An intelligent view of the Avant-Garde at the end of 1955

Unattributed
Potlatch #24, 24 November 1954

URBANISM. In Paris today we recommend visits to: Contrescarpe (Continent); Chinatown; the Jewish Quarter; Butte-aux-Cailles (the Labyrinth); Aubervilliers (at night); the public gardens of the 7th Arrondissement; the Medical-Legal Institute; rue Dauphine (Nesles); Buttes-Chaumont (play); the Merri neighborhood; Parc Monceau; Ile Louis (the island); Pigalle; Les Halles (rue Denis, rue du Jour); the Europe neighborhood (memory); rue Sauvage.

We do not recommend visits, under any circumstances, to: the 6th and 15th Arrondissements; the grand boulevards; Luxembourg; Champs-Elysees; Place Blanche; Montmarte; Ecole Militaire; Place de la Republique; Etoile and Opera; the whole 16th Arrondissement.

DECORATION. Project by J. Fillon for decoration of a living room: three quarters of the room, occupying the part that one crosses on entering through the only door, are elegantly furnished and have no particular purpose. At the far part of the room there is a barricade, partitioning off the functional part of the room, occupying one quarter of its total area. The barricade is absolutely authentic, built from cobblestones, sandbags, barrels, and other objects commonly used for this purpose. It is approximately as high as a person is tall, with several peaks and a few gaps. Loaded guns may be laid across the top. A narrow passageway leads to the functional part of the room, which is tastefully furnished and laid out in such a way as to provide a pleasant place to receive friends and acquaintances.

This living room, which of course also requires the appropriate lighting and ambient sound, could be used as a departure from the standard layout of a run-of-the-mill house, merely introducing a superficially picturesque element. Nevertheless, its true purpose is to form a part of a wider architectural complex where its decisive value in the construction of a situation comes to the forefront.

EXPLORATION. In the near future, a team of Lettrists, operating from a base on rue des Jardins-Paul, will undertake a thorough exploration of the Merri neighborhood, which has not yet appeared on any psychogeographical map. WE INVITE ALL AND SUNDRY JOIN THE LETTRIST INTERNATIONAL. We will keep a few.

EDUCATIONAL GAMES. A recent development, "ideological debate structured as a boxing match," seems to have a brilliant future among the intellectual elite, for whom it seems ideally suited. (IDEOLOGICAL DEBATE STRUCTURED AS A BOXING MATCH WILL HELP TO INCREASE YOUR PRESTIGE WHILE WASTING TIME.) Here are the rules:

The two opponents and the referee, whose decision is final, sit at the same table, separated from each other by the referee. The length of the match is decided beforehand along with the number of rounds and their precise duration.

When the referee declares the match has begun, the two opponents size each other up for a moment and then the first to go on the attack makes a statement on whatever subject he feels is appropriate. His opponent then responds, either with a vigorous rebuttal of the argument just formulated, or by making some statement on a related or unexpected topic, or -- best of all -- with a combination of the two. The referee makes sure that the opponents do not interrupt each other. nevertheless, any contender speaking for too long loses points. A chronometer marks the end of the round with an appropriate signal and the debate is broken off immediately.

The referee then awards the round to one of the opponents or calls a draw. During the break, the contenders' fans and trainers may bring them alcoholic beverages or cups of coffee (and in some cases, drugs). The match begins again when the order is given. The referee calls a knockout when either of the opponents, surprised by the vehemence or subtlety of an attack, is unable to continue the debate. Should no knockout occur, the winner of the match is decided at the end on points, depending on the number of rounds won. Cheating, even when obvious, is not penalized.

Already noted as favorite topics are Zen, the New Left, phenomenological ontology, Astruc, Gallic coins, censorship and the intelligence of chess.

The Lettrists, who would be unbeatable, do not play this game.)

above copied from: http://www.notbored.org/1955.html

Taking Art Seriously: Understanding Studio Research, Bernard Hoffert

Importance of the Visual

The degree to which art is integral to our way of life is scarcely worth noting. Most of us accept without question that access to art, both historic and contemporary, is part of any community and the diversity of contemporary art practice touches almost every aspect of our lives-public, commercial, creative and social. Experimental and media Arts reflect, enhance and influence culture and enrich our daily experience, while individual art choices provide a source of personal fulfillment and satisfaction. At a broader level it is the products of visual culture—the art, design and architecture—which direct our travels; it is the museums, galleries, buildings and spaces of past as well as present visual culture, which shape much of our holiday itinerary and our purpose in traveling. At a panoramic level it is not too extravagant to claim that it is the visual which shapes our experience of the world; every building we enter, every object we use and every image we enjoy is the product of a creative visual impulse, every city is the outcome of conscious aesthetic decisions, some good some bad, some motivated by function not excellence, but all in part visual.

The visual environment is so fundamental that we do not think about it. We accept the outcomes of art, design, architecture and the proliferation of visual forms, but we fail to acknowledge their status. We appreciate and enjoy the individual example, but as a category of learning with its own academic integrity, we do not accord it an equivalent recognition to the sciences, humanities or technologies.

As this paper explains, it is time we took art seriously, accepted it as a domain of knowledge and integrated it and its associated visual forms into the broader context of our knowledge culture.



Art and the Knowledge Environment

Research has become an increasingly important concept in the visual arts. Encouraged by government policy, universities place increased emphasis on research output. Artists and art educators describe art making in terms of research and academic art staff apply for grants as a source of research income. Disciplines known for their creativity are now equally acknowledged for their research. ‘Practice-led’ or ‘practice based’ research is becoming an aspect of research discussion, in part to establish the prestige of academic institutions, but also to link with the push for innovation and new outcomes from research knowledge, as government policies attempt to justify expenditure on research.

The UK tertiary sector has undergone a series of Research Assessment Exercises which evaluated the research outputs nationally. These mechanisms for quality assurance required the demonstration of research outcomes and accountability for research. An academic hierarchy of institutions has resulted from these Exercises along with a system of institutional funding based on research excellence. New Zealand has performed a similar exercise, Australia is about to do the same and other nations may well follow. Integral to this research data gathering is the inclusion of research in visual culture, not research about the visual, undertaken through the humanities, but research in the visual-Art as Research. This discussion contends that research in art and the visual contributes to knowledge in the same way as all disciplines do - research results in new knowledge and the final test of new knowledge is what it contributes to the human condition.



