I am against manifestos - Tristan Tzara guides future professors

The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.

That’s from a “Note on Poetry” by Tristan Tzara, originally published in Dada 4-5 (1919) – the title page, by Francis Picabia, is to the right.  I am reading the squib in Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries (Calder, 1977), translated by Barbara Wright.

Is there much point to reading this book?  I can think of – while reading I thought of – several objections.  First, is it not just a lot of arbitrary nonsense, much like that of other nonsense writers?

Dada is a dog – a compass – the lining of the stomach – neither new nor a nude Japanese girl – a gasometer of jangled feelings – Dada is brutal and doesn’t go in for propaganda – Dada is a quantity of life in transparent, effortless and gyratory transformation.  (“Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love,” part XI, read 1920, published 1921)

Though there is a fair amount of such stuff, the answer is No.  Tzara’s writing is generally coherent.

Second, is Dada not primarily of interest as a visual arts movement?  True.  Given that today’s high end art world is essentially Dadaist, an illogical endpoint of the movement, all too true.

Do we make art in order to earn money and keep the dear bourgeoisie happy?  Rhymes have the smack of money, and inflexion slides along the line of the stomach in profile.  Every group of artists has ended up at the bank, straddling various comets.  (from “Dada Manifesto 1918,” p. 5)

Visual art, design, theater, all more important than literature to Dada.  It helps me understand Tzara’s manifestos when I think of them as performances, as oral prose poems, to imagine Tzara declaiming “Dada Manifesto 1918” in a Zurich art gallery performance, surrounded by Hans Arps and Sophie Taeubers (although not the one to the right, from two years later).

I am writing a manifesto and there’s nothing I want, and yet I’m saying certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am against principles…  (p. 3)

I also lose the sense of the manifesto as an object, published as a pamphlet or poster or issue of Dada, with all of the surrounding artwork, although Wright’s translation does keep anything that is part of Tzara’s piece – strange typography, a mathematical problem I Have not deciphered, or a semi-abstract drawing of a large intestine.

So I just read the pieces as texts, as literature, which is what they have inevitability become.  Tzara’s manifestos, not to mention his little squibs on Pierre Reverdy and Picabia, turn out to be substantial works of art criticism.  Among the fine nonsense, he darts through some ideas about conceptual art that work as well in a museum today as they would have in 1920, except that none of this stuff would have been anywhere near a museum.

My third objection is something like “Why just Tzara?”  What about the manifestos by – everyone else – so many manifestos – by Hugo Ball, for example?  What about Tzara’s poems, or Arp’s, or etc.?  Yes.  Any recommendations are welcome.  I’m a curious ignoramus.

As I was writing, the October 27 New York Review of Books arrived.  It contains a survey of Dada by Alfred Brendel that is easy to recommend.  Brendel reminds me that in Zurich, this is the year of celebration of Dada, the centennial of the Cabaret Voltaire, with major exhibitions of Picabia and Kurt Schwitters, among many other events.  “Its high point,” writes Brendel,” may well have been the performance of the Symphony for Nine Harley Davidsons, Trumpet, and Synthesizer by the octogenarian avant-garde composer Dieter Schnebel,” which included a “motorcycle ballet.”  Lucky Zürchers.

Surrealism is so beautiful! It changes everything! - César Aira embarks on the great avant-garde adventure

In one of the mad scientist stories, Leopoldo Lugones explicitly invokes Poe’s “imp of the perverse,” Poe's greatest psychological insight:

The demon of scientific inquiry, which is nothing but the embodiment of the spirit of perversity, impelled me, nevertheless, to resume my experiments. (Strange Forces, “Yzur”)

I take this as a self-description, and also as a description of his countryman, future Nobel anti-Prize winner César Aira.

Surrealism is so beautiful!  It changes everything!  (“The Infinite,” 1993, p. 226)

As if Aira’s own fiction did not contain enough self-description.  That one is about a young Aira and a friend inventing a game in which the goal is to say a number larger than the previous number, children demonstrating a philosophical exercise about representation.

Daydreams are always about concepts, not examples.  I wouldn’t want anything I’ve written to be taken as an example.  (235)

My knock on Aira is that however inventive the surface variation he is always writing the same story, but perversely The Musical Brain (2015), a collection of short stories, mostly variations on the same handful of ideas, is the perfect introduction to Aira.  When surveying Aira, it helps to be able to triangulate, or at least it is easier to see Aira mention again and again, in story after story, the “fact” “that a piece of paper cannot be folded in half more than nine times” (“A Brick Wall,” 2011, 18) or to wonder about the surprising number of genies.

