Tristan Tzara Research Articles

Hans Richter: encounters

Hans Richter was a central figure in the avant-garde for more than fifty years. Born in Berlin in 1888, he joined the Zurich Dada group in 1916, and within a few years was producing some of the first abstract films ever created. In the 1930s, he produced a surprising array of commercial and propaganda films for both communist and capitalist interests - a phase of his career that has been, until now, little examined. After moving to the United States in 1940, Richter taught at City College of New York, serving as both a mentor to numerous participants in the New American Cinema movement and a historiographer of Dada. Richter worked alongside or in direct collaboration with a virtual Who's Who of the avant-garde, including Hans Arp, Paul Bowles, John Cage, Alexander Calder, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, Sergei Eisenstein, Max Ernst, Fernand Leger, El Lissitzky, Kasimir Malevich, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Kurt Schwitters, and Tristan Tzara. This book examines the ways in which these encounters - to use Richter's own term - with other artists engendered creativity, originality, and meaning throughout his career until his death in 1976. The catalogue also includes a chronology and the first complete Richter filmography in English. Illustrating his work alongside that of his colleagues, this volume represents an important contribution to our understanding of the relationships between modernism's most experimental artists, movements, and generations.

The Ghosts of the Avant-Garde(s): Exorcising Experimental Theater and Performance by James M. Harding (review)

James M. Harding. The Ghosts of Avant-Garde(s): Exorcising Experimental Theater and Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 234 pages. $50.00. Ghosts materialize with some regularity in theater and performance studies, both as subject and as theory-enabling metaphor. Herbert Blau, Joseph Roach, and Marvin Carlson have all powerfully used haunting or ghosting as tropes to explain how theater and performance work. But only James M. Harding proposes to conduct an exorcism, with intention of casting out one particularly persistent specter from field of studies: Peter Burger's 1974 Theory of Avant-Garde, which has exerted an outsized influence since its 1984 publication in English. Burger's central claim, as many will recall, is that is distinguished by its critique of art as an institution--not only museums, academies, publishers, etc., in or through which people usually encounter art, but also prevailing ideas of what counts as art. For Burger, emerged in early twentieth century to dismantle barriers between art and supposedly erected, or at least reinforced, by aesthetic movement. With avant-garde, art ceased to function as a social safety valve for mildly disaffected bourgeoisie and became instead a life praxis. In Burger's Theory, ferocious mockery of Dada is essential stance, and once that mockery became a predictable source of pleasure for a large enough late-capitalist public, was effectively dead. Cage? Warhol? Merely neo-avant-garde to Burger. Harding wants to expel ghost of Theory so that other, more performance-friendly theories of avant-gardes might thrive. To do so he critiques at length not only Burger, in whom he rightly detects an anti-theatrical streak, but also entire Eulogist School of Avant-Garde Studies (51), among whose members he counts Richard Schechner and David Savran. Harding borrows that pithy phrase from Mike Sell, whose critical work serves as a major source for his own argument. Like Sell, Harding insists that all movements are internally pluralistic, always moving in multiple directions from multiple points of origin. Likewise, he resists any account of vanguard activity that explicitly or implicitly leaves off s in Indeed, Harding's fundamental problem with Theory of Avant-Garde is that it's theory of the avant-garde (9): singular, homogenizing, and totalizing. To characterize non-linear historiographical method with which he wants to replace Burger's theory, Harding adopts Deleuze and Guattari's botanical metaphor, rhizome. The book's strong general claim is that concepts of origin and originality that enable critics to speak of an historical mistake manner in which avant-gardes coalesce, develop, and disperse. While Rosalind Krauss and Martin Puchner, among others, have made similar arguments about misapplication of such concepts in histories of vanguard art and performance, point bears repeating. Harding repeats it convincingly, taking scholars to task for confusing demise of any one with death of all past, current, and future avant-gardes. To demonstrate what an attention to vanguard multiplicities can reveal, Harding revisits several performances well known to scholars, reading them grain (23) not only of artists' stated intentions but also against conventional critical wisdom. He is not first critic to note that Hugo Ball's verse without words, performed at Cabaret Voltaire in magical bishop (1) regalia, existed in tension with Ball's expressed desire for a unified, stable discourse (8). Harding does well, though, to celebrate that tension as a condition of plurality (9) that demands a flexible theoretical model. To emphasize how contested ideological terrain is within any particular avant-garde, he recounts squabble within Paris Dada that produced both sober, Breton-helmed 1921 mock of Maurice Barres, through which Breton and Aragon attempted to expulse Tristan Tzara, and Tzara's retaliatory trial of Breton, which degenerated into a Tzara-approved melee. …

On the Outskirts of Modernity: Tristan Tzara and Dada in Romania

When it came to origins, Tristan Tzara (1896–1963) seemed to dismiss the subject outright. If he did not emerge from the womb with monocle and Underwood at the ready, Tzara nonetheless cultivated such a mysterious aura about his background that his son imagined him to be ‘an extreme case of self-making’, like ‘a comet having popped up from nowhere’.2 The first book on Tzara, written by Rene Lacote for the Poetes d’aujourd’hui series, begins in Zurich during 1916, as if the first twenty years of Tzara’s life never transpired.3 A half-century later, Francois Buot opens his biography of Tzara by professing difficulty in finding any trace of its young subject.4 A new interest in the Romanian context of Dada has been sparked by Tom Sandqvist’s Dada East (2006), but more needs to be done.5 When Tzara’s Romanian-language poems were collected in the early 1930s, he objected to the title Poemes avant Dada because it gave the impression of ‘rupture’ whereas, in his eyes, ‘there had been continuity [. . . ] a latent necessity’.6 That the poems he declaimed on the inaugural night of the Cabaret Voltaire were in Romanian is frequently forgotten, while ‘Il fait soir’ in Cabaret Voltaire contains the note: ‘[t]ranslated from Romanian 1913’.7 Tzara’s early poetry was written, and his first experiences as an impresario for modern art took place, in his country of birth. In 1912, while still in high school,