Research and Culture

Consider the relationship between the development of knowledge and its contribution to culture in the following disciplines:

New knowledge in science contributes to new technological development

Benjamin Franklin is well known for his experiments with electricity. In 1746, while watching a summer storm, it occurred to him that lightening looked like an electrical phenomenon, resembling the spark generated from an electrified body in his experiments. His research showed that a pointed object, like a finger or an electrified body attracted electrical discharges. Applying this discovery in nature, he found that lightning was attracted to such objects, confirming his suspicion it was electrical. He then invented the lightning rod - a simple, but effective device to dispel the destructive energy of these electrical impulses. He wrote: “may not the knowledge of this power of points be of use to mankind, in preserving houses, churches, ships and cont, from the stroke of lighting, by directing us to fix on the highest parts of those edifices, upright rods of iron made sharp as a needle…”. The lightning conductor is now integral to technologies associated with building, navigation and the environment (Koestler, 1970).

New knowledge in medicine results in improved health care

In 1879, Louis Pasteur was working on a cure for chicken cholera, a devastating poultry disease that was the nineteenth century version of bird flu. He was injecting healthy chickens with laboratory cultures of the disease and then attempting to treat the infected birds. During the summer his work was delayed for several months, and when he returned to his experiments, he found that chickens injected with the culture which had stood in his laboratory unused through the hot summer months, did not develop all the symptoms of the cholera, but contracted what appeared to be a very mild dose of the disease. Further testing confirmed that the weak culture had vaccinated the chickens against the cholera. Extrapolating from this example, Pasteur initiated a system of preventative medicine which has been integral to healthcare ever since (Koestler, 1970).

New knowledge in microbiology results in improved medical treatment

In 1922 Alexander Fleming was working at St Mary’s hospital in London when by chance he discovered that an active ingredient in nasal mucus, what he identified as lysozyme, had the ability to destroy bacteria. Although it was not a powerful germ killer, it pointed the way for his future research until seven years later he discovered penicillin. This laid the foundations of microbiology and the revolutionary impact antibiotics have had on improved health care ever since (Koestler, 1970).

New knowledge in engineering contributes to better structures and machines

In December 1903 Orville and Wilbur Wright mounted an engine onto a glider they had built and flew for 59 seconds, covering a distance of about 260 metres they effectively launched the aeronautical industry. What was revolutionary about the Wright brothers’ work was neither the glider nor the engine, although each was a significant development on existing technology; it was the shaping and structure of the wing which allowed a pilot to manipulate the aerodynamic impact on the structure while in flight; it was an issue of structural design. The whole aircraft industry reflects the innovations which flowed from their research. (Mc Farland, 1953).

Each of the above developments contributed to the betterment of the human condition; they also contribute within their disciplinary domain to culture. As a result culture improves in intellectual and material terms and we have an enhanced quality of life. Similarly, art produces new knowledge by a parallel contribution to culture, in which new art directly adds to the quality of cultural experience.



Art and Culture

Consider the following examples of developments in art that have contributed to cultural quality and experience:

New knowledge in environmental art contributes to a richer experience of nature

In the early 1840s a number of painters interested in recording the landscape were working in the small village of Barbizon, on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, near Paris. Although not a formal group they are often collectively called the Barbizon painters, due to the similar themes their work conveys in the celebrating of nature and recording the beauty of the landscape. Different artists produced work that fluctuated between realism and romanticism, but each was inspired by working directly from nature. One of the foremost artists associated with Barbizon was Theadore Rousseau, whose painting fell at the more realistic end of the scale. He recognized that the expansion of industry in Paris, the growth of the city beyond its walls and the popular indifference to nature, was devastating the forest. He sucessfully petitioned the Emperor of France, Napoleon III to establish a protected park in the forest and in 1863, 1,097 hectares of the Fontainebleau forest was set aside as a réserve artistique, which could not be exploited commercially. This was the first protected nature reserve and began a world wide movement to preserve the environment, still gaining momentum today. Rousseau and the Barbizon painters had considerable impact in the USA, reflecting the impact of the Hudson River Painters. This celebration of the land contributed, in 1864, to Abraham Lincoln signing a declaration of protection for the Yosemite Valley. In 1872 the American Congress established Yosemite National Park - the world’s first protected wild life reserve and forest. The Barbizon and Hudson River artists succeeded in awakening cultural sensibilities to the pleasures of nature (Chagnon-Burke, 2004).

New knowledge in populist art contributes to a richer experience of popular culture

In Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century a number of artists emerged who celebrated the Parisian nightlife and popular society. Linked mostly with the Impressionists and Post Impressionists, they used cafes, bars, dance halls and theatres as their subjects, shaping some of the most memorable images of early Modernism. Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1881) and the Moulin Rouge paintings of Lautrec introduce popular entertainment as the subject of art; the scenes of ballet and opera by Degas show us the world of the Parisian elite as they enjoy the pleasures of the new Garnier Opera House; the paintings by Berthe Morisot provide insights into the more restricted female world, the domestic environment, family and entertainments of the upper middle class. These artists and many others of the period, bring us the everyday world as the content of art, the entertainments, celebrations, private moments and debaucheries, the contemptuous underbelly of polite society which had previously been eschewed by art. This opened the door to popular culture and the richness and diversity of art which deals with the world around us, culminating in the Pop Art of the 1960s and its celebration of modern life. It spawned the vast use of ‘the popular’ as content in advertising, media, films and all of the other offshoot entertainments which enrich our lives; these 19th century artistic insights turned cultural awareness away from high art to the enjoyment of popular culture which is integral to modern living.

