Continental Drift
KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
And welcome to another UbuWeb Poetry Foundation podcast, all avant-garde all the time. I'm your host, Kenneth Goldsmith. I'm the founding editor of UbuWeb at ubu.com. Today we'll continue our series listening to the sounds of regionalism. This will be the third one. The first one was the sounds of Los Angeles in the 70s. The second was the sounds of the London Underground. Today we're going to do a vast sweep of the sounds of France, beginning in 1870 with Arthur Rimbaud continuing right up to the present with a piece from 2000. Paris, of course, is the home of the avant-garde, and much of this was expressed through sound. There are fabulous recordings of normal poetry, but the UbuWeb twist is that we're going to be listening to the way the avant-garde in France twisted up and bent language. This is a setting of Arthur Rimbaud's poem from 1870 'Roman,' which is translated as romance. (VIDEO PLAYS)
ARTHUR RIMBAUD:
(SPEAKS FRENCH) (VIDEO ENDS)
KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
It's a beautiful poem about a steamy June night, what it feels like to be 17 years old. And a young guy goes out and gets drunk, finds a girl falls in love, and from June to August, you're in love, your sonnets make her laugh. And this comes from a record by Jacques Doyen and Jacques Lasry entitled (SPEAKS FRENCH) recorded in 1966. These guys invented instruments that sounded electronic, but actually weren't electronic. They invented dozens of instruments that they called structures sonore or sonorous structures that were like Harry Partch's instruments that were made out of steel on aluminum and big conical sheets of metal. And anybody could play them with very little experience. (VIDEO PLAYS)
GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE:
(SPEAKS FRENCH) (VIDEO ENDS)
KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
This is actually the voice of Guillaume Apollinaire, a poem of his from his book called 'Alcools.' A poem is called Le Pont Mirabeau. His book averse'Alcools,' and of course, his visually graphical book 'Calligrammes' from 1918 established Apollinaire is the leading French poet of his day. Of course, it's a great story because he volunteered for World War I in 1914 and got blasted in the head in 1916, and was sent out of the army. He died in 1918 in Paris. The victim of the great influenza epidemic of that year. Apollinaire as well as being a great poet and a great visual poet will be best remembered as an ally of the Cubist. And his writing and attitude would just be a great influence on everybody from Dada to Surrealism. It was Apollinaire himself that coined the word Surrealist to describe a work of his in 1917. (VIDEO PLAYS)
MARCEL DUCHAMP:
Dictionary of a language in which each word would be translated into French order by several words when necessary, by whole sentence. (VIDEO ENDS)
KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
And the incredible voice of Marcel Duchamp. He's reading some texts here written between 1912 and 1920 from (UNKNOWN). This was recorded by Aspen Magazine in New York in November of 1967. (VIDEO PLAYS)
MARCEL DUCHAMP:
Makes this dictionary by means of cards. (VIDEO ENDS)
KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
What he's doing here. It's just a very, very short piece. It's a piece for Dadaist textual manipulations that would actually have ramifications much later in conceptual writing. Their conceptual ideas for translation mix the dictionary like cards. It's scramble the alphabet. He gives recipes for unspeakable languages. (VIDEO PLAYS)
MARCEL DUCHAMP:
Sound of this language. Is it speakable? No. (VIDEO ENDS)
KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
He encourages you to cross out words from the dictionary and then translate the dictionary into colors. Open up the dictionary at random and organize words by meaning, not by the way they're put alphabetically. (VIDEO PLAYS)
MARCEL DUCHAMP:
Dictionary with films they can close up. (VIDEO ENDS)
KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
He also calls for film to be substituted for words. You could actually make a dictionary of film. It's a fantastic thing. There's a lot of Duchamp on UbuWeb. There's actually the music of Marcel Duchamp on UbuWeb. And what many people do not know is that Duchamp composed an extensive body of aleatory music that had been realized by Peter Kotick and the SEM ensemble, all available on Duchamp's sound page on UbuWeb. (VIDEO PLAYS)
SAMUEL BECKETT:
(SPEAKS FRENCH) (VIDEO ENDS)
KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
This piece by Samuel Beckett called 'Ping' or 'Bing' in French from 1966, but we just heard translates as white ceiling shining white, one square yard, never seen ping, perhaps way out there. One second ping silence traces alone, unover given black gray signs, no meaning light gray, almost white, always the same. What we're listening to is a Radio France culture realization of this work in the 1960s, read by the great theater director Jose Bland, who was responsible for the first production of Samuel Beckett's waiting for Godot. The great thing about this piece was that when you read the text, it doesn't make much sense in and of itself. It's actually words being thrown around and caught up as material interspersed with this bing or ping every once in a while. And the music concrete people like Boulez or Stockhausen were actually taking sounds and applying similar techniques to them. So, you know, you don't have is a narrative. You have a spatial list idea and a spatial notion of language.