Mutable Forms: The Proto-ecology of William Burroughs’ Early Cut-ups

The extent to which ecocriticism can engage the early texts of William Burroughs is explored in order to identify the problems in attempting an ecocritical interpretation of the writer’s experimental writing with its lack of coherent narratives and shortage of recognizably relevant environmental content. The suggestion that early cut-ups from Minutes to Go and The Yage Letters can be considered a move towards proto-ecological writing forms is explored. Example fragments from Burroughs’ early cut-ups ‘VIRUSES WERE BY ACCIDENT?’ (1960) and ‘I am Dying, Meester?’ (1963) are examined to establish whether there are any connections between ecology and Burroughs’ cut-up method, and to illustrate the evolution of the cut-up method. The Yage Letters are shown to connect the cut-up method and ayahuasca as radical techniques of reality transformation, which means the undoing of Western assumptions about identity. The differences between Burroughs methods and those of the Dadaist Tristan Tzara are also discussed.

Secrets of Tristan Tzara

Secrets of Tristan Tzara

The Art and Aesthetics of Boxing by David Scott (review)

Reviewed by: The Art and Aesthetics of Boxing by David Scott Corry Cropper David Scott , The Art and Aesthetics of Boxing. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. 167 pp. The Art and Aesthetics of Boxing presents itself as an analysis of the art and poetry that takes boxing as its subject; but in its own right the book is itself an artistic and poetic presentation of boxing. Even for readers disturbed by boxing's violence, David Scott convincingly delineates a theory of boxing aesthetics and argues for boxing's importance in defining masculinity in Europe and the USA, particularly in the twentieth century. Scott further stakes a claim for boxing as a fertile field for artistic attention thanks to its deep historical roots, as a result of the way the sport concentrates violence, deception, and beauty in the blank space of the ring, and because of the sport's numerous contradictions that reflect the "dynamic tension" of modern life. Scott divides his book into three parts. Part One examines the history of boxing from antiquity into the twentieth century with a particular emphasis on the way the evolution of boxing's rules have made the sport a more appealing visual spectacle: the advent of the glove, the change from the ring of people surrounding fighters to the "square ring" of the modern sport, the advent of rounds, the use of feminine silk clothing, the addition of flexible ropes, and so forth. Part Two provides a careful reading of numerous works of art, from photos to sculptures to posters to paintings. Scott moves quickly through different artistic movements suggesting, as examples, that futurist artists focused on boxing because of its energy and constant movement, that cubists appreciated the multiple perspectives the moving boxers in the "ring/cube" afforded them, that an installation artist takes advantage of boxing's spatial confines to study the notion of painting (playing on the term "canvas") and the nature of public persona. In Part Three, Scott studies boxing literature, examining in rapid succession authors such as Tristan Tzara, Paul Eluard, Vladimir Nabokov, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Joyce Carol Oates, among others. Scott focuses on two themes in the literary excerpts he selects: the paradoxical relationship between pain and friendship and the use of boxing as a mechanism to negotiate modern masculinity. This last section ties up what could be considered the work's strongest and most persistent theme: boxing and gender. Early on Scott notes: "the satin material [worn by boxers] added a touch of feminine glamour both to the state of purposeful undress . . . and to the otherwise relentlessly masculine ethos of the sport" (21). He later considers Shelley MacDonald's assertion that the ring can be viewed as a feminine maternal space that is reappropriated [End Page 291] by the boxer as phallic male. Finally, he looks at boxing as a means to reaffirm masculine values following two world wars and again as a form of masculine reaffirmation for middle-aged men over the last two decades. Scott concludes: "Boxing continues to hold a deep appeal for the masculine psyche, the charmed circle of the square ring exerting a fascination that for some can be exorcised only through a physical involvement within it" (138). The book's short chapters are augmented by a large number of impressive black and white prints of artistic boxing posters, paintings, photos (include several of the author in boxing gear), sculptures, antique vases, etc. These add to the book's collectability and, given its insistence on visual representation, to the book's readability, particularly for readers not steeped in the traditions of art history or boxing. In addition, a number of memorable quips from authors who share a fascination for boxing punctuate the book. My favorite may be this one by Gerald Early: "Boxing is a form of kitsch, which explains why so many intellectuals have been attracted to it" (131). The choice of works studied does seem a bit scattershot at times and I often wished the author would take more time to savor some of the stunning photos and artwork boxing has inspired. Scott's approach could have also benefitted from more theoretical grounding (perhaps from Pierre Bourdieu, who...

