FULL PROGRAM click here
25 OCTOBER, wednesday
09h00
RECEPTION
Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT)
Generators Room
10h00-10h30
OPENING SESSION
Opening Session by Teresa Cid (Director of ULICES), Paulo Jorge Farmhouse Simões Alberto (Director of FLUL), Anabela Duarte (organizer, UL), Andrew Hussey (co-organizer, ULondon), Edgardo Medeiros da Silva (American Studies Research Group), Pedro Gadanho (MAAT).
10h30-10h45
WORKSHOP “THE INVISIBLE CIRCUS” – AVANT-GARDE MANIFEST FOR THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
Short Intro
Generators Room
3 day-workshop (MAAT and UL)
Schedule:
25th: Collection of Typographic Elements
26th: Collection and Printing
27th: Final Coating
Free
1- Collection of typographic and EXPRESSIVE elements
MAAT/all day
Abstract
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Invisible Circus of the Diggers, in 1967, the organizers decided to create a workshop that somehow would reenact the energy and the spontaneity of the 60s, with the urge for renewal and art activism of the present age. The workshop will be open to all participants and attendees. Participants are invited to collect bits of news flashes, papers, poetic fragments, their own talks and stories, which in the end will be both part of a printed absurd manifesto and of a living, symbolic archive of the conference. “O Homem do Saco” (The Boogeyman), a creative typographical association, will bring the necessary equipment and set up shop at the University of Lisbon.
Bionote
“O Homem do Saco” (The Boogeyman) is an atelier of typography and independent editions. It publishes limited editions in typography of moveable characters, including digital or offset fingerprints for editions with bigger print runs. At other times, it mixes different printing techniques (collage, rerouting, dripping, scotch tape, monotypes). There are several editorial labels in this association.
10h45-11h15
COFFEE-BREAK
Condensators Room
11h15-12h15
RECORDING AND ORCHESTRATING ISOU & LETTRIST POETRY-MUSIC
Plenary Session with Frédéric Acquaviva (La Plaque Tournante, FR)
Chair: Anabela Duarte (Universidade de Lisboa, PT)
Abstract
I discovered Lettrism in the nineties when I read Isou’s “Œuvres de Spectacles”. At the moment that everyone was hypnotized by Debord’s “Society of Spectacle”, I soon became aware that Isou claimed he was the best composer of all time. Being myself a composer, I thought I should meet him to listen to his proposals or, in case they weren’t recorded yet – and they weren’t – help him to record them. I saw him during the last ten years of his life and produced a few musical works with him. Then I met Maurice Lemaître, discovered Gil J. Wolman’s works and also became friends with some enemies of Lettrism, like Henri Chopin or Bernard Heidsieck, as well as with some members of the Lettrist movement. In this lecture, I would like to present the works I did to help them disseminate their musical ideas in a very hostile world, as well as present some other historical recordings.
Bionote
Frédéric Acquaviva, is an experimental composer and sound artist born in France. He lives in Berlin where he runs the space La Plaque Tournante and the magazine CRU (contemporary radical underground), with Loré Lixenberg. Since the 90s, he has composed more than 40 pieces of music and has released 100 multiples, CDs and sound books, which are part of the collections of Centre Pompidou. His work was presented at ZKM, Palais de Tokyo, Moderna Museet, Experimental Intermedia, Deep Listening, Royal Opera House, La Fenice, Berghain, Fylkingen, France Cultur, among others, and he was composer in residency at EMS and EHF. Having worked with Isou, Guyotat, Lemaître, Chopin or Heidsieck, Acquaviva is also known for writing books, doing films, radio programs, archives or curating exhibitions on Lettrism or Sound Poetry (Reina Sofia, MACBA, Serralves) for which he was twice awarded a fellowship at the Beinecke Library (Yale University).
http://www.frederic-acquaviva.net
12h15-13h30
AVANT-GARDES REVISITED I panel sessions
Chair: Manuel Portela (Universidade de Coimbra, PT)
Generators Room
THE SEMANTIC BOMB
Guy Maruani (Independent, FR)
Abstract
Avant-garde artistic movements in the twentieth century have disrupted the link between signifier and signified, like the explosion of the atomic bomb in 1945 disrupted the link between matter and energy. In literature James Joyce blurred the line between nonsense and polysemic signification, an attempt exemplified in Finnegans Wake.
After WW2 Isidore Isou, messianic Jew, survivor of the Holocaust, pretended to rebuild each domain of culture using the letter as paradigm. He and his folowers lettristes advocated a new Renaissance. We may find a distant echo of Isou’s hypergraphy in John Lennon’s booklets and a few of his songs, though the founder of the Beatles was, knowingly or not, a direct heir of James Joyce. Lennon achieved world fame when the Beatles were the medium and the message. He was then destroyed by his pretense to deliver a message, something which Bob Dylan in his wit never did.
Bionote
Guy Maruani is a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who worked and taught in Paris then Brussels. A former professional rock singer himself, he maintained during his career an interest in Creativity, Pop-Music and Art, learning a lot not only through research in neurosciences and psychology, but also by listening to his many artists patients. And don’t ask him if psychosis and genius are related; ask the conference what would mankind be without folly?
DADAIST MUSIC AND STRATEGIES OF ANTI-ART
Paul Ingram (University of London, UK)
Abstract
This paper explores Dadaist music, in relation to different strategies of anti-art, which can be summarized as follows: the incorporation of non-canonical elements, such as the popular and the “primitive”; the destruction of established forms of expression, principally through bruitism; and the disruption of dominant modes of attention, in provocative performances which rely heavily upon shock. The relative effectiveness of these approaches is assessed, with a distinction made between the violation of the norms of the bourgeois institution of art as currently constituted, and the negation of the aesthetic as such. I conclude that the former ultimately seeks to expand the definition of art, whereas the latter attempts to bring about its destruction.
Bionote
Paul Ingram is studying for a PhD in English Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London, under the supervision of Professor Esther Leslie. His doctoral thesis is about the figure of the philistine in the works of Theodor Adorno and Dada. He has published poetry, reviews and articles, on topics including anti-art and iconoclasm.
THE POLITICS OF A VOICE – DEMETRIO STRATOS
Fabio Guidali (Università di Milano, IT)
Abstract
In Italy, the political commitment of folk, pop and rock singers and groups in favor of Countercultural movements was not limited to the protests of 1968, but characterized the following decade too. In this context, Demetrio Stratos (1945-1979), a Greek born in Egypt with Cypriot passport who had moved to Italy, developed his musical career, first as a blues and rock singer, then as front man of the progressive rock band Area. Stratos also investigated extended vocal techniques (mainly diplophony and triplophony) and the non-narrative use of human voice, both as a protest against Western music standards and as an act of liberation of the body. The paper examines his intents and the reception of his performances, in order to understand how it was possible to conciliate vocal avant-garde research and political messages for large sections of the Italian population.
Bionote
Fabio Guidali earned his PhD in contemporary history from the University of Milan and the Freie Universität Berlin. He is a didactic assistant at the Dipartimento di Studi Storici at the University of Milan. He is the author of the monographies “Il secolo lungo di Gabriele Mucchi”, Una biografia intellettuale e politica (Milan 2012) and Scrivere con il mondo in testa. Intellettuali europei tra cultura e potere (Milan-Udine 2016). He also published several essays on European intellectuals and periodicals in the twentieth century. He is currently studying the Italian countercultural scene, focusing on underground and music magazines.
DADA DIALECTICS: COUNTERCULTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA
Kathryn M. Floyd (Auburn University, USA) and Brett M. Van Hoesen (University of Nevada, USA)
Abstract
In the 1960s, the University of Iowa (USA) fostered an unlikely convergence of scholars and practitioners influenced by Dada. Hans Breder, Stephen Foster, Rudolf Kuenzli, and others in art history, intermedia, electronic music, and the visual and performing arts, founded a series of experimental programs such as The Center for New Music (1966), the Intermedia Program (1968), and the International Dada Archive (1979) that investigated and employed Dada strategies and interventionist approaches to interrogate cultural categories and break down the boundaries of established media. This laboratory in which critical historical scholarship and experimental artistic practices worked together to push back against the traditions and frameworks of the public Midwestern university was nevertheless fostered by, and flourished within, the institution. Iowa’s “invisible republic” of Dada experimentation, once profoundly influential, now threatens to be forgotten. This paper sketches the unique countercultural landscape at the University of Iowa from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Bionotes
Kathryn M. Floyd is Associate Professor of Art History (Auburn University). She received her PhD (2006) from the University of Iowa. Her research concerns twentieth-century German art with a focus on exhibitions and their mediation in photography and film. She recently served as guest editor of Dada/Surrealism’s special issue on avant-garde exhibitions.
Brett M. Van Hoesen is Associate Professor of Art History (University of Nevada, Reno). She received her PhD (2009) from the University of Iowa. Topics of her recent publications include: Hannah Höch’s From an Ethnographic Museum and its legacy; postcolonial readings of the Weimar New Woman; avant-garde and popular press photomontage; the history of German sound art.
13h30-14h30
LUNCH
14h30-15h30
“All Poets are Yids!”: A Beginners’s Guide to Isidore Isou
Plenary Session with Andrew Hussey (University of London, UK)
Chair: Teresa Cid (University of Lisbon, ULICES, PT)
Generators Room
Abstract
Isidore Isou once said that he was not and never would be a French writer. He was in fact the direct opposite; a writer in French whose aim was to undermine the linguistic and cultural system within which he was operating. Someone else who made the same kind of choice was Paul Celan, who came from the same part of Romania as Isou, who lived through the Holocaust, and eventually came to France, where he chose to write poetry in German. Celan was in torment about this fact; he wrote in German but was not German, he was a Jew. He prefaced one of his last poems with an epigraph in Cyrillic which read ‘All Poets are Yids’ – meaning all poetry, all culture now had to be made from the Other, the outside. In this paper I present an introduction to Isidore Isou and lettrisme in the light of these ideas.
