JOHN CAGE was born in Los Angeles in 1912. He studied with Richard Buhlig, Henry Cowell, Adolph Weiss, and Arnold Schoenberg. In 1938 Cage composed the first prepared piano piece, Bacchanale, for a dance by Syvilla Fort. In 1951, he organized a group of musicians and engineers to make the first music on magnetic tape. In 1952, at Black Mountain College, he presented a theatrical event considered by many to have been the first Happening. In 1958, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Emile de Antonio organized a 25-year retrospective concert of his music at Town Hall in New York. He is musical advisor for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, having been associated with Merce Cunningham since 1943.
In 1949 Cage received a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Award from the National Academy of Arts and Letters for having extended the boundaries of music through his work with percussion orchestra and his invention of the prepared piano. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978, and to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1988. In 1982 the French Legion d'Honneur made Cage a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He received the Notable Achievement award from Brandeis University in 1983. He received the degree Doctorate of All the Arts Honoris Causa from the California Institute of the Arts in 1986. Cage was the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University for the 1988-89 academic year. He is a laureate of the 1989 Kyoto Prize given by the Inamori Foundation.
Cage is the author of Silence (1961), A Year From Monday (1968), M (1973), Empty Words (1979), and X (1983), all published by the Wesleyan University Press; Notations (with Alison Knowles, 1969), published by Something Else Press; Writings Through Finnegans Wake (1979), published by Printed Editions; For The Birds (conversations with Daniel Charles) (1981), published by Marion Boyars; Another Song (accompanying photographs by Susan Barron) and Mud Book (with illustrations by Lois Long), both published by Callaway Editions; and Themes and Variations (1982), published by the Station Hill Press. I - VI (the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1988-89) was published by the Harvard University Press in Spring 1990. The book includes transcripts of the question and answer periods that followed each lecture, and an audio cassette of Cage reading one of the six lectures. The First Meeting of the Satie Society (with illustrations by Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Sol Lewitt, Mell Daniel, the author, and Henry David Thoreau as rendered by Benjamin Schiff) is in preparation by the Limited Editions Club. The texts, without illustrations, are also accessible by modem from the Art Com Electronic Network carried by WELL (Whole Earth `Lectronic Link), San Francisco.
Conversing with Cage, a book-length composition of excerpts from interviews, by Richard Kostelanetz, was released in 1988 by Limelight Editions. John Cage. An Anthology, edited by Richard Kostelanetz, first published in 1970, was re-released in 1991 by Da Capo Press. David Revill's biography, The Roaring Silence. John Cage: A Life, was published by Arcade (New York) in late 1992.
John Cage's graphic works include Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel with Calvin Sumsion (1969), Mushroom Book with Lois Long and Alexander Smith (1974); and several series of etchings and monoprints made at the Crown Point Press, San Francisco, between 1978 and 1990. 52 paintings, the New River Watercolors, recently executed by Cage at the Miles C. Horton Center at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, made a tour of several Virginia museums and were shown at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC in April/May 1990.
John Cage's music is published by the Henmar Press of C.F. Peters Corporation. Recordings of his work are available from Wergo, Mode, New Albion, CRI, Columbia, Nonesuch, Folkways, Everest, Time, Cramps, C/P2 and many other labels.
John Cage died in New York City on August 12th, 1992.
The Above is copied from: http://www.lovely.com/bios/cage.html
for more information see:
http://ronsen.org/cagelinks.html
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/perloff.html
http://www.archive.org/details/CottInterviews
http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_5/articles/dur/dur1.html
http://www.8ung.at/fzmw/2002/2002_7.htm
http://main.wgbh.org/wgbh/NTW/ES/Video/tribute340.html
For videos of cage see:
http://www.ubu.com/film/cage.html
Saturday, December 8, 2007
Friday, December 7, 2007
Mail Art
Mail art is art which uses the postal system as a medium. The term mail art can refer to an individual message, the medium through which it is sent, and an artistic genre. Mail art is also known as postal art and is sometimes referred to as Correspondence/Mail Art (CMA).
Mail artists typically exchange ephemera in the form of illustrated letters, zines, rubberstamped, decorated, or illustrated envelopes, artist trading cards, postcards, artistamps, faux postage, mail-interviews, naked mail, friendship books, decos, and three-dimensional objects.
An amorphous international mail art network, involving thousands of participants in over fifty countries, evolved between the 1950s and the 1990s It was influenced by other movements, including Dada and Fluxus.
One theme in mail art is that of commerce-free exchange; early mail art was, in part, a snub of gallery art, juried shows, and exclusivity in art. A saying in the mail art movement is "senders receive," meaning that one must not expect mail art to be sent to them unless they are also actively participating in the movement.When the electronic telecommunications network known as the Internet gave rise to e-mail art, conventional mail-art artists came to refer to the international postal service as the 'paper net' or snail-mail net. When a group of these artists are in some way linked through their works they are collectively referred to as a Mail Art Network. The mail art community has been referred to as the Eternal Network since the 1980s (or possibly even earlier), and predates the time when access to the internet became widespread.
The Mail-Art Network concept has roots in the work of earlier groups, including the Fluxus artists and the notion of 'multiples' or artworks manufactured as editions. Most commonly, Mail-Art Network artists have made and exchanged postcards, designed custom-made stamps or 'artistamps', and designed decorated or illustrated envelopes. But even large and unwieldy three-dimensional objects have been known to have been sent by Mail-Art Network artists, for many of whom the message and the medium are synonymous.
Fundamentally, mail art in the context of a Mail Art Network is a form of conceptual art. It is a 'movement' with no membership and no leaders.
The above copied from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_art
for more information see:
http://www.iuoma.org/
http://www.dmoz.org/Arts/Visual_Arts/Mail_Art_and_Artistamps/
http://snaillymail.blogspot.com/
http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/palace/62/
http://www.vansebroeck.be/
http://www.artpool.hu/Ray/RJ_title.html
http://www.spareroom.org/mailart/mis_intro.html
Mail artists typically exchange ephemera in the form of illustrated letters, zines, rubberstamped, decorated, or illustrated envelopes, artist trading cards, postcards, artistamps, faux postage, mail-interviews, naked mail, friendship books, decos, and three-dimensional objects.
An amorphous international mail art network, involving thousands of participants in over fifty countries, evolved between the 1950s and the 1990s It was influenced by other movements, including Dada and Fluxus.
One theme in mail art is that of commerce-free exchange; early mail art was, in part, a snub of gallery art, juried shows, and exclusivity in art. A saying in the mail art movement is "senders receive," meaning that one must not expect mail art to be sent to them unless they are also actively participating in the movement.When the electronic telecommunications network known as the Internet gave rise to e-mail art, conventional mail-art artists came to refer to the international postal service as the 'paper net' or snail-mail net. When a group of these artists are in some way linked through their works they are collectively referred to as a Mail Art Network. The mail art community has been referred to as the Eternal Network since the 1980s (or possibly even earlier), and predates the time when access to the internet became widespread.
The Mail-Art Network concept has roots in the work of earlier groups, including the Fluxus artists and the notion of 'multiples' or artworks manufactured as editions. Most commonly, Mail-Art Network artists have made and exchanged postcards, designed custom-made stamps or 'artistamps', and designed decorated or illustrated envelopes. But even large and unwieldy three-dimensional objects have been known to have been sent by Mail-Art Network artists, for many of whom the message and the medium are synonymous.
Fundamentally, mail art in the context of a Mail Art Network is a form of conceptual art. It is a 'movement' with no membership and no leaders.
The above copied from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_art
for more information see:
http://www.iuoma.org/
http://www.dmoz.org/Arts/Visual_Arts/Mail_Art_and_Artistamps/
http://snaillymail.blogspot.com/
http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/palace/62/
http://www.vansebroeck.be/
http://www.artpool.hu/Ray/RJ_title.html
http://www.spareroom.org/mailart/mis_intro.html
Performance Art
Performance art is art in which the actions of an individual or a group at a particular place and in a particular time constitute the work. It can happen anywhere, at any time, or for any length of time. Performance art can be any situation that involves four basic elements: time, space, the performer's body and a relationship between performer and audience. It is opposed to painting or sculpture, for example, where an object constitutes the work. Of course the lines are often blurred. For instance, the work of Survival Research Laboratories is considered by most to be "performance art", yet the performers are actually machines.
Although performance art could be said to include relatively mainstream activities such as theater, dance, music, and circus-related things like fire breathing, juggling, and gymnastics, these are normally instead known as the performing arts. Performance art is a term usually reserved to refer to a kind of usually avant-garde or conceptual art which grew out of the visual arts.
Performance art, as the term is usually understood, began to be identified in the 1960s with the work of artists such as Yves Klein, Vito Acconci, Hermann Nitsch, Chris Burden, Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys, Wolf Vostell and Allan Kaprow, who coined the term happenings. In 1970 the British-based pair, Gilbert and George, created the first of their "living sculpture" performances when they painted themselves gold and sang "Underneath The Arches" for extended periods. Alongside pioneering work in video art by Jud Yalkut and others, some performance artists began combining video with other media to create experimental works like those of Chicago's Sandra Binion, who elevated mundane activities like ironing clothes, scrubbing steps, dining and doing laundry into living art. Binion has performed all over the world and is highly regarded as an artist in Europe.
Performance art genres include body art, fluxus, happening, action poetry, and intermedia. Some artists, e.g. the Viennese Actionists and neo-Dadaists, prefer to use the terms live art, "action art", intervention or "manoeuvre" to describe their activities. These activities are also sometimes referred to simply as "actions".
The abouve quoted from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_art
For more information see:
http://eamusic.dartmouth.edu/~wowem/electronmedia/visual/performanceart.html
http://www.franklinfurnace.org/
http://www.one-year-performance.com/
http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen6A/index.html
Although performance art could be said to include relatively mainstream activities such as theater, dance, music, and circus-related things like fire breathing, juggling, and gymnastics, these are normally instead known as the performing arts. Performance art is a term usually reserved to refer to a kind of usually avant-garde or conceptual art which grew out of the visual arts.
Performance art, as the term is usually understood, began to be identified in the 1960s with the work of artists such as Yves Klein, Vito Acconci, Hermann Nitsch, Chris Burden, Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys, Wolf Vostell and Allan Kaprow, who coined the term happenings. In 1970 the British-based pair, Gilbert and George, created the first of their "living sculpture" performances when they painted themselves gold and sang "Underneath The Arches" for extended periods. Alongside pioneering work in video art by Jud Yalkut and others, some performance artists began combining video with other media to create experimental works like those of Chicago's Sandra Binion, who elevated mundane activities like ironing clothes, scrubbing steps, dining and doing laundry into living art. Binion has performed all over the world and is highly regarded as an artist in Europe.
Performance art genres include body art, fluxus, happening, action poetry, and intermedia. Some artists, e.g. the Viennese Actionists and neo-Dadaists, prefer to use the terms live art, "action art", intervention or "manoeuvre" to describe their activities. These activities are also sometimes referred to simply as "actions".
The abouve quoted from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_art
For more information see:
http://eamusic.dartmouth.edu/~wowem/electronmedia/visual/performanceart.html
http://www.franklinfurnace.org/
http://www.one-year-performance.com/
http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen6A/index.html
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Installation Art
Installation art uses sculptural materials and other media to modify the way we experience a particular space. Installation art is not necessarily confined to gallery spaces and can be any material intervention in everyday public or private spaces.
Installation art incorporates almost any media to create an experience in a particular environment. Materials used in contemporary installation art range from everyday and natural materials to new media such as video, sound, performance, computers and the internet. Some installations are site-specific in that they are designed to only exist in the space for which they were created.
This genre of contemporary art came to prominence in the 1970s. Many trace the roots of this form of art to earlier artists such as Marcel Duchamp and his use of the readymade or to Kurt Schwitters' Merz art objects, rather than more traditional craft based sculpture. The intention of the artist is paramount in much later installation art whose roots lie in the conceptual art of the 1960s. This again is a departure from traditional sculpture which places its focus on form. Early non-Western installation art includes events staged by the Gutai group in Japan starting in 1954, which influenced American installation pioneers like Allan Kaprow.
Installation as nomenclature for a specific form of art came into use fairly recently; its first use as documented by the OED was in 1969. It was coined in this context in reference to a form of art that had arguably existed since prehistory but was not regarded as a discrete category until the mid-twentieth century. Allan Kaprow used the term “Environment” in 1958 (Kaprow 6) to describe his transformed indoor spaces; this later joined such terms as “project art” and “temporary art.”
Interactive installation is a branch off the installation arts category. Usually, an interactive installation will often involve the audience acting on it or the piece responding to the user’s activity. There are several kinds of interactive installations produced, these include web-based installations, gallery based installations, digital based installations, electronic based installations, etc. Interactive installations are mostly seen from the 1990s, when artists are more interested in the participation of the audiences where the meaning of the installation is generated.
With the improvement of technology over the years, artists are more able to explore out of the boundaries that were never be able to explore by artists in the past. The media used are more experimental and bold; they are also usually cross media and may involve sensors, which plays on the reaction to the audiences’ movement when looking at the installations. By using virtual Reality as a medium, immersive art is probably the most deeply interactive form of art. At the turn of a new century, there is a trend of interactive installations using video, film, sound and sculpture.
above reproduced from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Installation_art
for more information see:
http://www.installationart.net/
http://www.inside-installations.org/home/index.php
http://infopedia.nlb.gov.sg/Research/articles/PFInstallationArt.pdf
Installation art incorporates almost any media to create an experience in a particular environment. Materials used in contemporary installation art range from everyday and natural materials to new media such as video, sound, performance, computers and the internet. Some installations are site-specific in that they are designed to only exist in the space for which they were created.
This genre of contemporary art came to prominence in the 1970s. Many trace the roots of this form of art to earlier artists such as Marcel Duchamp and his use of the readymade or to Kurt Schwitters' Merz art objects, rather than more traditional craft based sculpture. The intention of the artist is paramount in much later installation art whose roots lie in the conceptual art of the 1960s. This again is a departure from traditional sculpture which places its focus on form. Early non-Western installation art includes events staged by the Gutai group in Japan starting in 1954, which influenced American installation pioneers like Allan Kaprow.
Installation as nomenclature for a specific form of art came into use fairly recently; its first use as documented by the OED was in 1969. It was coined in this context in reference to a form of art that had arguably existed since prehistory but was not regarded as a discrete category until the mid-twentieth century. Allan Kaprow used the term “Environment” in 1958 (Kaprow 6) to describe his transformed indoor spaces; this later joined such terms as “project art” and “temporary art.”
Interactive installation is a branch off the installation arts category. Usually, an interactive installation will often involve the audience acting on it or the piece responding to the user’s activity. There are several kinds of interactive installations produced, these include web-based installations, gallery based installations, digital based installations, electronic based installations, etc. Interactive installations are mostly seen from the 1990s, when artists are more interested in the participation of the audiences where the meaning of the installation is generated.
With the improvement of technology over the years, artists are more able to explore out of the boundaries that were never be able to explore by artists in the past. The media used are more experimental and bold; they are also usually cross media and may involve sensors, which plays on the reaction to the audiences’ movement when looking at the installations. By using virtual Reality as a medium, immersive art is probably the most deeply interactive form of art. At the turn of a new century, there is a trend of interactive installations using video, film, sound and sculpture.
above reproduced from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Installation_art
for more information see:
http://www.installationart.net/
http://www.inside-installations.org/home/index.php
http://infopedia.nlb.gov.sg/Research/articles/PFInstallationArt.pdf
Sound Art
Sound art is a loosely associated group of art practices that concern sound and listening as their focus. From the Western art historical tradition early examples include Luigi Russolo's Intonarumori or noise machines, and subsequent experiments by Dadaists, Surrealists, the Situationist International, and in Fluxus happenings. Because of the diversity of sound art, there is often debate about whether sound art falls inside and/or outside of both the visual art and experimental music categories.
Like many genres of contemporary art, sound art is often very interdisciplinary, commonly engaging in acoustics and psychoacoustics, audio technologies (both analog and digital), found or environmental sound, exploration of the human body, in conjunction with the standard set of visual issues found in contemporary art.