Ondes de choc: nouveaux essais sur l’avant-garde by Henri Béhar

humans have but little purchase on reality, from Robbe-Grillet’s perspective. An author, consequently, can no longer pretend to reproduce some pre-existing reality and, as a result, Robbe-Grillet ended up admitting: “[J]e n’ai jamais parlé d’autre chose que de moi” (4), thus contradicting effectively the earlier talk of objectivity and death of the author that marked the beginnings of the New Novel. In retrospective, as some of the participants observe, the themes for which the New Novel became known help us place it in a broader, postmodern cultural context. Nevertheless, while Robbe-Grillet may well have become a national monument, as he said, his literary and filmic endeavors have not been free from controversy. As the editors note, “comment prétendre ignorer le divorce, chez Robbe-Grillet, entre éthique et sexualité?” (39). Robbe-Grillet’s well known predilection for sadistic fantasies can certainly be found unsettling and was only underlined by his last novel, Le roman sentimental—a gallery of pornographic vignettes detailing the torture and sexual abuse of young girls. It has received a mostly negative press in France: one notable critic bemoaned “les infortunes du pornographe” (483). Arguably, the reception of the novel probably reveals the obsolescence of this sort of provocation. As Shawn Duriez suggests, considering that we live “à une époque marquée par la revalorisation de la lisibilité, qui abandonne les prétentions de rupture et de renouvellement esthétiques de la dernière avant-garde,” a number of Robbe-Grillet’s novels have clearly lost their appeal (480). On the other hand, academics, to whom Robbe-Grillet owed much of his early success—as he himself recognized—still find there is much to be elucidated in an oeuvre that once fascinated many of us in this country and that is still found intriguing by a number of colleagues around the globe. Ohio State University Karlis Racevskis BÉHAR, HENRI. Ondes de choc: nouveaux essais sur l’avant-garde. Paris: L’Âge d’homme, 2010. ISBN 978-2-8251-4100-7. Pp. 343. 28 a. Béhar adds to his already extensive bibliography a new volume with essays on Dadaism, Surrealism, and on several writers within the margins of these movements. In a style that is highly personal, Béhar manages to create a context for the avant-garde in France by discussing, on one side, its relationship with literary traditions and, on the other side, the complex contacts and exchanges amongst various avant-garde groups. The title, a metaphor borrowed from geology, compares the avant-garde to an earthquake that propagated from its epicenter with consecutive shock waves through space—implying its international spread— and through time—assuring its persistent effect on today’s culture. Along with the title, the preface sets the tone for the whole book: Béhar follows Tristan Tzara’s conviction that the avant-garde is a unified phenomenon “d’un seul tenant” (7), while he identifies three features that may define the avant-garde in general: the spirit of ‘breaking’ with traditional norms—which leads him to invent the term ‘littérupture’—the creation of a community, and an aspiration to politics. Béhar emphasizes that his knowledge of the avant-garde stems equally from his life-long scholarly interest in the topic and from his personal acquaintance and experience with writers and artists. The analysis thus follows these two lines, bringing forward archival material and discussing literary works, as well as doubling as a personal itinerary of the author and his career. 562 FRENCH REVIEW 86.3 The essays are divided into three groups. The first group, titled “La bombe Dada,” contains six essays, which consider well-known and some lesser-known aspects of Dadaism. The movement is seen within the avant-garde’s historical continuity—its connection with Futurism is discussed in the first essay, “Tristan Tzara, fourrier du futurisme”—and within the cultural context of its time—by raising the issue of the ambivalent relationship between Dadaism and psychoanalysis in “Dada est un microbe vierge.” The political and the international dimensions of the movement, both modeled on anarchism, have a central position in Béhar’s consideration of Dadaism. In the...

The Last Frontier: Burroughs’s Early Work and International Tourism

William S. Burroughs's image as a subversive avant-garde writer, uncompromisingly contesting all forms of social control, has shown remarkable staying power. A half-century after publication of Naked Lunch (1959), many critics would agree with Timothy S. Murphy that Burroughs's literary career is based upon a resistance to the totalitarian, system of modern capitalism and its ideological tool, state (Wising 4). It follows that Burroughs urges us to contest capitalist globalization, which Schneiderman and Walsh anthology Retaking Universe: William S. Burroughs in Age of Globalization (2004) models as a post-Cold War order of domination. Burroughs, we are told, well be more important than ever before in alerting us to realities of new global order and teaching us how to resist it (Russell 163), since his oppositional art ... challenge[s] standardized consciousness imposed by multinational corporate enterprise (McDaniel 134). David Banash, in his review of volume, does suggest that while Burroughs might be a bridge for media theorists to global, reader is left to wonder if this might not be a one-way street. One might well wish for a companion anthology of scholars with significant investments in global geography and history that Burroughs inhabited as an expatriate in Morocco, Mexico, South America, and Europe. Does Burroughs speak to such scholars as a resistant, liberatory intellectual? Yet Brian T. Edwards, a scholar with a significant investment in Morocco, concurs with Retaking Universe's assumptions. Although Burroughs may flirted with Orientalism (181), he writes, Naked Lunch ultimately refuses narrative coherence or authorial stability that pure American voice usually delivers. ... The breakdown of smooth rendering of speech is connected with Burroughs's antinational project and thus resists globalization, which relies on coherent difference and on maintenance of nation-states (181-82). This essay will take up Banash's suggestion that Burroughs's art may not be universally liberating, and read Naked Lunch and cut-up trilogy (The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express) against global geography and history. I put Burroughs's postmodern art in context of international tourism, which in late 1940s and 1950s was dominated by American money. Although he favored an off-the-beaten-track itinerary, Burroughs shared in mobility and buying power of postwar American middle class, and valorized destinations such as Mexico, where a single man lives high ... for $100 per month (Letters 63); Ecuador, where supposedly 2 ex-soldiers traveling with $2,000 now own large banana plantation, hacienda, live like kings (103); and Tangier, where one can have a room in best district for 50 per day (196). My purpose here is not simply to denounce Burroughs for playing imperialist Ugly American abroad, able to buy what and whoever he wants with his 'Yankee dollar' (Harris, Introduction xxviii). However, to borrow a term from Edward Said, I do want to emphasize that Burroughs's writing was worldly (World 35), in that he had specific ideological commitments that were bound up with touristic marketplace. Burroughs valorized libertarian freedom that he associated with vanished frontier of American West, and sought to recover this autonomy through a creative usage of leisure time outside America's borders. Accordingly, his fragmented narratives are not only influenced by Tristan Tzara and avant-garde of Paris, but by his status as a kind of subversive travel agent. Burroughs has gained respectability in American literary academy in large part through his work's anticipation of various concepts in poststructuralist thought, and his emphasis on cultural intermixture can even be said to anticipate postcolonial notions of hybridity. …