Bionote
Andrew Hussey is Professor of Cultural History in the School of Advanced Study, University of London. He is a regular contributor to the Guardian and the New Statesman and the writer/presenter of several documentaries for BBC TV, BBC Radio 4 and Channel 4. He is the author of The Game of War: The Life and Death of Guy Debord (2001), Paris: The Secret History (2006) and The French Intifada: The Long War Between France and its Arabs. He was awarded an OBE in 2011 for his services to cultural relations between the United Kingdom and France. He is currently writing a book called “Speaking East: The Life in Letters of Isidore Isou”. He lives in Paris.
15h30-17h00
TRANSATLANTIC AVANT-GARDES AND COUNTERCULTURE I panel sessions
EUGENE JOLAS AND THE TRANSATLANTIC AVANT-GARDE
Panel organized and chaired by Vladimir Feshchenko PhD, Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow
Generators Room
Abstract
The panel proposes a discussion of the legacy of Eugene Jolas (1894-1952), American-French poet, translator and litarary critic, founder of the influential literary magazine transition, which in the 1920-30s integrated diverse movements of the Euro-American avant-garde. A multilingual writer and journalist, Jolas aspired for a new universal language that would make transfers between different national avant-gardes easier and bolder. The presentations within this panel address the issue of the transatlatic avant-garde as a quest for a universal language of Euro-American communication in arts and literature.
Bionote
Vladimir Feshchenko, PhD. Author of over 80 publications in theoretical linguistics, poetics, semiotics, translation studies and four books: Laboratory of the logos: language experiment in avant-garde creativity (2009, in Russian) and The creation of the sign. Essays in linguistic aesthetics and semiotics of art (2014, in Russian, co-authored with O. Koval’); The Adventures of Untovarich Kem-min-kz in the Land of the Soviets: E.E. Cummings and Russia (2013, in Russian); The Transatlantic Avant-Garde: Anglo-American Literary Movements (1910-1940) (to be published in 2017). Translations of G. Stein, W.C. Williams, M. McLuhan, M. Palmer, E.E. Cummings, E. Jolas, W. Lewis, E. Pound into Russian.
EUGENE JOLAS AND THE TRANSATLANTIC AVANT-GARDE –
Abstraction and Universals: from Transition (1927–38) to Documenta (1955–)
Barrett Watten (Wayne State University, USA)
Skype Presentation
Abstract
There has been recognition of the global politics of what was formally known as modernism. There has not yet been, however, an adequate attempt to explain modernism in terms of its own regional construction. I want to follow the spatial entailments of political economy in the construction of transnational modernism, leading to the abstract and universalizing forms of modernism that emerged after 1945. This abstract form of modernism may be best understood, however, not in its universalizing claims but as a region of the modern in its own right, one that acts as a critical regionalist politics within an emerging global order. To test this hypothesis, I will focus on the construction of an abstract and universalizing modernism through the publication history of transition, the transnational expatriate modernist review primarily edited by Eugene Jolas and published in Paris and Amsterdam from 1927 to 1938.
Bionote
Barrett Watten is Professor of English at Wayne State University and member of the Academy of Scholars. He is the author of The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics and Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences (University of Iowa Press, 2016), as well as numerous volumes of poetry, including Frame (1971-1990), Bad History, and Progress/Under Erasure. With Carrie Noland, he co-edited Diasporic Avant-Gardes (Palgrave, 2008); and with Lyn Hejinian, he is co-editor of A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field, 1982- 98 and Poetics Journal Digital Archive (Wesleyan University Press, 2013/15).
Eugene Jolas’ Universal Language
Olga Sokolova (Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences, RU)
Abstract
The paper explores the conception of universal language by American-French avant-garde poet and publisher Eugene Jolas. Universal language was a project aimed at an “interracial synthesis” of all languages “being spoken in America today”. In this conception Jolas goes beyond multilingualism as an integration of languages towards transformation of the very basis of language. At the core of the transformation lies Jolas’ theory of poetic basis of the universal language as a “mantic compost”, constantly changing and developing at all linguistic levels. Universal language has an effect on the speaker’s mind by initiating linguistic creative activity and by creating new communicative forms.
Bionote
Olga Sokolova, Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. In 2015 defended thesis in candidacy for a doctoral degree Active Affect Discourses: Theory and Typology. Author of book Active Impact Discourses: Poetic Avant-Garde, Advertising and PR (2014, in Russian). Translations of Eugene Jolas, and F. T. Marinetti into Russian.
Eugene Jolas and “The Malady of Language”
Jason Parks (Anderson University, Indiana, USA)
Abstract
When Georges Perloson responds to Eugene Jolas’ “Inquiry on the Malady of Language,” and says that he and his fellow artists “demand the right to say everything that passes through [their] bodies,” one could read the demand as an aggressive outcry against literary censorship. As a response to censorship, Perloson’s use of the phrase “our bodies,” might then be interpreted as a signpost for all the experimental art works that, up to that point in the mid-1930’s, had been repeatedly accosted by a reactionary public. In the following paper, I will investigate some of the central bodily (and health-related) questions reiterated and explored throughout the entire run of transition (in fiction, criticism, and poetry).
Bionote
Jason Parks is an Assistant Professor of English at Anderson University in Anderson, Indiana (USA). He holds a PhD in literature from Ball State University. He recently published a chapter entitled “A Digital Approach to Teaching Postmodern Fiction” in a collection entitled Teaching Literature with Digital Technology. He is a member of the Modernist Studies Association and the College English Association. He also teaches courses on Chaucer, Shakespeare, Contemporary Global Literature, and Book History. His current research project centers on the relationship between popular journalism and avant-garde literature, with a special focus on Eugene Jolas and transition.
17h00-17h30
COFFEE-BREAK
Condensators Room
17h30-19h00
WORKSHOP KOMPLEX – KABARET LISBON, BY MARIANO EQUIZZI (IT)
Theoretical Session
Generators Room
3-day workshop, with a first theoretical session at MAAT (25th), followed by the effective production with participants: moving in the neighborhood, snapping photos, driving in the decoupage and digital torning technique, at the University of Lisbon (26th -27th).
Technical requirements:
Smartphones with Aurasma APP installed (Android – iOS)
Laptop, with the following free download software:
-Blender
-Gimp
-Black Magic Fusion
-Audacity
Max: 15 participants
Fee: 25€
Abstract
Komplex KabARet Lisbon is a workshop that aims to create an Augmented Reality experience in the venues of the Conference, at MAAT and in the skyline of Lisbon. The workshop intends to share the paradigm of Komplex in the technical and creative production of AR in an urban space. It will focus on computer vision, representation techniques to reach the suspension of disbelief of the user, and it will mash-up the “AR” with the provocations of the avant-gardes. Likewise, Komplex will use open source technologies and software in the dissemination of AR, considering it as a tool to empower the audience from traditional cinematic experiences (cinema, TV set), and to inspire the audience to wander in urban spaces as they search for the unexpected.
Bionote
Mariano Equizzi (member of Komplex) is an Italian digital artist and filmmaker active in Italy and Bulgaria and a former student of the National Cinema School of Rome. He is devoted to the exploration of New Media and provocative approaches in storytelling and speculative fiction. Since the 80s he has scanned and created multimedia works related to publishing, cinema and to a crossroads in which the media can disrupt each other, offering to the User/Viewer a new landscape of actions able to empower the audience from market dogmas and media cages. For the work “Komplex, 28”, he achieved the honorable mention of the jury at the 2014 Filmteractive Festival Lodz, PL. Komplex set up all over the world Augmented Reality experiences based on the psychogeographic exploration of the urban space.
19h00-21h00
DINNER
21h00-23h00
CONCERT BY FRÉDÉRIC ACQUAVIVA AND LORÉ LIXENBERG
Generators Room
Isidore Isou “Symphony #4”: Juvenal
(2001), 62’
orchestrated and performed by Frédéric Acquaviva (2001-2003)
spatialized in real time on multiple speakers
voice : Isidore Isou
solo voice : Maria Faustino
lettrist choir : Jean-Baptiste Beck, Silva Gabriela Béju, Alain Bertaud, Nicole Brenez, Broutin, Jacques
Chaumeix, Camille Cholain, Catherine Cousin, Lucienne Deschamps, Maria Faustino, Sylvain Monségu, Eric
Monsinjon, Francois Poyet, Helene Richol, Marie-Therese Richol-Müller, Woodie Roehmer, Roland Sabatier, Jean-Louis Sarthou, Frédéric Studeny, Dany Tayarda.
Abstract
After having met Isou and produced his first symphony from 1947 (which had never been performed before), I wanted to see what kind of “symphony” Isou would write in 2001. Since he complained about the whole world, seen as a part of the Society of Spectacle, such as his famous ex-disciple Guy Debord, he decided to write a new 62-minute symphony on Juvenal. In this particular piece, which I orchestrated creatively, a Lettrist choir repeats the famous sentence “Panem and circenses”, and you can also hear Isou’s unique, old and very moving voice. I will spatialize the work with multi speakers and invite people to walk into the space or just lie down, listening to this very special music, which seems to synthesize primitive, early and contemporary music.
(Bionote on top)
ISIDORE ISOU RECITAL (1947-1984), 30’
Loré Lixenberg (singer, UK)
- Cris pour 5.OOO.OOO de juifs égorgés (1947)
- Neige (1950)
- Recherches pour un poème en prose pure (1950)
- Opus aphonistique n°1 (1959)
- Poème aphoniste à fonctionnelle (1984)
Abstract
Loré Lixenberg proposes a highly varied recital of Isou’s most striking poetic propositions. With her unique interpretation that contrasts dramatically with the previous non-professional interpreters of Isou, and specially the Lettrists themselves, Lixenberg manages to give relief and subtlety to these amazing Lettrist’s proposals, which can be seen as a major influence on voice composers such as Aperghis.