Other artistic lineages from which sound art emerges are sound poetry, spoken word, avant garde poetry, and experimental theater. Early practitioners include Tristan Tzara, Kurt Schwitters, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, William S. Burroughs, Hugo Ball, and Henri-Martin Barzun.
for more information see:
http://eamusic.dartmouth.edu/~kov/soundArt/index.html
http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=2413
http://onelonelypixel.org/soundart.html
http://cec.concordia.ca/econtact/9_2/wilson.html
http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue3/theartofnoise.htm
http://emfinstitute.emf.org/articles/aldrich03/aldrich.html
to listen to examples see:
http://www.ubu.com/sound/index.html
Like many genres of contemporary art, sound art is often very interdisciplinary, commonly engaging in acoustics and psychoacoustics, audio technologies (both analog and digital), found or environmental sound, exploration of the human body, in conjunction with the standard set of visual issues found in contemporary art.
Other artistic lineages from which sound art emerges are sound poetry, spoken word, avant garde poetry, and experimental theater. Early practitioners include Tristan Tzara, Kurt Schwitters, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, William S. Burroughs, Hugo Ball, and Henri-Martin Barzun.
for more information see:
http://eamusic.dartmouth.edu/~kov/soundArt/index.html
http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=2413
http://onelonelypixel.org/soundart.html
http://cec.concordia.ca/econtact/9_2/wilson.html
http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue3/theartofnoise.htm
http://emfinstitute.emf.org/articles/aldrich03/aldrich.html
to listen to examples see:
http://www.ubu.com/sound/index.html
"The right to be myself, as long as I live! As if I were a sound.": Postmodernism and the Music of John Cage, Nancy Perloff
"The right to be myself, as long as I live! As if I were a sound.": Postmodernism and the Music of John Cage
Nancy Perloff
from POSTMODERNISM: THE KEY FIGURES, ed. Hans Bertens and Joseph Natoli (2002), Blackwell, © 2002
In 1972, as the term "postmodernism" was beginning to gain wide currency, the American composer John Cage offered the following observations on the new music. His remarks, first made during the recording of the TV film Birdcage on April 7, 1972, appeared later in the periodical Protokolle-Wiener Halbjahresschrift fur Literature, Bildende Kunst und Musik (1974) and then in the journal October (1997):
"The two kinds of music now that interest me are on the one hand a music which is performed by everyone. And I would like to say that the Chinese people are, from my point of view, now performing a beautiful music which I would actually like to go and hear . . So I like that music by many, many people. And here, more and more in my performances, I try to bring about a situation in which there is no difference between the audience and the performers. And I’m not speaking of audience participation in something designed by the composer, but rather am I speaking of the music which arises through the activity of both performers and so-called audience. . . The other kind of music that interests me is one which has been traditionally interesting and enjoyable down through the ages, and that’s music which one makes oneself without constraining others. If you can do it by yourself you’re not in a situation of telling someone else what to do." (Cage and Helms, 1997, pp. 82-83)
Cage’s writings, his often detailed written instructions for performance, his explanations of compositional procedure, and his musical scores, all produced during a long and prolific career (b. 1912, d. 1992), provide extraordinarily rich and varied evidence of his role as twentieth-century modernist and as source for postmodern aesthetics. The vast modal differences underlying the writings, scores, and live performances also point to problems inherent in applying a "modernist" or "postmodernist" label to John Cage. In the early 1970s, as we see in the comments quoted above, Cage endorsed collaborative musical performances in which the audience worked together with performers, fusing art with its environment, and in which the composer’s will did not constrain participants’ activities. This de-centered, collaborative, and heterogeneous principle for musical performance seems very postmodern. Yet the decisive presence of Cage’s ego ("I like", "I try to bring about"), as well as the value he attached to historical musical practice, steered a modernist course. He designed and determined the performance situation, no matter how many participants were involved, and relied on his invention of chosen traditions from the past.
Did Cage tend more toward "modernism" or "postmodernism"? How is his radical contribution best understood? Cage moves between the seemingly oppositional contexts of postmodernism in the 1970s and 80s, and European modernism in the early twentieth century, with reference especially to the art of Erik Satie (whom Cage championed), Italian Futurism, and German Dada. Cage’s friendship and intellectual exchange with the French composer, Pierre Boulez, during the early 1950s offers a third vantage point. Although the three contexts are quite separate, stylistically and chronologically, each is integral to the evolving Cage oeuvre. Yet none entirely accounts for his radicality. Through a discussion of these comparative settings, Cage emerges as an experimentalist and an avant-garde figure who believed in his responsibility to change the world through new music.
Writers on music have used "postmodernism" less frequently than critics in other fields. Even when comprised of quotation and appropriated soudns, music is an abstract language. In the case of Cage, a particularly complex scenario emerges. Here we have a composer who wrote poetic texts and mesostics, transformed the score into a visual object, and created music to be performed with dance and theater. Owing perhaps to the revolutionary changes Cage introduced in the meaning of musical composition, critics have skirted the issue of Cage’s postmodernism, identifying him instead as a leader of the late twentieth-century avant-garde. By reviewing the postmodernist debate in relation to Cage, what conclusions might be drawn about the usefulness of "postmodernist" or avant-garde in defining his art?
The few critics who address Cage’s links to postmodernism (Henry Sayre, Richard C. Hobbs, David Shapiro) identify his collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg and Merce Cunningham, beginning with their Dadaist "Happening" at Black Mountain College in 1952, as a significant impetus for the avant-garde of the 70s. They define Cage’s collaborative work on the "Happening" and on experimental dance in New York City as instances of "theatricality", a term applied by Michael Fried in 1982 to contemporary painting and sculpture which "depends for its effects of ‘presence’ on the staging, the conspicuous manipulation, of its relation to an audience" (Sayre, 1989, p. 9) In the years following Fried’s introduction of the term, "theatricality" came to coincide with "postmodernism" and shifted from single media art to a performative art revealed through the collaboration of performers and audience, and of high and vernacular media, sounds, and images. The modernist frame disappeared in postmodernism, replaced by contingency and fragmentation.
The experimental performance or "Happening" which Cage created and staged in the dining hall at Black Mountain College placed the performers in the aisles among the audience and presented a range of simultaneous but unrelated events: John Cage on a ladder reciting either his Meister Eckhart lecture, lines from Meister Eckhart, a lecture on Zen Buddhism, the Bill of Rights, or the Declaration of Independence; Merce Cunningham dancing around the chairs; Rauschenberg standing in front of his paintings or playing scratchy Edith Piaf recordings at double speed; David Tudor playing a prepared piano and a small radio; and M.C. Richards and Charles Olson perched on a different ladder and reading from their poetry. No narrative unfolded. But the events witnessed by the audience were staged and could be enhanced and refined by the performers, in the course of performance. (Harris, 1987, pp. 226; 228) In both respects, Cage’s "Happening" was a new form of theater.
This theatricality and the close link between performance and composition prompted Sayre to identify Cage, Rauschenberg and Cunningham as the originators of postmodernism. Sayre supported his argument with a discussion of important documents such as the "Interview with Roger Reynolds", published in 1962 in the Henmar Press catalogue of Cage’s compositions through 1962, the essay "Composition as Process", and particular compositions. In the Roger Reynolds interview, Cage redefined the nature of composition. Composition was not a finished, static object performed before an audience of passive listeners, but, rather, a changing acoustical experience subjective to each individual (performer and auditor) in the performance space. Since the performance action might have no beginning, middle, or end, and no discernible ordering of events, the composition as process opened the possibility for many different receptions and critiques by the audience. The French philosopher Roland Barthes concurred with the argument that Cage introduced a new music. Barthes’ analysis of this break linked the new role of performance with the idea of multiple signifiers in Cage’s music and the ceaseless production of new signifiers during the act of listening. In Barthes’s view, a sharp line had to be drawn between classical music, with its requirements that listeners decipher the construction of the piece from a code, and what he called the "new music as exemplified by Cage", which offered listeners a "shimmering of signifiers". This heterogeneity of codes with their shifting meanings and referents affected the listening process, which Barthes compared to the experience of reading a modern text: "Just as the reading of the modern text…does not consist in receiving, in knowing or in feeling this text, but in writing it anew", there is a kind of composition that requires us "to perform" it, "to operate" its music, "to lure it (as it lends itself) into an unknown praxis. (Barthes, 1985, pp. 259; 265) Here Barthes implicitly concurred with Sayre’s view that the performative requirements of Cage’s music define its novelty and hence its postmodernism.
Both the dancer Yvonne Rainer and the critic and philosopher Theodor Adorno discussed Cagian ideas associated with postmodernism, and attack them as apolitical and uncritical. In talking about Cage’s impact on her dance, Rainer praised the precedents he established for a new nonhierarchical, indeterminate organization, but argued that this nonhierarchy still failed to enable us to, as Cage would have it, "wake up to the excellent life we are living". On the contrary, she asserted, the critical insights gained from new methods of indeterminate composition and performance lead us to question whether the life we lead is so excellent, so just, so right, and how and why we have been led to believe this (Sayre, 1989, p. 8). Adorno attacked Cage for the practice of indeterminacy, the freedom to let sounds be sounds, the aesthetic of a composition’s interpenetration with its surroundings. The philosopher endorses, instead, relative autonomy of the work of art from its social conditions, believing both in the composer’s independence and his exertion of some control, so that the work assumed a critical function in relation to society. (Joseph, 1997, pp. 90; 95)
In The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, Lydia Goehr took a different tack on the radical nature of the ego in Cage. She argued that Cage did not succeed in abdicating control of, and hence distance from, the musical performance and attributed this ‘failure’ to a split between his theory (his ideas and aspirations) and his actual musical practice. Goehr avoided the terms "postmodern" or "modern", but posited that a chance-inspired musical work like the celebrated "4’33", premiered by David Tudor in 1952, still operated within the protocols of the concert hall. The concert setting conveyed a message to the audience about when to applaud and how to behave during the performance. The fixed duration told the audience to follow this behavior during an allotted time period. Cage intended to relinquish control over the performance, so that the sounds of audience and space would produce the contents of the piece. In Goehr’s view, however, theory and practice went their separate ways, since specific performance instructions circumscribed the range of random sounds and events. (Goehr, 1992, pp. 261-264) Whereas Rainer and Adorno believed that a stronger ego would articulate a critique of social conditions, Goehr asserted that Cage’s performances were the result of a powerful ego, which imposed choices that inadvertently strengthened, rather than undermined, the work-concept.
In seizing upon Cage’s theatricality and nonhierarchy as a source for postmodernism of the 70s, critics overlooked the emergence of collaborative and mixed media performance in Europe as early as the 1910s. (Sayre, 1989, p. 9) Satie’s ‘lyric comedy in one act. . . with dance music by the same gentleman’, Le Piège de Méduse (Medusa’s Trap) (1913), was revived as part of a Satie Festival organized by Cage at Black Mountain College in 1948. The production, which marked the American premiere, featured Buckminster Fuller as the Baron Medusa, Merce Cunningham as the mechanical monkey, sets by Elaine de Kooning, dances performed by Cunningham, and piano accompaniment by Cage. While fully notated and scripted (far from a chance piece), Piège de Méduse experiments with absurdist word-play, outrageous disjunctions between dialogue and stage action, and mixed media (dance, theater, music). (Whiting, 1999, pp. 449-60) It surely influenced Cage’s Black Mountain "Happening" staged four years later with Cunningham. Méduse coincided in time with the Italian Futurists’ organization of concerts of new sounds and with the Dadaists’ creation of a new form of poetic recitation. Luigi Russolo, the pioneer of Futurist music, broke the "limited circle of pure sounds" by composing scores for intonorumori (noise-intoners). He designed these instruments to produce noise-sounds divided into six timbral types: "booms, whistles, whispers, screams, percussive sounds and vocal sounds (human and animal". He intended this medley to simulate the sounds of the street and vernacular life. Cage’s interest in noise as the primary material of music indicates that he was familiar with Russolo’s writings. (Pritchett, 1993, p. 12) For German Dadaists such as Kurt Schwitters and Raoul Hausmann, new performance expressed itself in an abstract poetry, in which the formal visual patterns of words and letters served also as scores for poetic recitation.
The modernist theater of Satie, Russolo, and Schwitters are but three examples of performance genres which preceded and inspired Cage. He studied the aesthetics of the past and borrowed from musical and philosophical traditions that intrigued him, in order to invent his own voice (Pasler, 1994, pp. 125; 133) It is important to recognize this practice as we define Cage’s position vis-à-vis postmodernism. Whereas postmodernist artists referred to historical practices through techniques of quotation and bricolage, Cage used history as an intensive research process involving reinterpretations of tradition from his contemporary vantage and leading to the discovery of a personal style.
Cage’s serious study of the past began early in his career, during lessons in counterpoint and analysis with Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles (March, 1935 – Summer, 1937) and during a six-month stay in Europe in 1949. Cage spent the bulk of his time in Paris, where he went regularly to the Bibliothèque Nationale to study the life and work of Satie -- one year after he had arranged the celebrated Satie performance at Black Mountain. During his visit, Cage pursued Virgil Thomson’s suggestion to contact Pierre Boulez, the most prominent French composer of the postwar avant-garde. The two developed a close friendship, which continued through correspondence when Cage returned to New York in November, 1949. (Nattiez, 1993, pp. 4-7) Cage was thirty-six, and Boulez twenty-four. A study of their friendship, their shared views on musical composition, and their gradual divergence, presents a new context for evaluating Cage as postmodernist. Is Boulez a postmodern composer? If not, does his position help define where Cage stands?
When he first met Boulez, Cage was searching for matrices with which to organize his works, particularly their rhythmic structure. A letter he received from Boulez in August 1951 suggests the nature of their Paris conversations. Using technical terms, Boulez described how the notion of the twelve-tone series could be generalized to apply not only to frequency but to intensities (volume), attacks, rhythm, and even timbre. (Nattiez, 1993, pp. 99ff) Boulez spoke of the "serial structure" of each musical parameter and introduced corresponding tables which mapped out the serial organization. This letter so impressed Cage that he translated much of it and published it in 1952 in the journal Transformations, with commentary by Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, and Cage. By bringing together the French serialist Boulez with American composers of chance and indeterminacy, Cage made a statement about the new music. He affirmed the common goal of composers of new music to isolate and compose for individual musical parameters, so that the parameters could then be integrated in different combinations.
Boulez’s admiration for Cage hinged on their common interest in doing away with Western European harmony and defining sound instead as an aggregate of timbre, frequency, attack, and duration. In a lecture Boulez delivered on Cage on June 17, 1949 (while Cage was in Paris), Boulez praised his colleague for "making use of sound complexes", instead of "pure sounds". In the published version of this lecture which appeared in 1952 in La Revue Musicale ("Possibly"), Boulez expanded this point:
We also owe to John Cage the idea of sound complexes; for he has written works in which, instead of using pure sounds, he employs chords which have no harmonic function, being essentially a sort of amalgam of sounds linked to timbres, durations, and intensities. (Nattiez, 1993, p. 9)
Boulez was most likely thinking of the sounds of Cage’s prepared piano, a magical tranformation of the piano into a percussion instrument capable of producing different timbres when materials (string, rubber band, metal coils…) were inserted between the strings. During the 1940s Cage had composed many pieces for prepared piano with which Boulez was clearly familiar.
The basis for friendship between the two young composers was solid: an interest in structure and in structural relations between musical parameters, in mathematical tables which charted out the different parameters, in sonic aggregates, in the idea of the series. They parted ways, however, as Cage became increasingly interested in chance and in a new performance situation. Boulez had always been critical of Morton Feldman’s "imprecision" and "simplicity", but as early as December 1951 Boulez lashed out at Cage’s precise use of chance in Music of Changes (1951):
"The only thing, forgive me, which I am not happy with, is the method of absolute chance (by tossing the coins). On the contrary, I believe that chance must be extremely controlled: by using tables in general, or series of tables, I believe that it would be possible to direct the phenomenon of the automatism of chance, whether written down or not. . . there is already quite enough of the unknown." (Nattiez, 1993, p. 17)
In Music of Changes, Cage used the I Ching, or Chinese Book of Changes, to create charts corresponding to three musical parameters: sound, duration, dynamics. To compose his piece, he tossed the dice (Boulez’s coins), obtained numbers referring to different cells in his charts, devised a sound aggregate with the resultant frequency, duration, and dynamics cells, then threw the dice to construct the next sound. In Boulez’s view, Cage left too much to chance. Boulez’s use of mathematical tables, which Cage initially found appealing, utterly controlled both the compositional process and the outcome. The idea of selecting compositional materials according to chance methods was unacceptable to the French composer.