Dire le social dans le roman francophone contemporain ed. by Justin K. Bisanswa, Kasereka Kavwahirehi

The essays are divided into three groups. The first group, titled “La bombe Dada,” contains six essays, which consider well-known and some lesser-known aspects of Dadaism. The movement is seen within the avant-garde’s historical continuity—its connection with Futurism is discussed in the first essay, “Tristan Tzara, fourrier du futurisme”—and within the cultural context of its time—by raising the issue of the ambivalent relationship between Dadaism and psychoanalysis in “Dada est un microbe vierge.” The political and the international dimensions of the movement, both modeled on anarchism, have a central position in Béhar’s consideration of Dadaism. In the second section, “Lames de fonds spectaculaires,” Béhar examines specific instances of the avant-garde spectacle, paying particular attention to the theater of and around surrealism. Essays on the Théâtre Alfred Jarry, Antonin Artaud, director and actor Sylvain Itkine, and the films of Roger Vitrac are framed by two more general discussions of surrealist and Dada theater, its influences and goals. The last and probably most interesting section of the book showcases Béhar’s full command of Surrealism’s history, encounters, and behind-the-scenes exchanges . With the exception of two essays—one devoted to Jean Paulhan and his friendship with André Breton, the other addressing Dali’s scatological imagery and obsessions—this section approaches Surrealism’s various implications and endeavors as a movement. The limits of the movement are explored, either as the sometimes porous demarcation lines between Surrealism and groups like “Le Grand Jeu,” or with respect to its geographical frontiers, as in a fascinating discussion of Surrealism in the Canary Islands. Again, the politics of the avant-garde come to the foreground, both in general considerations of what it means for an artistic movement to be political, and through an assessment of Surrealism’s attitude during the Algerian War and the preparation of the “Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie.” Finally, the literary credentials and preoccupations of Surrealism are pieced together in a discussion of the literary criticism in surrealist publications, and through consideration of Surrealism’s representational strategies with regard to the literary topos of the landscape. Avoiding wide theoretical claims and relying almost exclusively on French critical studies, this book reads as a fragmented fresco of the French avant-garde, mimicking by its structure the avant-garde itself, and reminding us thereby how a discontinuous project managed nonetheless to be “d’un seul tenant.” Princeton University (NJ) Effie Rentzou BISANSWA, JUSTIN K., et KASEREKA KAVWAHIREHI, éd. Dire le social dans le roman francophone contemporain. Paris: Champion, 2011. ISBN 978-2-74532031 -5. Pp. 601. 115 a. A weighty volume in all senses, Dire le social offers a preface by Jean Bessière, co-editors’ introduction, and index, in addition to thirty-two substantive essays often to thirty pages each by authors from three continents, many of them wellknown to Francophone scholars. A special bonus is the postface by Bernard Mouralis, who retraces his own intellectual trajectory as he documents the often difficult evolution of Francophone studies in France. While it does not cut a wide swath through Francophone studies (two-thirds of the essays are devoted to sub-Saharan African literature, whereas five treat the Maghreb and two the Reviews 563 Caribbean, with one each for Tahiti and Egypt), the volume promises a rare treat for Africanists especially insofar as many essays examine authors emerging in the past decade (Alain Mabanckou, Leonora Miano, and Fatou Diome), along with lesser-studied writers in the African canon (Georges Ngal, Alioum Fantouré, Werewere Liking, Aminata Sow Fall, and Ken Bugul), and more standard fare (Ahmadou Kourouma, Mongo Beti, Henri Lopes, and V.I. Mudimbe). In mapping out in their introduction the parameters of what “saying the social” means and what creative forms it can take, Bisanswa and Kavwahirehi seek to extricate the Francophone novel from its imprisonment in imitative models of classic realism and to distance their project from equally reductive forms of sociological criticism that are derived from, and limited by, sociological methodologies. They exhort readers to conceptualize a new realism that responds to the urgent need for a parole publique to...

Tristan Tzara’s Poetical Visions: Ironic, Oneiric, Heroic

Tristan Tzara’s Poetical Visions: Ironic, Oneiric, Heroic

Anarchism and the Advent of Paris Dada: Art and Criticism, 1914-1924 (review)

