This section is for fragments (quotations, portions) of texts that I find interesting. Below the fragment, I will have appropriate citation. (The date notes the date I read the fragment).
March 25, 2012 (Alfred Jarry)
CONCERNING THE EQUIVALENT BOOKS OF DOCTOR FAUSTROLL
In the premises detailed above, entry having been effected by M. Lourdeau, locksmith at Paris, no. 205, rue Nicolas Flamel, with the exception of a bed of polished copper mesh, twelve meters long and without bedding, of an ivory chair and of an onyx and gold table; sequestration made of twenty-seven assorted volumes, some paper-backed and others bound, with the following titles:
- BAUDELAIRE, a volume of E.A. POE translations.
- BERGERAC, Works, volume II, containing the History of the States and Empires of the Sun, and the History of Birds.
- The Gospel According to SAINT LUKE, in Greek.
- BLOY,The Ungrateful Beggar.
- COLERIDGE, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
- DARIEN, The Thief.
- DESBORDES-VALMORE, The Oath of the Little Men.
- ELSKAMP, Illuminated Designs.
- An odd volume of the Plays of FLORIAN.
- An odd volume of the Thousand and One Nights, in the GALLAND translation.
- GRABBE, Scherz, Satire, Ironie und tierfere Bedeutung comedy in three acts.
- KAHN, The Tale of Gold and of Silence.
- LAUTREAMONT, The Lays of Madoror.
- MAETERLINCK, Aglavine and Selysette.
- MALLARME, Verse and Prose.
- MENDES, Gog.
- The Odyssey, Teubner’s edition.
- PELADAN, Babylon.
- RABELAIS.
- JEAN DE CHILRA, The Sexual Hour.
- HENRI DE REGNIER, The Jasper Cane.
- RIMBAUD, Illuminations.
- SCHWOB,The Children’s Crusade.
- Ubu Roi.
- VERLAINE, Wisdom.
- VERHAEREN, The Hallucinated Landscapes.
- VERNE, Voyage to the Center of the Earth.
February 9, 2012 (Maya Deren)
STAIRWAYS /1942-1943/
[ritual transformations]
A poet who knew Maya Deren from the mid-forties until she died referred to her films as “a series of rites reflecting the ritual transformations of her own self in life.”
Because Deren lived with a rich sense of the mythic, and because that sense becomes increasingly apparent in her work as a film-maker, it seems appropriate to follow the poets’ instincts and regard her life as she no doubt did herself-in terms of ritual transformations.
“L.A. Reportage” – “Fruit-pickers”
//—Meshes of the Afternoon — // PT: an unmistakably everyday world: a private home, a love affair, the woman’s fantasy life. Here the immediate world of the lovers becomes subject to the laws of dream; objects transmuted into symbols; physical laws are transcended and implemented by filmic devices: slow motion, weird angles, magical mutations and transitions.
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As a dream on film, it also corresponds to the age-old practice of inducing dreams and visions during the rites of initiation. Such dreams picture the initiate’s emotional state at these critical junctures in life.
{GALKA SCHEYER} – THE OLD SHARK
THE BLUE FOUR (Klee, Kandinsky, Jawlensky, Feininger : The “BLUE FOUR” was founded at the Bauhaus, Dessau, in 1924. . . .The desired purpose was to arrange exhibitions and lectures of the works of these artists in America, trusting to interest the United States in the spiritual significance of their work withe the hopes that through it might come an exchange of spirits between the artists of the two continents.)
(neutra)
She would invite us over every so often, and we would sleep in the room where all these Klees hung. It was a great experience, to sleep among the Feiningers and Klees and Kandinskys and Picassos. There was a terrace with a view over Hollywood. She had a little bathroom with moss on the floor, wild moss, with two glass walls to the outside, where we would take showers.