Bionote
Lore Lixenberg is an English mezzo-soprano that lives in London and Berlin. She has worked with contemporary composers such as Stockhausen, Aperghis, Ligeti, Earle Brown, Wishart, Acquaviva, Turnage, Phill Niblock or Pauline Oliveros, as well as poets or artists like Stelarc, ORLAN, Heidsieck, Lemaître, but also pop bands like Radiohead. She has released the first complete recording of John Cage’s Songbooks for Sub Rosa and has transcribed for her own voice Conlon Nancarrow’s Piano Studies. She was the first singer to perform a complete Isidore Isou recital worldwide. Loré Lixenberg is also the only singer that has worked both with Pierre Boulez and Bronski Beat. She also composes her own pieces, like the real-time opera Prêt-à-Chanter or the super-extended vocal piece Bird, and published her Memory Maps, which are in the collection of the MACBA.
http://www.lorelixenberg.wordpress.com
MESS (2015-2017), 26’
Frédéric Acquaviva (composer, FR)
for buchla, voice, mouths, skins, fixed imaged and ideas
Spatialized in real time on multiple speakers by Frédéric Acquaviva
Mezzo-soprano: Loré Lixenberg
MESS was commissioned by Deutsche Radio Kultur and created at Berghain in Berlin for the Arts Birthday 2017. I wanted to write a piece that would go beyond what I already had composed – and specially what I had composed for voice – but also beyond the usual phonetics and effects used in Lettrism or sound poetry. I was interested in dealing with the sounds and frequencies of the legendary Buchla put at my disposal at EMS in Stockholm and which I reworked on computer during an entire year. Those textures were themselves antagonized by some Arabic percussion as well as by a few comments in French and a video-text in English.
26 OCTOBER thursday
University of Lisbon – Faculty of Letters
10h00
WORKSHOPS RUNNING:
1.KOMPLEX KABARET LISBON
All day
Outdoors
2.THE INVISIBLE CIRCUS w/ THE BOOGEYMAN
10h-13h/14h-17h
Room 2.13
10h00-11h30
POLITICS AND AESTHETICS OF INVISIBILITY I panel sessions
Chair: Anabela Duarte (Universidade de Lisboa, ULICES, PT)
Amphitheater III
INVISIBLE REPUBLIC/INVISIBLE EMPIRE: BOB DYLAN AND THE BEATLES c. 1967
Rodney Nevitt (University of Houston, USA)
Abstract
Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes and the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album, though both dating from 1967, have usually been understood to represent opposing musical visions, with the Beatles’ work epitomizing the psychedelic fashion, and Dylan’s a rougher, folk tradition—what Greil Marcus characterized as the sounds of an “invisible republic” in American history. My paper, instead, will explore shared themes in the music of Dylan and the Beatles. I will argue that the Beatles too, in the Neo-Victorian imagery of Sgt. Pepper, were invoking their own national history, mapping, in effect, a British “Invisible Empire”, with references both to American rock and roll and Indian music. My paper will also engage deeply with matters of visual culture, such as the album cover design for Sgt. Pepper, and that of the official Basement Tapes album (1975).
Bionote
I am currently Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Houston. I received my Ph. D. in Fine Arts from Harvard University in 1992, and have published a book, Art and the Culture of Love in Seventeenth-Century Holland (Cambridge University Press, 2002), and articles in the field of seventeenth-century Dutch art. I am currently working on a book on the visual culture of the Beatles. Though my historical period has shifted, I remain committed to the study of visual objects in their cultural context, and am especially interested in the interaction of visual, literary and musical discourses.
1,000 INVISIBLE THINGS
Multimedia
Gabrielle Senza (Transart Institute, UK)
Abstract
We rely on unseen elements in our everyday world to give us strength, hope and even life itself. How does that which is invisible influence our lives? Is there a difference among cultures in how invisibility is experienced or perhaps even desired? This multimedia performance lecture presents aspects of the artist’s ongoing investigation into perception, identity, and visibility. Researching the space between seeing and not seeing, knowing and not knowing, memory, imagination, oppression and abandon, her creative practice explores these territories through sound, movement, spoken word, video and song.
Bionote
Gabrielle Senza is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work addresses social, political, and environmental themes through visual and performing art practices including creative activism and socially engaged art projects. She has exhibited widely and her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), and other public, corporate and private collections. Among her teaching credits are Guest Artist and Adjunct Faculty positions with Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Cooper Union, MASS MoCA, IS 183 Art School, Flying Cloud Institute, and Montserrat School of Art.
INTERPLAY OF THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBLE: THE RADICAL SUBJECTIVITY OF THE ZAPATISTAS
Tijen Tunali (University of Tours François Rabelais, FR)
Abstract
The Zapatistas in Chiapas-Mexico are one of the social movements that have created an alternative practice of being a political subject. They mask themselves to be seen and to represent all those unseen. This paradox of being visible without being seen is a critique of the current representation system, but it also allows for the creation of a collective subjectivity where the individual subject, the “I,” dissolves into a plural third-person subjectivity: the “we.” The Zapatista aesthetics arise from an amalgamation of autonomist Marxism and Mayan way of life, making it hard to be framed by political philosophy. This paper analyzes the images of masked Zapatistas across the social media. It also discusses the Zapatista aesthetics with examples of poetry, dance and murals of Zapatistas to understand their unique representation of language, visual symbols, humor and stories as well as their influence on the counterculture and the anti-globalization movement.
Bionote
Tijen Tunali is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Université François-Rabelais, Tours-France. She completed her PhD in Art History at the University of New Mexico. She wrote her dissertation on the neoliberal turn in art and aesthetics, analyzing art as both a resource for neoliberal processes and an act of resistance against neoliberal conservatism and urbanism. Her research interests focus on aesthetics and politics, social movements and art, and ecological aesthetics. In addition to the international peer-reviewed academic journals, she is a contributor to the books on art and activism by Liverpool University Press, Routledge and Palgrave Macmillan.
10h00-11h30
AVANT-GARDES REVISITED II panel sessions
Chair: Marta Soares (New University of Lisbon, IHA, PT)
Room 5.2
O CIRCUITO DA POESIA SONORA: FESTIVAIS, REDES E RELAÇÕES TRANSATLÂNTICAS
Nuno Miguel Neves (Universidade de Coimbra, PT)
Resumo
A fundação do Cabaret Voltaire inaugurou aquilo que Steve McCaffery designou como uma tradição da Poesia Sonora, o que poderá explicar, em parte, a pulsão do género para formas de realização da Poesia ligadas à performance. Os Festivais de Poesia Sonora, realizados entre a década de 60 e a década de 80, estão ainda por analisar embora se constituam como parte essencial das práticas de poesia experimental a partir dos anos 60. A presente comunicação recupera a história da produção e realização destes eventos e o seu lugar na história da Poesia Sonora, destacando-os no contexto da produção e desenvolvimento das diferentes expressões ligadas à prática em questão. Quem participou? Como moldaram eles a Poesia Sonora e como contribuíram na configuração de uma rede transnacional de contactos e contaminação de registos poéticos? Que relações permitiram estabelecer entre os diferentes movimentos de vanguarda e como contribuíram para dinâmicas de descentralização dos mesmos?
Bionota
Nuno Miguel Neves é licenciado em Antropologia e tem uma pós-graduação em Estudos Artísticos pela Universidade de Coimbra. É actualmente Bolseiro da FCT e estudante de Doutoramento no Programa de Doutoramento em Materialidades da Literatura. Faz parte do micro colectivo músculo-poético A Equi. Fundou recentemente o lab[oratório], espaço para investigação e reflexão de índole experimental de fenómenos sono-voco-verbais que desenvolve o seu trabalho através da divulgação, promoção, análise e reflexão crítica de formas de expressão plástica como a Poesia Sonora ou a Sound Art. Encontra-se a terminar a sua tese intitulada “Vox Ex Machina: A Poesia Sonora no Século XXI”.
REMIX FOTOCOPIADO, SAMPLING VISUAL, MASHUP DE PAPEL: A COPY ART DE CÉSAR FIGUEIREDO
Bruno Ministro (Universidade de Coimbra, PT)
Resumo
A estética do ruído visual de César Figueiredo é liminarmente marcada pela exploração da relação material entre signo verbal e visual, perseguindo a libertação da carga semântica da palavra iniciada por dadaístas e letristas. Fá-lo, nomeadamente, através dos processos de remix, sampling e mashup que marcam um alargado conjunto dos seus trabalhos impressos e objectuais. A obra experimental de Figueiredo está sujeita a uma dupla condição de marginalidade e invisibilidade. Primeiro, porque opera uma desestabilização dos modelos de publicação artística e literária, com a produção de um conjunto de artefactos que deliberadamente colocam as suas obras fora dos mercados de produção, circulação e consumo da arte. Em segundo lugar, porque a opção de descentralizar a circulação da sua produção artística – nomeadamente através da rede de mail art – implica, não só situar-se transgressoramente fora do mencionado circuito, como também ensaiar, pela praxis, uma crítica desse mesmo circuito e dos seus protocolos.
Bionota
Bruno Ministro é estudante de doutoramento no Programa FCT em Materialidades da Literatura, na Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal. É colaborador do Arquivo Digital da PO.EX (Universidade Fernando Pessoa, Porto) e membro da Electronic Literature Organization. A sua tese de doutoramento, intitulada Todas as cópias são originais, tem como foco a análise da produção de copy art por artistas portugueses a partir dos anos 1980, desenvolvendo uma perspetiva comparada que combina áreas como os estudos literários, os estudos dos média e os estudos culturais.