Reviewed by: Anarchism and the Advent of Paris Dada: Art and Criticism, 1914-1924 Walter L. Adamson Anarchism and the Advent of Paris Dada: Art and Criticism, 1914-1924. Theresa Papanikolas. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. Pp. x + 195. $99.95 (cloth). Anarchism and the Advent of Paris Dada is a crisp, engaging, and smartly written introduction both to the political world of Paris dada and to the art-historical context in which multi-decade debates about the movement have unfolded. Even if the specific arguments that Papanikolas makes are not always fully convincing, readers will find much to recommend in this book. But this is, nevertheless, a book that promises more than it delivers. By the time we reach its conclusion we are likely to have doubts about the point of the whole exercise. How does it really help us to understand both Paris dada and Breton's early surrealism as specifically anarcho-individualist? Might not insisting upon this connection overstate the continuing relevance of old intellectual and political paradigms in a cultural world groping in every direction for new models, new understandings, new inspirations—indeed a "new spirit"? These were, after all, the years of the so-called époque floue (the "vague years"). Moreover, while the aesthetic and political machinations of someone like Tristan Tzara seem relatively one-dimensional (even if we might disagree on exactly how to characterize that dimension) and thus reducible to a single intellectual impulse like "anarcho-individualism," it is hard to see someone as protean, multifaceted, and deeply conflicted as André Breton in the light of any single intellectual or political tradition. And indeed, Papanikolas herself contributes to this uncertainty when she concedes, on the book's final page, that Breton's debt to anarchism "was obscured critically by the Surrealists' alignment with Marxism in the mid 1920s." Papanikolas has set herself two clear goals in the book, and she succeeds far more in one than in the other. One goal is to overturn the image of Paris dada as an "apolitical moment in the prehistory of Surrealism" and to insist upon its "real anarchist underpinnings" (1). Here she is only partly successful, in this reviewer's judgment. One problem is that, pace Papanikolas, the strength of anarchism did diminish during the First World War as Marxism gained increasing hegemony on the left. Another is that the connections between dada anti-art and the anarcho-individualism that the author claims to find underpinning it are more often asserted than demonstrated. Unfortunately, the truly concrete connections that Papanikolas's argument would seem to demand—between Tzara and Breton's study of (or commitment to) anarcho-individualism and [End Page 200] their avant-garde outlooks—never emerge in the book. Still another problem is how we should sort out the meanings of "political" and "apolitical" in the context of a movement like dada. If we take "political" to mean that it sought to ally with or to contribute to contemporary political parties and movements, or even, more loosely, to participate in expressly political debates and their electoral outcomes, then certainly Paris dada was not political. Clearly someone like Tzara was "disdainful of practical politics" (11), even if he did undoubtedly seek to "undermine the cultural codes perpetuating nationalist hegemony" (112). And, as the author herself notes, postwar anarcho-individualists (including the dadaists) "steered clear" of actually existing political processes (40) and purposefully ignored "party politics" (153). On the other hand, if by political one means something more general, like mindfulness regarding the proper mode of organizing and conducting political, social, and cultural life, awareness of the political implications of one's work, and other considerations of this sort, then yes, we must concede that Paris dada was political art, although we might be hard-pressed to find art that is not political in this sense. Papanikolas's other aim is to argue that critical opinion regarding the nature of the cultural-political context in postwar France has overemphasized its conservative, return-to-order side. Here, I believe, she is far more successful. Clearly "nationalist power structures" (4) and "bellicose nationalism" (5) were the object of intense critique both by dadaism (whether we locate the source of...

The Integration of Art in the Culture of Primitive Peoples

First published in Dutch in 1943, Frans M. Olbrechts’ essay promoted a new contextual approach in the study of primitive art and rejected the purely descriptive and “art critical” approach to the object, as exemplified by Tristan Tzara and others. Central to Olbrechts’ analysis is the “cultural content” that the object’s formal features communicate to its intended audience. Drawing on examples of objects from West and Central Africa and Oceania, Olbrechts argues that the motifs and the style of the objects must be decoded against their cultural background. Identifying that visual message, Olbrechts proposes, is the main task of any scholar who wants to get to the “essence” of the work of art under examination.

<i>Theorem</i> (review)

Films and Filming Reviews, 1966-1969 Peter Whitehead Between 1966 and 1969, Peter Whitehead wrote a series of reviews for the British film magazine Films and Filming. The magazine had begun in 1954 and would be published monthly up until 1990. At the time of Whitehead's involvement, it was edited by the respected cinema journalist Robin Bean and was noted for publishing the work of critics such as Raymond Durgnat. In his own critical writing, Whitehead places emphasis less on the technical aspects of the films under his consideration than on the extent of their engagement with "truth," "being," and other key philosophical issues. When reading this material, the impression is created that they are compacted essays that use the films as lenses through which to discuss a number of personal concerns. Whitehead's contributions to Films and Filming also consisted of reviews of films by Godard. Apart from the review herein of the collaborative Paris vu par . . . , these have been included under "Dossier: Godard." Reviewed by: Thomas the Imposter Peter Whitehead Thomas the Imposter. Directed by Georges Franju. Produced by Eugene Lepicier. Screenplay by Jean Cocteau, Georges Franju, Michel Worms and Raphael Cluzel from the novel by Jean Cocteau. Director of photography, Marcel Fradetal. Editor, Gilbert Natot. Music, Georges Auric. Art director, Claude Pignot. A Filmel production, distributed by Amanda French. English subtitles. Original title, Thomas l'Imposteur. Cert A. 93 mins. The Princess de Bormes, Emmanuelle Riva; Pesquel-Duport, Jean Servais; Thomas, Fabrice Ronleau; Henriette, Sophie Dares; Doctor Vernes, Michel Vitold; Mme. Valiche, Rosy Varte; Dr. Gentil, Bernard Lavalette; Aunt Thomas, H Dieudonne; The Bishop, J. R. Caussimon; Elderly man at the ball, Andre Melies; The nurse, Edith Scob; Captain Roy, Edouard Dermithe; Narrator, Jean Marais. In 1918 Tristan Tzara wrote, in his introduction to Dada that "we have repudiated all the distinctions between life and poetry; our poetry was a matter of living"—and at about the same time, Alfred Jarry, with this is as his philosophy, identified himself with Pere Ubu until he was indistinguishable from his creation.1 Four years later, Jean Cocteau wrote his novel Thomas l'Imposteur about the First World War in which he describes his young hero's death with these words—"Thomas thought, I will be lost if I do not act as if I'm dead. But in Thomas, fiction and reality had become one." Thomas is a young poet who, instead of writing poetry, lives it. To escape the reality of war and his untenable duty to be a soldier in it, he imagines himself to be someone else, just as in a similar way perhaps, Cocteau himself while serving at the same front with the Marine riflemen, may have dreamed away the time creating his character Thomas. Cocteau gave the rights to Franju to make the film of his novel, saying that he'd sooner be betrayed by him than anyone else. The master has been served very well. One image in Franju's film, however, accidentally creates an experience in which fiction and reality become simultaneous. A terrified horse gallops through the surrealistic ruins of a town, vainly trying to escape the flames of its own burning mane. In the context of the film, the image has tremendous power and works with almost archetypal immediacy. But coincident with this "reading" is a second one, for we suddenly realise that the horse is a real horse and not just a "horse in a film"—it's not a horse acting!—it really is a frightened horse whose terror has been inflicted upon it by a film unit making a film. Whether or not this is justified is another question but, for a second or so, the reality of the film, the illusion, is breached; its reality is transcended by the image. We suffer for the horse both as an imaginary one and a real one. Such a moment is a Cocteau illumination, and for Franju too it would be an experience in which "surrealism" becomes real, when its use is justified. It is not surprising after the unbelievable horrors of the First World War that soon after, poets should speculate on the nature of the tenuous...