New knowledge in art and design contributes to beautifying our surroundings

In 1861 the firm of Marshall, Morris, Faulkner and Co. was formed in London to craft furniture based on truth to materials, celebrating their natural beauty; and simplicity of design, rather than overlays of decoration. Reacting to the excesses of Victorian abundance and poor quality industrial production, William Morris and his friends began what turned into the Arts and Crafts Movement. Their inspiration came from nature and a romanticized notion of Mediaeval times when happy craftsman celebrated their skills in the creation of beauty. The ideal led to a revolution in both art and design with major artists and designers working together to beautify and refine furnishings, revive historic ideals and improve the quality of life. While the social ambitions of the Movement might have fallen short, their aesthetic ideals influenced generations of artists and designers and are integral to craft design today.

New knowledge in perception contributes to richer personal experience

In 1910 in the village of Murnau in the Bavarian Alps, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky painted the first intentionally abstract painting, a small watercolour that set him on the pursuit of abstract imagery as the subject matter of art. His book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, outlines his theories, explaining how abstract colours and forms carried meaning that could enrich our experience. Through the work of Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich and the work of other abstract artists, the expressive and communicative power of colour, line, texture and form became evident to a broader audience. Aspects of image construction, previously regarded as the building blocks of meaning, were recognized as having expressive meaning of their own. It was as if a new sensibility had been unleashed as artists, architects and designers of all types adopted the power of colour and simple, direct form to enliven their creations. Abstraction has since become an integral aspect of all visual communication, in which the components of making any image - shape, colour, tone and texture - are as least as important for the message as the image itself. The whole visual spectrum has developed using the perceptual innovations of the early abstractionists (Kandinsky, 1977).

New knowledge in the scope of art contributes to a broader appreciation of culture

The creative excitement of Russia in the early twentieth century is best evidenced through two major design movements, the Suprematists, founded by the painter and designer, Kasimir Malevich and the Constructivists, who are linked most closely with the designer for social needs, Vladimir Tatlin. A major figure who spanned both movements was Isador El Lissitsky, an engineer, architect and designer who, fascinated by the discoveries of science, sought to represent these movements’ inspirational ideas in geometric shapes and composite lines. Lissitsky’s drawings and designs, inspired by speculations on a fourth dimension, provided a conceptual leap into a new way of considering space and introduced visual forms that suggested the interplay of science and life, paralleling the innovations of Kandinsky and Mondrian in their impact on visual culture expressed through typography, architecture and industrial design (Hoffert, 1995).

New knowledge in the application of art contributes to a richer quality of human experience

In 1916 the Expressionist, then Cubist and eventually abstract painter, Piet Mondrian, joined the Dutch group De Stijl, which combined artists and designers in a search for a style that represented the needs of the twentieth century. Influenced by the Theosophical teachings of Madam Blavatsky and using the terminology of the philosopher, H J M Schoenmaekers, Mondrian refined his visual language to the artists’ primaries, red, yellow and blue and the tones, black grey and white. This was the language of his art for the remainder of his life, used in different formal relationships and always built around a formal geometric basis. Mondrian and his colleagues defined a style of design which has permeated the last 80 years, applied through architecture and interiors, furniture and fabrics. Who has not walked on Mondrian linoleum or worn a Mondrian jumper? So strong was the impact of De Stijl that its characteristic design is better known today than it was when it was begun in the 1920s (Hoffert, 1995).

The list of additions to art knowledge is almost endless, the innovations of Russolo’s noise music in the development of pop; the impact of Futurist theatre on modern performance, both as theatre and as art; the insights of Surrealist and Pop Artists which have fed advertising, media and now multimedia imagery. All demonstrate the vast contribution that research in art has made to culture; new knowledge has been developed in art and this has led to development, enrichment, diversification and expansion in culture at large.

These examples demonstrate that while art contributes to culture, within the domain of its discipline, it also creates new knowledge which enables/inspires other disciplines to contribute to culture within their domains. Both functions are research developments, evolving from art practice. In recognizing this, the challenge becomes to establish the academic infrastructure and a research methodology through which art can be undertaken as research in university degrees; to allow practice based research the same recognition and status accorded other research. To achieve this is a major task of art education.



A Proposal for Research Degrees in Art

As mentioned earlier, increasingly art schools are addressing the research potential of visual culture; in the UK research in art was integral to the Research Assessment exercises and the same will be the case in Australia.

Research degrees in art practice have been established at Master’s level since the 1980s and studio-based PhD degrees emerged during the 1990s in the UK and Australia, attracting major artists and artist-academics as well as younger artists using the university context, with its seminars, critiques and interrogative engagement, as a means of further their practice.

The Faculty of Art & Design at Monash University has been developing formats for research degrees in art and design for the last fifteen years. Monash is one of Australia’s major research universities and all its academic disciplines are required to contribute to the university’s research objectives. The Faculty addressed this demand by developing an approach to visual research which has developed into the largest, practice based research degree program in the country and one of the largest in the world. The problem was to recognize the quality and achievement of professional visual production and to reformulate art production as research without compromising its quality as art.

The Monash research degree program is structured around an exhibition, which is the outcome of the research process. This is supported by a dissertation which bridges the expectations of professional art practice and university expectations of PhD degrees, to contextualize the visual research. Coursework components facilitate the integration of practice and theory, but the dominant emphasis is on the development of a body of studio research, for examination. With over 250 candidates at Masters and PhD level, the program’s success has been as a result of the support system developed to translate the expectations of professional art practice into research. The methodology coursework subjects explore issues of terminology and ways for visual research to be contextualized, to demonstrate its innovation. They also develop a theoretical context by which professional production can be taken further into the realms of research and cultural production. Seminars and critiques underpin the creative interaction within the program. The outcome has been a community of artist-scholars who create, discuss and critique each other’s art as part of the process of enhancing their visual output. They are art professionals who use their visual exploration to inspire visual research, using the academic experience to build and enhance their understanding of and contribution to visual culture. Art becomes an equal partner in the academic disciplines of the academy as a bastion of research and innovation within society.

‘Taking Art Seriously’ means we understand not just its creative potential, but how we can use its research knowledge to contribute, parallel to other disciplines, in the development of culture.

above copied from:http://artandeducation.net/papers/view/21

Manifesto of Industrial Painting, Guiseppe Pinot-Gallizio

Manifesto of Industrial Painting: For a unitary applied art

Colloidal macromolecules have already made their appearance in the field of art, and although their poet has not yet been found, thousands of artists are busying themselves with the effort to master them.