AURALIDADE E POESIA CIBORGUE: LER A VOZ E DIZER A ESCRITA
Ana Marques Silva (Universidade de Coimbra, PT)
Resumo
Partindo do pressuposto de que a voz re-entra na cena da literatura através das tecnologias digitais, esta comunicação pretende discutir a auralidade no contexto da literatura generativa a partir de dois objectos literários que desafiam convenções relativamente às noções de texto, escrita, leitura e literatura, e nos quais a linguagem se inscreve sonora e não graficamente. The Listeners (John Cayley, 2015-17) é uma performance linguística levada a cabo entre humanos e o robot doméstico da Amazon. Em Aim Bad (Jhave, 2015), o autor programa um gerador que produz textos que são ‘treslidos’ à medida que vão sendo gerados. Através da discussão dos conceitos de auratura (Cayley) e poesia ciborgue (Jhave), pretendo reflectir sobre: 1) as implicações literárias do processamento automático de linguagem; e 2) a auralidade enquanto interface de mediação entre humanos e dispositivos computacionais.
Bionota
Ana Marques da Silva é licenciada em Línguas e Literaturas Modernas, com especialização em Tradução, e concluiu o mestrado em Ensino de Português e Francês no Ensino Secundário pela Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Dedicou-se ao teatro e às artes plásticas, e trabalhou como jornalista, programadora cultural e professora. Actualmente é bolseira FCT no programa de doutoramento em Materialidades da Literatura, na Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra, onde está a terminar a sua tese sobre literatura generativa.
A (in)Visibilidade do artesanto na historiografia da arte dos séculos XX e XXI
Inês Jorge (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, PT)
Resumo
Partindo da consciência de que o artesanato se encontra num momento de considerável vitalidade e de que a percepção em torno deste se altera ao longo do tempo, o presente artigo pretende averiguar a (in)visibilidade do artesanato na historiografia da arte dos séculos XX e XXI. Na historiografia da arte moderna, o artesanato é frequentemente incorporado na oposição teórica entre cultura de elite e cultura de massas. Nesse contexto, destaca-se o paralelismo estabelecido entre a cultura popular, o feminino e as artes decorativas. Já no âmbito do pensamento pós-modernista estas analogias são questionadas. Em particular, a arte e teoria feministas estimularam a abertura da historiografia da arte a perspectivas anteriormente silenciadas, designadamente de diferentes subculturas. No século XXI, o debate teórico em torno do artesanato e a actividade artesanal sofreram uma expansão e, por esse motivo, torna-se necessário repensar o valor do artesanato no contexto da prática artística.
Bionota
Inês Jorge é licenciada em História da Arte (2011) e Mestre am História Contemporânea (2014), pela Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa (FCSH), tendo defendido uma dissertação sobre a relação entre o artesanato e a arte entre os séculos XIX e XXI. Tem colaborado com diversos museus e instituições culturais em áreas como a educação, a investigação, a produção e a programação. Actualmente, integra o projecto educativo Anexo da associação cultural Arquivo 237.
11h30-12h00
COFFEE-BREAK
Hall of Amphitheater III
12h00-13h00
A Culture of Protest: Between Avant-Garde and Activism, 1947-1977
Plenary Session with Kevin Repp (Yale University, USA)
Chair: Andrew Hussey (University of London, SAS, GB)
Amphitheater III
Abstract
Based on the collections of postwar avant-garde and counterculture at Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, this presentation sketches out a history that has yet to be written. Three events in Paris in the year 1947 provide the point of departure: 1) the rise of Lettrism in the jazz cellars of Saint-Germain-des-Prés; 2) Revolutionary Surrealism’s challenge to the return of André Breton from exile in America; and 3) Antonin Artaud’s legendary meltdown at the Vieux Columbier Theater. Combining word and image into a rapid-fire survey, this brief and necessarily incomplete narrative traces the repercussions of the “annis terribilis” 1947 through movements such as Cobra, the Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, the Lettrist and Situationist Internationals, the Provo and Happening movements, performance art and experimental poetry, and concludes by considering Italy’s Movement ’77 in Italy in relation to the the birth of punk and hip-hop in 1977.
Bionote
Kevin Repp is Curator of Modern European Books & Manuscripts at Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. Prior to joining the staff at Beinecke, he taught twentieth-century European intellectual history, also at Yale, with an emphasis on modernism. For the past ten years he has focused on the postwar European avant-garde, protest movements and counterculture, collecting major archives of Lettrism, the Situationists, Concrete, Visual, and Sound Poets, as well as leading figures of the postwar underground. He is currently working on his next exhibition, Beyond Words, which will explore the relations between radical politics and experimental poetry.
13h00-14h00
LUNCH
14h00-16h00
INVISIBILITY LAB installation
Hall of Amphitheater III
Abstract
The Invisibility Lab is a mobile creative center where the phenomena of invisibility is studied and presented under the canopy of a pop-up tent through multimedia participatory activities, exhibitions, performances, and socially engaged art practices. It functions as a mobile gallery, stage, creative studio, and research lab. During the Invisible Republic Conference the Invisibility Lab will be located in the main lobby where attendees are invited to stop by and participate in or observe experiments happening at the Lab.
LAB #1
Archive of Invisible Things: The Specimen Jar Collection – Stop by the Invisibility Lab and add something to the growing collection of invisible things.
LAB #2
Invisible Dialogues: A One-to-One Performance with Gabrielle Senza – Enjoy an intimate one-to-one performance with Gabrielle Senza in the privacy of the Invisibility Lab. Limited to 6 intimate performances scheduled in advance with the artist by registration only.
Max: 6 participants
15-20 minutes per session
Fee: 25€
Bionote
Gabrielle Senza is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work addresses social, political, and environmental themes through visual and performing art practices including creative activism and socially engaged art projects. She has exhibited widely and her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), and other public, corporate and private collections. Among her teaching credits are Guest Artist and Adjunct Faculty positions with Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Cooper Union, MASS MoCA, IS 183 Art School, Flying Cloud Institute, and Montserrat School of Art.
15h00-16h15
NEW POETIC LANGUAGES, CINEMA AND TECHNOLOGY I panel sessions
Chair: Ana Barroso (University of Lisbon, ULICES, PT)
Amphitheater III
REVISITING UNWORD – SOUND AS RADICAL DISCOURSE
Claire M. Holdsworth (Kingston School of Art, Kingston University London, GB)
Abstract
Between 1969 and 1970, Ian Breakwell undertook four performance permutations entitled Unword. This paper explores this performance, exploring how Breakwell and other artists working in this intermedial context, when writing, texts and the act of speaking were subject to radical interdisciplinary experimentation via recording. Within this context, poetry and the influence of American counter-culture on experimental film- and sound- making in the UK are significant, framed by what Starr and Strauss term the ecology of ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ work (CSCW, 8(1), 1999). The re-recorded nature of Unword enhances complex discourses over-time, indicating how radical re-conceptions of sound and language affect re-articulation of avant-garde discourses – particularly in the ways that such examples are re-shown, re-written and re-visited today.
Bionote
Dr Claire M. Holdsworth is an archivist and Early Career Research Fellow at Kingston School of Art (Kingston University London). Specialising in British artists’ moving image, her research considers the voice and authorship by investigating narration, oral history and archives. She completed a PhD at Central Saint Martins (UAL) following an MA in Aural and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University. As an archivist she has worked for writer and curator Jasia Reichardt amongst others. Current projects investigate connections between experimental sound arts practices and the moving image in 1970s London.
http://kingston.academia.edu/ClaireMHoldsworth
CIAO MANHATTAN: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE UNDERGROUND
Kostoula Kaloudi (University of Peloponnese, GR)
Abstract
In 1972, after five years of intermittent filming, the filmmakers John Palmer and David Weisman completed their film Ciao Manhattan, starring Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol’s muse and New-York counterculture icon for a brief period in the mid-1960s. The film tells the story of a former underground cinema superstar that looks back on the past, strongly reminiscent of Edie Sedgwick’s own story. Regarded as a singular example of avant-garde cinema, Ciao Manhattan adopts a weird, boundary-blurring narrative. Is this a biopic about a real-life celebrity, or a docudrama?, Τhe film is also a small allegory of the ‘60s and all those who were part of the underground scene. Successfully portraying the transition of a generation and its culture from euphoria, non-stop partying and pushing the limits to decline and exhaustion, the film still holds a special place in the landscape of underground cinema.
Bionote
Kostoula Kaloudi is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Theatre Studies at the University of the Peloponnese. She has contributed articles to international journals, conference proceedings and edited volumes and she has participated in international conferences. She has also published two books in Greece (The Asia Minor catastrophe in cinema, Dodoni, 2001, Filmic influences and references, a cinematic labyrinth, Papazisis 2014). Her research interests focus on the relationship of cinema and history, the representation of individual and collective memory in the cinema, the cinematic techniques for narrating the past and the relation of cinema with the other arts.
POSTMODERNISM, AVANT-GARDE AND NEO DADAISM: THE LEGACY OF BOGUSLAW SCHAEFFER
Michal Zdunik (University of Warsaw, PO)
Abstract
The main topic of my talk is avant-garde and neo-dadaist inspiration and influence in works by Bogusław Schaeffer, a Polish composer, theorist of music, playwright and graphic designer. In my presentation I want to prove that he is, in fact, the continuator of avant-garde pre-war tradition. But he isn’t a simple imitator of the artistic language. The Polish composer takes the techniques and forms typical of avant-garde and dadaist styles and re-uses and transforms them into his own independent form. Thus, Schaeffer is the typical example of an artist of the postmodern period. For him, the cultural, modernistic legacy is the only kind of “text” and “quotation” that he uses in a completely free way, in the manner of intertextual strategies. In my paper, I want to prove my thesis on the phenomenon of “postmodern, Polish neo-avant-garde and neo-dadaism” by using several examples, such as Schaeffer’s musical pieces, dramas and graphics.