<i>The Sergeant</i> (review)

Films and Filming Reviews, 1966-1969 Peter Whitehead Between 1966 and 1969, Peter Whitehead wrote a series of reviews for the British film magazine Films and Filming. The magazine had begun in 1954 and would be published monthly up until 1990. At the time of Whitehead's involvement, it was edited by the respected cinema journalist Robin Bean and was noted for publishing the work of critics such as Raymond Durgnat. In his own critical writing, Whitehead places emphasis less on the technical aspects of the films under his consideration than on the extent of their engagement with "truth," "being," and other key philosophical issues. When reading this material, the impression is created that they are compacted essays that use the films as lenses through which to discuss a number of personal concerns. Whitehead's contributions to Films and Filming also consisted of reviews of films by Godard. Apart from the review herein of the collaborative Paris vu par . . . , these have been included under "Dossier: Godard." Reviewed by: Thomas the Imposter Peter Whitehead Thomas the Imposter. Directed by Georges Franju. Produced by Eugene Lepicier. Screenplay by Jean Cocteau, Georges Franju, Michel Worms and Raphael Cluzel from the novel by Jean Cocteau. Director of photography, Marcel Fradetal. Editor, Gilbert Natot. Music, Georges Auric. Art director, Claude Pignot. A Filmel production, distributed by Amanda French. English subtitles. Original title, Thomas l'Imposteur. Cert A. 93 mins. The Princess de Bormes, Emmanuelle Riva; Pesquel-Duport, Jean Servais; Thomas, Fabrice Ronleau; Henriette, Sophie Dares; Doctor Vernes, Michel Vitold; Mme. Valiche, Rosy Varte; Dr. Gentil, Bernard Lavalette; Aunt Thomas, H Dieudonne; The Bishop, J. R. Caussimon; Elderly man at the ball, Andre Melies; The nurse, Edith Scob; Captain Roy, Edouard Dermithe; Narrator, Jean Marais. In 1918 Tristan Tzara wrote, in his introduction to Dada that "we have repudiated all the distinctions between life and poetry; our poetry was a matter of living"—and at about the same time, Alfred Jarry, with this is as his philosophy, identified himself with Pere Ubu until he was indistinguishable from his creation.1 Four years later, Jean Cocteau wrote his novel Thomas l'Imposteur about the First World War in which he describes his young hero's death with these words—"Thomas thought, I will be lost if I do not act as if I'm dead. But in Thomas, fiction and reality had become one." Thomas is a young poet who, instead of writing poetry, lives it. To escape the reality of war and his untenable duty to be a soldier in it, he imagines himself to be someone else, just as in a similar way perhaps, Cocteau himself while serving at the same front with the Marine riflemen, may have dreamed away the time creating his character Thomas. Cocteau gave the rights to Franju to make the film of his novel, saying that he'd sooner be betrayed by him than anyone else. The master has been served very well. One image in Franju's film, however, accidentally creates an experience in which fiction and reality become simultaneous. A terrified horse gallops through the surrealistic ruins of a town, vainly trying to escape the flames of its own burning mane. In the context of the film, the image has tremendous power and works with almost archetypal immediacy. But coincident with this "reading" is a second one, for we suddenly realise that the horse is a real horse and not just a "horse in a film"—it's not a horse acting!—it really is a frightened horse whose terror has been inflicted upon it by a film unit making a film. Whether or not this is justified is another question but, for a second or so, the reality of the film, the illusion, is breached; its reality is transcended by the image. We suffer for the horse both as an imaginary one and a real one. Such a moment is a Cocteau illumination, and for Franju too it would be an experience in which "surrealism" becomes real, when its use is justified. It is not surprising after the unbelievable horrors of the First World War that soon after, poets should speculate on the nature of the tenuous...