The great era of resin[1] is inaugurated and with it has commenced the use of matter in motion; the colloidal macromolecule will etch itself profoundly onto the concept of relativity, and the constants of matter will suffer a definitive collapse. Concepts of eternity and immortality will disintegrate, and the woes of eternalization of matter will be reduced ever more to nothing, leaving to the artists of chaos the infinite joy of the "always new."

The novel[2] -- conceived amidst the risks of infinite imagination and invention: drawn from the liberated energry that man will harness toward the reconstruction of the gold standard, understood as the congealed energy of the infernal banking system already decomposing.

The patented[3] society, conceived of and based on the simplistic notions, the elementary gestures of artists and scientists reduced in captivity from ants to lice, is about to end. Man is expressing a collective consciousness and (wielding) a tool adequate to the transformation to a potlatch system of gifts which cannot be purchased if not with other poetic experiences.

The machine may very well be the appropriate instrument for the creation of an industrial-inflationist art, based on the Anti-Patent; the new industrial culture will be strictly "Made Amongst People" or not at all! The time of the Scribes is over.

Only a continual and implacable creation and destruction will result in an anxious and pointless quest for object-things of transitory use, planting mines beneath the foundations of the Economy, destroying its values or impeding their formation; the ever-novel will destroy the boredom and anguish created by man's slavery to the infernal machine, queen of the all-equivalent; the new possibility will create a new world of the total-diverse.

Quantity and quality will be fused; the arising society of the luxury-standard will annihilate traditions.

Proverbs will no longer have meaning.

For example, the proverb, "He who leaves the old path for the new," etc., will be replaced by, "The proverbs of the old starve the young to death."

A new, ravenous force of domination will push men toward an unimaginable epic poetry.

Not even the habit of establishing time will be preserved.

From now on, time will be merely an emotive value, a newly minted coin of shock, and will be based on the sudden changes arising in moments of creative life, and upon rare instants of boredom.

Men without memories will be created; men in a continual violent ecstasy, forever starting at ground zero; a "critical ignorance" will come into being with extensive roots in the long prehistory of savage man, the magus of the caves.

The new magic will have the more recent spice of the sparks of the conflagration of the library of Alexandria which was the synthesis of the neolithic revolution and which continues in our own times to burn the residue of the urban society of the Sumerians and the nomadism of the Phoenicians, flavoring like a narcotic incense the hopes of man.

So great will be the artistic productions that machines will produce, compliantly bending to our wills, that we will not even be able to fix it in memory; machines will remember for us.

Other machines will intervene to destroy, determining situations of non-value; there will be no more works of the art-champion, but open air ecstatic-artistic exchanges among the people.

The world will be the stage and the by-play of a continuous representation; the new earth will transform itself into an immense Luna Park, creating new emotions and new passions.

The cosmic spectacle offered by humanity will be effectively universal and visible in its total simultaneity at telescopic distance, obliging man to ascend in order to embrace the entire spectacle; the laziest will put their names down in Paradise.

Man is thus launched on the quest of myth.

In the past, the epic was able to create itself on earth; lack of communication, wars, great fears, and the confusion of languages and customs favored in time deformations and distortions of reality; they transformed actions, and synthesized into myth.

Today a myth can only be created with difficulty and when man manages to find himself in special conditions, or launches himself into macrocosm with immense instruments, or descends with miniscule ones into microcosm.

Because of this we must depict the roads of the future with unknowable materials, marking the long path of the Heavens with methods of signing adequate to the grandiosity of our undertakings.

Where today one makes signs with spokes in sodium, tomorrow we will use new rainbows, fatas morganas, aurora borealises that we will construct; the stripteases of the constellations, the rythmic dances of asteroids and ultrasonic music of thousands of fragmented sounds will supply us with moments worthy of demigods.

For all those things and men already powerful: sooner or later you will give us machines to play with or we will fashion them ourselves to occupy that leisure time which you, with demented voracity, look forward to passing in Banality and in making minds progressively into mush. We will use these machines to draw the highways, to make the most fantastical and unique fabrics in which for a single instant the joyous throngs will dress themselves with an artistic sense.

Kilometers of printed paper, engraved, colored, will sing hymns to the strangest and most zealous follies.

Houses of painted leather, of pottery, lacquered, of metal, of alloys, of resin, of vibrantly colored cements will form on the earth an asymmetrical and continuous moment of shock.

We will fix images at our pleasure with cine-photographical and televisual machines, which the collective genius of the people has created, and which you have until now evilly employed in securing for yourselves an absolute reign of Boredom.

Each person will feel the joy of color, of music; architectonic airs of colored gasses, hot walls of infrareds that provide eternal springtime - we will make it so that man plays from the cradle to the grave, and even death will be nothing but a game.

Colored poetic signs will create emotional moments and give us the infinite joy of the magico-creative-collective moment, on the platform of the new myths and passions.

With automation there will no longer be work in the traditional sense, and there will be no more "after work" time, but a free time to liberate antieconomic energies.

We want to found the first establishment of industrial poetry and from this unimaginable and monstrous birth which machines will grant us, we will create establishments of immediate destruction, to obliterate at once the emotional products already created, so that our brains will be forever immune to plagiarism and will be able to find themselves immediately in the state of grace of ground zero.

A people of artists only can survive guided by its brilliant minority: the creators of belief.

The ancient cultures give us examples of this with their inflation; everything was unique and this immense production was impossible without the inclusion of popular elements dragged along in their works of immense poetry.

Once the poetic font dried up, it was a brief step to the ruin of the Maya, of the Cretans, of the Etruscans, etc.

Today man is a part of the machine he has created and which negates him and by which he is dominated.

We must invert this non-sense or there will be no more creation; we must dominate the machine, force it to make the unique gesture -- useless, antieconomic, artistic -- in order to create a new anti-economic society, one that is poetic, magical, artistic.