In his rejection of Western harmony and his application of the idea of the tone row of Schoenberg and Webern to all aspects of musical structure, Boulez stood as a leading avant-garde figure. He was not, however, a postmodernist or even a source for postmodernism, for reasons that are clear from his response to Music of Changes. Neither Boulez’s theory nor his practice expressed an intent to remove the ego, make the auditor central, and fuse art with life. Seen in relation to Boulez, Cage was the American experimentalist who used the discipline practiced by Boulez to redefine both musical composition and performance, and to introduce randomness. Unlike those of Boulez, Cage’s experiments involved collaboration with any number of artists in other media (Cunningham in dance, Rauschenberg and Johns in painting and set design, filmmakers, video artists). Recasting the modernism of Satie, Italian Futurism, Dada, and other early modernist movements, Cage infused the vernacular into his composition by giving audiences the freedom to move and participate and, during the 60s, by conceiving of the work as a disciplined action by the performer with or without sounds. (Pritchett, 1993, p. 146)
Yet to place Boulez with the avant-garde and Cage with postmodernism is far too simple. The two composers had much in common. Both believed in building upon tradition, in this case the serialism of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern. Both believed that in applying serial structure to all musical components, they were extending and reinterpreting the work initiated by this Second Viennese School to replace functional harmony with a disciplined counterpoint in which one sound did not imply the next. Neither Boulez nor Cage engaged in social and political satire or attack. They tended not to appropriate and combine fragments of social and cultural history, philosophy, or composition to create multiple voices and simulacra. Cage, in particular, sought to discover a "suitable past" from which to invent a tradition of which he was the logical heir, the next voice. (Pasler, 1994, pp. 125; 133) He was concerned to carve his place in history, his original voice. Absorbed by the past, Cage joined the "mainstream of musical modernism" and set himself apart from the "fading sense of history" and the life in a "perpetual present" of postmodernist culture. (Pasler, 1994, 140; Connor, 1989, p. 91)
In assessing whether the postmodernist label aptly defines Cagian composition and aesthetics, I have argued that his interest in theater and mixed media may have prefigured postmodernism; I have situated Cage in the context of European modernism of the 1910s and 20s; and I have discussed his work in relation to that of the French avant-garde composer Pierre Boulez. The missing link is the contribution of Cage to our understanding of the present world, independently of movements he may have anticipated, echoed, or refuted. With every decade, Cage’s work changed dramatically. In the 1950s, he explored procedures of chance and indeterminacy, devising unique graphic notations which performers could realize in a myriad of ways and raising perplexing questions about critical evaluation based on the written score or on the performance (which always changed). Cage sought to create a world of interpenetrating sounds, without hierarchy among these sounds. (Pritchett, 1993, pp. 139; 146) In the 60s, Cage’s aesthetic changed. Rather than treating the composition as a concrete object made up of sounds, he approached it as an action, a process in which the composer set up electronic components, and the performer realized a score that offered broad outlines, but no specifics. For instance, the score for Cage’s 0’00 (4’33" no. 2) of 1962 contains the following sentence: "In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action." By the 1970s, according to James Pritchett, Cage’s aesthetic had changed again, preoccupied more with an eclectic mixture of styles than with a single music of the future. (Pritchett, 1993, pp. 146; 158; 173)
Cage’s production was diverse, yet motivated throughout by goals which cannot be contained within the postmodernist rubric. The utopian vision of modernism and American experimentalism led Cage to transform the traditional roles of composer, performer, and audience, and to introduce a vision of "freedom given to disciplined people" to change society and to show the "practicality of anarchy". (Cage, 1997, p. 81) Cage used chance procedures in order to shift the authorial voice from the composer, to the performer and to the individual members of the audience. His move away from self-expression resonates with the multiple voices of postmodernism, although indeterminacy operated within his chosen parameters. In addition, the "postmodernist" rubric does not adequately explain Cage’s challenge to musical composition, the revolution he sparked in the 1950s by establishing difference between writing (the musical score) and sound (the performance). Cage paved the way for the production of works that were not fully notated or fixed. In the 1960s and 70s, Fluxus musicians went on to explore this idea of the "open work", which anticipated conceptual art. (Pepper, 1997, pp. 37-38) The Cagian tension between the written score and the variable performance, the resulting paradox that the score is autonomous, without fixed referent, the treatment of composition as process, the expansion of the possibility for multiple signifiers and critical receptions – such ideas propelled the avant-garde to new terrain. Explored in their own right, they distinguish Cage as a startlingly provocative voice whose originality made room for a new freedom for the contemporary audience.
reproduced from: http://www.ubu.com/papers/perloff_nancy.html
Nancy Perloff
from POSTMODERNISM: THE KEY FIGURES, ed. Hans Bertens and Joseph Natoli (2002), Blackwell, © 2002
In 1972, as the term "postmodernism" was beginning to gain wide currency, the American composer John Cage offered the following observations on the new music. His remarks, first made during the recording of the TV film Birdcage on April 7, 1972, appeared later in the periodical Protokolle-Wiener Halbjahresschrift fur Literature, Bildende Kunst und Musik (1974) and then in the journal October (1997):
"The two kinds of music now that interest me are on the one hand a music which is performed by everyone. And I would like to say that the Chinese people are, from my point of view, now performing a beautiful music which I would actually like to go and hear . . So I like that music by many, many people. And here, more and more in my performances, I try to bring about a situation in which there is no difference between the audience and the performers. And I’m not speaking of audience participation in something designed by the composer, but rather am I speaking of the music which arises through the activity of both performers and so-called audience. . . The other kind of music that interests me is one which has been traditionally interesting and enjoyable down through the ages, and that’s music which one makes oneself without constraining others. If you can do it by yourself you’re not in a situation of telling someone else what to do." (Cage and Helms, 1997, pp. 82-83)
Cage’s writings, his often detailed written instructions for performance, his explanations of compositional procedure, and his musical scores, all produced during a long and prolific career (b. 1912, d. 1992), provide extraordinarily rich and varied evidence of his role as twentieth-century modernist and as source for postmodern aesthetics. The vast modal differences underlying the writings, scores, and live performances also point to problems inherent in applying a "modernist" or "postmodernist" label to John Cage. In the early 1970s, as we see in the comments quoted above, Cage endorsed collaborative musical performances in which the audience worked together with performers, fusing art with its environment, and in which the composer’s will did not constrain participants’ activities. This de-centered, collaborative, and heterogeneous principle for musical performance seems very postmodern. Yet the decisive presence of Cage’s ego ("I like", "I try to bring about"), as well as the value he attached to historical musical practice, steered a modernist course. He designed and determined the performance situation, no matter how many participants were involved, and relied on his invention of chosen traditions from the past.
Did Cage tend more toward "modernism" or "postmodernism"? How is his radical contribution best understood? Cage moves between the seemingly oppositional contexts of postmodernism in the 1970s and 80s, and European modernism in the early twentieth century, with reference especially to the art of Erik Satie (whom Cage championed), Italian Futurism, and German Dada. Cage’s friendship and intellectual exchange with the French composer, Pierre Boulez, during the early 1950s offers a third vantage point. Although the three contexts are quite separate, stylistically and chronologically, each is integral to the evolving Cage oeuvre. Yet none entirely accounts for his radicality. Through a discussion of these comparative settings, Cage emerges as an experimentalist and an avant-garde figure who believed in his responsibility to change the world through new music.
Writers on music have used "postmodernism" less frequently than critics in other fields. Even when comprised of quotation and appropriated soudns, music is an abstract language. In the case of Cage, a particularly complex scenario emerges. Here we have a composer who wrote poetic texts and mesostics, transformed the score into a visual object, and created music to be performed with dance and theater. Owing perhaps to the revolutionary changes Cage introduced in the meaning of musical composition, critics have skirted the issue of Cage’s postmodernism, identifying him instead as a leader of the late twentieth-century avant-garde. By reviewing the postmodernist debate in relation to Cage, what conclusions might be drawn about the usefulness of "postmodernist" or avant-garde in defining his art?
The few critics who address Cage’s links to postmodernism (Henry Sayre, Richard C. Hobbs, David Shapiro) identify his collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg and Merce Cunningham, beginning with their Dadaist "Happening" at Black Mountain College in 1952, as a significant impetus for the avant-garde of the 70s. They define Cage’s collaborative work on the "Happening" and on experimental dance in New York City as instances of "theatricality", a term applied by Michael Fried in 1982 to contemporary painting and sculpture which "depends for its effects of ‘presence’ on the staging, the conspicuous manipulation, of its relation to an audience" (Sayre, 1989, p. 9) In the years following Fried’s introduction of the term, "theatricality" came to coincide with "postmodernism" and shifted from single media art to a performative art revealed through the collaboration of performers and audience, and of high and vernacular media, sounds, and images. The modernist frame disappeared in postmodernism, replaced by contingency and fragmentation.
The experimental performance or "Happening" which Cage created and staged in the dining hall at Black Mountain College placed the performers in the aisles among the audience and presented a range of simultaneous but unrelated events: John Cage on a ladder reciting either his Meister Eckhart lecture, lines from Meister Eckhart, a lecture on Zen Buddhism, the Bill of Rights, or the Declaration of Independence; Merce Cunningham dancing around the chairs; Rauschenberg standing in front of his paintings or playing scratchy Edith Piaf recordings at double speed; David Tudor playing a prepared piano and a small radio; and M.C. Richards and Charles Olson perched on a different ladder and reading from their poetry. No narrative unfolded. But the events witnessed by the audience were staged and could be enhanced and refined by the performers, in the course of performance. (Harris, 1987, pp. 226; 228) In both respects, Cage’s "Happening" was a new form of theater.
This theatricality and the close link between performance and composition prompted Sayre to identify Cage, Rauschenberg and Cunningham as the originators of postmodernism. Sayre supported his argument with a discussion of important documents such as the "Interview with Roger Reynolds", published in 1962 in the Henmar Press catalogue of Cage’s compositions through 1962, the essay "Composition as Process", and particular compositions. In the Roger Reynolds interview, Cage redefined the nature of composition. Composition was not a finished, static object performed before an audience of passive listeners, but, rather, a changing acoustical experience subjective to each individual (performer and auditor) in the performance space. Since the performance action might have no beginning, middle, or end, and no discernible ordering of events, the composition as process opened the possibility for many different receptions and critiques by the audience. The French philosopher Roland Barthes concurred with the argument that Cage introduced a new music. Barthes’ analysis of this break linked the new role of performance with the idea of multiple signifiers in Cage’s music and the ceaseless production of new signifiers during the act of listening. In Barthes’s view, a sharp line had to be drawn between classical music, with its requirements that listeners decipher the construction of the piece from a code, and what he called the "new music as exemplified by Cage", which offered listeners a "shimmering of signifiers". This heterogeneity of codes with their shifting meanings and referents affected the listening process, which Barthes compared to the experience of reading a modern text: "Just as the reading of the modern text…does not consist in receiving, in knowing or in feeling this text, but in writing it anew", there is a kind of composition that requires us "to perform" it, "to operate" its music, "to lure it (as it lends itself) into an unknown praxis. (Barthes, 1985, pp. 259; 265) Here Barthes implicitly concurred with Sayre’s view that the performative requirements of Cage’s music define its novelty and hence its postmodernism.
Both the dancer Yvonne Rainer and the critic and philosopher Theodor Adorno discussed Cagian ideas associated with postmodernism, and attack them as apolitical and uncritical. In talking about Cage’s impact on her dance, Rainer praised the precedents he established for a new nonhierarchical, indeterminate organization, but argued that this nonhierarchy still failed to enable us to, as Cage would have it, "wake up to the excellent life we are living". On the contrary, she asserted, the critical insights gained from new methods of indeterminate composition and performance lead us to question whether the life we lead is so excellent, so just, so right, and how and why we have been led to believe this (Sayre, 1989, p. 8). Adorno attacked Cage for the practice of indeterminacy, the freedom to let sounds be sounds, the aesthetic of a composition’s interpenetration with its surroundings. The philosopher endorses, instead, relative autonomy of the work of art from its social conditions, believing both in the composer’s independence and his exertion of some control, so that the work assumed a critical function in relation to society. (Joseph, 1997, pp. 90; 95)
In The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, Lydia Goehr took a different tack on the radical nature of the ego in Cage. She argued that Cage did not succeed in abdicating control of, and hence distance from, the musical performance and attributed this ‘failure’ to a split between his theory (his ideas and aspirations) and his actual musical practice. Goehr avoided the terms "postmodern" or "modern", but posited that a chance-inspired musical work like the celebrated "4’33", premiered by David Tudor in 1952, still operated within the protocols of the concert hall. The concert setting conveyed a message to the audience about when to applaud and how to behave during the performance. The fixed duration told the audience to follow this behavior during an allotted time period. Cage intended to relinquish control over the performance, so that the sounds of audience and space would produce the contents of the piece. In Goehr’s view, however, theory and practice went their separate ways, since specific performance instructions circumscribed the range of random sounds and events. (Goehr, 1992, pp. 261-264) Whereas Rainer and Adorno believed that a stronger ego would articulate a critique of social conditions, Goehr asserted that Cage’s performances were the result of a powerful ego, which imposed choices that inadvertently strengthened, rather than undermined, the work-concept.
In seizing upon Cage’s theatricality and nonhierarchy as a source for postmodernism of the 70s, critics overlooked the emergence of collaborative and mixed media performance in Europe as early as the 1910s. (Sayre, 1989, p. 9) Satie’s ‘lyric comedy in one act. . . with dance music by the same gentleman’, Le Piège de Méduse (Medusa’s Trap) (1913), was revived as part of a Satie Festival organized by Cage at Black Mountain College in 1948. The production, which marked the American premiere, featured Buckminster Fuller as the Baron Medusa, Merce Cunningham as the mechanical monkey, sets by Elaine de Kooning, dances performed by Cunningham, and piano accompaniment by Cage. While fully notated and scripted (far from a chance piece), Piège de Méduse experiments with absurdist word-play, outrageous disjunctions between dialogue and stage action, and mixed media (dance, theater, music). (Whiting, 1999, pp. 449-60) It surely influenced Cage’s Black Mountain "Happening" staged four years later with Cunningham. Méduse coincided in time with the Italian Futurists’ organization of concerts of new sounds and with the Dadaists’ creation of a new form of poetic recitation. Luigi Russolo, the pioneer of Futurist music, broke the "limited circle of pure sounds" by composing scores for intonorumori (noise-intoners). He designed these instruments to produce noise-sounds divided into six timbral types: "booms, whistles, whispers, screams, percussive sounds and vocal sounds (human and animal". He intended this medley to simulate the sounds of the street and vernacular life. Cage’s interest in noise as the primary material of music indicates that he was familiar with Russolo’s writings. (Pritchett, 1993, p. 12) For German Dadaists such as Kurt Schwitters and Raoul Hausmann, new performance expressed itself in an abstract poetry, in which the formal visual patterns of words and letters served also as scores for poetic recitation.
The modernist theater of Satie, Russolo, and Schwitters are but three examples of performance genres which preceded and inspired Cage. He studied the aesthetics of the past and borrowed from musical and philosophical traditions that intrigued him, in order to invent his own voice (Pasler, 1994, pp. 125; 133) It is important to recognize this practice as we define Cage’s position vis-à-vis postmodernism. Whereas postmodernist artists referred to historical practices through techniques of quotation and bricolage, Cage used history as an intensive research process involving reinterpretations of tradition from his contemporary vantage and leading to the discovery of a personal style.