Bionote
Michał Zdunik is a PhD student at Institute of Polish Literature, University of Warsaw. He is interested in literature and Modernism (theatre plays and poetry), his own theory of Polish postsacral drama, comparative analysis of music and literature and contemporary Polish and European theatre and drama. He is also a playwright (his dramas were published and presented in Poland and France), director (he is a student in the Department of Theatre Direction at Theatre Academy in Warsaw) and composer. Zdunik is an essayist as well – he writes about theatre, classical music and literature. His texts were published in important Polish journals (“Ruch Muzyczny”,“Teatr”, “Dwutygodnik”).
15h00-16h15
MUSIC, SOUND/SOUNDSCAPE AND LITERATURE I panel sessions
Chair: Manuel Silva (New University of Lisbon, INET-MD, PT)
Room 5.2
NEW YORK COMPOSERS: GOVERNMENT FUNDED SONGS ON SURREALIST TEXTS, 1935-1939
Carole Blankenship (Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, USA)
Abstract
The Composers’ Forum Laboratory in New York was formed in 1935 as a division of the Federal Music Project. Ashley Pettis chose Aaron Copland to lead the Composers’ Forum Laboratory. Copland, along with a board of directors that included Edgard Varèse, chose the composers whose works would be presented at weekly concerts. Several of the composers featured on the CFL concerts came to be the most well known American composers of the twentieth century. Virgil Thomson, Paul Bowles, and Ned Rorem were protégés of Copland and composed songs for voice and piano. These composers spent time in Paris and were drawn to the works of the Surrealists and influenced by the artists of the Avant-Gardes movement, especially Salvador Dali, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, and later Frank O’Hara, and Kenneth Koch.
Bionote
Carole Blankenship, soprano, is Associate Professor of Music and Elizabeth Daughdrill Chair in the Fine Arts at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Dr. Blankenship has performed solo recitals and led master classes in the U.S., the U.K., and Australia. She has presented papers at the International Congress of Voice Teachers in Brisbane, Australia and the Society for American Music National Conference. She co-edited songs by Paul Bowles with Irene Herrmann for Classical Vocal Reprints and maintains research in American song. Dr. Blankenship served as Vice President for Auditions for the National Association of Teachers of Singing, 2012-2016.
MUSIC, LITERATURE AND CINEMA: WHEN THE NARRATIVE IS GUIDED BY THE SCORE
Francesco Bacci (University of Macerata, IT)
Abstract
My paper aims to explore how music or a song can influence the narrative construction and create a specific series of themes. Starting from one of the last Fitzgerald short stories where the story revolves around various songs of the musical “No, No, Nanette”, the research takes into consideration Postmodernist novels and a series of movies in order to illustrate this specific mechanism. The main purpose of this research is to deconstruct and highlight with a few concrete examples how this process of contamination has developed a new kind of narrative that follows innovative rules. This specific choice involves Fitzgerald’s narrative because it’s one of the first literary examples of cinematic techniques and Larraín’s “Jackie” because it’s the latest concrete example of the same procedure.
Bionote
I’m an Italian graduated student in Languages and Cultures. In the last years, I have written for the London-based Guestlist Magazine, Roar Magazine, Il Caffè Quotidiano and I have taken part and visited various London-based music and film festivals. I have a Master Degree in Languages, Cultures and Literary Translation from the University of Macerata, Italy, discussing Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s essays and latest short stories in relation to cinema and to his anticipation of postmodernist themes and narrative structures. Currently, I am applying for a PhD program at various universities.
MUSIC AND MODERNISM IN THE POETRY OF T.S. ELIOT AND WALLACE STEVENS
Hicham Ali Belleili (University of Boumerdes, DZK)
Abstract
Modernist experimentation was often seen in relation to other arts. Following this concern, Ezra Pound called for poets “to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.” Consequently, a large number of modernists invested their efforts to associate their works with ‘the musical phrase.’ In this respect, T.S Eliot and Wallace Stevens, among many other poets, displayed a great interest in involving music in their poetry. This paper attempts to show that the treatment of music in both Eliot’s and Stevens’ poems illustrates a significant antagonism between the two poets. While Eliot’s use of music portrays his desire to revive past European tradition, Stevens’ use of musical imagery rather shows his desire to create a new poetry based on imagination, independent from past European tradition.
Bionote
Hicham Ali Belleili is a PhD student and a supply teacher at the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Civilizations, M’Hamed Bouguerra University, Boumerdes, Algeria. His M.A thesis (2014) treated the influence of some early 20th Century literary and artistic movements (Imagism, Symbolism, and Cubism) in the poetry of T.S Eliot. He is a trained musician and studied music at his young age. His PhD thesis, entitled Musical Aesthetic in the Poetry of T.S Eliot and Wallace Stevens, treats the subject of music and the use of some musical techniques in modernist poetry.
16h15-16h45
COFFEE-BREAK
Hall of Amphitheater III
16h45-17h45
Disturbing Codes, Distancing Effects
Plenary Session with Bronac Ferran (University of London, GB)
Chair: Jeffrey Childs (Open University, PT)
Amphitheater III
Abstract
From the late nineteen forties through to the late nineteen sixties internationally, radical shifts took place in the shape and form of poetry. These were substantially iterated and theorized throughout the 1950s, paving the way for radical manifestations during the following decade. Through new constructive techniques combined with processes of linguistic decomposition poets sought to reinforce, reinvent and reinvest the basic elements of language, shamanically casting off the word as if to invent new affordances, to renew language at its roots, to make a tabula rasa. Drawing on Paul Celan’s observation that poetry maintains itself “at its own extremity” my presentation reflects on points of radical shift in the form and language of poetry in the post-war period in Brazil, France, Germany and the UK, indicating traversal connections to developments within other disciplines, not least in scientific and technological domains.
Bionote
Bronac Ferran is a writer and curator. Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, published her monograph on Hansjörg Mayer, including the first bibliography of his works, in March 2017. Her recent exhibitions include Design & the Concrete Poem (2016); a token of concrete affection (2015) and Graphic Constellations: Visual Poetry & the Properties of Space (2014). She is co-editor of the Spring 2017 issue of the Interdisciplinary Science Reviews Journal (Taylor & Francis) on interdisciplinary influences in post-war British Art and is doing a PhD thesis on Hansjörg Mayer and the Typoetical Revolution of the 1960s at Birkbeck, University of London.
17h45-19h15
AVANT- GARDES REVISITED III panel sessions
Chair: Sandra Vieira Jurgens (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, IHA, PT)
Amphitheater III
POP AVANT-GARDE IN CHINESE ART IN THE POST-TIAN’ANMEN ERA
Maciej Szatkowski (Nicolaus Copernicus University, PO)
Abstract
After Mao Zedong’s death in the late 1970s, the spirit of avant-garde and experiment began to revive in China. It is not easy to tell when the Chinese avant-garde was born. The beginning can be dated on 1919 and The May 4th Movement (modernizing Chinese culture), when new Western trends appeared in China. One can acknowledge the time of ‘cultural fever’ (a cultural tendency in China in the mid 1980s) as the real birth of Chinese avant-garde that was later violently terminated after students’ Tian’anmen Protests of 1989. After the so called Tian’anmen Incident the artists tried to express (or repress) their trauma in many ways, mostly making use of the aesthetics of experimental art. In the new century Chinese art, like most of the aspects of life, experienced rapid socioeconomic transformations and tried to adjust to the new reality – so called pop avant-garde was born.
Bionote
Graduated from the Adam Mickiewicz University (M.A. in Sinology), head of Center for Chinese Language and Culture at Nicolaus Copernicus University. In 2016, he received PhD in the Humanities with the dissertation on Meng Jinghui’s works at Warsaw University. Lecturer and translator of Chinese. Member of Polish Orient Society and Polish Society of Theater Studies. Major research fields: postmodern drama, contemporary Chinese literature and culture, modern Chinese history.
ALBERTO GRECO’S VIVO-DITO AND THE NOMADIC PRACTICE OF THE NEO-AVANTGARDE
Fernando Herrero-Matoses (Boston University in Madrid, SP)
Abstract
This presentation examines the works of Alberto Greco as instances of affective participation. As it explores, Greco’s public actions (what he called Arte Vivo-Dito) attempted to playfully resignify life as an artistic gesture. By capturing a moment of life in public view, Greco’s actions invited the viewer to witness a moment of artistic appropriation of reality while also taking part in it. This paper argues that Greco’s Vivo-Dito function as singular instances of affective self-inscription and deterritorialization of the artistic self while offering a non-canonical approach to the international avant-garde of the early 1960s.
Bionote
Fernando Herrero-Matoses, PhD, Art History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Independent Scholar and fellow researcher at the Reina Sofia Museum Madrid (MNCARS) (2015-2016). He has a Postgraduate degree from the Independent Studies Program (PEI) at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona, (MACBA). He has published articles on Antonio Muñoz Molina, Gerhard Richter and W.G Sebald, Alberto Greco and Julio Cortázar. He has collaborated at Macba, Barcelona, The Phillips Collection in Washington DC and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, MNCARS, Madrid.
EARLY AVANT-GARDE: EXCEEDING NATIONAL, LINGUISTIC AND STYLISTIC BOUNDARIES
Michal Wenderski (Adam Mickiewicz University, PO)
Abstract
This paper explores the nature of international relationships within the interwar avant-garde network exemplified by a look at two apparently distant areas, namely Poland and the Low Countries. The representatives of these two areas, besides their ties to French or German formations, also engaged in direct cooperation with one another, which had a great impact on their activities and therefore on the development of the avant-garde as such. Polish, Dutch and Belgian artists – belonging to a non-hierarchical, rhizomatic and supranational network – were vividly interested in each other’s artistic endeavours and novelties, they exchanged artworks, viewpoints, theories and texts with one another. This intense exchange left many tangible traces that will be presented and discussed in this paper in order to shed some new light on the history of the early European avant-garde and to revise some commonly applied historiographical assumptions and paradigms which still overshadow its proper understanding.