“Allow Intelligence to Survive”: Life’s Language in Williams and Tzara

“Allow Intelligence to Survive”: Life’s Language in Williams and Tzara Paul Jaussen In Mexico, since we are talking about Mexico, there is no art: things are made for use. And the world is in perpetual exaltation. —ANTONIN ARTAUD (11) There is a famous passage in William Carlos Williams’s Autobiography in which he recollects his visit to the Armory Show of 1913. Encountering Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” Williams says, “I laughed out loud when I first saw it, happily, with relief” (A 134). Writing several decades after the fact, he claims that the piece “is too hackneyed for [him] to remember anything clearly about it now,” a slight on Duchamp, perhaps (who himself had sufficiently slighted Williams at a party for the latter to bear a grudge), but the statement is also a revelation that the need for an effectively lasting or “timeless” piece of art was absent during the period of Williams’s early work (A 134). The time was now, a now of experiment, of change, of warfare and industrialization, a time accelerating into the future yet unable to completely negotiate the past. And yet a time of laughter and forgetting, when breaking into the world involved breaking from its orders and languages. Williams’s laughter can be read as not simply pleasure, but, as he says, “relief,” what Henry Sayre describes as “release,” the sense of unleashed opportunity that America inherited from the fractured and alienated Europe, the chance to make a new aesthetic practice all its own (16). New York in the years following the Armory Show was the place for that art of release and mirth, and Williams, despite the constraints of a medical practice and a young family, could not keep himself away. This was an era of the small magazines and the French immigrants (most famously Francis Picabia and Duchamp), of salons and parties, all fueled by the compelling need to create something new, not for the museums, but for the world in which they lived, the conflicted everyday [End Page 17] places and spaces that were dominated by the technology of the modern and the logic of warfare.1 Williams, in the thick of it, attended the gatherings and met the artists, aided Alfred Kreymborg in the publication of the journal Others, founded the magazine Contact in 1920, and, through it all, never stopped writing (Dijkstra 22, 109). As Sayre argues, this context of avant-garde energy is crucial for our understanding of the books Williams produced at this time, particularly Spring and All and Kora in Hell: Improvisations (Sayre 17). These works are far from formally autonomous high modernism, nor are they the expansive historical and philosophical vision of what would become Paterson; instead, they are texts that reveal American avant-garde at its conflicted nascent stages, coming from an author who resisted “both Europe and America” in an effort to create newness in his time and place (Tashijan 91). It is the radical commitment to the value of that new, its work as a source of energy in the world, that comes to the forefront of Spring and All and Kora in Hell. This energy went by many names in Williams’s texts, but consistently he refers to it as “life”—an eruptive force which outlasts the constraints of language and culture that always attempt to channel or block it. Life is the energy put into play by its correlative faculty, the imagination, without which, Williams is very clear, thinking disappears. In other words, the newness of life is a fundamental and essential ingredient for all human activities, such as language and science, even as those edifices tend to cover over it and deny its significance. Williams’s poetic goal at the time of these early writings is to make life happen, to restore it to sensibility and allow the imagination to move. Life’s importance is not unique to Williams, however; it springs forth as well in the manifestos of Tristan Tzara. A number of critics have read Dada as the avantgarde movement closest to the early Williams, and, as Peter Schmidt writes, although it is unknown whether or not Williams ever read Tzara’s...

Meghitt idegenek – Kassák Lajos párizsi kiállításai (1960 és 1963)

Abstract Győző Vasarhelyi (Victor Vasarely) and Denise Rene staged two exhibitions of Lajos Kassak in the Galerie Denise Rene in Paris, in 1960 and 1963. The organizers included former members of the European School now living in Paris and Kassak's avant-garde artistic connections, including Jean Arp, Sonia Delaunay, Etienne Hajdu, Vera Molnar and her husband Ferenc, Imre Pan, Michel Seuphor, Tristan Tzara. The art historical significance of these exhibitions was that they kept abreast of the contemporary West European and American artistic tendencies: along a linear art historical logic, they created continuity between the abstraction of the first two decades of the 20th century and – with a great leap in time – the geometric abstraction, op art and kinetic trends of the 1950s and 1960s. The basis to do so was, on the one hand, Kassak's oeuvre spanning from 1920 to 1960s, and on the other, the joint presentation of Kassak and Vasarely, as representatives of two periods. Their joint exhibitions and public...

Translating 'Pure Nonsense': Walter Benjamin Meets Systran on the Dissecting Table of Dada

The international Dada movement (c. 1916–1922) sought to subvert the rational, consensual social values which it saw as the cause of the First World War, notably by undermining the conceptual patterns and assumptions embodied in everyday language. Dada texts therefore provocatively challenge 'meaning', making them problematic to translate from the conventional perspective of equivalence. Walter Benjamin's contemporary essay 'The Task of the Translator' also critiques the assumption that translation involves a search for semantic equivalence, emphasizing instead the requirement for translators to follow the rhetorical and associative (dichterisch) patterns of the original at the expense of its meaning. Although his ideological standpoint is different from that of Dada, Benjamin's advocacy of a literalist, foreignizing (Venuti) method of translation offers a theoretically-grounded approach to translating Dada texts without betraying their underlying intentions. Machine Translation is here proposed as an ideologically neutral mechanism for performing such translations and two examples of its output, texts by Francis Picabia and Tristan Tzara transcoded into English, are analysed. These automatic translations are shown to reveal strikingly different associative patterns and lacunae in the two languages, offering an ironic, negative image of Benjamin's ideal of a Pure Language founded on the supplementarity of translations in the 'afterlife' of the original.