Cage’s serious study of the past began early in his career, during lessons in counterpoint and analysis with Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles (March, 1935 – Summer, 1937) and during a six-month stay in Europe in 1949. Cage spent the bulk of his time in Paris, where he went regularly to the Bibliothèque Nationale to study the life and work of Satie -- one year after he had arranged the celebrated Satie performance at Black Mountain. During his visit, Cage pursued Virgil Thomson’s suggestion to contact Pierre Boulez, the most prominent French composer of the postwar avant-garde. The two developed a close friendship, which continued through correspondence when Cage returned to New York in November, 1949. (Nattiez, 1993, pp. 4-7) Cage was thirty-six, and Boulez twenty-four. A study of their friendship, their shared views on musical composition, and their gradual divergence, presents a new context for evaluating Cage as postmodernist. Is Boulez a postmodern composer? If not, does his position help define where Cage stands?
When he first met Boulez, Cage was searching for matrices with which to organize his works, particularly their rhythmic structure. A letter he received from Boulez in August 1951 suggests the nature of their Paris conversations. Using technical terms, Boulez described how the notion of the twelve-tone series could be generalized to apply not only to frequency but to intensities (volume), attacks, rhythm, and even timbre. (Nattiez, 1993, pp. 99ff) Boulez spoke of the "serial structure" of each musical parameter and introduced corresponding tables which mapped out the serial organization. This letter so impressed Cage that he translated much of it and published it in 1952 in the journal Transformations, with commentary by Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, and Cage. By bringing together the French serialist Boulez with American composers of chance and indeterminacy, Cage made a statement about the new music. He affirmed the common goal of composers of new music to isolate and compose for individual musical parameters, so that the parameters could then be integrated in different combinations.
Boulez’s admiration for Cage hinged on their common interest in doing away with Western European harmony and defining sound instead as an aggregate of timbre, frequency, attack, and duration. In a lecture Boulez delivered on Cage on June 17, 1949 (while Cage was in Paris), Boulez praised his colleague for "making use of sound complexes", instead of "pure sounds". In the published version of this lecture which appeared in 1952 in La Revue Musicale ("Possibly"), Boulez expanded this point:
We also owe to John Cage the idea of sound complexes; for he has written works in which, instead of using pure sounds, he employs chords which have no harmonic function, being essentially a sort of amalgam of sounds linked to timbres, durations, and intensities. (Nattiez, 1993, p. 9)
Boulez was most likely thinking of the sounds of Cage’s prepared piano, a magical tranformation of the piano into a percussion instrument capable of producing different timbres when materials (string, rubber band, metal coils…) were inserted between the strings. During the 1940s Cage had composed many pieces for prepared piano with which Boulez was clearly familiar.
The basis for friendship between the two young composers was solid: an interest in structure and in structural relations between musical parameters, in mathematical tables which charted out the different parameters, in sonic aggregates, in the idea of the series. They parted ways, however, as Cage became increasingly interested in chance and in a new performance situation. Boulez had always been critical of Morton Feldman’s "imprecision" and "simplicity", but as early as December 1951 Boulez lashed out at Cage’s precise use of chance in Music of Changes (1951):
"The only thing, forgive me, which I am not happy with, is the method of absolute chance (by tossing the coins). On the contrary, I believe that chance must be extremely controlled: by using tables in general, or series of tables, I believe that it would be possible to direct the phenomenon of the automatism of chance, whether written down or not. . . there is already quite enough of the unknown." (Nattiez, 1993, p. 17)
In Music of Changes, Cage used the I Ching, or Chinese Book of Changes, to create charts corresponding to three musical parameters: sound, duration, dynamics. To compose his piece, he tossed the dice (Boulez’s coins), obtained numbers referring to different cells in his charts, devised a sound aggregate with the resultant frequency, duration, and dynamics cells, then threw the dice to construct the next sound. In Boulez’s view, Cage left too much to chance. Boulez’s use of mathematical tables, which Cage initially found appealing, utterly controlled both the compositional process and the outcome. The idea of selecting compositional materials according to chance methods was unacceptable to the French composer.
In his rejection of Western harmony and his application of the idea of the tone row of Schoenberg and Webern to all aspects of musical structure, Boulez stood as a leading avant-garde figure. He was not, however, a postmodernist or even a source for postmodernism, for reasons that are clear from his response to Music of Changes. Neither Boulez’s theory nor his practice expressed an intent to remove the ego, make the auditor central, and fuse art with life. Seen in relation to Boulez, Cage was the American experimentalist who used the discipline practiced by Boulez to redefine both musical composition and performance, and to introduce randomness. Unlike those of Boulez, Cage’s experiments involved collaboration with any number of artists in other media (Cunningham in dance, Rauschenberg and Johns in painting and set design, filmmakers, video artists). Recasting the modernism of Satie, Italian Futurism, Dada, and other early modernist movements, Cage infused the vernacular into his composition by giving audiences the freedom to move and participate and, during the 60s, by conceiving of the work as a disciplined action by the performer with or without sounds. (Pritchett, 1993, p. 146)
Yet to place Boulez with the avant-garde and Cage with postmodernism is far too simple. The two composers had much in common. Both believed in building upon tradition, in this case the serialism of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern. Both believed that in applying serial structure to all musical components, they were extending and reinterpreting the work initiated by this Second Viennese School to replace functional harmony with a disciplined counterpoint in which one sound did not imply the next. Neither Boulez nor Cage engaged in social and political satire or attack. They tended not to appropriate and combine fragments of social and cultural history, philosophy, or composition to create multiple voices and simulacra. Cage, in particular, sought to discover a "suitable past" from which to invent a tradition of which he was the logical heir, the next voice. (Pasler, 1994, pp. 125; 133) He was concerned to carve his place in history, his original voice. Absorbed by the past, Cage joined the "mainstream of musical modernism" and set himself apart from the "fading sense of history" and the life in a "perpetual present" of postmodernist culture. (Pasler, 1994, 140; Connor, 1989, p. 91)
In assessing whether the postmodernist label aptly defines Cagian composition and aesthetics, I have argued that his interest in theater and mixed media may have prefigured postmodernism; I have situated Cage in the context of European modernism of the 1910s and 20s; and I have discussed his work in relation to that of the French avant-garde composer Pierre Boulez. The missing link is the contribution of Cage to our understanding of the present world, independently of movements he may have anticipated, echoed, or refuted. With every decade, Cage’s work changed dramatically. In the 1950s, he explored procedures of chance and indeterminacy, devising unique graphic notations which performers could realize in a myriad of ways and raising perplexing questions about critical evaluation based on the written score or on the performance (which always changed). Cage sought to create a world of interpenetrating sounds, without hierarchy among these sounds. (Pritchett, 1993, pp. 139; 146) In the 60s, Cage’s aesthetic changed. Rather than treating the composition as a concrete object made up of sounds, he approached it as an action, a process in which the composer set up electronic components, and the performer realized a score that offered broad outlines, but no specifics. For instance, the score for Cage’s 0’00 (4’33" no. 2) of 1962 contains the following sentence: "In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action." By the 1970s, according to James Pritchett, Cage’s aesthetic had changed again, preoccupied more with an eclectic mixture of styles than with a single music of the future. (Pritchett, 1993, pp. 146; 158; 173)
Cage’s production was diverse, yet motivated throughout by goals which cannot be contained within the postmodernist rubric. The utopian vision of modernism and American experimentalism led Cage to transform the traditional roles of composer, performer, and audience, and to introduce a vision of "freedom given to disciplined people" to change society and to show the "practicality of anarchy". (Cage, 1997, p. 81) Cage used chance procedures in order to shift the authorial voice from the composer, to the performer and to the individual members of the audience. His move away from self-expression resonates with the multiple voices of postmodernism, although indeterminacy operated within his chosen parameters. In addition, the "postmodernist" rubric does not adequately explain Cage’s challenge to musical composition, the revolution he sparked in the 1950s by establishing difference between writing (the musical score) and sound (the performance). Cage paved the way for the production of works that were not fully notated or fixed. In the 1960s and 70s, Fluxus musicians went on to explore this idea of the "open work", which anticipated conceptual art. (Pepper, 1997, pp. 37-38) The Cagian tension between the written score and the variable performance, the resulting paradox that the score is autonomous, without fixed referent, the treatment of composition as process, the expansion of the possibility for multiple signifiers and critical receptions – such ideas propelled the avant-garde to new terrain. Explored in their own right, they distinguish Cage as a startlingly provocative voice whose originality made room for a new freedom for the contemporary audience.
reproduced from: http://www.ubu.com/papers/perloff_nancy.html
The Context of a Vanguard: Toward a Definition of Concrete Poetry, Jon M. Tolman
The Context of a Vanguard: Toward a Definition of Concrete Poetry
Jon M. Tolman
Poetics Today, Vol. 3, No.3, Poetics of the Avant-Garde. (Summer, 1982), pp. 149-166.
This essay represents an attempt to define Brazilian concrete poetry (and the world-wide movement it headed) within the context of contemporary vanguard movements. It is my intention to demonstrate that concrete poetry developed into the first truly classical literary movement of modern times. It achieved this breakthrough by rejecting the effort of neo- classical restoration groups to establish a contemporary poetic movement by disinterring the past. Concrete poetry will be shown to be essentially anti-romantic in sensibility and technique. Whether an isolated phenomenon or the first manifestation of a new spirit, its psychological, social and literary profile will be seen to be undeniably classical. As a pioneering movement it necessarily employs a number of strategies developed by earlier, romantic avant-gardes, but the theoretical writing of the movement clearly demonstrates that this use of the past is not anachronistic but rather that the recognition that certain achievements of the past have made possible a new aesthetic awareness. The concrete poets possess a well-defined sense of culmination or supplantation in which they do not worship or imitate the past, but build upon it.
Before undertaking my demonstration of these theories, I shall begin with a brief historical presentation in order to locate the Brazilian movement within its immediate literary tradition. Brazilian literature entered the twentieth century twenty years behind the times, having been kidnapped by a Parnassian movement which dominated Brazil as it never dominated France. Its domain was so pervasive, in fact, that Symbolism was almost stillborn, reduced in impact and relegated to distinct minority status until 1922, when it was rescued from oblivion by a revolutionary generation that used it as a weapon against a moribund Parnassian establishment. What happened in 1922 was the Modern Art Week, which ushered in an eight-year spree known in Brazil as Modernism, and which under the banner of innovation, brought Brazil into line with Europe. Iconoclastic, destructive and intensely nationalistic, Modernism was basically expressionist in orientation, but only certain elements of the European avant-garde were imported into Brazil. There was marked indifference to imagism, Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism (in sharp contrast with Spanish America, where Surrealism, even today, has a profound influence). However, certain attitudes universally shared by avant-garde movements were accepted. Among them were a rejection of traditional poetics, with its formalistic emphasis on rhyme and meter; a gleeful spirit of épater le bourgeois; a search for a national language, a national identity. By 1930 Modernism had worn itself out and gave way to a more constructive spirit which maintained its formal iconoclasm even while turning away from it thematically. Nationalism was abandoned as poets turned inward searching for individual identity, thereby anticipating the alienation which would be the dominant attitude in the literature of postwar Europe and America. In prose, the poetic nationalism of the previous period crystallized into the novel of the Brazilian Northeast, neo-realistic in technique and reformist or revolutionary in its social message.
In the late forties a growing dissatisfaction with the formlessness of the previous aesthetic began to manifest itself in poetry through a return to traditional poetics. The first traditional form to reappear was the sonnet, to be followed by the ode and other long-abandoned devices. In prose a similar reaction took place. In fact the entire evolution of postwar Brazilian literature may be said to have been dominated by formalism and formalistic experimentation. In poetry this formalistic preoccupation coalesced into what would be called the Generation of 1945, later to be accused of being neo-Parnassian. The most important poet of this period, João Cabral de Melo Neto, collaborated only briefly with the "Orpheus Group," as they called themselves, before pulling away from them to develop his own formalistic aesthetic under the influence of Paul Valéry.1 While the poetics of the Orpheus Group more nearly resembles that of Rilke or T. S. Eliot, Cabral's poetic theories--after coming into contact with Valéry, and incorporating local influences of two of Modernism's greatest voices, Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Murilo Mendes--developed along the lines of an anti-rhetoric, a negative poetics exalting an extreme, ascetic formalism.
The aegis of the Generation of 1945 was short-lived. A small group of young men in São Paulo, restive under the constraints of what they perceived as literary anachronism, published their first work in Orpheus periodicals, but as they gained confidence and knowledge, they launched a fulminating attack on their elders. The Generation of 1945, repudiated in their moment of dominance, never recovered. What was surprising was the sudden development of the Noigandres Group (initially Augusto and Haroldo de Campos and Décio Pignatari) and their movement which they called concrete poetry. It was in the early fifties when they took the country by storm and succeeded briefly in dominating the literary scene. By the early sixties, in spite of continued influence among certain young poets, concrete had lost its hegemony over contemporary poetry. The following period in Brazilian literature seems marked by eclecticism with no really definable trends, or at least by no trends with any large following. Concrete continues to exert considerable influence, and the concrete poets continue to be active, but there is widespread hostility to the group, the result of the polemics which marked its birth and development. Internationally, however, the Noigandres group still has prestige, and as a dynamic element of the concrete movement of the fifties which had worldwide ramifications, it continues to be prominent.2
Two concepts underlie the essay which follows. The first is that romanticism is less a movement than an all-embracing state of mind and culture spanning two centuries, with its beginnings in the late eighteenth century and extending to the present. The second is that romanticism and classicism are poles between which Occidental art has always oscillated. Critics and literary historians as diverse as Mario Praz and Hiram Haydn have contributed to these concepts, while such modern theoreticians as Murray Krieger and Morse Peckham have been instrumental in applying them to postwar literary phenomena. It may be helpful in the present context for me to define, in the broadest possible terms, what I mean by classical and romantic. For that purpose, Haydn's epistemological definition is admirably suited. Eschewing an attempt to list "characteristics," always vitiated or completely nullified when one goes to the work itself, he strikes at the heart of the matter by examining the differing attitudes of romanticism and classicism to that most basic of human problems: the gap between the real and the ideal:
The only definition of the Classicist that I have found possible to apply with equal validity to Plato and Pope, to Racine and Dante, to Addison and AEschylus, is that the Classicist is a man and artist who finds it possible to accept without misgivings the authority and discipline of a fixed order and rules because he believes in the essential congruence and relatedness of the ideal and the empirically actual--that which should be and that which is. Whether the actual is but an imperfect extension of the ideal, as with Plato; whether it is an ordained and limited part of the creation effected by the ideal (in Christian terminology, God), as in Pope's and Addison's version of the Great Chain of Being; whether, as in the concept of "immatered form" of Aristotle's mature philosophy, which recognizes the usefulness and relatedness of intellectual concept and empirical observation, it is a question of rooting the ideal in the actual, and motivating the actual by the ideal--in any case, the Classicist recognizes the relation as a direct and certain one, and fixes upon that recognition his aesthetic as well as his moral, philosophical or religious creed.
The Romanticist, on the other hand, is that man or artist who, moved by the discrepancy he finds between the ideal and the empirically actual, cannot reconcile the two. As a result, he may, like Keats, yearn more and more nostalgically for an escape to, and a complete immersion in, the world of the ideal--which becomes increasingly, and perhaps even exclusively, real to him. [...] On the other hand, like Shelley, the Romantic may dream of effecting a reconciliation between the two by the ultimate imposition of the ideal upon the empirical actuality in the distant and improbable future. [...] Still again, with Wordsworth, he may find the ideal in simple and primitive nature, and in those closest to her. [...]
But whether the particular Romantic's form of rebellion is escape or reform, passive or active, he is always a rebel against the established order and skeptical about the validity of the value of fixed laws. [...] He does not accept the established relatedness of the ideal and the actual, and he refuses to abide by rules derived from this central premise, whether aesthetic ones or ones pertaining to the conduct of life (Haydn 1950:15).