She lived like a hermit. She had this huge room where there was nothing but a straw carpet and these paintings on the wall. She herself would live in a little cubbyhole, and she had a little kitchen about that size too. It was like a temple, more than a house. All the living spaces were small, and this grand space was devoted to art. HELLA HAMMID.
It was due to Galka that I gave up painting. At the time I knew her I was both painting and writing music, and the people whose opinions I respected, as I did hers, said nicer things to me about my music than about my painting. . . .
People at the point of suicide would come wandering up into the hills to throw themselves somewhere, and they would be drawn to her like a magnet, and she would reinspire them about the value of living. JOHN CAGE.
(“FREE, IMAGINATIVE AND CREATIVE”) – (PEDAGOGY)
(correspondence)
The “Sarabande” is the language of a soul of two souls of the universal soul, very abstract, and the fifth record of the Beethoven quartet is the incredibly capacity of the emotion of the human heart. Maybe one day you’ll have a chance to hear them. Love, Galka
(André Breton/Gotham Book Mart Window/Duchamp- See View March and May, 1945)
(correspondence)
I am having a wonderful time with music and pictures and live rather a life within myself. I wish I could see the film you have made. . . . I wish you were living here and we could share and exchange our love of art. . . . Love as ever, Galka
This is the true deep meaning of creative, Galka. You above all, are creative, for you create more than a work of art. You create the will to art, from which all art will forever flow. If, one day, I can say these things about myself, I shall be very happy. Maya + Sasha
[from poetry to film]
(paul valéry)
(julian levy’s surrealism – black sun press, 1936)
(the Tibetan Book of the Dead)
(relativity)
Her essays would be explicitly concerned with the poles of objectivity and subjectivity, and the notion that perceptions and values are not fixed but relative, according to one’s point of view. The Tibetan Book of the Dead acknowledges the multiplicity of perspectives and emphasizes the necessity of reconciling “the many” to a “oneness of vision,” just as Einstein’s theory, in the science of observation, was, as Deren noted, “designed to overcome and compensate for the inalienability of subjective position.”
(mirrors)
In the Tibetan rites, the yogin uses a mirror to meditate on the relationship between objects in the world and the deceptive reality of their of their reflected images. The mirrors offers a visually rich metaphor for the juxtaposition of reality and illusion, and it is just such mirror trickery that is the subject of Maya and Sasha’s photographs of the late 1942. This series of stills reveals how Deren and Hammid, like the Surrealists, used mirrors and mannequins to play on photography’s inability-being two-dimensional-to discriminate between living reality and plastic illusion. Woman, mannequin, and mirror image are flattened into a still life composition in which all elements are created equal. Looking at their photographs, the viewer, like the Tibetan yogin, is challenged to transcend the paradox.
(death and rebirth)
It is ironic, then, that Dr. Deren’s last “gift” to his daughter would be her movie camera. She bought the Bolex she used for all her films with the money she inherited at his death.
ELEANORA – MAYA – ILLUSION
//—Meshes of the Afternoon — //
conception – idea : home movie (subjective camera, pair of eyes ^^)
(first person perspective >> multiple points of view)
(program note) (Film Culture, No. 39, 1965)
This film is not concerned with the interior experiences of an individual. It does not record an event which could be witnessed by other persons. Rather, it reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience.
The incident might occur to anyone. A girl, on her way to the house of another person, find a flower on the road and carries it with her. She arrives at the house, (glimpsing, for a brief second, a figure disappearing around the curve of the road nearby), tries the door and finds it locked. She takes out her own key, which slips from her hand and falls down the outdoor stairs so that she is forced to run after it and climb the stairs again before finally entering the house. She makes a tour of the rooms in search of the person who is supposed to be there, but although the still-turning phonograph, the receiver off the hook of the telephone, and other objects indicate that someone has just been there, the house is empty and she settles herself by the window to wait. Waiting, she falls asleep and in her dream the experience she has just had begins to repeat itself, but always in a strange and different manner. Now it is a tall woman in black with a mirror face, who disappears around the curve of the road. She carries the flower which the girl had found, and although she walks slowly, the girl, running after her, can never catch her. The objects which the girl had noticed in the room are now in changed places. She watches herself come to the house three times, so that finally there are three of her, and herself sleeping in the chair as well. And from then on the event which was originally so simple becomes increasingly emotional and complex. It is culminated by a double-ending in which it would seem that the imagined achieved, for her, such force that it became reality.