And yet, because it's language, you can't rid it of meaning or emotion. So, you've got the best of both worlds. It's abstract and it's emotional at the same time. (VIDEO PLAYS)
SPEAKER:
(SPEAKS FRENCH) (SPEAKS FRENCH) (VIDEO ENDS)
KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
And what we're listening to here is in fact the sounds of Onri, Chopin's digestive tract. Henri Chopin is a founder of sound poetry. This was recorded a little bit later in 1972, but what he used was small microphones all over his body to amplify and manipulate the sounds coming from the body. He achieves this percussive effect by, you know, the same way that a, a child would go, whoa, whoa, over his mouth. You can actually control in a rhythmic way by eating and swallowing rhythmically the sounds that your body's making. So, he is actually breathing in and out and drinking and eating during this piece, which is being recorded and then remixed a little bit later at his home studio while he was living at the time in England. Henri Chopin often said, the body is a sound factory. And he put the sounds of the body to use. Now it, even though he called himself a sound poet, it fell somewhere between a sound poetry and music concrete and as a result, Henri Chopin is viewed as a pioneer of poetry and of electronic music using his body, his source material.
So, at this point, you're gonna be asking the obvious question, where are the women? And the obvious answer is that there really weren't very many women in the French scene doing this. Unlike England, which was packed with women doing experimental work in France, there was a real dearth of women. (VIDEO PLAYS)
ELISA GARNIER:
(SPEAKS FRENCH) (VIDEO PLAYS)
KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
One of the exceptions was a woman named Elisa Garnier. And what we're listening to here is a piece of hers from 1962 called (UNKNOWN). This was recorded on a amazing group of Italian releases. They were little 45 RPM sound poetry disc called the three (UNKNOWN) Poetry Records. And what she's trying to do here is trying to make space age poetry. In fact her husband, Pierre Garnier, with whom she worked quite extensively, made what they called spatial poetry using tape recorded samples of the sounds of technology, as well as the kind of chatter of transmissions that were coming back from space. They tried to warp and bend poetic form at warp speed. So, you get a lot of chipmunk voices and you get a lot of murky sort of transmissions and echoes trying to approximate the sounds of space. (VIDEO PLAYS)
ELISA GARNIER:
(SPEAKS FRENCH) (VIDEO ENDS)
KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
The racket that we're hearing in the background is done by the very famous French painter, Jean Dubuffet, who very few people knew was a musician. In late 1960 into 1961, he began experimenting with sound and he made several recordings with the Situationist Danish painter Asger Jorn. Jorn was a little bit trained in music, he could play the violin or the trumpet, and Dubuffet was completely untrained, but that didn't stop him from collecting many exotic instruments like flutes and hurdy gurdies and Asian and African instruments, and making an absolute racket. Jean Dubuffet, a promoter of art brute, decided to take that practice into the music studio using himself then as the brutalist. He said, "As far as the tape recorder goes, I was a complete novice"and it's fantastic music. This is using tape recorders, the two tape to make his bad playing sound even more chaotic and bombastic. This is one note that's played for an hour. This is Yves Klein, the Painter, and this is his monotone symphony written in 1949, recorded on the night of March 9th, 1960.