Bionote
Michał Wenderski is an architect, translator and scholar of modern Dutch literature. Currently senior lecturer at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, and head of a research project in the field of cultural mobility between Poland and the Low Countries in the 1920s. Author of several publications on the interwar aesthetic avant-garde in the fields of literature, fine arts and architecture.
GOTHIC AS THE FIRST AVANT-GARDE ART
Maria Antónia Lima (University of Évora, PT)
Abstract
If vanguard means an anti-conventional passion for change and renewal in every art form, the Gothic can be considered the first avant-garde art in the modern sense of the term. Across its history, the Gothic has been an anti-realistic protest, a rebellion of the imagination, an aesthetic of excess. It has deeply developed an anti-conventional vision of reality and defended many forms of transgression of aesthetic conventions and the inversion of accepted categories, searching for the Dionisiac force in the dark underground river beneath the surface of human life. There is a thread of dark imagery or ideas that runs through much contemporary art. Some contemporary artists like Mike Kelley, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin or Douglas Gordon produce their art works not only as expressions of profound transformations in art practices, but also as manifestations of contemporary fears. Some of the most innovative works of contemporary art are often gothic art.
Bionote
Maria Antónia Lima is Assistant Professor at the University of Évora (Portugal). She completed her Ph.D in 2001 on the fiction of Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. She is also a Research Fellow of the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (ULICES). She was President of the Portuguese Association for Anglo-American Studies (APEAA). Her current areas of research include gothic fiction and the relations between literature and the arts. Her publications include essays in specialised journals and critical volumes as well as books such as Impersonality and Tragic Emotion in Modern Poetry (2003); Brown, Poe, Hawthorne and Melville: Terror in American Literature (2008) and the novel Haunted Words (2011).
17h45-19h15
TRANSATLANTIC AVANT-GARDES AND COUNTERCULTURE II panel sessions
Chair: Ana Mendes (University of Lisbon, ULICES, PT)
Room 5.2
EXPERIMENTS IN COMMUNITY AND ART: FROM BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE TO THE GATE HILL COOPERATIVE
Multimedia
Mark Davenport (Regis University, USA)
Abstract
This presentation focuses on the largely untold story of the Gate Hill Cooperative, an intentional community founded in 1954, 30 miles north of Manhattan, by some of the most creative figures of the twentieth century. All of the founding members were faculty or students at the experimental Black Mountain College during the 1940s and early 50s, including the composers John Cage and David Tudor, the dancer Merce Cunningham, the writer and poet M.C. Richards, the potters David Weinrib and Karen Karnes, the multi-media filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek, the early music pioneers Patsy Lynch and LaNoue Davenport, the children’s author and activist Vera B. Williams, and the unheralded visionary and philanthropist Paul Williams. Drawing on extensive research, source material and interviews, and illustrated through an exclusive collection of archival photographs, this presentation demonstrates how, for many of these artists, that period (1954-1971) stands among the most productive and innovative of their careers.
Bionote
Mark Davenport is Professor of Music and Director of the Music Program at Regis University in Denver, Colorado, where he also directs the school’s Collegium Musicum. A performing scholar, Davenport’s interests are interdisciplinary and include performances in early and contemporary music with scholarly work in the fields of Early Music, American Music, Art and Culture, and Education. He is currently working on the first comprehensive history of the Gate Hill Cooperative, an intentional community of artists, musicians, educators and social activists, founded by former faculty and students at Black Mountain College, and where he grew up.
HOW DOES NEO-TRIBALISM FACTOR IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF AN INDEPENDENT RECORD LABEL?
Jonathan Lindley (University of Huddersfield, UK)
Abstract
This paper uses neo-tribalism as a vehicle to explore the contemporary relevancies of counterculture, subculture and independent culture. The study utilizes Sunbird Records—an independent record label in Darwen, North West England—as a model of participation, as well as a platform to observe and critique the efficacy of neo-tribal tactics. Through neo-tribalism, Sunbird Records generates a counter-dialogue that articulates alternatives to the established culture industry, which appears to be held in a cartel.
Bionote
After working with bands like Lightning Bolt, Rolo Tomassi, Enter Shikari, Drumcorps and AC4, Jonathan started researching subversive culture at The University of Huddersfield. As a major part of his research, he relaunched ‘Sunbird Records’ an independent record label in Darwen UK, over the course of a few years neo-tribalists interested in similar styles of music began to congregate around the record label, until eventually in 2016 he opened his own music venue as an incubator for all this activity.
SOUNDTRACK OF THE “INVISIBLE EMPIRE”: VISIONS OF AMERICA IN WHITE POWER MUSIC
Axelle Germanaz (Universitat Nurnberg-Erlangen, DE)
Abstract
Music has long played a significant role in politics, giving voice to propaganda andmovements of resistance alike. This talk shows, from an Americanist perspective, inwhat way white nationalists have appropriated music as material expression of whitepower. It will focus on identifying national myths and discourses professed in thewhite power music scene in the U.S. I will deal with this music scene the way GreilMarcus dealt with rock’n’roll in Mystery Train: not only as counterculture, but also as American culture. This presentation will hence (1) analyze the origins and evolutionof hate music in the U.S. and (2) identify the imagery developed in American whitepower music. The soundtrack of the “Invisible Empire” is more than just loud music:it echoes social and political frustration from a great part of the American population.
Bionote
Axelle Germanaz was born on La Réunion, France, in 1994. After studying in the
Classes Préparatoires Littéraires, she continued with English and American studies at
the Université de la Réunion in 2015. She completed her Bachelor’s degree at Inha
University, Incheon, South Korea. She is now completing a Master’s degree at
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen Nürnberg, Germany. She is currently
writing her Master thesis in American Studies, which investigates the relations
between white supremacy, music, performance, identity, and community.
Raw and Ragged: Abstract Expressionism and Dixieland Jazz in Postwar San Francisco
Carl Schmitz (Independent, USA)
Abstract
In 1954, art connoisseur Michel Tapié made the first significant attempt to bring abstract artists on the American west coast together into a conceptual parallel to the New York School of painters. Tapié’s École du Pacifique was challenged by critics for grouping dissimilar artists such as the Abstract Expressionist upstarts at San Francisco’s California School of Fine Arts with the more refined Seattle-based painters Mark Tobey and Morris Graves. Recent work by art historian Susan Landauer, focusing on the CSFA and its social history, has established the less-often debated notion of a San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism. The CSFA’s Studio 13 Jazz Band, fronted by the same artists who painted in a style that was subversively abstract, played a danceable version of Dixieland. This paper will trace the art histories of midcentury San Francisco with a beat provided by recordings of this unpolished, wildly energetic period.
Bionote
Carl Schmitz is an art historian who has spent the past decade researching midcentury modern art in California and Abstract Expressionism in the United States. A catalogue raisonné veteran, he has previously presented his research in London, Australia, New Mexico, New York, Iceland, Nebraska, and Scotland.
19h15-20h15
LE CABARÉT DISCRÉPANT dance film
Introduction by Pascal Quéneau (FR)
Chair: Luísa Falcão (University of Lisbon, ULICES, PT)
Amphitheater III
creation 2011
Conception: Olivia Grandville, after Isidore Isou
Abstract
Revisiting the proposals of the Lettrist movement in the field of dance, Le Cabarét Discrépant proposes a performance presentation in the form of a choreographic fugue. A tribute to a movement of great formal and critical inventiveness, as much as a look at the risks and driving mechanisms that have been running through dance for fifteen years, Le Cabarét Discrépant combines musicality and millimetric composition, commitment and the voice and body engagement, a critical irony, a polemical platform and an anti-reactionary political manifesto of a dance that believes in its essential and original place. By attacking the foundations of the Ballet, Isidore Isou and Maurice Lemaître literally pulverize the choreographic art of their time and pose with devastating humor the bases of a reflection that continues to agitate the dance of today. They invent writing processes with multiple entries. A Dance of the amorphous and arrhythmic, of slowness and immobility, of disappearance, how can one not make the connection between these Lettrist propositions and some of the most radical works of recent years?
Bionote
After a drama training with Blanche Salant at the American Center in Paris, Pascal Quéneau began working for theater, cinema and television. His predominant interest in dance has led him to collaborate and dance with many choreographers including Boris Charmatz, Emmanuelle Huynh, Olivia Grandville, Michel Schweitzer, Anne Collod, Maguy Marin, Dominique Brun, Vera Mantero, among others. He collaborates with Olivia Granville on different projects and has been part of the conception and elaboration of the Cabaret Discrépant seven years ago. While developing a pedagogical work for years, he constantly diversifies his activities and accompanies artistic projects as a collaborator in choreographic and dramaturgical writing, design, organization, sound or coaching.
20h30-21h30
BUS TO ROSSIO
21h30
CONFERENCE DINNER
Café Garret – Rossio
Teatro D. Maria II
27 OCTOBER friday
9h00-12h00
WORKSHOP – THE POETICS OF VOICE
Américo Rodrigues, coordinator
Congress room – Library
Abstract
A practical workshop on sound poetry and vocal improvisation, guided by the sound poet Américo Rodrigues, which seeks to discover and explore the expressive potentialities of the voice, in an insistent search to say the unspeakable.
Bionote
Américo Rodrigues is a sound poet, performer and vocal improviser. He graduated in Portuguese Language and has a Master in Speech Sciences, with a thesis on Emotions in Speech. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Américo Rodrigues (1961-) developed an intense experimentation with voice in live shows and recordings. Between sound poetry and music, his sonic and vocal work constitute a singular example of appropriation and renewal of the sound poem and of how to maximize poetic and musical possibilities. The vocalizations of Américo Rodrigues make a virtuoso use of the vocal apparatus, sometimes with the help of external acoustic sources and with sound manipulation of his recorded materials.