The makers of this film have been primarily concerned with the use of cinematic technique in such a way as to create a world: to put on film the feeling which a human being experiences about an incident, rather than to accurately record the incident.
(narrative line in the program note)
(cinematic technique and malevolent objects)
["CINE POEM"]
[SHOT LIST]
June 13, 2010
Above is Eugen Gomringer’s wikipedia page. Below is a screen shot his poem “Silencio.”
June 11, 2010
Ian Hamilton Finlay to Pierre Garnier, 1963
One of the Cubists-I forget who-said that it was after all difficult for THEM to make cubism because they did not have, as we have, the example of cubism to help them. I wonder if we are not all a little in the dark, still as to the real significance of “concrete.” . . . For myself I cannot derive from the poems I have written any “method” which can be applied to the writing of the next poem; it comes back, after each poem, to a level of “being,” to an almost physical intuition of the time, or of a form . . . to which I try, with huge uncertainty, to be “true.” Just so, “concrete” began for me with the extraordinary (since wholly unexpected) sense that the syntax I had been using, the movement of language in me, at a physical level, was no longer there-so it had to be replaced with something else, with a syntax and movement that would be true of the new feeling (which existed in only the vaguest way, since I had, then, no form for it . . .). So that I see the theory as a very essential (because we are people, and people think, or should think, or should TRY to think) part of our life and art; and yet I also feel that it is a construction, very haphazard, uncertain, and by no means as yet to be taken as definitive. And indeed, when people come together, for whatever purpose, the good is often a by-product . . . it comes as the unexpected thing. For myself, on the question of “naming,” I call my poems “fauve” or “suprematist,” this to indicate their relation to “reality” . . . (and you see, one of the difficulties of theory for me is that I find myself using a word like “reality” while knowing that if I was asked, “What do you mean by reality?,” I would simply answer, “I don’t know . . .”). I approve of Malevich’s statement, “Man distinguished himself as a thinking being and removed himself from the perfection of God’s creation. Having left the non-thinking state, he strives by means of his perfected objects, to be again embodied in the perfection of absolute, nonthinking life….” That is, this seems to me, to describe, approximately, my own need to make poems . . . though I don’t know what is meant by “God.” And it also raises the question that, though the objects might “make it,” possibly, into a state of perfection, the poet and painter will not. I think any pilot-plan should distinguish, in its optimism, between what man can construct and what he actually is. I mean, new thought does not make a new man; in any photograph of an aircrash one can see how terribly far man stretches- from angel to animal; and one does not want a glittering perfection which forgets that the world is, after all, also to be made by man into his home. I should say -however hard I would find it to justify this in theory-that “concrete” by its very limitations offers a tangible image of goodness and sanity; it is very far from the now-fashionable poetry of anguish and self. . . . It is a model, of order, even if set in a space which is full of doubt. (Whereas non-concrete might be said to be set in society, rather than space, and its “satire,” its “revolt,” are only disguised symptoms of social dishonesty. This, I realisej goes too far; I do not mean to say that society is “bad.”) . . . I would like, if I could, to bring into this, somewhere the unfashionable notion of “Beauty,” which I find compelling and immediate, however theoretically inadequate. I mean this in the simplest way-that if I was asked, “Why do you like concrete poetry?” I could truthfully answer “Because it is beautiful.”
June 8, 2010
Brion Gysin audio from Mektoub: Recordings 1960-1981 and hosted on ubuweb.