Powerful and symmetrical lords: asymmetry, at the heart of modern biology, is expanding in the artistic and scientific fields, undermining the foundations of your symmetrical world calculated upon the axioms of poetic moments of a long gone past that has arrived at an absolute immobility in the crystalline Boredom of Your devising.

The ultimate modern artistic creations actuated with a magico-prophetic sense have destroyed space; the long kilometric cloths can be translated and measure chronometrically, like films, like cinerama (twenty minutes of painting, thirty, an hour).

Time, the magic box with which men of ancient agrarian cultures would regulate their vital and poetic experiences, has halted and compelled you to change speed.

The instruments which are the basis of your dominion: space and time, will be useless toys in your childish, crooked, paralytic hands.

Useless your idealist constructs of the Superman and of genius; useless your proprieties, your immense urbanistic formations that bore the insomniac nights of aristocratic spirits capable only of limping about empty palaces, like bats and owls in search of the foul foods of artificial paradises.

Useless and vain your centuries of urbanism, because only to you and for you the people have vainly consecrated their best free creative energies, believing you to be the effective representatives of a poetic message. Today antimatter, the physical antiworld has been discovered and your whole unwieldy dwelling trembles on the precipice.

The anti-man has already appeared in the dramatic scenario of physics. The people will have no use in the future for your purposeless proprieties, which are nothing but vast cemeteries in which you have entombed over the centuries all the pains and the poetry that man has created for you.

New proprieties are required; true nomadism requires scenes for camping, for gypsy caravans, for the weekends.

The return to nature with modern instrumentation will allow man, after thousands of centuries, to return to the places where Paleolithic hunters overcame great fear; modern man will seek to abandon his own, accumulated in the idiocy of progress, on contact with humble things, which nature in her wisdom has conserved as a check on the immense arrogance of the human mind.[4]

Lords already powerful in the East and the West, you have built subterranean cities to protect yourself from the radiation which you have savagely: very well, the ingenious artists will transform your sewers into sanctuaries and into atomic cathedrals tracing with emotional magic the signs of the industrial culture that will swiftly transform into the symbols of the new zodiac, the new calendars of fleeting moments.

New energies gathered from the sensitive minority that the masses will express in extended lethargy will transform your termitai[5] of armored cement into opulent, transmittable and exchangeable moments.

Artists will be the teddy-boys of the old culture: that which you have not already destroyed will be destroyed by them in order that nothing is remembered, since your dullness has come to such a point that it has destroyed the last possibility of rebirth left to you: war.

This was always your last resort, since destruction requires renovation: today your cowardice, your fear has exploded in your hands.

You are indefatigable fabricators of Boredom.

Your progress will sterilize the last of your sensibilities, and nothing, if not your civilization, will help you to gasp the last particles of an infected oxygen, prolonging your agony in the emissions of the machines which you yourselves have overworked and exhausted.

The new decorums, stretching from cloth to dwellings, from means of transport to glasses and plates and lighting fixtures to the experimental cities, will be unique, artistic and unrepeatable.

We will not longer use the term "immobili,"[6] but "mobili,"[7] seeing that they will be ephemeral instruments of joy and play; in a word, we will return to poverty, extreme poverty but possessed of wealth of spirit in a new way of acting and being.

Possessions will be collective and have a swiftness of self-destruction.

Poetry will no longer be about the senses which we already know, but those which we have yet to know; it will have no more architecture, nor painting, nor words, nor images, but will be without external surfaces and without volume. We are nearing the fourth dimension, nearing pure poetry, magic without a master, but it can only be if it is total, we are near the savage state with a modern sense, with modern instruments: the promised land, paradise, Eden, can be nothing other than to breathe the air, to eat, to touch, to penetrate. To purify one's self in the air in order to create with these new, impalpable proprieties the new passionate and free man, who no longer has time to satiate all his desires and create new ones.

All ideologies, all religions, follow the politics of desire, never satisfying them if not in the hereafter: the result is that today science and art find themselves facing an impenetrable wall of whys.

We want to wipe out the whys for good.

The new prophets have already breached this infinite and sweet wall of new poetry at its foundations.

The man of tomorrow will, guided by these pioneers, tap into the indestructible nectar which flows from it.

The entire new human way of being and acting will be a game, and man will live all his life for play, preoccupying himself with nothing but the indulgence of emotions arising from the play of his desires.

The first rudimentary tools of this revolution are, in our opinion, artistic-industrial and devaluating, simply because these are above all instruments of joy: and so this is why in proposing our minor results, like industrial painting, we feel arrogantly certain that our hopes are good, judging from the spreading enthusiasm with which they have been received.

Industrial painting is the first attempted success in playing with machines, and the result has been the devaluing of the work of art.

When thousands of painters who today labor at the non-sense of detail will have the possibilities which machines offer, there will be no more giant stamps, called paintings to satisfy the investment of value, but thousands of kilometers of fabric offered in the streets, in markets, for barter, allowing millions of people to enjoy them and exciting the experience of arrangement.

It will be the triumph of great numbers moved by quality, which will establish unknown values, and the speed of exchange will determine a new identity: Value will become identical to Exchange.

It will be the end of all speculation.

The great game began at Turin in 1958, continued in Milan and Venice, was reconfirmed in Monaco in 59 where the Congress of Situationists established that the ten point of Amsterdam were the fruit of a silent but effective premise for a unitary-urbanism.

The subsequent Exhibition of Paris, where environmental construction was successfully demonstrated, the emotion of an instant, demonstrated how cultural unity is the only idea capable of dominating the machine.

We are poor and it doesn't matter, our poverty is our strength.

Its useless for us to stew in our own juices, they will be able to exclude us from their Exhibitions, they will be able to silence us, insult us, humiliate us.

The people have already understood our poetry and already the tribulation of the new poetic moment beats anxiously in the heart of the throngs bored with the exhausted idols fabricated by the hypocritical and self-interested fornication of phantom powers of the earth and their impoverished and miserable artists, snarlingly superintended by all the wheels of the human automatic mechanism of thought and of technology and of the most impotent race on the globe: the intellectuals.