Max: 15 participants
Fee: 25€
10h00
WORKSHOPS RUNNING:
1.KOMPLEX KABARET LISBON
All day
Outdoors
2.THE INVISIBLE CIRCUS w/ THE BOOGEYMAN
10h-13h/14h-17h
Room 2.13
10h30-11h30
THE PARADIGM OF YOUTH: THE LETTRIST CONTRIBUTION TO A NEW AGE OF PROTEST (1946-1968)
Plenary Session with Sylvain Monségu (Les Cahiers de l’Externité, FR)
Chair: José Miranda Justo (University of Lisbon, CFUL, PT)
Amphitheater III
Abstract
Lettrism was more than an Avant-Garde group that decided to overcome the failure of some of their most radical predecessors (dada and surrealism), offering new aesthetic horizons based on letters “between poetry and paintings”; bringing in his numerous manifestos the project to revolutionize each area of the modern culture, in the mid of the twentieth century Isidore Isou met some angry young outsiders in Paris and created a group who experimented and announced the breaking point of may 68. Their action verifies the validity of Isou’s political concepts, formalized in his huge theoretical sum “Uprising of the Youth”- young people without any right represent the only real opposition to society, ready to join every subversive movement to improve their social situation. Lettrism represents de facto a necessary key to understand all the disorders witch marked two decades high in artistic and political dissents and their prolific counter-culture.
Bionote
Sylvain Monségu, founded a small publishing house Les Cahiers de l’externité (reissues of classical lettrist texts and some issues of the UJCP newspapers including Isou’s important contributions). Currently teaching in a secondary school, he prepares a thesis on Lettrism (University Paris VII); coherent with his initial training, he is interested in all the political and artistic outsiders, counterculture and its influence on academic fields as much as their effective action on the historical scene.
11h30-12h00
COFFEE BREAK
12h00-13h30
NEW POETIC LANGUAGES, CINEMA AND TECHNOLOGY panel sessions
Chair: Fernando Fadigas (University of Lisbon, FBAUL, PT)
Amphitheater III
GRAVITAS: A NON-LINEAR AUDIOVISUAL CADAVRE EXQUIS FOR TIMES OF LEXICAL REDUCTION
Daniel Brandão (University of Porto, PT) and Heitor Alvelos (University of Porto, PT) and Anselmo Canha (University of Porto, PT)
Abstract
Gravitas is an experiment with meaning and aesthetic value provided by chance. It is an audiovisual piece that brings together three production instances generated independently: a concert, an audio reconstruction/edit, and a video. All three fronts converge in the final piece while the overall motto (acoustic ascension / figurative revelation) remains consistent. The layering of autonomous elements argues for an often under-valued (even unwelcome) factor in the creative process: the purposeful investment in uncontrolled outcomes. This may be regarded as an antidote to the lexical reduction currently at work in online instances. Furthermore, the piece signals a possible migration of the avant-garde onto a broader sphere of resonance, by weaving pure acoustics with field recordings, visual abstraction with tangible figuration, semiotic deconstruction with narrative allure.
Bionotes
Daniel Brandão
ID+: Center for Unexpected Media
PhD in Digital Media 2014, Master in Multimedia Art 2008, both at University of Porto.
Author of Museu do Resgate, a participatory video project on everyday life as cultural heritage. Teaches Communication Design, Video and Motion Graphics at the BA Graphic Design and MA in Digital Design at IPCA (Barcelos); also teaches at BA Multimedia Design and Communication at ESAP (Porto).
Graphic and Motion Designer at the Serralves Foundation, 2004-2010.
Member of ID+ and communication designer at Rádio Manobras.
//museudoresgate.org
Heitor Alvelos
University of Porto / ID+: Center for Unexpected Media
PhD Royal College of Art 2003, MFA School of the Art Institute of Chicago 1991.
Professor of Design, University of Porto. Member, Academia Europaea.
Director, ID+, U.Porto. Curator, FuturePlaces Medialab (since 2008).
Course Director, PhD Design (U.Porto / UPTEC / ID+ / U.Aveiro).
Chairman of the Scientific Board (HSS), Foundation for Science and Technology since 2016.
Sound and AV work out on Touch, The Tapeworm, 333, Cronica Electronica, KREV, Radio Manobras. He has lectured and performed in four continents since 2001.
//benevolentanger.org
Anselmo Canha
University of Porto / ID+
Currently a PhD student at PhD Design (ID+, University of Porto and University of Aveiro)
MA Image Design (University of Porto, 2008).
Graphic Designer since 1989: Incomun, Sino Design, A Transformadora.
Musician: Repórter Estrábico, Stopestra, Before Surgery, Diário da República.
Has extensively performed and co-organised impromptu sound workshops and concerts.
Co-coordinator of Manobras no Porto, 2011-2012 (https://www.facebook.com/manobrasporto).
Coordinator of Rádio Manobras since 2015 (radiomanobras.pt)
Sound producer at Futureplaces.org.
ON ANTIVIRAL MUSIC
Eric Lyon (Virginia Tech, USA)
Abstract
With the annihilation of personal privacy in modern society through corporate/state partnerships, a radically private art may be a spiritual necessity of the 21st century. Antiviral music is posited as this kind of early 21st century art form. In search of antiviral music, we look for internet-accessible music that has largely averted the gaze of the attention economy as indicated by low numbers of views or hits, and which possesses a latent strangeness that is redeemable as artistic experience. In this paper, we develop a working definition of antiviral music, consider the ethics of searching for a music that may wish to stay hidden, consider pre-digital precedents to antiviral music, query the instability of antiviral music (which could potentially turn viral), discuss specific examples of antiviral music, and identify established areas of the musical avant-garde that may be destabilized by the presence of antiviral music.
Bionote
Eric Lyon’s computer music focuses on articulated noise, spatial orchestration and computer chamber music. His publicly released software includes the object collections FFTease and LyonPotpourri, written for Max/MSP and Pd. He is the author of “Designing Audio Objects for Max/MSP and Pd.” His music has been selected for the Giga-Hertz prize, MUSLAB, and League ISCM World Music Days. He recently guest-edited two issues of the Computer Music Journal, devoted to the topic of high-density loudspeaker arrays. Lyon teaches in the School of Performing Arts at Virginia Tech, and is a faculty fellow at the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology.
CODING PRAXIS FOR MUSIC TECHNOLGY: A CRITICAL THEORY APPROACH
Andrew Telichan-Phillips (New York University, USA) and Daniel Marchwinski (Oakland University, USA)
Abstract
Abstract: That technology and culture reciprocally influence each other is historically confirmed. Recently, the degree to which technology is being influenced by profit concerns has increased dramatically, such that technological platforms largely influence the public into meeting such concerns. In the context of current musical creative practices, we feel that freedom is restricted by commercial industry. In fact, we assert that aspects of existing platforms for musical creation serve mainly to further control culture according to certain ideological, profit-based assumptions. In response, we take a critical theory approach, developing a platform based in collective collaboration and aimed at developing a coding praxis for music technology. Our approach seeks to illuminate how ideological assumptions are embedded in music technology practices today and make clear all levels of user interaction. Our goal is to preclude the possibility of any single ideology being used to define the goals of software-based music systems.
Bionote
We are a two-person collaborative / co-author team, comprised of Andrew Telichan-Phillips (PhD Candidate in Music Technology at New York University) and Daniel Marchwinski (Special Lecturer at Oakland University and Adjunct Faculty at College for Creative Studies, Michigan, USA). Telichan-Phillips is a composer whose research focuses on critical discourse of musical and performing arts and their relation to social and technical systems; Marchwinski is an interdisciplinary artist, coder and educator.
12h00-13h30
Music/Sound/Soundscape and Literature panel sessions
Chair: António Ângelo Vasconcelos (Escola Superior de Educação do Instituto Politécnico de Setúbal, PT)
Room 5.2
“ANOTHER COUNTRY”: O CARNAVAL DE THE BASEMENT TAPES
Maria Fernandes (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, CESEM, PT)
Resumo
Após um acidente de mota, em 1966, Bob Dylan afasta-se dos palcos e junta-se aos membros da The Band, na cave de uma casa alugada. Durante os meses de Março e Outubro de 1967, compõem, gravam e fazem covers em jam sessions. Apesar de ser um tempo revolucionário e progressista, Dylan e os The Band optaram por associar-se a um folclore e a um país que não se enquadrava no mundo em que viviam, como se se tratasse de uma república diferente, a qual Greil Marcus irá designar por “Invisible Republic” numa primeira instância e, numa segunda instância, por “The Old, Weird America”. Este estudo pretende analisar, através de um olhar iconográfico, a capa do álbum The Basement Tapes e como esta se relaciona com as temáticas propostas por Greil Marcus no seu livro The Old, Weird America, de 2001.
Bionota
Maria Fernandes é licenciada em Ciências Musicais pela Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Actualmente é aluna de mestrado em Musicologia Histórica, na mesma universidade. É bolseira de Iniciação Científica no Centro de Estudos de Sociologia e Estética Musical (CESEM) no ano letivo 2016/2017 e faz parte do Núcleo de Iconografia Musical (NIM), sob a direcção da Professora Doutora Luzia Rocha. Colabora desde 2014 com a Da Capo Revista Musical Portuguesa.
O PENSAMENTO DE HANS EGGEBRECHT APLICADO À MÚSICA CONCRETA
Fábio Martins (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, CESEM, PT)
Resumo
A emergência da música concreta e da poesia electro-acústica futurista obrigou os filósofos e os conceptuais da música contemporânea, a repensarem a estética musical e, acima de tudo, o significado na música. O progresso da tecnologia permitiu ultrapassar os limites do conteúdo imposto pela forma, tendo esta última vigorado até ao século XX. Neste trabalho, pretendo identificar o valor e a importância estética da música concreta, passando pelas fases de evolução da electro-acústica propostas por Michel Chion, em contraponto com os três modos de relação entre música e não-música, estabelecidos por Hans Eggebrecht; pretendo ainda analisar o seu pensamento musical aplicado à música concreta e a sua importância para a história do pensamento musical ocidental.