Hugo Ball, Iconoclasm and the Origins of Dada in Zurich

It will be clear to anyone who peruses the vast literature on Dada even casually, or who visited the labyrinthine Dada exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2005–2006,1 that there are almost as many ‘Dadaisms’ as there were Dadaists. Hugo Ball (1886–1927) was a founder, a key theorist and the most self-reflective of the Dadaists in Zurich.2 His Dadaism was deeply ambivalent and contingent. Having opened the Cabaret Voltaire, the much-mythologized ‘birthplace of Dada’, in February 1916, he renounced the emerging movement just six months later, worrying that ‘all Expressionism, Dadaism, and other -isms are the worst kind of bourgeoisie’.3 Persuaded back by Tristan Tzara, with whom he ran the Galerie Dada from March until May 1917, Ball broke definitively with the movement in a state of exhaustion that summer. But in public and in private, he wrestled for decades with the concerns that will be outlined here. They affected his work, life, political views, and shifting religious convictions before, during, and after the time that he was a ‘Dadaist’.

FAIRE DE SON HISTOIRE UNE BOUCLE (NOIRE): WAYS OF LOOKING AT TRISTAN TZARA

A close examination of pictorial and verbal portraits of Tzara, by both himself and others (Breton, Louis Aragon, Picabia, Germaine Everling, Man Ray, Hans Arp) – as filtered in the art and texts of the dadas and their critics through adaptations of cabbalism, Tao‐inflected Africanism, spirit photography and Maurice Barrès's ponderously mystical nationalism – yields a peculiar portrait of Paris dada, and of Tristan Tzara's ethical role within it. Anti‐Semitic slurs against Tzara, used as weapons in dada power politics, while construable as a knowingly disingenuous use of cliché and caricature, raise questions of idiom. Raoul Hausmann's Mechanical Head: the Spirit of Our Time (1919) is analysed as an exemplary approach to dada portraiture, in which constellations of contradictory readymade attributes and associations, including anti‐Semitic stereotypes, configure a tragicomic array of received social constructions, revolutionary aspirations, prejudices and ambivalences that constitute individuals as social actors within and outside dada.

Modernist Song: The Poetry of Tristan Tzara by Stephen Forcer

MLR, 104.2, 2009 575 appear to have encouraged the perception of lifeas one of the early stages of death, itself figured as the fulfilment of Romantic yearnings for the immutable and the eternal. The good life could, to this extent, be measured by the good death, an assumption in part inherited from earlymodern piety. Yet the growing irreligion and scientism of the age inevitably called death's meaning into question, as demon strated by Barbara Giraud's revelatory essay on theGoncourts' Sceur Philomene and its early representation of death in a medical (as opposed to charitable) hospital. The nineteenth-century death ofGod also called intoquestion notions of order and harmony, including theorder and harmony of literaryforms.This point isbrilliantly developed byDavid Evans, who demonstrates how poems byMallarme and Banville, each commemorating the biological deaths of friends, also served to theorize the death of inherited forms of poetry, as well as their rebirth as a necessary illusion. The links between death and maternity are explored in two striking essays by Car men Mayer-Robin and Maria Scott. In the first, Mayer-Robin looks at Fecondite, Zola's pro-natalist response to the crisis of population he identifies.Mayer-Robin develops Carol Mossman's concept of gynocolonization, providing additional con text in order to demonstrate how Zola uses his novel to unwrite some of his own theses, particularly in relation to abortion and infanticide. In the second, Scott writes convincingly about Stendhal's views on the entombment ofwomen within nineteenth-century constructions ofmaternity. She goes on to provide a valuable reassessment of Le Rouge et le Noir and itsforegrounded opposition of thematernal Mme de Renal and Amazonian Mathilde de La Mole, turningmany a conventional assumption about the novel on itshead. Scott needs more space fully to address the problem ofMathilde's self-serving vanity that, from a Stendhalian perspective, appears toundermine her status as an exemplar?I eagerly await themonograph she is currentlypreparing on Stendhal's 'resistant' heroines, aswell as thepublication of furtherproceedings of the SDN's remarkably successful series of conferences. King's College London Francesco Manzini Modernist Song: The Poetry of Tristan Tzara. By Stephen Forcer. London: Le genda. 2006. x+146 pp. ?45. ISBN 978-1-904713-14-2. As Stephen Forcer indicates in the introduction to this compelling book, the cultural memory of Tristan Tzara is grossly limited to his role as the 'Father ofDada\ with criticism focusing almost exclusively on theperformances, exhibitions, reviews, and manifestos produced over a relatively brief period of Tzara's career. There is little recognition of the fact that for a significantly longer period?for four decades after theDada manifestos were published?Tzara's main careerwas as a poet. Thus Forcer sets out here to redress the balance, providing a close textual analysis of a selection of Tzara's poems from across thewhole of this period, examining how they evolve afterDada, and so problematizing Tzara's iconic function. This is effectivelyaided by Forcer's refusal to adopt a single predetermined theoretical agenda informinghis selection of poems, which frees up his enquiry and allows him to produce amore organic' reading. 576 Reviews And without doubt it ishis engagement with the detail of the poems that is the real strength of this book: taking one or two from each collection as paradigms for thewhole, this small but dense corpus of analysis communicates the vitality of Tzara's work.Writing with evident pleasure, Forcer starts from an accessible premiss to go on to explore exciting new ground, teasing out a surprising array of readings and styles. This exploration is for themost part both engaging and persuasive, but also controversial in parts: if the reader is of similar persuasion to Charles Chadwick (withwhom Forcer exchanged a series of commentaries in the French Studies Bulletin in 2006), s/hemay be less convinced by Forcer's argument for the hidden significance of individual letters inwhat are essentially typographically and phonetically unremarkable texts, finding thismeaning to be mere accident or fancy. Forcer suggests inhis response toChadwick that to dismiss such findingsbased on the question of authorial intent is facile in a world afterBarthes and Derrida, and contends that the signifying play may rather be less a question of intent...