Thus begin the long days of atomic creation.

Now it is the turn of we artists, scientists, poets to create the earth anew, the oceans, the animals, the sun and the other stars, the air, the water, and the things.

And it will be our turn to breath life into clay to create the new man fit to rest on the seventh day.

[1] Also rosin/amber.

[2] Literally "il nuovo," or the new: I chose the word novel because there is an oblique response throughout Gallizio's text to Bahktin's formulation of the "novel" vs. the "epic," in which "the novel" refers at once to a literary form and a kind of subversive, carnivalesque element in literature which predates the advent of the long form fiction of the early 18th century designed "the novel" in English. This case here should not be construed as referring at all to the literary prose form, which in Italian, as in French, is named in a way that stresses the continuity of literary forms, not the break, or newness, of the novel ("romanzo" in Italian, "roman" in French).

[3] Or licensed.

[4] On the Italian philosophical problem of the return to primitive conscioussness, see Vico's concept of "ricorso" in La Scienza Nuova (The New Science).

[5] Termites? Terminals?

[6] Literally: unmoveable; it refers to houses, apartments, real estate.

[7] Moveables/furnishings.

Note: dated August 1959, this text by Guiseppe Pinot-Gallizio was originally published in Notizie Arti Figurative No. 9 (1959). Shortly thereafter, it was translated into French and published in Internationale Situationniste no.3 (1959). In May 1997, Molly Klein translated the Italian version into English. All footnotes are by Ms Klein.


above copied from: http://www.notbored.org/gallizio.html

Apropos of 'Readymades, Marcel Duchamp

In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn.
A few months later I bought a cheap reproduction of a winter evening landscape, which I called "Pharmacy" after adding two small dots, one red and one yellow, in the horizon.
In New York in 1915 I bought at a hardware store a snow shovel on which I wrote "In advance of the broken arm."
It was around that time that the word "Readymade" came to my mind to designate this form of manifestation.
A point that I want very much to establish is that the choice of these "Readymades" was never dictated by aesthetic delectation.
The choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste ... in fact a complete anaesthesia.
One important characteristic was the short sentence which I occasionally inscribed on the "Readymade."
That sentence instead of describing the object like a title was meant to carry the mind of the spectator towards other regions more verbal.
Sometimes I would add a graphic detail of presentation which, in order to satisfy my craving for alliterations, would be called "Readymade aided."
At another time, wanting to expose the basic antinomy between art and "Readymades," I imagined a "Reciprocal Readymade": use a Rembrandt as an ironing board!
I realized very soon the danger of repeating indiscriminately this form of expression and decided to limit the production of "Readymades" to a small number yearly. I was aware at that time, that for the spectator even more for the artist, art is a habit forming drug and I wanted to protect my "Readymades" against such a contamination.
Another aspect of the "Readymade" is its lack of uniqueness... the replica of the "Readymade" delivering the same message, in fact nearly every one of the "Readymades" existing today is not an original in the conventional sense.
A final remark to this egomaniac's discourse:
Since the tubes of paint used by an artist are manufactured and readymade products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are "Readymades aided" and also works of assemblage.


Written in 1961

above copied from: http://members.peak.org/~dadaist/English/Graphics/readymades.html

Proclamation without Pretension, Tristan Tzara

Art is going to sleep for a new world to be born
"ART"-parrot word-replaced by DADA,
PLESIOSAURUS, or handkerchief

The talent THAT CAN BE LEARNED makes the
poet a druggist TODAY the criticism
of balances no longer challenges with resemblances

Hypertrophic painters hyperaes-
theticized and hypnotized by the hyacinths
of the hypocritical-looking muezzins

CONSOLIDATE THE HARVEST OF EX-
ACT CALCULATIONS

Hypodrome of immortal guarantees: there is
no such thing as importance there is no transparence
or appearance

MUSICIANS SMASH YOUR INSTRUMENTS
BLIND MEN take the stage

THE SYRINGE is only for my understanding. I write because it is
natural exactly the way I piss the way I'm sick

ART NEEDS AN OPERATION

Art is a PRETENSION warmed by the
TIMIDITY of the urinary basin, the hysteria born
in THE STUDIO

We are in search of
the force that is direct pure sober
UNIQUE we are in search of NOTHING
we affirm the VITALITY of every IN-
STANT

the anti-philosophy of spontaneous acrobatics

At this moment I hate the man who whispers
before the intermission-eau de cologne-
sour theatre. THE JOYOUS WIND

If each man says the opposite it is because he is
right

Get ready for the action of the geyser of our blood
-submarine formation of transchromatic aero-
planes, cellular metals numbered in
the flight of images

above the rules of the
and its control

BEAUTIFUL

It is not for the sawed-off imps
who still worship their navel.



Above copied from: http://members.peak.org/~dadaist/English/TextOnly/proclamation.html

Invisible Venue(s): Alternatives to the Institution, Christian L. Frock

Invisible Venue collaborates with artists to present art in unexpected settings. It is a one-person organization that supports artist’s ideas and explores alternative locations for the presentation of contemporary art, outside of conventional gallery and institutional settings. Often in speaking about Invisible Venue my language switches back and forth between “I” and “we.” Though Invisible Venue encompasses my independent curatorial practice and research, the work itself is collaborative and has been dependent upon a number of generous collaborators, including the artist Aaron Stienstra who should be recognized here for his extensive support. Additionally, I would like to recognize all of the artists who have collaborated with Invisible Venue and who have brought tremendous brio to the task of making something from nothing—complete documentation of each project and details about all of the artists are available on www.invisiblevenue.com.

I created Invisible Venue in 2005 in response to these questions: Is it possible to show something (artwork) that is also nothing (conceptual, digital, ephemeral), everywhere (public spaces) and nowhere (online)? As a curator and cultural producer, I wanted to collaborate with artists to explore their ideas and through this collaboration interrogate the relationship between contemporary art and daily life. Intrinsic to my objectives was finding a way to work both independently and publicly—to what extent could I interject the work of artists into the public realm through the force of personal autonomy? What kinds of opportunities exist in between the margins of regulations and special permissions? What, in short, are the alternatives to the institution?