My friends and I had become experts in deciphering that perfect economy of signs [Aira means film narrative].  It seemed perfect to us anyway, in contrast with the chaotic muddle of signs and meanings that constituted reality.  Everything was a clue, a lead.  Movies, whatever their genre, were really all detective stories.  Except that in detective stories, as I was to learn at around the same time, the genuine leads are hidden among red herrings, which, although required in order to lead the reader astray, are superfluous pieces of information, without significance.  (“A Brick Wall,” 7)

The movies “seemed like a super-reality.”  Sometimes I wondered is Aira was being too bald, but can I blame him if once in a while he wants someone to understand him, or, speaking for myself, pretend to understand him, since it is more than likely that I have been distracted by the savory red herrings, so good on toast.

From outside, it [contemporary art] might have seemed like a meaningless eccentricity contest.  But when one entered the game, the meaning became apparent, and dominated everything else.  It was, in fact, a game of meaning, and without meaning, it was nothing.  (“The Two Men,” 2007, 272)

Aira was the impetus for and center of a week of writing about conceptual art I did a couple of years ago.  In a 2013 essay in The White Review that is only superficially distinct from a couple of the stories in The Musical Brain, Aira describes the avant-garde, his avant-garde, as “an attempt to recuperate the amateur gesture,” to “restore to art the ease with which it was once produced.”

We were embarking on the great avant-garde adventure.  (“Athena Magazine,” 2007, 38)

The result is, as in this story and often in so-called real life, not the creation of the thing itself, in this case a magazine, but the perfect idea of a magazine, which for Aira almost counts as a success.  Not quite, though.  Tomorrow, “Cecil Taylor.”

Why conceptual art? - against "a kind of inhuman hyperprofessionalism"

How did we get here?  Meaning, in this week’s context, how did we get to a point where Alvin Lucier’s recording of a mechanically distorted bit of speech can be credibly placed among the most important pieces of music of the 20th century.  Why does anyone worry about, while writing a novel, the alphabeticization of the words, like Walter Abish did?   How on earth did we get to – to – to – this:

If that image does not immediately appear at the website of Jeff Koons, click on “Inflatables” – or better yet, do not.  That place is a chamber of horrors.

More to the point, why are these works so prestigious and important.  No, that is easy.  They are pres. & imp. because certain other people believe they are p. & i., but I have just moved the target of the Why? and added a Who?

I don’t know the answers.  I am always looking for evidence.  Part of my pursuit of Austrian literature was a search for clues.  I found plenty.  A lot changed around 1900 – or 1910, Virginia Woolf says everything changed in 1910.  Maybe so.

I am so glad Rise pointed me to César Aira’s essay on conceptual art.  It is worth revisiting.  Aira has a good one-word explanation: professionalization.  This is what he means:

Once a professional novelist is established, he has two equally melancholy alternatives: to keep writing the ‘old’ novels in updated settings; or to heroically attempt to take one or two more steps forward.  This last possibility turned out to be a dead end within a few years: while Balzac wrote fifty novels, and still had time to live, Flaubert wrote five, shedding blood in the process.  Joyce wrote two, and Proust a single novel, and it was a work that took over his life, absorbing it, a kind of inhuman hyperprofessionalism. The fact is that being able to make a living from literature was a momentary and precarious state which could only happen at a determined moment in history.

The avant garde, a focus on concept and process rather than content, is Aira’s way to break the impasse, “an attempt to recuperate the amateur gesture” rather than trying to outdo Proust.  Note Aira’s strong sense of progress in the arts.  One could quibble with some of Aira’s evidence.

Now, lots of people write and far more read lightly updated versions of the old novels, Flaubert and Proust for our time (or Austen and Dickens), and they can find readers, and receive awards and critical praise.  This is the big difference between literature and classical music or fine art.  The audience for new work in fiction is much larger, and the avant gardists have not captured whatever mechanism is it that distributes prestige.  Sometimes I think they have captured poetry, other times I am not so sure.  But fiction is too big. Too – no, I don’t know what.

I thought about writing this post as a series of questions.  What is innovation in fiction?  How does originality differ from innovation?  Is there a taste for innovation?  And once I answer these questions, if I can, I have to historicize them – would the answers be the same in Shakespeare’s time, or Johnson’s, or even Dickens’s?  No – so what changed, and why?  I don’t know, I don’t know.

To return to my first paragraph, since I feel bad about lumping them together for illustrative purposes – Lucier is narrow and brilliant, Abish is narrow and interesting, Koons is a con man.