It should be borne in mind that Haydn's study involves Elizabethan literature (in spite of the nineteenth-century references in the quote), not "Romanticism" in the limited historical sense of the word. According to these concepts, it is possible to postulate the essential romantic identity of movements as diverse as Symbolism and Surrealism, the essentially romantic nature of apparently anti-romantic movements such as Realism and Naturalism. Further, if the modern age in art has been essentially romantic, it is possible to postulate the eventual exhaustion of that great impulse and its replacement by its antipode, classicism.
But if romanticism triumphed in artistic milieux in the mid-nineteenth century and then proceeded to develop a tradition which can be traced through Baudelaire to Verlaine and Rimbaud and to the Symbolists and thence to avant-garde movements such as Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism, it did not triumph socially until recently. It was romanticism's long struggle with public taste that shaped its development. The public in the Western world has always taken "for its ideals, or idols, what may be called, if not classicism, at least the traditional or the academic" (Poggioli 1973:50). In the first third of this century this basic divergence in taste was exacerbated by a growing alienation of the avant-garde artist from society. His alienation, according to Poggioli, took several avenues of expression; antagonism, in which the artist deliberately affronts public morality and etiquette, and attacks (usually his predecessors) in violent polemical jargon; nihilism, in which the artist reaches "a point of extreme tension toward the public and tradition" (p. 64), which culminates in a destructive impulse capable of annihilating all cultural values; agonism, in which the artist, convinced of the impending end of civilization, acts suicidally in an attempt to bequeath something of value to the future; and Futurism, in which the artist has an acute sense of being in a state of transition, perceiving himself as a precursor of future developments. Important in contemporary nihilism have been two factors, the commercialization and vulgarization of art, and the increasing tendency to regard the relationship between an artist and his work as a private one, negating the social value of art in favor of art as private fantasy.
Poggioli convincingly argues that only modern bourgeois societies create conditions in which avant-garde art may flourish, nurturing a counter culture which despises its source. The bête noir opposed by contemporary avant-gardes has been mass culture, in all its forms. In technological urban societies there has been a radical and permanent separation between popular and avant-garde culture, accentuated by a homogenizing process in which ethnic and folk elements are lost under the pressures of mass media and other forces. "By means of specialization and technology, modern society has broken all the links between artisan and artist, destroyed all the forms of folklore and ethnic culture; it has even transformed the very concept of 'the people,' now a synonym for the quite different concept of 'the masses'" (p. 122). Poggioli sees the attempts of such modern artists as Eliot to recreate or restore a lost sense of craftsmanship as doomed from the start. I shall return to this point later.
In his epilogue Poggioli summarizes the evolution of the avant-garde, divided into four moments or phases. The culmination of this development in our time is the triumph of the avant-garde spirit and its ramification into all artistic spheres. But Poggioli does not perceive that this success extends even to society, which has become impervious to shock, permissive to extremes, willing to tolerate and reward the most outrageous artistic extravagances. Avant-garde has become chic, not merely among the elites, but among a vast bourgeois audience which has at last been weaned away from academicism. There remains a sullen residue which opposes all such decadence, but the numbers of adherents have been vastly swollen by affluence and the public education it has fostered. This success has put the avant-garde into crisis, undermining the alienation necessary to its survival. Harold Rosenberg has aptly summarized this situation in Discovering the Present (1973: X-X:):
The cultural revolution of the past hundred years has petered out. Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Today's aesthetic vanguardism is being sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, by state art councils, by museums, by industrial and banking organizations. Foundation grants are made to underground film and magazines, to little-review contributors, to producers of happenings and electronic music, to the Merce Cunningham dance group. The art-historical media have become thoroughly blended with the mass media and with commercial gesign and decoration under the slogan of community art programs. Reciprocally, commercial movies, thrillers, even TV advertising spots have become so daringly experimental in the formal sense as to elicit not the comprehension of a message but the immediate total response of a work of art.
By and large, the contemporary artistic scene demonstrates that the boast of the Dadaists that they had done it all was true. There is a kind of desperation in the most extreme manifestations of contemporary avant-garde art of the now traditional left. It is besieged by a sense of déjà vu. Literally everything has already been tried. According to Rosenberg:
In art, "conservative" and "radical" ought to be abandoned and attention concentrated on déjà vu. The purpose of education is to keep a culture from being drowned in senseless repetitions, each of which claims to offer a new insight. In America an almost total absence of genuine education in modernist creations and attitudes of the past hundred years is responsible for wave after wave of déjà vu novelties. The dejavunik exploits his audience's lack of education by appealing to its desire to be advanced and its expectation of being repelled by new work. Today, cultural professionals can count on avant-garde déjà vu to arouse the enthusiasm of undergraduate movie makers, post-art aesthetes, far-out curators, and collector-dealers for whatever makes the grade as Time-Newsweek shock (p. xi).
These quotes suggest that the romantic age as I have defined it may be ending. It is too early to determine such a hypothesis objectively, but there is mounting evidence that something of the sort may be happening. I refer to the prevalence of a neo-classical revival during the last forty years. It can be stated without exaggeration that the most powerful literary impulses of contemporary culture have come from artists basically hostile to romanticism. I refer to Eliot, Pound and Valéry. It remains to be seen, however, whether this "anti-romanticism" is any more authentic than preceding manifestations in the nineteenth century. T. E. Hulme's prediction of a new classical spirit, although widely assumed to have been futile, did have serious repercussions in its effects on Eliot and Pound.3 Poggioli takes up this question and dismisses the possibility of a new classicism, at least as it is exemplified in Eliot, largely because Eliot's impulse is nostalgic. Poggioli does admit that recently the dynamism seems to have gone out of avant-garde, manifested in increasingly rare appearances of new movements, but attributes this lack of intensity to a broadening of the avant-garde spirit in its contemporary triumph:
In modern poetry and art, classicism can operate only as a retrospective utopia, as a logical counterbalance to the futuristic utopia. In any case, the frequency within the recent avant-garde of positions such as Eliot's along with the rehabilitation and renewal of the very concept of tradition, has certainly contributed to making new movements and manifestoes more rare and scarce. Thus the appearance of a series of new poetics, neoclassical on the surtace, has devaluated experiment as an end in itself (p. 223).
It is significant that Haroldo de Campos's rejection of the poetics of the Generation of 1945 is couched in quite similar phraseology. I refer to the essay entitled "Poetry and Paradise Lost." It is precisely a "retrospective utopia" which is repugnant to the concrete poets:
Anodyne and anonymous lyricism, and love of conventional patterns of vagueness lie, for instance, behind the "rediscovery" of the sonnet in the manner of a "dernier cri." These are the well-known manifestations of Sunday-Park art, a backwater where poetry is perfectly codified in little metric rules, adjusted to a serene formal elegance and equipped with a stock of metaphors prudently controlled in all their petite bourgeois self- sufficiency by a curiously repressing policy: the so-called "atmosphere" (climate) of the poem (1975:25).
Other passages from the Theory of Concrete Poetry (Teori a de Poesia Concreta) demonstrate that for concrete, the poetry of the previous generation was doubly damned: it looked backward in attempting the restoration of clichéd poetic forms, and it was romantic in its sensibility, alienation and sentimentality. While the apparent neoclassicism of the Generation of '45 and other postwar groups might thus be disposed of as a kind of cloying anachronism, the poetics of Valéry and Pound offered sterner resistance, and it was only after deliberation that the concrete poets concluded that they must push beyond them.
Beyond its rejection of nostalgic anachronism, how is concrete poetry's classical protile delineated? Brietly, concrete poetry is not alienated, not agonistic, not nihilistic, not Futuristic. It subscribes to a theory of Zeitgeist, conceived in Russian formalist terms. It rejects subjectivism in all its forms, even the detached subjective role of the artist in the work as conceived by Valéry or Pound. It rejects the idea that art and society are inimical, and in fact attempts a conscious rapprochement with the public. It embraces modern technology and scientism, and is fascinated by communication theory.4 It totally rejects the cult of the metaphor which has characterized contemporary art, and refuses to accept a favorite avant-garde dictum that legitimate art is exceptional.
Concrete's rejection of alienation is profound. It rejects the whole subjective-romantic emphasis on the subconscious, on correspondence, on the poet as mystic or seer. In fact, it overwhelmingly rejects what Hannah Arendt has called the "deep-structure fallacy": the idea that surface is superficial or frivolous and that what matters, what is essential, is what is hidden from view. Concrete affirms the thingness of things, accepting the phenomenological reality of surface. It is therefore opposed to the oneiricism of the Surrealists, proposing instead the maximalization of lucidity. Poggioli has analyzed the Schopenhauerian conception of will as an irrational, unconscious, automatic vital cosmic force. It is this conception (which lies behind avant-garde theories of automatism) that is specifically rejected by the concrete poets, for whom even chance and intuition are subject to rigid control. Décio Pignatari speaks of "the chronomicrometering of chance," and "the most lucid intellectual work for the clearest intuition" ("newpoetry: concrete," 1975:41). He later elaborates these ideas in "Chance, Choice, Shots," where he speaks of chance shaped by mathematical theories of probability. Concrete does not flee from technology, but rather embraces its empiricism and functionalism.
The ingenuous or academic notions that someone might have about mathematics are also not important. Mathematics cannot be opposed to art to the point of conferring to intuition that traditional absolute value, which betrays an idealistic education prisoner to the apparently infinite field of the Arbitrary. Those who ignore principles through the panicked belief that they limit or restrict (one knows not what ... inspiration, perhaps) is compelled to justify "post factum" his work. He can only do this by using dubious articulations or subjective sub-levers. Right was always on the side of those who had reasons instead of mere justifications (1975:147-148).
In this statement, Pignatari redefines intuition in biological terms which do not permit the slightest idealization of the process: "A [ ... ] physiological, psycho-cultural perception mechanism [ ... ] at the root of elementary feedback circuits and high-grade options, stimulating experimental actions." For concrete, creativity is not a process of blind subjection to the unconscious justified post factum as art, but the a priori determination of an aesthetic problem to be solved in a specific and straight-forward manner. In his essay "From the Phenomenology of Composition to the Mathematics of Composition," Haroldo de Campos makes this plain.
Concrete poetry is moving toward the rejection of organic structure in favor of a mathematical or quasi-mathematical one. In the poem of the word-after-word type, structure results from the interaction of words or fragments of words produced in the spatial field, with each new word implying something like a structural option. Such an option solicits a marked intervention of chance and intuitional readiness. Concrete poetry instead seeks a mathematical structure planned before the word. The solution of the structural problem will therefore require that words be used under the control of the thematic number. The definition of structure which fits the poem will be the exact moment of the creative option. From that point on the intervention of a disciplining and critical intelligence will be effected with greatest intensity. The structure selected will rigorously determine the elements of play and their relative positions in an almost mathematical way.
We seek a planned verbal structure, "as precise as possible," as neat as "symbolic logic," as exact as the "visible ideas" of a concrete painter (1975:91-93).
Haroldo de Campos's theory of a "thematic number" conclusively refutes a common criticism of concrete poetry that it represents nothing more than a kind of automatism where isolated words are arbitrarily thrown together as in one of Tristan Tzara's games. Two examples follow, from different moments in the movement's evolution. Even as early as 1953, concrete had moved away from extrinsical, "shaped" poems à la Apollinaire. This is evident in the Poet-Minus series by Augusto de Campos. In this series, Augusto worked with color and words, seeking to reproduce in poetry some equivalent to Webern's musical theories of Klangfarbenmelodie (it is unfortunate that this presentation is limited to the printed word, since the spoken-musical version of the following poem is essential to its Gestalt, to its verbi-voco-visual wholeness):
It is clear in "Here are the Lovers" that we have words arranged by an aprioristic but open-minded/receptive creative mentality which allows full play to what Pignatari calls "factors of proximity and likeness." It should be equally obvious that this is no mere word-picture poem. The juxtaposed words resonate together, setting off refractions of meaning that scintillate around the columns and contribute to its Gestalt. The experience is in some ways akin to synesthesia, where one sensation evokes a response in another sense area. In this case, what the poem manages to evoke/provoke in the receptive reader is a sensual response that goes far beyond the usual intellectual titillation essential to love poetry.
Haroldo de Campos's "Poemandala" from his Lacunae series (1971) exhibits an ethereal grace, managing to evoke the oriental (concrete's fascination with the ideogram can be traced to Pound and pervades the movement's theory) while teasing the mind with its haiku-like columns of words. As insubstantial as a shadow, as permanent as the symbol that forms its core, the poem seems almost like the image left on the retina when one blinks after seeing a strong light. It is a perfect demonstration of what can be achieved with "minimal means," with "a planned verbal structure" that nevertheless is neither clumsy nor pedestrian (as might be assumed by the mathematical formulations of the theory):
Concrete's rejection of subjectivism, the romantic cult of personality, is carried to the extreme of excluding from the poem all traces of the author's presence. This quality is amply demonstrated in the two poems that precede this paragraph. In this effacement the concrete poets go far beyond the craftsmanship of Valéry, Pound or Eliot, where, for all their formal discipline, the authors maintain a persona, a mediator between author, work and reader. It was Eliot, in fact, who revived the Renaissance theories of persona in his attempt to reestablish distance between author and work and eliminate the romantic tendency to blur the distinction between maker and speaker. In the concrete poem there is simply no speaker. To the extent that the reader and the author make contact they do so in the poem itself, not outside it. The concrete poem makes great demands on the reader, since the raw materials of the poem are presented to him, along with certain instructions, and it is he who must realize the poem. This act of faith on the part of the concrete poet reflects his belief in Gestalt, in the validity of the concept that 2 + 2 can equal 5 in art. But the problem is that in the concrete work, the Gestalt is not presented pre-digested by a persona but left only as a potential. This quality is demonstrated in Augusto's "Eis os amantes" where the reader re-creates/re-experiences the copulation that forms the poem's experiential foundation. For another convincing demonstration of this dynamism in concrete poetry, the reader is referred to Haroldo's "Si-Ien-cio"(1956). An equally convincing demonstration of the direct, experiential qualities of concrete may be found in Décio Pignatari's "beba coca cola," in which the poet expresses a profound existential nausea. This is a protest poem with a difference: the reader is invited to participate in an experience that begins with a slogan, "Drink Coca Cola" and culminates in an explosion of rage/ nausea/expulsion (as in excretion). Once again, to listen to the aleatoric vision of this poem in a recording is to materially increase the intensity of the experience. Even more than in traditional word-after-word poetry, concrete is dependent for complete impact on complete experience:
A striking feature of the concrete movement is its attempt to rejoin the severed relations between poetry and public. Concrete theory attempts to demystify art, advocating a kind of Functionalism in which the poem is treated as an object, not an objet d'art to be carefully preserved and saved in a museum case, but an object like a piece of bread or a newspaper. Rather than emphasize craftsmanship in an attempt to valorize the artist's creative effort, concrete poets emphasize creativity as a process akin to industrial design, in which the designer's creative efforts go into conceiving a prototype. Such a prototype is anonymous and capable of infinite reproduction. The test of its efficacy is not the personal taste of an elite collector, but whether the object functions and satisfies the needs of the public. As a consequence, concrete poetry strives to present itself without mystery directly to the consumer. The intellectual elitism involved in the modern cult of the metaphor is also avoided, along with the entire rhetorical-discursive apparatus of traditional lyric poetry. Décio Pignatari says:
The now classic postulation, "form follows function," involving the notion of useful, utilitarian beauty, means an awareness on the part of the artist, both artistically and economically, of the new world of assemblyline industrial production. In this world, "et pour cause," craftsmanship is put out of circulation as anti-economic, anachronistic, incompatible and incommunicable with that impersonal, collective and rational world that comes to depend entirely on planning on all levels and meanings.
The contradictions between industrial production and individual artistic craftsmanship opened a chasm between art and the public. In the face of these divergencies, it became necessary to join beauty with utility in order to attend to the needs of a new type of consumer, a "consumer of physical design," in the words of Neutra ("Form, Function and General Project," Campos and Pignatari 1975:107-108).