Image: Brion Gysin, Dreamachine, 1960
June 4, 2010
George Brecht: The Book of the Tumbler on Fire
is a continuing work in the Spring of 1964. It now consists of eight chapters completed or in process, of some 215 pages.
The book might be called a research into the continuity of un-like things; of objects with each other, of objects and events, of scores and objects, of events in time, of objects and styles, etc.
Chapter I consists largely of objects arranged in boxes, usually one box to a page, but sometimes two or three boxes to a page. The chapter also contains some of my event scores, or realizations of these scores. Page 27 is a collage and theater performance given at Judson Hall, New York; Page 26 is a dream.
The twenty-nine pages of Chapter II are again mainly boxed objects, but include also the eight cans of snuff contributed to Arman’s Key Event (New York, March, 1965); as assemblage made for Daniel Spoerri and left for him in the oven of his room at the Hotel Chelsea, New York; the MAT/MOT edition of my Universal Machine; an as yet unrealized Progetto per una transformazione (reducing the Colosseum to dust with Waring Blendors, transporting the dust by elephant to the Alps and bringing back snow, re-building the Colosseum with snow) etc.
Chapter III comprises a series of chairs (Chair with a History, Hopscotch, etc.) scores for chair events, and realizations of some of these scores I have made at one time or another (for the traveling “Assemblage” shoe at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; for the Martha Jackson Gallery; Cordier & Ekstrom, Fischbach, etc.). Event scores realized as objects (Drip Music, Fox Trot, Three Aqueous Events), signs (SILENCE, NO SMOKING), and wall hangings investigating the relationship between words and objects, make up Chapter IV.
A short Chapter V is made up of a double cedilla given to Emmett Williams, an altered greeting card carrying a reproduction of my Repository (in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York), two collages, a multi-lingual rebus, and a play/collage.
Chapter VI is a 35 mm. film found on Via Fratelli Bandiera in Rome, where I was living at the time. I consider each frame a page, and have so far distributed some eighty-two. When all the pages have been distributed, the film may be re-constituted and projected.
Chapter VII consists of objects in deep glass-covered boxes, often having movable parts. Some fifteen have been completed.
Chapter VIII explores the relationship between object assemblages and “styles”, the assemblages being combined at random with the styles of Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de style.
January 1967
Published in the 1967 Galleria Schwarz catalog for The Book of the Tumbler on Fire
April 17, 2010
GEORGE BRECHT
CHANCE IMAGERY
(excerpts from Brecht organized as I understand them)
Words about art are infinetly inferior to the art itself. Art unites us with the whole; words only permit us to handle a unified reality by maneuvering arbitraily excised chunks.
CHANCE
The cause or system of causes, responsible for a given effect is unknown or unlooked-for or, at least, that we are unable to completely specify
CHANCE IN ART
One: Where the origin of images is unknown because it lies in deeper than conscious levels of the mind
Two: Where images derive from mechanical processes not under the artists control
*Both of these processes have in common a lack of conscious design
EXAMPLES
DADA AND SURREALISM
“During the course of Surrealist development, outside all forms of idealism, outside the opiates of religion, the marvelous comes to light within reality. It comes to light in dreams, obsessions, preoccupations, in sleep, fear, love, chance; in hallucinations, pretended disorders, follies, ghostly apparitions, escape mechanisms and evasions; in fancies, idle wanderings, poetry, the supernatural and the unusual; in empiricism, in supereality.” – Andre Breton, “First Surrealist Manifesto”
DUCHAMP
1913 “3 stoppages etalon” : wind, gravity, aim
JACKSON POLLOCK
His paintings seems much less manifestations of one group of techniques for releasing the unconscious (as the Dada experiments seemed), then they do of a single, integrated use of chance as a means of unlocking the deepest possible grasp of nature in its broadest sense.