I attempt to celebrate, or spoil, Herman Melville's birthday by describing him as a conceptual innovator

Happy birthday, Herman Melville.  I honestly thought I was going to spend most of this week writing about Melville, about The Piazza Tales (1856).

Melville was a kind of conceptual writer.  He was not concerned with the process of creativity like Alvin Lucier or Andy Warhol or César Aira (“nowadays, art that does not use a procedure is not truly art”).  Who at the time would have understood that kind of gibberish?  But he was a self-conscious innovator in fiction and verse.

The forms of the novel that were standard in the late 1840s were not a good fit for Melville, so he struggled to find a form for himself.  By his third book, the crazy Mardi (1849) he had assembled the pieces of his style:  short chapters (Mardi has 195!), a wild mix of realism and metaphor verging on allegory, a literally poetic diction, and a de-emphasis on novelistic character.  The latter especially was completely contrary to the contemporary emphasis of English (and French and Russian) fiction, where authors were creating amazingly lifelike, sympathetic characters.  This still drives unsuspecting readers of Moby-Dick crazy, doesn’t it?  Where are the people?

The Melville “novel” I am reading now, The Confidence Man (1857), is even more extreme, with all of the characters replaced by allegorical figures moving in a kind of a procession in a pointedly artificial setting.  It is like The Fairie Queen.  It is slow going.  Perhaps it is no longer a novel, but some other still unnamed form of prose fiction.

I think this wild allegorizing is fairly new, although it is partly borrowed from Nathaniel Hawthorne.  I believe the prose as poetry is new, too, something no one had done to the same extent.  I should keep an eye out for more examples of that.

Curiously, since I am knocking his characterization, two of Melville’s most significant creations are characters.  Even more curiously, they both can be thought of as conceptual innovations.  What I mean here is that some fundamental part of Captain Ahab and Bartleby the Scrivener can be understood without reading the original text.  Heck, without knowing that there is a text.  Ahab is the crazy guy who obsesses over a pointless goal; Bartleby is the office drone who prefers not to do anything.

Whether or not these descriptions match what is in the text is incidental.  They have turned out to be valuable concepts.  Useful shorthand descriptions.  They join Don Quixote, Don Juan, Ebenezer Scrooge, Faust, Sherlock Holmes, and that poor sap who turns into a bug as characters who have escaped their novels, however narrowly, as ideas more than as people.

I feel that movies have muddled this entire line of argument in some way I do not yet understand.

I also have this idea that the ingenious ways novelists have found to plump up the seeming reality of their characters prevents them from becoming free-floating concepts.  So we could call a well-meaning busybody Emma Woodhouse, but Jane Austen’s Emma is too complex or ambiguous, or just too much a part of her own novel to escape it.  I don’t know.  Please substitute your own example.  Imagine Maggie Tulliver independently of The Mill on the Floss, Anna Karenina outside of her book, Charles Kinbote at large.  It seems pointless, almost impossible, but who knows.  Reincarnations of Don Quixote and Captain Ahab show up all over the place.  I know, I know, Captain Ahab is himself a version of Don Quixote.

I wonder what I am going to ramble about tomorrow.

Alvin Lucier's Music 109 - Your professor is prepared.

Yesterday I was trying to get to a wonderful book, Music 109 by Alvin Lucier (2012), an adaptation of the music history class Lucier has been teaching at Wesleyan University for the last forty years.

Lucier is, in the sense I was discussing, a conceptual composer.  His compositions break music down into sound.   He hooks a wire up to some electronics and lets it vibrate – that’s a composition (Music on a Long Thin Wire). In his best known work, I am sitting in a room (1969), Lucier records himself describing the piece, and then records a playback of the recording, and then records a playback of the playback, repeating until the acoustics of the room have destroyed any trace of speech aside from its rhythm.  What remains, surprisingly, is music, or something very much like it (“Speech became music.  It was magical”).  The process of the creation of the piece is crucial to understanding what it is, to even know what I am hearing.  Why would anyone record this uninteresting text, which begins with “I am sitting in a room”?

It was crucial to avoid poetic references – poems, prayers, anything with high aesthetic value.  I felt that would only get in the way.  I wanted the acoustic exploration to be paramount, the room acoustics and its gradual transformation to be the point of the piece.  (90)

The finished recording is forty-five minutes long.  The distorting acoustical transitions are small and the piece moves slowly.

As César Aira writes, in an essay on John Cage and conceptual art that I swear I did not know about until Rise pointed it out to me yesterday, “what we think of as the ‘work’ can be the method by which the work is made, rather than the actual work itself, the work acting as a kind of documentary appendix which serves only as a means of deducing the process from which it arose.”