Lest anyone mistake his meaning, assuming that concrete seeks to commercialize art, Pignatari adds that these consumer goods lie "in the realm of thought and sensitivity, not convertible into mere utilitarian values." This is n ot to say that commercialization and art are necessarily inimical. Pignatari himself established a successful ad agency in Sa o Paulo for a number of years, and one of his ads is usually included in concrete anthologies. In his "Disenfo rmio" (an anti-diarrheal medicine) the letters of the product invade and consume the "intestinal disturbance." The ad is a t once a highly effective commercial message (part of whose effectiveness is subliminal) and a demonstration that what works has artistic value.
The concrete poets showed an early interest in the media and in communication theory, and the use of concrete graphic techniques by ad agencies and television are seen by them as proof of the validity of their theoretical position. The modern urban consumer, accustomed by television and the newspaper to headlines and simplified syntax, has been conditioned to high speed communication. In the concrete aesthetic what functions, what communicates, possesses artistic value. In the words of Haroldo de Campos:
Concrete poetry is language fit for the contemporary creative mind. It permits high-speed communication. It prefigures for the poem a re-integration in daily life similar to that which the Bauhaus achieved for visual arts: whether as a vehicle of commercial advertising (newspapers, signs, TV, movies, etc.), or as an object in itself (functioning in architecture, for example) with a field of possibilities analogous to both industrial design and painting. It substitutes the magical, the mystical and the "maudit" for the useful (1975:46).
Concrete's rapprochement with mass culture may be partially explained by the specific Brazilian situation, which in some ways resembles that of Russia in the time of the Formalists. In both cases a technologically oriented, innovating avant-garde reacts to a stratified literary tradition it identifies with a colonialist mentality. In such a situation, the avant-garde may regard a mass-oriented aesthetic favorably rather than adopt the hostile attitude typical of the avant-garde in more advanced countries. In this instance there is a confluence of specific local conditions and generalized cultural ones which produces an avant-garde movement quite unique in contemporary art. It is the '45 Generation's traditional elitist sociopsychological orientation that sets off the concrete movement's mass-accepting intransigence.
Beyond concrete's non-alienated orientation to society and art, there are other characterisitics which identify the movement as classical. The most prominent is perhaps the movement's historicism. As Poggioli has noted, classical movements have a well-defined sense of being a culmination as opposed to the agonistic sense of transition which besets the romantic avant-garde. Concrete regards itself as the fruition of a half century of vanguard efforts, and its Theory is replete with analyses of the movements which preceded it. These analyses emphasize the failures of Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism and of such figures as Apollinaire even while conceding their contribution to the concretist aesthetic. For example, in the essay "Aspects of Concrete Poetry," Haroldo de Campos (1975:94-106) analyzes the contributions of Mallarmé, Pound, Apollinaire, the Futurists, Dadaists and others to concrete poetry. In spite of his respect for their contributions, he rejects the contemporary validity of these precursors, accepting their innovations only in the spirit of an inheritor, saying that "the cinematic descriptiveness, the frenetic subjectivity and the ultraromanticism of the futurists hypostatized in their characteristic machine made their compositions barren of constructive organization." Similarly, Augusto de Campos rejects Apollinaire, after recognizing his contributions, in the following terms: "Apollinaire condemns the poetic ideogram to the mere figurative representation of theme. [...] This removes most of the vigor and physiognomic richness which the calligrammes might have had, in spite of the grace and visual 'humor' with which Apollinaire almost always 'draws' them" (1975:19). Pound himself, the direct aesthetic forbear of the concrete poets, is ultimately rejected for his attachment to craftsmanship and the individualistic, subjective relationship between maker and poem that this attitude implies. It should be evident from the foregoing remarks that I have used the term "precursor" advisedly. Perhaps the only way in which a previous author can be a "precursor" is in the literal sense, of a forerunner, a contributor to one's aesthetic, and even then only when the formulator of such a statement has a classicist mentality, perceiving himself as a culmination.
While concrete poetry shares with other avant-garde movements a love of the experimental, it has developed a radical new conception of the theme-form equation which deserves analysis as it relates to classicism and romanticism. Standard avant-gardism's cult of the new presumes a feverish search for new forms of expression and their abandonment when they become generalized or vulgarized through mass acceptance. In other words, what commonly characterizes avant-garde movements is their abhorrence of stereotype. On the other hand, traditional classicism has taken the view that certain artistic forms are virtually immutable, defining originality in terms of surpassing models. To some extent this orientation explains the failures of neo-classical movements in modern literature, obsessed with restoring modes of expression anathematized by the romantic avant-gardes. This constitutes the central dilemma of the modern classical vision: the inability to invent a form adequate to express that vision in non-anachronistic terms. Instead, modern exponents of classicism have attempted the restoration of a lost paradise, and in so doing, have demonstrated that they continue trapped in the romantic ethos they abhor. The problem has been that the power of the Greco-Roman model was such that in spite of increasing distance in time it exercised (and continues to exercise) a fatal fascination for would-be followers of the classical way. In reality, only the exuberant optimism of the Renaissance prevented, and then only temporarily, an awareness of the incongruity of resurrecting a long-dead cultural model to express fourteenth- and fifteenth-century aesthetic and philosophical needs. As Hiram Haydn has demonstrated, the Baroque age was the first romantic period of modern time, one in which the paradoxical possibilities of the Greco-Roman model were fully explored. The eighteenth century's attempt to reassert the model foundered, at least partially, on anachronistic incongruity and ushered in the modern romantic age. The genius of concrete poetry lies in its freedom from the past and its invention of a form adequate to the expression of a twentieth-century classicism.
In its development of a new formal theory in harmony with the contemporary period, concrete poetry has abandoned classicism's traditional insistence that theme and form are separate entities. At best, classicism of the Greco-Roman mold will admit only that certain forms, such as the sonnet, are uniquely adapted to the expression of certain themes. Concrete poetry resolves the theme-form binomial in favor of a new synthesis in which form is theme (isomorphism) in which the structure and physical arrangement of words in a poem are determined in each case by the internal demands of the Gestalt created by the "factors of proximity and likeness" at play. Form is not imposed on the words from without, is not programmatic, is not extrinsic. This conception confronts the poet with a radical new creative option each time he begins a poem. In traditional poetry, a writer conquers a style and evolves thematically within it, content to innovate only in a relative sense. Even when the poet adheres to a new movement, for example, he simply takes over the new style, makes it his own and tinkers. For the concrete poet each new poem is a leap in the dark.
It should be evident from the foregoing that concrete poetry also has made a radical new formulation in the concept of originality. Leaving behind both traditional classicism's effort at surpassing models and romanticism's cult of the new, the concrete poet confronts each new creative moment armed only with his readiness to allow the words to shape themselves into an idea, which, once expressed, is relatively unique. At most a new idea will lead to a limited series of poems that exhaust its potentiality. The creative attitude of the concrete poet is one of patient awareness.
The related concepts of form and originality are themselves important in their relationship with another traditional shibboleth: that of "national" literature. Isolated behind very real walls of distance and time, modern Occidental literatures developed concepts of nationalism that seemed both logical and inevitable. The traditional artist, protected behind these arbitrary walls, was free to imitate, often rather closely, the efforts of contemporaries in other countries, and the product of his labor was assured a place in the intellectual market of his country. The concrete poet, operating in an age when communication is virtually instantaneous and travel is relatively so, fully accepts the impossibility in such a situation of any appeal to relativity or uniqueness. Concrete poetry developed internationally in such a way that limitations of language and culture were minimized within a tacit consensus that imitation or duplication from one country to another was impossible practically and illicit creatively.
In this essay I have attempted to demonstrate the possibility that concrete poetry is an avant-garde movement of classicist tendencies rather than romantic ones. For the purposes of example, parting from an epistemological basis, I have explored the various ways it rejects alienation, the predominant characteristic of modern romantic avant- garde movements. Beyond the movement's intrinsic merits as an approach to contemporary aesthetics, the intriguing possibility of its classicist nature especially recommends it to those interested in contemporary literary typology. Indeed, if concrete is classicist and avant-garde then a whole series of assumptions about vanguardism and aesthetics must be reconsidered, since vanguardism has been universally assumed to be a romantic phenomenon. If romanticism, after a two-hundred-year reign, has reached a point of inanition, a classicist revolt will assume certain characteristics of the avant-garde as a matter of dynamics inherent in the situation. This may also explain why contemporary neo-classical movements such as the Generation of 1945 in Brazil failed to generate impact. The possibilities of a technically formalist moderating reaction within romanticism were exhausted by such nineteenth-century movements as Parnassianism. Concrete has shown that formal tinkering within a romantic aesthetic is no longer viable. For formalism to work in the contemporary period, a radical psychological amputation is necessary. The affirmative, optimistic mentality of concrete, allied with its acceptance of avant-garde aesthetics makes it clear that we have in reality two apparently similar but radically different movements which contemplate each other across an unbridgeable gulf.
FOOTNOTES
1. João Cabral de Melo Neto is reasonably well known in the United States and elsewhere. His poetry may be consulted in various anthologies, including The Literary Review (Winter issue, 1978), and Elizabeth Bishop's An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry (1972). These anthologies may also be consulted for the other Brazilian poets mentioned.
2. A kind of unofficial Brazilian blockade of concrete works was broken a few years ago, and the intervening period had seen the commercial publication of several important works. Prior to that time, within Brazil, all concrete works, including Invenção and Noigandres were privately financed and published. In 1973, a second edition of the Teoria da Poesia Concreta was published by the São Paulo publisher, Duas Cidades. In the same year, Augusto de Campos privately printed his retrospective Caixa Preta (Black Box), together with designer Julio Plaza. In 1977 Haroldo de Campos's Xadrez de Estrelas (Chessboard of Stars) (poetry and prose) was published in Sa o Paulo by Perspectiva. In the same year, Décio Pignatari's Poesia Pois E Poesia (Poetry? Damn Right!) was published by Duas Cidades. Finally, in 1979, Haroldo published his Signantia Quase Coelum, a collection of poetic fragments with a Dantean foundation, also with Perspectiva. These retrospective editions have for th e first time provided readers in Brazil and abroad with access to almost the entire corpus of concrete poetry.
In addition, the author of this essay recently finished translating the Theory of Concrete Poetry. It is possible that the Theory will become available to the English-speaking community in the near future. (All translations in this study are taken from that text.) The poems themselves are available in translation in a number of anthologies, most notably Mary Ellen Solt's Concrete Poetry: A World View (1970) and Emmett Williams's An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967).
3. See the essay entitled "Romanticism and Classicism" in Hulme (1936:113-140). The romanticism of the New Critics, Hulme's inheritors, is expounded by Richard Foster (1962: 30-44).
4. The movement's preoccupation with communication theory led it, in later stages, toward semiotics. The movement may be justly regarded as a pioneering semiotically oriented effort. See the Teoria da Poesia Concreta or the Anthology of Concrete Poetry (Williams 1967) for examples of semiotic poems. The Theory, with its phenomenological orientation, abounds in pre-semiotic discoveries.
REFERENCES
Bishop, Elizabeth and Emanuelle Brasil, 1972. An Anthotogy of Twentieth-Century Brazitian Poetry (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan UP).
Campos, Augusto de, 1975. Caixa Preta (São Paulo).
Campos, Haroldo de, 1977. Xadrez de Estrelas (São Paulo : Perspectiva).
1979 Signantia Quase Coelum (São Paulo: Perspectiva).
Campos, Haroldo de, Augusto de Campos and Décio Pignatari, 1975. Teoria da Poesia Concreta, 2nd ed. [Original edition, 1965] (São Paulo: Duas Cidades).
Foster, Richard, 1952. The New Romantics (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP).
Haydn, Hiram, 1950. The Counter-Renaissance (New York: Scribners).
Hulme, T.E., 1936. Speculations (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., Ltd.).
Kreiger, Murray, 1960. The Tragic Vision (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston).
1971 The Classic Vision (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP).
Peckham, Morse, 1962. "Toward a Theory of Romanticism: II Reconsiderations," Studies in Romanticism 1:1-8.
Peckham, Morse, 1965. Romanticism (New York: Braziller).
Pignatari, Décio, 1977. Poesia Pois é Poesia (São Paulo: Duas Cidades).
Poggioli, Renato, 1973. The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP).
Praz, Mario, 1960. The Romantic Agony (New York: Meridian Books).
Rosenberg, Harold, 1973. Discovering the Present (Chicago: Chicago UP).
Soit, Mary Ellen, 1970. Concrete Poetry: A World View (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP).
Williams, Emmet, 1967. An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (New York: Something Else Press).
reproduced from: http://www.ubu.com/papers/tolman.html
Jon M. Tolman
Poetics Today, Vol. 3, No.3, Poetics of the Avant-Garde. (Summer, 1982), pp. 149-166.
This essay represents an attempt to define Brazilian concrete poetry (and the world-wide movement it headed) within the context of contemporary vanguard movements. It is my intention to demonstrate that concrete poetry developed into the first truly classical literary movement of modern times. It achieved this breakthrough by rejecting the effort of neo- classical restoration groups to establish a contemporary poetic movement by disinterring the past. Concrete poetry will be shown to be essentially anti-romantic in sensibility and technique. Whether an isolated phenomenon or the first manifestation of a new spirit, its psychological, social and literary profile will be seen to be undeniably classical. As a pioneering movement it necessarily employs a number of strategies developed by earlier, romantic avant-gardes, but the theoretical writing of the movement clearly demonstrates that this use of the past is not anachronistic but rather that the recognition that certain achievements of the past have made possible a new aesthetic awareness. The concrete poets possess a well-defined sense of culmination or supplantation in which they do not worship or imitate the past, but build upon it.
Before undertaking my demonstration of these theories, I shall begin with a brief historical presentation in order to locate the Brazilian movement within its immediate literary tradition. Brazilian literature entered the twentieth century twenty years behind the times, having been kidnapped by a Parnassian movement which dominated Brazil as it never dominated France. Its domain was so pervasive, in fact, that Symbolism was almost stillborn, reduced in impact and relegated to distinct minority status until 1922, when it was rescued from oblivion by a revolutionary generation that used it as a weapon against a moribund Parnassian establishment. What happened in 1922 was the Modern Art Week, which ushered in an eight-year spree known in Brazil as Modernism, and which under the banner of innovation, brought Brazil into line with Europe. Iconoclastic, destructive and intensely nationalistic, Modernism was basically expressionist in orientation, but only certain elements of the European avant-garde were imported into Brazil. There was marked indifference to imagism, Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism (in sharp contrast with Spanish America, where Surrealism, even today, has a profound influence). However, certain attitudes universally shared by avant-garde movements were accepted. Among them were a rejection of traditional poetics, with its formalistic emphasis on rhyme and meter; a gleeful spirit of épater le bourgeois; a search for a national language, a national identity. By 1930 Modernism had worn itself out and gave way to a more constructive spirit which maintained its formal iconoclasm even while turning away from it thematically. Nationalism was abandoned as poets turned inward searching for individual identity, thereby anticipating the alienation which would be the dominant attitude in the literature of postwar Europe and America. In prose, the poetic nationalism of the previous period crystallized into the novel of the Brazilian Northeast, neo-realistic in technique and reformist or revolutionary in its social message.
In the late forties a growing dissatisfaction with the formlessness of the previous aesthetic began to manifest itself in poetry through a return to traditional poetics. The first traditional form to reappear was the sonnet, to be followed by the ode and other long-abandoned devices. In prose a similar reaction took place. In fact the entire evolution of postwar Brazilian literature may be said to have been dominated by formalism and formalistic experimentation. In poetry this formalistic preoccupation coalesced into what would be called the Generation of 1945, later to be accused of being neo-Parnassian. The most important poet of this period, João Cabral de Melo Neto, collaborated only briefly with the "Orpheus Group," as they called themselves, before pulling away from them to develop his own formalistic aesthetic under the influence of Paul Valéry.1 While the poetics of the Orpheus Group more nearly resembles that of Rilke or T. S. Eliot, Cabral's poetic theories--after coming into contact with Valéry, and incorporating local influences of two of Modernism's greatest voices, Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Murilo Mendes--developed along the lines of an anti-rhetoric, a negative poetics exalting an extreme, ascetic formalism.