Variables: paint viscosity, density, rate of flow at any instant; direction, speed, and configuration of the application; uniformity of paint
ART/ORDINARY THINGS/NATURE
…place the painter’s, musician’s, poet’s, dancer’s chance images in the same conceptual category as natural chance-images (the configuration of meadow grasses, the arrangement of stones on a brook bottom), and to get away from that idea that the artist makes something “special” and beyond the world of ordinary things. An Alpine peak or an iris petal can move us at times with all the subtle power of “Night Watch” or one of the profound themes of Opus 131. There is no a priori reason why moving images should originate only with artists. This leaves “art” to mean something constructed, from a starting point of pre-conceived notions, with the corollary that as art approaches chance-imagery, the artist enters a oneness with all of nature.
THINK STATISTICS, SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY
Werner Heisenberg’s publication of his principle of indeterminacy in 1927
…Heisenberg showed mathematically that it was not possible to determine both the position and the momentum of an electron a the same time, that is, that as the precision with which the momentum of an electron was measured was increased, the precision with which the position of the electron was measure necessarily decreased, and conversely….The causal descriptions of classical physics (and philosophy) then, (that is, such statements as, “When A happens, then B will always happen”) are idealizations, or simplified models of the actual state of affairs. The best we can do is make statements with a high degree of probability (e.g., “When A happens B will happen in a certain proportion of cases”), for we cannot exhaustively describe the causal structure of any real system. Thus chance becomes the underlying principle of our world-view.
RANDOMNESS
Used for the removal of bias.
John Cage’s “Music for Four Pianos”: four pianists play independently of each other, the resulting rhythmic and melodic pattern being this freed of personal bias.
WAYS OF INVOKING CHANCE
The technique chosen for making random or chance selections in the arts is largely determined by the number and nature of the elements from which the selection is to be made. In addition, the degree of randomness of the finished image can be made as great as the artist’s desires and capabilities allow. For example, a coin can simply be tossed to determine whether a pre-selected image shall be painted in black-on-white or white-on-black, or, at the other extreme, random number tables can be used to determine the field material (canvas, paper, etc.) size and shape of the field, medium, colors, method of application of the medium (brush, drip, etc), components of the method (brush width, applicator dimensions, etc.), and any other characteristics of interest.
Various techniques: coins, dice, numbered wheels, cards, bowl drawing, automatism, random numbers, irrelevant process
CODA
Chance in the arts provides a means for escaping the biases engrained in our personality by our culture and personal past history, that is, it is a means of attaining greater generality….it seems to me that we fall short of the infinite expansion of the human spirit for which we are searching, when we recognize only images with are artifacts. We are capable of more than that.
AN AFTER-NOTE
In 1957, when this article was written, I had only recently met John Cage and had not yet seen clearly that the most important implications of chance lay in his work rather than in Pollock’s. Nor could I have forseen the resolution of the distinction between choice and chance which was to occur in my own work….November, 1965
Originally published in 1966 as a Great Bear Pamphlet by Something Else Press. Accessed on www.ubu.com
January 13, 2010
JOSEPH KOSUTH
My current work, which consists of categories from the thesaurus, deals with the multiple aspects of a idea of something. I changed the form of presentation from the mounted photostat, to the purchasing of spaces in newspapers and periodicals (with one “work” sometimes taking up as many as five or six spaces in that many publications- depending on how many divisions exist in the category). This way the immateriality of the work is stressed and any possible connections to paintings are severed. The new work is not connected with a precious object- it is accessible to as many people as are interested, it is non-decorative- having nothing to do with architecture; it can be brought into the home or museum, but was not made with either in mind; it can be dealt with by being torn out of its publication and inserted into a notebook or stapled to the wall- or not torn out at all- but any such decision is unrelated to the art. My role as an artist ends with the work’s publication.
Joseph Kosuth, untitled statement (1968), in Germano Celant, Art Povera (New York: Praeger, 1969), 1968.
*see also “Art After Philosophy” (1969) by Joseph Kosuth