At 10:00 PM a crown of a hundred people all dressed in black tie attire came to a gallery in Paris. Mr. Klein, of course, was in a black dinner jacket, and he proceeded to conduct a 10 piece orchestra in his personal composition, the monotone symphony. Now, it wasn't just an orchestral piece of course, because there were naked women and they were rolled in paint and paper. And Mr. Klein, once he got the instruments going, dragged these beautiful girls through the paint and made gorgeous paintings of them. When the symphony stopped, it was followed by a strict 20 minutes of silence, and everybody sat still for 20 minutes, including the naked women. And you can bet that for most of those 20 minutes, most of the audience was fixated on the bodies of the naked women. At the end, everybody was aware that they had been in the presence of a genius At Work Yves Klein triumphed. It was his greatest moment in art history as he referred to it later, a total success. (VIDEO PLAYS)
BEN VAUTIER:
First idea I sing. OK, (SPEAKS FRENCH). Better, I have the second idea. No, first idea. Where have you been? Billy boy, Billy boy? Where have you been charming, Billy, I've been to see my wife. She's a darling of my life. She's a young thing who cannot even mother (VIDEO ENDS)
KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
This is a great piece by Ben Vautier, the French Fluxus artist called 'Some Ideas for Fluxus' Recorded in 1989 from the collection called the Fluxus Anthology. Fluxus in the early sixties was a do it yourself type of art movement. It was not predicated upon skill, vision, or talent coming after the ideas of John Cage, it said, "anybody can be an artist and anything you propose can be art." Here Ben Vautier is singing a child song, basically Billy boy, and say, if you sing that you two can be a fluxus artist. (VIDEO PLAYS)
BEN VAUTIER:
And now I propose anybody who wants to do fluxus music just sings a song. Idea number two. (VIDEO ENDS)
KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
The second idea that he has is to... (VIDEO PLAYS)
BEN VAUTIER:
Take The record and eat it. (VIDEO ENDS)
KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
Anybody could eat anything and it could be construed as art. (VIDEO PLAYS)
BEN VAUTIER:
If It's too hard to eat, throw it outta the window. (VIDEO ENDS)
KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
And for his third piece that he proposes here, it's simply he can't come up with anything and he doesn't know. And the fact that he doesn't know makes it a great work of art. (VIDEO PLAYS)
BEN VAUTIER:
I don't know. I don't know what to do. OK. (VIDEO ENDS)
KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
And we're listening to the contemporary French composer. He's based in Leon. His name is Lionel Marchetti. (VIDEO PLAYS)
LIONEL MARCHETTI:
(SPEAKS FRENCH) (VIDEO ENDS)
KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
This is a piece called 'Five Studies on Sleep and Dreaming.' It's a collaboration with another electroacoustic composer, Olivier Caparros, who is also a poet. Caparros is the speaker here. (VIDEO PLAYS)
OLIVIER CAPARROS:
(SPEAKS FRENCH) (VIDEO ENDS)
KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
And Marchetti, what he's done is he's taken us on a tour of spoken dreams by insomniacs using the voices of children and bits and pieces of psychoanalysis. It's a study in five parts and an invitation to explore the enigmatic territory between awakenness and asleep. And this is a piece by the French composer George Aperghis called 'Recitations.' And this is recitation number 10. The entire recitations is inspired by the work of the Oulipo. Jacques Roubaud and George Perec, and also by the formal language games of the letters. Basically what starts to happen over the course of the recitations is that the rhythmic entities get so complex that they build up in these frenetic bursts of unpronounceable, screeching consonants, moving from meaning into pure sound. And this is a piece by a young French artist named Xavier Guttier called'Rachel' Recorded in 2000. And what we're hearing is the French version from the Ridley Scott movie, 'Blade Runner.' And it's all the words that Rachel says in chronological order throughout the entire course of the movie.
Rachel is a minor character, a replicant who believes she's human. So, by ordering all of her words chronologically, I believe Guttier is trying to convince us that she's not human, and that her words can be ordered mathematically and logically instead of emotionally and meaningfully. Like so many young composers today, Guttier is using samples, he's organizing, found material or appropriated media material. And I think a lot of French practice, of course, having its roots in the avant-garde, has now moved into a pan national or international way of working with sound no longer tied to the romance of the avant-garde. And this has been another UbuWeb Poetry Foundation podcast, all avant-garde all the time. I'm Kenneth Goldsmith. Everything you've heard today can be downloaded and listened to @ubu.com.
How the French avante-garde twisted up and bent language, featuring Rimbaud, Apollinaire, the space age poetry of Ilse Garnier, and more.
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