Invisible Venue originated as a website to present new media projects in the widely accessible public forum of the world wide web, an unregulated public space that allowed for complete creative freedom1. The first project, titled You Don’t Know San Francisco (2005), featured eleven videos by Bay Area artists2. The website launched a week prior to Frieze Art Fair, an international showcase for contemporary art that takes place annually in London. I distributed cards with the web address throughout the fair and in public spaces around London and arranged a public screening by borrowing a flat, a laptop, and a projector to project directly from the website3. More than 100 people attended the all-night event. It was my first realization that I could independently create the circumstances to present art publicly in alternative locations. In 2008 Invisible Venue won an Alternative Exposure Grant, awarded by San Francisco nonprofit Southern Exposure in conjunction with The Andy Warhol Foundation, to support independent initiatives in contemporary art. In addition to a vote of confidence, this grant provided small budgets for 11 projects last year; otherwise Invisible Venue operates as a do-it-yourself venture, with all of the self-directed autonomy and limited financial means implied therein. Since the inception of Invisible Venue, I have collaborated with more than 30 artists to present projects in a variety of unconventional spaces4. Projects have included digital media online and on the telephone, guerilla billboard interventions, ephemeral performance, site-specific temporary installations, public events, happenings, and accidental encounters.

Public art agencies ArtAngel, Creative Time, Dia Foundation, and Public Art Fund have been valuable educational resources in the development of Invisible Venue. My work is significantly influenced by their work. Most frequently I am interested in the temporary, site-specific, and conceptual artworks that exist for a limited time before being absorbed into public memory or not. Key also to my interests is artwork with the power to engage accidental and art-initiated audiences alike. One important example that I discovered through research is Michael Bramwell’s Building Sweeps (1995-6), a yearlong site-specific art action sponsored by Creative Time that involved the artist’s mopping, sweeping and cleaning the public areas of a city-owned Harlem tenement building, unannounced and uninvited. Though the community response to this work was contentious and its success, even by the standards of its sponsors, is unclear, it is the DIY spirit of this project, absent of permits, which gives me permission to trespass into private and public spaces. As does Chris Doyle’s Commutable (1996), a temporarily gilded staircase on an otherwise unremarkable Manhattan pedestrian walkway produced by Public Art Fund. Finally, Janet Cardiff’s The Missing Voice (1999) an audio walk that navigated the neighborhood surrounding London’s Whitechapel Public Library taught me that the work does not have to have a material presence to continue to appear in your mind’s eye5. Further I am captivated by art that is surreptitiously integrated into the fabric of everyday life, such as Walter De Maria’s Earthroom (1977), situated in a discreet location and yet right in the middle of Soho in Manhattan.

Inspired by public artworks that engage domestic spaces, I decided to curate and produce artist projects in and around a four bedroom flat in July 2007. Over the next two years Invisible Venue commissioned eleven projects for this location, or rather project space, in West Oakland. The neighborhood was both central and remote; it was a two-minute walk from the first train stop outside of San Francisco, in a partially industrial neighborhood in a forgotten part of town. The space of the main entry, the stairwell and landing, and the two front rooms—literally half of the 101-year-old Victorian era flat—was dedicated to Invisible Venue. I lived with my family in the back half of the building, separate from the project space, with our own entrance and living areas. Artists were invited to use the project space however they wanted and consequently projects spilled into our living areas, the yard, the billboard on the side of the building, and the empty lot across the street. It is important to stipulate this was not a gallery for commercial endeavors or for showing pre-existing two-dimensional work. All the work that I commissioned investigated the inherent politics of the location as a public platform—in every instance, the space itself was intrinsic to the ideas. Investigations included the physical building and its architecture, but also macro-level considerations of the past and present politics of the neighborhood, the historical and social concerns of Oakland, the location in the vicinity of an important industrial port, and the micro-level considerations of the space as both public and domestic, interior and exterior.

For one of the first projects in this space, Invisible Venue collaborated with Jonn Herschend to present The Man Who Disappeared into His Own Clothes Pile (2007). A self-navigable installation representative of The Man’s living quarters prior to his disappearance was installed in the project space. A deadpan documentary in which Herschend interviewed those who knew The Man simultaneously played in my living room, as if the television had been left on. Visitors were brought in the street entrance and directed to go through The Man’s personal affects in the project space, including a journal and drawings. Visitors were told to take as much time as they needed, then make their way to the living room to watch the documentary for more information. The documentary was filmed on site and featured various neighbors from the building. As visitors moved through the house, I continued to work in the kitchen, doing dishes or something equally banal, further blurring the lines between the artwork and quotidian domestic life. The work combined the voyeuristic experience of reality television with the live action of eavesdropping or peeping, placing the viewer in an uncomfortable position to fully explore the dynamic tensions of a public project in a private space.

Concurrent with this project, Helena Keeffe collaborated with Invisible Venue to present Talking to Neighbors: Jim in West Oakland (2007). This social sculpture, to use the artist’s term, and audio piece consisted of a recorded and edited interview between the West Oakland-based artist and Jim Edgar, a local resident of nearly 70 years. The interview was transferred to an answering machine hooked up to a landline and installed on the landing, as if it was the house telephone. A disused telephone booth, located at the other end of the block, was cleaned and painted for the application of a vinyl sign that advertized the telephone number to access the interview. Additionally the information was distributed on www.invisiblevenue.com, over email and in blanket text messages. As a freely accessible recurring experience this work challenged the assumed materiality of public art.

In December 2008, Michael Damm projected a series of videos onto windows in the project space, as well as the living area because they offered the best vantage points from the street and the passing trains. The videos ran for 10 consecutive nights, during the darkest time of the year, from about 5pm to 9pm, overlapping with the heaviest commute hours. Consisting of images from various locations in Oakland, the work reflected the visually rich experience of navigating the city, when one is only half aware of their environment and is en route to somewhere else. incidental films for an accidental audience (2008) played upon the visibility of the building and its windows from a distance; the videos were visible to passing trains, from the train platform itself, to passing cars and neighborhood pedestrians. This accessibility reflected on the nomadic features of contemporary communities as the work was visible to West Oakland residents and to everyone in transit. It also interrogated the public and private aspects of the space by co-opting the windows for use as an alternative venue, projecting outward when windows are typically covered for privacy and inviting attention to the building from every direction.