Although Lucier also wants to hear the results of the process.  He likes the surprise.  I believe I have only made it all the way through I am sitting in a room three times, although I have listened to parts of it many times.  I must have first come across Lucier in William Duckworth’s survey 20/20: 20 New Sounds of the 20th Century (1999), which included I am sitting in a room alongside Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Ives’s Concord Sonata, and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue as one of the seminal works of the century.  Really?  Yes, at this point, yes.

Since Lucier is now part of music history, his music history class is his music history.  The first work discussed is Charles Ives’s Symphony No. 4.  Beethoven appears as the author of the Grosse Fuge, “the only nineteenth-century work that can exist on a wholly modern music concert” (183).  The major figures are John Cage, Robert Ashley, La Monte Young – people Lucier knew and worked with.  Chapter titles cover forms (Opera, String Quartets), but also concepts (Indeterminacy, Repetition) and who knows what – Bell Labs, Words, Tape Recorders.

The prose is conversational, although secretly filled with pedagogical mines designed to explode years later.  I should try to write more like Lucier.  He gets to the point.

When [Cage] was at Wesleyan in the Sixties, he taught a course in which he sent everyone to the library to find a different book.  The students used chance operations to generate the call numbers.  They all came back with different books on different subjects, some even in different languages.  Cage thought it was a stupid idea for everybody to read the same thing.  He thought it would be more interesting if everyone read something different.  (13)

How wonderful that with the internet a curious reader can now listen along with whatever crazy piece Lucier mentions, no matter how obscure.  How wonderful Lucier’s class must be.

Let’s pack up our book bags and go into the tunnels under the Music Studios, the acoustics there are very reverberant.  I brought along a pitch pipe.  (Your professor is prepared)…  Let’s carry our perfect fifth with us into the tunnels and perform La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #7.  (102)

Aira and Abish - literary conceptual art

The fiction of César Aira is conceptual.  It is created under a restriction that is not part of the text itself.  Aira talks about his method of composition openly in interviews, so it is no secret, but there is no way to derive the method from the text.  The narrator of Varamo says that is exactly what he is doing (“all the critic has to do is translate each verse, each word, backwards, into the particle of reality from which it sprang,” 45) but he is fictional, and that line is a joke.  You have to read the little tag beside the painting to know about the concept.

This kind of explicitly conceptual fiction is rare and has always been rare.  No need to pester me with your favorite exceptions.  Conceptual theater and poetry are much more common, which is why Varamo is about the composition of a poem.  The novel is set during 1923 (p. 3), so the great poetic masterpiece that is supposedly at the center of Varamo, which itself is composed in a conceptual manner (it is a found object collage), is written in the same year as The Wasteland, another collage-like masterpiece.  This is not a coincidence.

Within his constraints, Aira does not break so many rules.  He has characters, plots, jokes, transitions, all of the usual stuff of fiction.  Heck, Walter Abish has all of that stuff.  See the amazing post Rise put together.  Abish’s Alphabetical Africa (1974) employs an arbitrary constraint based on the alphabet.  The first chapter only uses words that begin with the letter A, the second chapter expands to words that begin with A and B, and so on for 26 chapters, after which each chapter removes a letter until we shrink back down to A words at the end.  As soon as you leaf through the pages you get the concept.  And yet the novel still has characters (not particularly good characters, I admit), a plot, etc.

I have argued that Madame Bovary belongs in this company.  I am not sure many people believe me.

If conceptual fiction is rare, purely conceptual fiction, or for that matter poetry or plays, barely exists.  I mean novels consisting of a single word repeated ten million times, or poems without words.  That kind of thing.  It has never been an important part of literary history.

Twentieth century fine art and music are of course full of – from the point of view of many people, plagued with – this stuff. John Cage’s 4’33”, just four minutes and thirty-three seconds of a pianist not playing the piano, or Marcel Duchamp’s signed urinal, or Yves Klein’s monochromatic blue paintings, or Yoko Ono’s string quartets, where the complete score is something like “The musicians and audience leave the concert  hall and look at the stars.”  I made that specific one up, but that’s what they are like.

Many music lovers and art enthusiasts hate this stuff, just loathe it.  They think it has ruined modern art, and that the artists are con men and the audience a pack of fools.  Let’s not go into the reasons for this.  Skeptical readers can comfort themselves that despite the best efforts of various Dadaists and Surrealists and Vorticists, conceptual literature has remained more of a concept than it has in music or fine art.  In literature, it is fairly easy to pretend that conceptual art does not exist.

This is all a preface to a kind of book review, if you can believe it.