The aegis of the Generation of 1945 was short-lived. A small group of young men in São Paulo, restive under the constraints of what they perceived as literary anachronism, published their first work in Orpheus periodicals, but as they gained confidence and knowledge, they launched a fulminating attack on their elders. The Generation of 1945, repudiated in their moment of dominance, never recovered. What was surprising was the sudden development of the Noigandres Group (initially Augusto and Haroldo de Campos and Décio Pignatari) and their movement which they called concrete poetry. It was in the early fifties when they took the country by storm and succeeded briefly in dominating the literary scene. By the early sixties, in spite of continued influence among certain young poets, concrete had lost its hegemony over contemporary poetry. The following period in Brazilian literature seems marked by eclecticism with no really definable trends, or at least by no trends with any large following. Concrete continues to exert considerable influence, and the concrete poets continue to be active, but there is widespread hostility to the group, the result of the polemics which marked its birth and development. Internationally, however, the Noigandres group still has prestige, and as a dynamic element of the concrete movement of the fifties which had worldwide ramifications, it continues to be prominent.2
Two concepts underlie the essay which follows. The first is that romanticism is less a movement than an all-embracing state of mind and culture spanning two centuries, with its beginnings in the late eighteenth century and extending to the present. The second is that romanticism and classicism are poles between which Occidental art has always oscillated. Critics and literary historians as diverse as Mario Praz and Hiram Haydn have contributed to these concepts, while such modern theoreticians as Murray Krieger and Morse Peckham have been instrumental in applying them to postwar literary phenomena. It may be helpful in the present context for me to define, in the broadest possible terms, what I mean by classical and romantic. For that purpose, Haydn's epistemological definition is admirably suited. Eschewing an attempt to list "characteristics," always vitiated or completely nullified when one goes to the work itself, he strikes at the heart of the matter by examining the differing attitudes of romanticism and classicism to that most basic of human problems: the gap between the real and the ideal:
The only definition of the Classicist that I have found possible to apply with equal validity to Plato and Pope, to Racine and Dante, to Addison and AEschylus, is that the Classicist is a man and artist who finds it possible to accept without misgivings the authority and discipline of a fixed order and rules because he believes in the essential congruence and relatedness of the ideal and the empirically actual--that which should be and that which is. Whether the actual is but an imperfect extension of the ideal, as with Plato; whether it is an ordained and limited part of the creation effected by the ideal (in Christian terminology, God), as in Pope's and Addison's version of the Great Chain of Being; whether, as in the concept of "immatered form" of Aristotle's mature philosophy, which recognizes the usefulness and relatedness of intellectual concept and empirical observation, it is a question of rooting the ideal in the actual, and motivating the actual by the ideal--in any case, the Classicist recognizes the relation as a direct and certain one, and fixes upon that recognition his aesthetic as well as his moral, philosophical or religious creed.
The Romanticist, on the other hand, is that man or artist who, moved by the discrepancy he finds between the ideal and the empirically actual, cannot reconcile the two. As a result, he may, like Keats, yearn more and more nostalgically for an escape to, and a complete immersion in, the world of the ideal--which becomes increasingly, and perhaps even exclusively, real to him. [...] On the other hand, like Shelley, the Romantic may dream of effecting a reconciliation between the two by the ultimate imposition of the ideal upon the empirical actuality in the distant and improbable future. [...] Still again, with Wordsworth, he may find the ideal in simple and primitive nature, and in those closest to her. [...]
But whether the particular Romantic's form of rebellion is escape or reform, passive or active, he is always a rebel against the established order and skeptical about the validity of the value of fixed laws. [...] He does not accept the established relatedness of the ideal and the actual, and he refuses to abide by rules derived from this central premise, whether aesthetic ones or ones pertaining to the conduct of life (Haydn 1950:15).
It should be borne in mind that Haydn's study involves Elizabethan literature (in spite of the nineteenth-century references in the quote), not "Romanticism" in the limited historical sense of the word. According to these concepts, it is possible to postulate the essential romantic identity of movements as diverse as Symbolism and Surrealism, the essentially romantic nature of apparently anti-romantic movements such as Realism and Naturalism. Further, if the modern age in art has been essentially romantic, it is possible to postulate the eventual exhaustion of that great impulse and its replacement by its antipode, classicism.
But if romanticism triumphed in artistic milieux in the mid-nineteenth century and then proceeded to develop a tradition which can be traced through Baudelaire to Verlaine and Rimbaud and to the Symbolists and thence to avant-garde movements such as Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism, it did not triumph socially until recently. It was romanticism's long struggle with public taste that shaped its development. The public in the Western world has always taken "for its ideals, or idols, what may be called, if not classicism, at least the traditional or the academic" (Poggioli 1973:50). In the first third of this century this basic divergence in taste was exacerbated by a growing alienation of the avant-garde artist from society. His alienation, according to Poggioli, took several avenues of expression; antagonism, in which the artist deliberately affronts public morality and etiquette, and attacks (usually his predecessors) in violent polemical jargon; nihilism, in which the artist reaches "a point of extreme tension toward the public and tradition" (p. 64), which culminates in a destructive impulse capable of annihilating all cultural values; agonism, in which the artist, convinced of the impending end of civilization, acts suicidally in an attempt to bequeath something of value to the future; and Futurism, in which the artist has an acute sense of being in a state of transition, perceiving himself as a precursor of future developments. Important in contemporary nihilism have been two factors, the commercialization and vulgarization of art, and the increasing tendency to regard the relationship between an artist and his work as a private one, negating the social value of art in favor of art as private fantasy.
Poggioli convincingly argues that only modern bourgeois societies create conditions in which avant-garde art may flourish, nurturing a counter culture which despises its source. The bête noir opposed by contemporary avant-gardes has been mass culture, in all its forms. In technological urban societies there has been a radical and permanent separation between popular and avant-garde culture, accentuated by a homogenizing process in which ethnic and folk elements are lost under the pressures of mass media and other forces. "By means of specialization and technology, modern society has broken all the links between artisan and artist, destroyed all the forms of folklore and ethnic culture; it has even transformed the very concept of 'the people,' now a synonym for the quite different concept of 'the masses'" (p. 122). Poggioli sees the attempts of such modern artists as Eliot to recreate or restore a lost sense of craftsmanship as doomed from the start. I shall return to this point later.
In his epilogue Poggioli summarizes the evolution of the avant-garde, divided into four moments or phases. The culmination of this development in our time is the triumph of the avant-garde spirit and its ramification into all artistic spheres. But Poggioli does not perceive that this success extends even to society, which has become impervious to shock, permissive to extremes, willing to tolerate and reward the most outrageous artistic extravagances. Avant-garde has become chic, not merely among the elites, but among a vast bourgeois audience which has at last been weaned away from academicism. There remains a sullen residue which opposes all such decadence, but the numbers of adherents have been vastly swollen by affluence and the public education it has fostered. This success has put the avant-garde into crisis, undermining the alienation necessary to its survival. Harold Rosenberg has aptly summarized this situation in Discovering the Present (1973: X-X:):
The cultural revolution of the past hundred years has petered out. Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Today's aesthetic vanguardism is being sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, by state art councils, by museums, by industrial and banking organizations. Foundation grants are made to underground film and magazines, to little-review contributors, to producers of happenings and electronic music, to the Merce Cunningham dance group. The art-historical media have become thoroughly blended with the mass media and with commercial gesign and decoration under the slogan of community art programs. Reciprocally, commercial movies, thrillers, even TV advertising spots have become so daringly experimental in the formal sense as to elicit not the comprehension of a message but the immediate total response of a work of art.
By and large, the contemporary artistic scene demonstrates that the boast of the Dadaists that they had done it all was true. There is a kind of desperation in the most extreme manifestations of contemporary avant-garde art of the now traditional left. It is besieged by a sense of déjà vu. Literally everything has already been tried. According to Rosenberg:
In art, "conservative" and "radical" ought to be abandoned and attention concentrated on déjà vu. The purpose of education is to keep a culture from being drowned in senseless repetitions, each of which claims to offer a new insight. In America an almost total absence of genuine education in modernist creations and attitudes of the past hundred years is responsible for wave after wave of déjà vu novelties. The dejavunik exploits his audience's lack of education by appealing to its desire to be advanced and its expectation of being repelled by new work. Today, cultural professionals can count on avant-garde déjà vu to arouse the enthusiasm of undergraduate movie makers, post-art aesthetes, far-out curators, and collector-dealers for whatever makes the grade as Time-Newsweek shock (p. xi).
These quotes suggest that the romantic age as I have defined it may be ending. It is too early to determine such a hypothesis objectively, but there is mounting evidence that something of the sort may be happening. I refer to the prevalence of a neo-classical revival during the last forty years. It can be stated without exaggeration that the most powerful literary impulses of contemporary culture have come from artists basically hostile to romanticism. I refer to Eliot, Pound and Valéry. It remains to be seen, however, whether this "anti-romanticism" is any more authentic than preceding manifestations in the nineteenth century. T. E. Hulme's prediction of a new classical spirit, although widely assumed to have been futile, did have serious repercussions in its effects on Eliot and Pound.3 Poggioli takes up this question and dismisses the possibility of a new classicism, at least as it is exemplified in Eliot, largely because Eliot's impulse is nostalgic. Poggioli does admit that recently the dynamism seems to have gone out of avant-garde, manifested in increasingly rare appearances of new movements, but attributes this lack of intensity to a broadening of the avant-garde spirit in its contemporary triumph:
In modern poetry and art, classicism can operate only as a retrospective utopia, as a logical counterbalance to the futuristic utopia. In any case, the frequency within the recent avant-garde of positions such as Eliot's along with the rehabilitation and renewal of the very concept of tradition, has certainly contributed to making new movements and manifestoes more rare and scarce. Thus the appearance of a series of new poetics, neoclassical on the surtace, has devaluated experiment as an end in itself (p. 223).
It is significant that Haroldo de Campos's rejection of the poetics of the Generation of 1945 is couched in quite similar phraseology. I refer to the essay entitled "Poetry and Paradise Lost." It is precisely a "retrospective utopia" which is repugnant to the concrete poets:
Anodyne and anonymous lyricism, and love of conventional patterns of vagueness lie, for instance, behind the "rediscovery" of the sonnet in the manner of a "dernier cri." These are the well-known manifestations of Sunday-Park art, a backwater where poetry is perfectly codified in little metric rules, adjusted to a serene formal elegance and equipped with a stock of metaphors prudently controlled in all their petite bourgeois self- sufficiency by a curiously repressing policy: the so-called "atmosphere" (climate) of the poem (1975:25).
Other passages from the Theory of Concrete Poetry (Teori a de Poesia Concreta) demonstrate that for concrete, the poetry of the previous generation was doubly damned: it looked backward in attempting the restoration of clichéd poetic forms, and it was romantic in its sensibility, alienation and sentimentality. While the apparent neoclassicism of the Generation of '45 and other postwar groups might thus be disposed of as a kind of cloying anachronism, the poetics of Valéry and Pound offered sterner resistance, and it was only after deliberation that the concrete poets concluded that they must push beyond them.
Beyond its rejection of nostalgic anachronism, how is concrete poetry's classical protile delineated? Brietly, concrete poetry is not alienated, not agonistic, not nihilistic, not Futuristic. It subscribes to a theory of Zeitgeist, conceived in Russian formalist terms. It rejects subjectivism in all its forms, even the detached subjective role of the artist in the work as conceived by Valéry or Pound. It rejects the idea that art and society are inimical, and in fact attempts a conscious rapprochement with the public. It embraces modern technology and scientism, and is fascinated by communication theory.4 It totally rejects the cult of the metaphor which has characterized contemporary art, and refuses to accept a favorite avant-garde dictum that legitimate art is exceptional.
Concrete's rejection of alienation is profound. It rejects the whole subjective-romantic emphasis on the subconscious, on correspondence, on the poet as mystic or seer. In fact, it overwhelmingly rejects what Hannah Arendt has called the "deep-structure fallacy": the idea that surface is superficial or frivolous and that what matters, what is essential, is what is hidden from view. Concrete affirms the thingness of things, accepting the phenomenological reality of surface. It is therefore opposed to the oneiricism of the Surrealists, proposing instead the maximalization of lucidity. Poggioli has analyzed the Schopenhauerian conception of will as an irrational, unconscious, automatic vital cosmic force. It is this conception (which lies behind avant-garde theories of automatism) that is specifically rejected by the concrete poets, for whom even chance and intuition are subject to rigid control. Décio Pignatari speaks of "the chronomicrometering of chance," and "the most lucid intellectual work for the clearest intuition" ("newpoetry: concrete," 1975:41). He later elaborates these ideas in "Chance, Choice, Shots," where he speaks of chance shaped by mathematical theories of probability. Concrete does not flee from technology, but rather embraces its empiricism and functionalism.
The ingenuous or academic notions that someone might have about mathematics are also not important. Mathematics cannot be opposed to art to the point of conferring to intuition that traditional absolute value, which betrays an idealistic education prisoner to the apparently infinite field of the Arbitrary. Those who ignore principles through the panicked belief that they limit or restrict (one knows not what ... inspiration, perhaps) is compelled to justify "post factum" his work. He can only do this by using dubious articulations or subjective sub-levers. Right was always on the side of those who had reasons instead of mere justifications (1975:147-148).
In this statement, Pignatari redefines intuition in biological terms which do not permit the slightest idealization of the process: "A [ ... ] physiological, psycho-cultural perception mechanism [ ... ] at the root of elementary feedback circuits and high-grade options, stimulating experimental actions." For concrete, creativity is not a process of blind subjection to the unconscious justified post factum as art, but the a priori determination of an aesthetic problem to be solved in a specific and straight-forward manner. In his essay "From the Phenomenology of Composition to the Mathematics of Composition," Haroldo de Campos makes this plain.
Concrete poetry is moving toward the rejection of organic structure in favor of a mathematical or quasi-mathematical one. In the poem of the word-after-word type, structure results from the interaction of words or fragments of words produced in the spatial field, with each new word implying something like a structural option. Such an option solicits a marked intervention of chance and intuitional readiness. Concrete poetry instead seeks a mathematical structure planned before the word. The solution of the structural problem will therefore require that words be used under the control of the thematic number. The definition of structure which fits the poem will be the exact moment of the creative option. From that point on the intervention of a disciplining and critical intelligence will be effected with greatest intensity. The structure selected will rigorously determine the elements of play and their relative positions in an almost mathematical way.
We seek a planned verbal structure, "as precise as possible," as neat as "symbolic logic," as exact as the "visible ideas" of a concrete painter (1975:91-93).
Haroldo de Campos's theory of a "thematic number" conclusively refutes a common criticism of concrete poetry that it represents nothing more than a kind of automatism where isolated words are arbitrarily thrown together as in one of Tristan Tzara's games. Two examples follow, from different moments in the movement's evolution. Even as early as 1953, concrete had moved away from extrinsical, "shaped" poems à la Apollinaire. This is evident in the Poet-Minus series by Augusto de Campos. In this series, Augusto worked with color and words, seeking to reproduce in poetry some equivalent to Webern's musical theories of Klangfarbenmelodie (it is unfortunate that this presentation is limited to the printed word, since the spoken-musical version of the following poem is essential to its Gestalt, to its verbi-voco-visual wholeness):
It is clear in "Here are the Lovers" that we have words arranged by an aprioristic but open-minded/receptive creative mentality which allows full play to what Pignatari calls "factors of proximity and likeness." It should be equally obvious that this is no mere word-picture poem. The juxtaposed words resonate together, setting off refractions of meaning that scintillate around the columns and contribute to its Gestalt. The experience is in some ways akin to synesthesia, where one sensation evokes a response in another sense area. In this case, what the poem manages to evoke/provoke in the receptive reader is a sensual response that goes far beyond the usual intellectual titillation essential to love poetry.
