, p. 1.

[3] Dickran Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avant-garde 1920-1950 (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1995), p. 196.

[4] Philpot and Tillman, p. 2.

[5] Parker Tyler, The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew (New York: Fleet Publishing Company,1967), p. 422.

[6] Tashjian, p. 200-201.

[7] Ford to his father, Charles Lloyd Ford, June 17, 1943, Ford Papers, HRC.

[8] Ford to his mother, Gertrude Cato Ford, December 2, 1944, Ford Papers, HRC.

[9] Susan Weil Nessen, Surrealism In Exile: The Early New York Years, 1940-1942, Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University, 1986, .p. 60.

[10] Marticia Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1995), p. 197.

[11] Only three issues were produced in 1942. The Max Ernst special issue was Series II, number 1, April 1942. The Tchelitchew issue was Series II, number 2, May 1942 and the "Americana Fantastica" issue was Series II, number 4, January 1943.

Copyright Andrew Otwell under the Creative Commons license

The above copied from: http://www.heyotwell.com/work/arthistory/view.html

Art Which Can't Be Art

Alan Kaprow
Art Which Can’t Be Art
(1986)

It’s fairly well known that for the last thirty years my main work as an artist has been located in activities and contexts that don’t suggest art in any way. Brushing my teeth, for example, in the morning when I’m barely awake; watching in the mirror the rhythm of my elbow moving up and down . . . The practice of such an art, which isn’t perceived as art, is not so much a contradiction as a paradox. Why this is so requires some background.
When I speak of activities and contexts that don’t suggest art, I don’t mean that an event like brushing my teeth each morning is chosen and then set into a conventional art context, as Duchamp and many others since him have done. That strategy, by which an art-identifying frame (such as a gallery or theater) confers “art value” or “art discourse” on some nonart object, idea, or event, was, in Duchamp’s initial move, sharply ironic. It forced into confrontation a whole bundle of sacred assumptions about creativity, professional skill, individuality, spirituality, modernism, and the presumed value and function of high art itself. But later it became trivialized, as more and more nonart was put on exhibit by other artists. Regardless of the merits of each case, the same truism was headlined every time we saw a stack of industrial products in a gallery, every time daily life was enacted on a stage: that anything can be estheticized, given the right art packages to put it into. But why should we want to estheticize “anything”? All the irony was lost in those presentations, the provocative questions forgotten. To go on making this kind of move in art seemed to me unproductive. Instead, I decided to pay attention to brushing my teeth, to watch my elbow moving. I would be alone in my bathroom, without art spectators. There would be no gallery, no critic to judge, no publicity. This was the crucial shift that removed the performance of everyday life from all but the memory of art. I could, of course, have said to myself, “Now I’m making art!!” But in actual practice, I didn’t think much about it. My awareness and thoughts were of another kind. I began to pay attention to how much this act of brushing my teeth had become routinized, nonconscious behavior, compared with my first efforts to do it as a child. I began to suspect that 99 percent of my daily life was just as routinized and unnoticed; that my mind was always somewhere else; and that the thousand signals my body was sending me each minute were ignored. I guessed also that most people were like me in this respect. Brushing my teeth attentively for two weeks, I gradually became aware of the tension in my elbow and fingers (was it there before?), the pressure of the brush on my gums, their slight bleeding (should I visit the dentist?). I looked up once and saw, really saw, my face in the mirror. I rarely looked at myself when I got up, perhaps because I wanted to avoid the puffy face I’d see, at least until it could be washed and smoothed tomatch the public image I prefer. (And how many times had I seen others do the same and believed i was different!)
This was an eye-opener to my privacy and to my humanity. An unremarkable picture of myself was beginning to surface, and image I’d created but never examined. It colored the images I made of the world and influenced how I dealt with my images of others. I saw this little by little. But if this wider domain of resonance, spreading from the mere process of brushing my teeth, seems too far from its starting point, I should say immediately that it never left the bathroom. The physicality of brushing, the aromatic taste of toothpaste, rinsing my
mouth and the brush, the many small nuances such as right-handedness causing me to enter my mouth with the loaded rush from that side and then move to the left side — these particularities always stayed in the present. The larger implications popped up from time to time during the subsequent days. All this from toothbrushing. How is this relevant to art? Why is this not just sociology? It is relevant because developments within modernism itself let to art’s dissolution into its life sources. Art in the West has a long history of secularizing tendencies, going back at least as far as the Hellenistic period. by the late 1950s and 1960s this lifelike impulse dominated the vanguard. Art shifted away from the specialized object in the gallery to the real urban environment; to the real body and mind; to communications technology; and to remote natural regions of the ocean, sky, and desert. Thus the relationship of the act of toothbrushing to recent art is clear and cannot be bypassed. This is where the paradox lies; an artist concerned with lifelike art is an artist who does and does not make art.
Anything less than paradox would be simplistic. Unless the identity (and thus the meaning) of what the artist does oscillates between ordinary, recognizable activity and the “resonance” of that activity in the larger human context, the activity itself reduces to conventional behavior. Or if it is framed as art by a gallery, it reduces to conventional art. Thus toothbrushing, as we normally do it, offers no roads back to the real wold either. But ordinary life performed as art/not art can charge the everyday with metaphoric power.