Christine Lee furthered this exploration between interior and exterior space with Order and Ornamentation (2009), a site-specific installation and concurrent intervention that existed both in the project space and in an undeveloped publicly accessible lot across the street from the building. In the project space, Lee installed living sod, cut in lengths and arranged to mimic the pattern of the original century-old hardwood floors. In the lot, Lee installed a collection of reclaimed carpet remnants, cut and assembled in a historic floral pattern that evoked the original interiors of the surrounding Victorian neighborhood. This unconventionally "woven" rug bisected a pre-existing "desire path" worn into the lot by pedestrian footfall. The term desire path was coined by Gaston Bachelard in his 1958 book The Poetics of Space, an analysis that privileges a lived experience of architecture over the abstract rhetoric of theory. Both the installation and the intervention explored the lived experience of West Oakland and its complicated history as an old family neighborhood with once beautiful architecture in contrast with its present state.

Though we regarded the project space as a public site, there were of course concerns about safety due to the fact that we lived in the building. Whenever we projected videos out of the windows to the street, we wondered if we would invite vandalism, but we never experienced a single incident. Projects are and have always been listed on numerous public event listings online, as well as postings on Facebook and Twitter. Press releases are sent to all of the most prominent local critics, newspapers and publications, and the announcement list includes hundreds of strangers. Anyone who emails about being added to our list is added. Anyone who asks to see projects by appointment is scheduled an appointment. Sometimes the doorbell would ring from the Invisible Venue entrance because someone on the street wanted to know more about the flickering projections. Other times I would walk up to a person outside puzzling over an intervention and chat with them about the work. We did not attempt to prescript encounters with the work—like much public art, it was left to the viewer to wonder at its existence. We continue in this same vain. Though every project has information online and there are project descriptions available upon request, by and large, we leave the accidental audience members alone to interpret or ignore the work as they choose.

Attendance is difficult to quantify for the projects that have taken place in public spaces because the works are left unattended. Projects that took place in the West Oakland project space had varied attendance at launch events—with some events seeing attendance of more than 100 people in a single day. Despite operating slightly under the mainstream radar and being a unusual organizational model, Invisible Venue projects have received a fair amount of critical attention in a variety of publications including SFGate.com, Examiner.com, International Arts Magazine, ArtSlant, San Francisco Bay Guardian, San Francisco Chronicle, Artillery Magazine, and SF Camerawork Journal, in addition to numerous blogs.

Since relinquishing the West Oakland space in August of 2009, Invisible Venue has transformed again to produce projects in exclusively public environments. (Meant to be) Lost and Found (2009) recently featured work by Charles Gute, Anthony Discenza, Jonn Herschend and Jamie Hilder. Predicated on the private/public nature of displaced personal correspondence, the participating artists created artworks that resembled official letters, business memos and handwritten notes. 100 inkjet prints of the “letters” were printed on the reverse with “This is public art. www.invisiblevenue.com.” The letters were left in public spaces throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn over four days in October 20096. Locations included restaurants, cabs, elevators, lobbies, the subway, baskets on bicycles, stores, and front porches, among many other places—all locations were chosen at random to mediate chance encounters with an unquantifiable public audience. Here printed correspondence provided a metaphor to ask questions about public art, as both printed correspondence and permanent public art appear to be diminishing products of a bygone era in favor of increasing digitization, the passive call and no- response of social networking and temporary spectacle. The range of audience engagement was anticipated to mimic that of formally recognized "public art" and likely also incited any number of positive and negative responses: indifference, derision, contemplation, or enjoyment. The production of this project challenged the market-driven budgets and architectural scale of much recent contemporary public art and deployed the recessionary conventions of revolutionist movements—including interventionist tactics, low-budget production methods and portability.

Site-specificity is still at the core of Invisible Venue investigations, except now the site is once again transient with projects taking place in all manner of public spaces rather than limited to a specific location. Based on these experiences, I have discovered it is possible to present something that is also nothing, everywhere and nowhere when one considers every possible site an invisible venue.

Invisible Venue(s): Alternatives to the Institution by Christian L. Frock. Originally presented in "Site Variations: The Shifting Grounds of Public Art," College Art Association 98th Annual Conference, Chicago 2010; also edited and republished in Art Practical, Issue 9

Above copied from: http://artandeducation.net/papers/view/23

The Lettrists disavow the insulters of Chaplin, Jean-Isidore Isou, et al.

The members of the Lettrist movement are united on the basis of new principles of knowledge and each keeps his independence as far as the details of the application of these principles. We all know that [Charles] Chaplin was been "a great creator in the history of the cinema" but "the total (and baroque) hysteria" that has surrounded his arrival in France has embarassed us, as does the expression of all mental instability. We are ashamed that the world today lacks more profound values than these, which are secondary and "isolatrous" of the "artist." Only the Lettrists who signed the tract against Chaplin are responsible for the extreme and confused content of their manifesto. As nothing has been resolved in this world, "Charlot" receives, along with applause, the splashes [eclaboussures] of this non-resolution.

We, the Lettrists who were opposed to this tract of our comrades from the beginning, smile at the maladroit expression of the bitterness of their youth.

If "Charlot" must receive mud, it won't be us who throw it at him. There are others, who paid to do it (the Attorney General, for example).

We thus revoke our solidarity from the tract of our friends and we associate ourselves with the homage rendered to Chaplin by the entire populace.

In their turn, the other Lettrists can explain themselves, in their own journals or in the press.

But "Charlot" and all this only constitutes a simple nuance.
JEAN-ISIDORE ISOU, MAURICE LEMAITRE, GABRIEL POMERAND

(Published in Combat on 1 November 1952 and reprinted in Internationale Lettriste #1, December 1952. Translated from the French by NOT BORED!)

above copied from: http://www.notbored.org/lettrist-disavowal.html