Haroldo de Campos's "Poemandala" from his Lacunae series (1971) exhibits an ethereal grace, managing to evoke the oriental (concrete's fascination with the ideogram can be traced to Pound and pervades the movement's theory) while teasing the mind with its haiku-like columns of words. As insubstantial as a shadow, as permanent as the symbol that forms its core, the poem seems almost like the image left on the retina when one blinks after seeing a strong light. It is a perfect demonstration of what can be achieved with "minimal means," with "a planned verbal structure" that nevertheless is neither clumsy nor pedestrian (as might be assumed by the mathematical formulations of the theory):
Concrete's rejection of subjectivism, the romantic cult of personality, is carried to the extreme of excluding from the poem all traces of the author's presence. This quality is amply demonstrated in the two poems that precede this paragraph. In this effacement the concrete poets go far beyond the craftsmanship of Valéry, Pound or Eliot, where, for all their formal discipline, the authors maintain a persona, a mediator between author, work and reader. It was Eliot, in fact, who revived the Renaissance theories of persona in his attempt to reestablish distance between author and work and eliminate the romantic tendency to blur the distinction between maker and speaker. In the concrete poem there is simply no speaker. To the extent that the reader and the author make contact they do so in the poem itself, not outside it. The concrete poem makes great demands on the reader, since the raw materials of the poem are presented to him, along with certain instructions, and it is he who must realize the poem. This act of faith on the part of the concrete poet reflects his belief in Gestalt, in the validity of the concept that 2 + 2 can equal 5 in art. But the problem is that in the concrete work, the Gestalt is not presented pre-digested by a persona but left only as a potential. This quality is demonstrated in Augusto's "Eis os amantes" where the reader re-creates/re-experiences the copulation that forms the poem's experiential foundation. For another convincing demonstration of this dynamism in concrete poetry, the reader is referred to Haroldo's "Si-Ien-cio"(1956). An equally convincing demonstration of the direct, experiential qualities of concrete may be found in Décio Pignatari's "beba coca cola," in which the poet expresses a profound existential nausea. This is a protest poem with a difference: the reader is invited to participate in an experience that begins with a slogan, "Drink Coca Cola" and culminates in an explosion of rage/ nausea/expulsion (as in excretion). Once again, to listen to the aleatoric vision of this poem in a recording is to materially increase the intensity of the experience. Even more than in traditional word-after-word poetry, concrete is dependent for complete impact on complete experience:
A striking feature of the concrete movement is its attempt to rejoin the severed relations between poetry and public. Concrete theory attempts to demystify art, advocating a kind of Functionalism in which the poem is treated as an object, not an objet d'art to be carefully preserved and saved in a museum case, but an object like a piece of bread or a newspaper. Rather than emphasize craftsmanship in an attempt to valorize the artist's creative effort, concrete poets emphasize creativity as a process akin to industrial design, in which the designer's creative efforts go into conceiving a prototype. Such a prototype is anonymous and capable of infinite reproduction. The test of its efficacy is not the personal taste of an elite collector, but whether the object functions and satisfies the needs of the public. As a consequence, concrete poetry strives to present itself without mystery directly to the consumer. The intellectual elitism involved in the modern cult of the metaphor is also avoided, along with the entire rhetorical-discursive apparatus of traditional lyric poetry. Décio Pignatari says:
The now classic postulation, "form follows function," involving the notion of useful, utilitarian beauty, means an awareness on the part of the artist, both artistically and economically, of the new world of assemblyline industrial production. In this world, "et pour cause," craftsmanship is put out of circulation as anti-economic, anachronistic, incompatible and incommunicable with that impersonal, collective and rational world that comes to depend entirely on planning on all levels and meanings.
The contradictions between industrial production and individual artistic craftsmanship opened a chasm between art and the public. In the face of these divergencies, it became necessary to join beauty with utility in order to attend to the needs of a new type of consumer, a "consumer of physical design," in the words of Neutra ("Form, Function and General Project," Campos and Pignatari 1975:107-108).
Lest anyone mistake his meaning, assuming that concrete seeks to commercialize art, Pignatari adds that these consumer goods lie "in the realm of thought and sensitivity, not convertible into mere utilitarian values." This is n ot to say that commercialization and art are necessarily inimical. Pignatari himself established a successful ad agency in Sa o Paulo for a number of years, and one of his ads is usually included in concrete anthologies. In his "Disenfo rmio" (an anti-diarrheal medicine) the letters of the product invade and consume the "intestinal disturbance." The ad is a t once a highly effective commercial message (part of whose effectiveness is subliminal) and a demonstration that what works has artistic value.
The concrete poets showed an early interest in the media and in communication theory, and the use of concrete graphic techniques by ad agencies and television are seen by them as proof of the validity of their theoretical position. The modern urban consumer, accustomed by television and the newspaper to headlines and simplified syntax, has been conditioned to high speed communication. In the concrete aesthetic what functions, what communicates, possesses artistic value. In the words of Haroldo de Campos:
Concrete poetry is language fit for the contemporary creative mind. It permits high-speed communication. It prefigures for the poem a re-integration in daily life similar to that which the Bauhaus achieved for visual arts: whether as a vehicle of commercial advertising (newspapers, signs, TV, movies, etc.), or as an object in itself (functioning in architecture, for example) with a field of possibilities analogous to both industrial design and painting. It substitutes the magical, the mystical and the "maudit" for the useful (1975:46).
Concrete's rapprochement with mass culture may be partially explained by the specific Brazilian situation, which in some ways resembles that of Russia in the time of the Formalists. In both cases a technologically oriented, innovating avant-garde reacts to a stratified literary tradition it identifies with a colonialist mentality. In such a situation, the avant-garde may regard a mass-oriented aesthetic favorably rather than adopt the hostile attitude typical of the avant-garde in more advanced countries. In this instance there is a confluence of specific local conditions and generalized cultural ones which produces an avant-garde movement quite unique in contemporary art. It is the '45 Generation's traditional elitist sociopsychological orientation that sets off the concrete movement's mass-accepting intransigence.
Beyond concrete's non-alienated orientation to society and art, there are other characterisitics which identify the movement as classical. The most prominent is perhaps the movement's historicism. As Poggioli has noted, classical movements have a well-defined sense of being a culmination as opposed to the agonistic sense of transition which besets the romantic avant-garde. Concrete regards itself as the fruition of a half century of vanguard efforts, and its Theory is replete with analyses of the movements which preceded it. These analyses emphasize the failures of Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism and of such figures as Apollinaire even while conceding their contribution to the concretist aesthetic. For example, in the essay "Aspects of Concrete Poetry," Haroldo de Campos (1975:94-106) analyzes the contributions of Mallarmé, Pound, Apollinaire, the Futurists, Dadaists and others to concrete poetry. In spite of his respect for their contributions, he rejects the contemporary validity of these precursors, accepting their innovations only in the spirit of an inheritor, saying that "the cinematic descriptiveness, the frenetic subjectivity and the ultraromanticism of the futurists hypostatized in their characteristic machine made their compositions barren of constructive organization." Similarly, Augusto de Campos rejects Apollinaire, after recognizing his contributions, in the following terms: "Apollinaire condemns the poetic ideogram to the mere figurative representation of theme. [...] This removes most of the vigor and physiognomic richness which the calligrammes might have had, in spite of the grace and visual 'humor' with which Apollinaire almost always 'draws' them" (1975:19). Pound himself, the direct aesthetic forbear of the concrete poets, is ultimately rejected for his attachment to craftsmanship and the individualistic, subjective relationship between maker and poem that this attitude implies. It should be evident from the foregoing remarks that I have used the term "precursor" advisedly. Perhaps the only way in which a previous author can be a "precursor" is in the literal sense, of a forerunner, a contributor to one's aesthetic, and even then only when the formulator of such a statement has a classicist mentality, perceiving himself as a culmination.
While concrete poetry shares with other avant-garde movements a love of the experimental, it has developed a radical new conception of the theme-form equation which deserves analysis as it relates to classicism and romanticism. Standard avant-gardism's cult of the new presumes a feverish search for new forms of expression and their abandonment when they become generalized or vulgarized through mass acceptance. In other words, what commonly characterizes avant-garde movements is their abhorrence of stereotype. On the other hand, traditional classicism has taken the view that certain artistic forms are virtually immutable, defining originality in terms of surpassing models. To some extent this orientation explains the failures of neo-classical movements in modern literature, obsessed with restoring modes of expression anathematized by the romantic avant-gardes. This constitutes the central dilemma of the modern classical vision: the inability to invent a form adequate to express that vision in non-anachronistic terms. Instead, modern exponents of classicism have attempted the restoration of a lost paradise, and in so doing, have demonstrated that they continue trapped in the romantic ethos they abhor. The problem has been that the power of the Greco-Roman model was such that in spite of increasing distance in time it exercised (and continues to exercise) a fatal fascination for would-be followers of the classical way. In reality, only the exuberant optimism of the Renaissance prevented, and then only temporarily, an awareness of the incongruity of resurrecting a long-dead cultural model to express fourteenth- and fifteenth-century aesthetic and philosophical needs. As Hiram Haydn has demonstrated, the Baroque age was the first romantic period of modern time, one in which the paradoxical possibilities of the Greco-Roman model were fully explored. The eighteenth century's attempt to reassert the model foundered, at least partially, on anachronistic incongruity and ushered in the modern romantic age. The genius of concrete poetry lies in its freedom from the past and its invention of a form adequate to the expression of a twentieth-century classicism.
In its development of a new formal theory in harmony with the contemporary period, concrete poetry has abandoned classicism's traditional insistence that theme and form are separate entities. At best, classicism of the Greco-Roman mold will admit only that certain forms, such as the sonnet, are uniquely adapted to the expression of certain themes. Concrete poetry resolves the theme-form binomial in favor of a new synthesis in which form is theme (isomorphism) in which the structure and physical arrangement of words in a poem are determined in each case by the internal demands of the Gestalt created by the "factors of proximity and likeness" at play. Form is not imposed on the words from without, is not programmatic, is not extrinsic. This conception confronts the poet with a radical new creative option each time he begins a poem. In traditional poetry, a writer conquers a style and evolves thematically within it, content to innovate only in a relative sense. Even when the poet adheres to a new movement, for example, he simply takes over the new style, makes it his own and tinkers. For the concrete poet each new poem is a leap in the dark.
It should be evident from the foregoing that concrete poetry also has made a radical new formulation in the concept of originality. Leaving behind both traditional classicism's effort at surpassing models and romanticism's cult of the new, the concrete poet confronts each new creative moment armed only with his readiness to allow the words to shape themselves into an idea, which, once expressed, is relatively unique. At most a new idea will lead to a limited series of poems that exhaust its potentiality. The creative attitude of the concrete poet is one of patient awareness.
The related concepts of form and originality are themselves important in their relationship with another traditional shibboleth: that of "national" literature. Isolated behind very real walls of distance and time, modern Occidental literatures developed concepts of nationalism that seemed both logical and inevitable. The traditional artist, protected behind these arbitrary walls, was free to imitate, often rather closely, the efforts of contemporaries in other countries, and the product of his labor was assured a place in the intellectual market of his country. The concrete poet, operating in an age when communication is virtually instantaneous and travel is relatively so, fully accepts the impossibility in such a situation of any appeal to relativity or uniqueness. Concrete poetry developed internationally in such a way that limitations of language and culture were minimized within a tacit consensus that imitation or duplication from one country to another was impossible practically and illicit creatively.
In this essay I have attempted to demonstrate the possibility that concrete poetry is an avant-garde movement of classicist tendencies rather than romantic ones. For the purposes of example, parting from an epistemological basis, I have explored the various ways it rejects alienation, the predominant characteristic of modern romantic avant- garde movements. Beyond the movement's intrinsic merits as an approach to contemporary aesthetics, the intriguing possibility of its classicist nature especially recommends it to those interested in contemporary literary typology. Indeed, if concrete is classicist and avant-garde then a whole series of assumptions about vanguardism and aesthetics must be reconsidered, since vanguardism has been universally assumed to be a romantic phenomenon. If romanticism, after a two-hundred-year reign, has reached a point of inanition, a classicist revolt will assume certain characteristics of the avant-garde as a matter of dynamics inherent in the situation. This may also explain why contemporary neo-classical movements such as the Generation of 1945 in Brazil failed to generate impact. The possibilities of a technically formalist moderating reaction within romanticism were exhausted by such nineteenth-century movements as Parnassianism. Concrete has shown that formal tinkering within a romantic aesthetic is no longer viable. For formalism to work in the contemporary period, a radical psychological amputation is necessary. The affirmative, optimistic mentality of concrete, allied with its acceptance of avant-garde aesthetics makes it clear that we have in reality two apparently similar but radically different movements which contemplate each other across an unbridgeable gulf.
FOOTNOTES
1. João Cabral de Melo Neto is reasonably well known in the United States and elsewhere. His poetry may be consulted in various anthologies, including The Literary Review (Winter issue, 1978), and Elizabeth Bishop's An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry (1972). These anthologies may also be consulted for the other Brazilian poets mentioned.
2. A kind of unofficial Brazilian blockade of concrete works was broken a few years ago, and the intervening period had seen the commercial publication of several important works. Prior to that time, within Brazil, all concrete works, including Invenção and Noigandres were privately financed and published. In 1973, a second edition of the Teoria da Poesia Concreta was published by the São Paulo publisher, Duas Cidades. In the same year, Augusto de Campos privately printed his retrospective Caixa Preta (Black Box), together with designer Julio Plaza. In 1977 Haroldo de Campos's Xadrez de Estrelas (Chessboard of Stars) (poetry and prose) was published in Sa o Paulo by Perspectiva. In the same year, Décio Pignatari's Poesia Pois E Poesia (Poetry? Damn Right!) was published by Duas Cidades. Finally, in 1979, Haroldo published his Signantia Quase Coelum, a collection of poetic fragments with a Dantean foundation, also with Perspectiva. These retrospective editions have for th e first time provided readers in Brazil and abroad with access to almost the entire corpus of concrete poetry.
In addition, the author of this essay recently finished translating the Theory of Concrete Poetry. It is possible that the Theory will become available to the English-speaking community in the near future. (All translations in this study are taken from that text.) The poems themselves are available in translation in a number of anthologies, most notably Mary Ellen Solt's Concrete Poetry: A World View (1970) and Emmett Williams's An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967).
3. See the essay entitled "Romanticism and Classicism" in Hulme (1936:113-140). The romanticism of the New Critics, Hulme's inheritors, is expounded by Richard Foster (1962: 30-44).
4. The movement's preoccupation with communication theory led it, in later stages, toward semiotics. The movement may be justly regarded as a pioneering semiotically oriented effort. See the Teoria da Poesia Concreta or the Anthology of Concrete Poetry (Williams 1967) for examples of semiotic poems. The Theory, with its phenomenological orientation, abounds in pre-semiotic discoveries.
REFERENCES
Bishop, Elizabeth and Emanuelle Brasil, 1972. An Anthotogy of Twentieth-Century Brazitian Poetry (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan UP).
Campos, Augusto de, 1975. Caixa Preta (São Paulo).
Campos, Haroldo de, 1977. Xadrez de Estrelas (São Paulo : Perspectiva).
1979 Signantia Quase Coelum (São Paulo: Perspectiva).
Campos, Haroldo de, Augusto de Campos and Décio Pignatari, 1975. Teoria da Poesia Concreta, 2nd ed. [Original edition, 1965] (São Paulo: Duas Cidades).
Foster, Richard, 1952. The New Romantics (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP).
Haydn, Hiram, 1950. The Counter-Renaissance (New York: Scribners).
Hulme, T.E., 1936. Speculations (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., Ltd.).
Kreiger, Murray, 1960. The Tragic Vision (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston).
1971 The Classic Vision (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP).
Peckham, Morse, 1962. "Toward a Theory of Romanticism: II Reconsiderations," Studies in Romanticism 1:1-8.
Peckham, Morse, 1965. Romanticism (New York: Braziller).
Pignatari, Décio, 1977. Poesia Pois é Poesia (São Paulo: Duas Cidades).
Poggioli, Renato, 1973. The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP).
Praz, Mario, 1960. The Romantic Agony (New York: Meridian Books).
Rosenberg, Harold, 1973. Discovering the Present (Chicago: Chicago UP).
Soit, Mary Ellen, 1970. Concrete Poetry: A World View (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP).
Williams, Emmet, 1967. An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (New York: Something Else Press).
reproduced from: http://www.ubu.com/papers/tolman.html
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