Bionota
Fábio Martins é licenciado em Filosofia pela Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa com a dissertação “A Matéria segundo Berkeley e Russell – Das Ideias aos Dados Sensoriais”. Actualmente frequenta o primeiro ano do Mestrado de Estética e Estudos Artísticos com especialização em Ciências Musicais pela Faculdade de Ciências Socias e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Paralelamente trabalha para diversos Centros de Explicações, onde presta apoioa jovens típicos e atípicos (PEA), nas disciplinas de Filosofia e História. As suas áreas de interesse são o Minimalismo, a Música-concreta, a Fenomenologia e a Estética Kantiana.
ACASO: A ORIGEM DA OBRA DE JOHN CAGE
Ana Luísa Valdeira (Universidade de Lisboa, CEAUL, PT)
Resumo
Como começar uma obra de arte? É este o grande momento da escolha para qualquer artista: ter um infinito de possibilidades para compor tudo, de todas as maneiras, em todas as direcções e escolher um só caminho. Perdido muitas vezes na vastidão de possibilidades, o artista restringe as suas escolhas e, entre tantas opções, espartilha a sua obra a partir de uma qualquer regra que o ajude a tomar decisões. John Cage também escolheu uma regra, mas escolheu uma que lhe permitiu, por estranho que pareça, não ser ele a decidir. A partir dos anos 50, Cage escolheu o acaso. Escolheu como regra a indecisão. Escolheu não escolher. Mas o que dizer de uma obra de arte cujos elementos não são o resultado da escolha do seu autor, mas são antes submetidos ao acaso? Que razões tem Cage para adoptar o acaso na construção das suas composições? E como é que permitia que o acaso interferisse na sua obra? Ou, por outras palavras, em que é que consistia exactamente o seu método?
Bionota
Ana Luísa Valdeira é licenciada em Estudos Artísticos e Mestre em Estudos Ingleses e Americanos — Estudos Inter-Artes pela Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa. Actualmente é bolseira de doutoramento da FCT, frequentando o programa de Doutoramento em Artes da Universidade de Lisboa, editora da Cine Qua Non – Bilingual Arts Magazine e investigadora do Centro de Estudos Anglísticos da Universidade de Lisboa. As suas principais áreas de investigação são as Artes Performativas, os Estudos Inter-Artes e a Arte Norte-Americana do século XX. Completou ainda o Curso Complementar de Violino e foi membro da Orquestra Sinfónica Juvenil, membro co-fundador da Nova Orquestra de Lisboa e membro da Orquestra da Universidade de Lisboa.
ARES DE FLAMENCO NA INTERNACIONAL LETRISTA
Benito Barja (University Paris-Sorbonne, FR)
Resumo
O flamenco é um mundo onde a arte não se separa da vida, é uma arte de viver. Esse paralelismo vital com o que o Situacionismo quer e deseja, não é apenas uma coincidência, ou uma convergência. Existiu, de facto, uma impregnação flamenca na fase de gestação do Situacionismo, quando este ainda se chamava Internacional Letrista.
Tal pré-história da Internacional Situacionista foi também a matriz da paixão espanhola de Guy Debord e, com ele, seguiremos algumas sequências da vida letrista: escutando Germaine Montero com Jean-Michel Mension e Michèle Bernstein em Chez Moineau; bailando com Eliane Papaï; derivando por Aubervilliers em busca de La Taverne des Révoltés com os anarquistas espanhóis, Juan Goytisolo, Gil Wolman e Ivan Chtcheglov. Passaremos ainda por Alba, na Itália, com dois aflamencados do norte, Asger Jorn e Constant, e retornamos a Paris em La Méthode com a cantora Mara Jerez.
Bionota
Após estudos em História da Arte, centrados na actividade situacionista e na figura de Guy Debord, a minha dedicação à “deriva” foi-se convertendo em prática habitual, sendo os meus territórios Paris e a Península Ibérica. Essa dupla formação, académica e prática, levou-me a uma nova etapa nos Estudos Ibéricos da Sorbonne. Guy Debord é considerado um “tesouro nacional” em França, quando, no entanto, o seu tesouro oculto é a Espanha: a sua mitologia da Espanha é situacionista. O meu estudo, consiste em apreender esse mapa mental, a sua arqueologia e as suas perspectivas.
13h30-14h30
LUNCH TIME
14h30-15h45
AVANT-GARDES REVISITED IV panel sessions
Chair: Isabel Oliveira Martins (New University of Lisbon, PT)
Amphitheater III
“BE PLURAL LIKE THE UNIVERSE” – YIDDISH AND AVANT-GARDE
Aviv Livnat (Tel Aviv University and Bezalel Academy of Art, IE)
Multimedia Presentation
Abstract
My research deals with interactions of Yiddish culture, language and thought with the European Avant-garde. I trace these links and connections in the Jewish sphere as well as in the general artistic landscape where grains of Judaic thought percolated and nourished Avant-garde through Expressionism, Futurism, Cubism, Dada, Lettrism and so on. In my discussion I would like to focus on the significant concept of “Plurality” which lies at the heart of some important Avant-garde expression and which has its roots in Judaic thought as well as bearing direct links to the philosophies of Bergson and Deleuze. The subject is connected to the early manifestations of sound, letters and images and the way those interact in processes of death and creation. The talk will be dedicated to the endlessly multiple poet Fernando Pessoa.
Bionote
Aviv Livnat is a lecturer at Tel Aviv University and Bezalel Academy of Art, an artist and musician. He graduated in Philosophy studies and the multidisciplinary program in the Humanities at Tel Aviv University and MA studies magna cum laude. Livnat completed the PhD in the interdisciplinary program at the school of Jewish studies at Tel Aviv University, Achieved scholarships and awards for his thesis from the institute for the history of Polish Jewry, the Bubis and Lerner foundations, the N.Y. memorial foundation and received the Dov Sadan Prize for his research.
LETTRISM IN CONCRETE MUSIC
Loïc Bertrand (Paris Diderot University, FR)
Abstract
There is a historical conjunction between Lettrism and concrete music. But between them there is more than a chronological proximity. From a careful reading of the Journal de la musique concrète (1948-1952), where Schaeffer details the different steps of his sound experiments, we can see that the reference to lettrism plays a strategic role in the emergence of concrete music. While most musicians did not pay attention to his experiments, Schaeffer found unexpected enthusiasm among poets. When he extracted sounds out of musical language, in order to consider sounds in themselves, he realized that the same process had already happened in poetry. In this presentation, we will detail different aspects of this connection between musique concrète and lettrism, and try to clarify the distinction made by Schaeffer between two languages: one that we use as sign and signification and one that we use as signal or substance.
Bionote
Loïc Bertrand is a PhD student, member of the Doctoral School 131, “Language, literature, image: civilization and human sciences”, Paris-Diderot. Title of the thesis in progress: “Experimental music. From the primacy of sound to the crisis of representation”, under the direction of Martin Kaltenecker (Paris-Diderot) and Matthieu Saladin (Paris 8). Publications: “White noise. Constitution of a Musical Object”, Tacet 4, Sounds in the Arts, Sounds of Utopia, Les presses du réel, 2015; “Small archeology of photographic sound art: Weekend” (Ruttmann, 1930)”, “Archeology of audiovisual”, Cahier Louis-Lumière n° 10, 2016.
SITUATIONISM, MUSICAL EXPERIMENTATION AND WALTER OLMO
Lola San Martin Arbide (University of Oxford, GB)
Abstract
Rather than focusing on the influence of Situationism on music, as has been explored for instance in relationship to punk, this paper will address the musical activities within the movement. In fact, it will be centered around the foundational year of 1957. After the Cosio D’Arroscia conference, the Italian section of the Situationist International – constituted by Elena Verrone, Piero Simondo and Walter Olmo – was expelled following a heated response from Debord to the section’s submission of a text on musical experimentation. Their rationale followed (knowingly or not) some key innovations as developed among others by Satie, namely of his groundbreaking ambient pieces Musique d’Ameublement. I will discuss the connections between these compositions and Walter Olmo’s concept of musical experimentation and shed new light onto this elusive composer who developed a musical counterpart to the very core notion of unitary urbanism.
Bionote
Lola San Martín Arbide is a Junior Research Fellow in Musicology at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, where she carries out a research project on Parisian urban landscapes in music during the Third Republic. Her doctoral thesis studied ambient music in the 20th century and a subsequent development of this work led her to investigate the music within the Situationist International. She has published on Erik Satie, sound walking and mapping, music and literature, and on film music in English, French and Spanish, and is particularly interested in cross-media intersections between music and other arts.
14h30-15h45
POLITICS AND AESTHETICS OF INVISIBILITY panel sessions
Chair: Daniel Brandão (University of Porto, PT)
Room 5.2
DIÁRIO DA REPÚBLICA: HEAVY-METAL AS A TERRITORY OF EMANCIPATION FROM NEOLIBERAL HYPER-SCRUTINY
Heitor Alvelos (University of Porto, PT) and Anselmo Canha (University of Porto, PT)
Abstract
This paper presents the conceptual and ideological premises supporting “Diário da República” [DR], a Heavy Metal band deliberately operating under the radar since early 2016. The project is based on a threefold purpose:
Controlled visibility. DR operates on the assumption that the current syndrome of digital ubiquity and over-exposure is ambivalent in its psychosocial dangers and benefits.
Risk maximization. Neo-liberal ideology has been devising systems for predicting and minimizing loss; DR argues this has been bleeding into popular music, with a paradoxical effect in the substantial reduction of creative potential.
Poetics of legislation. DR re-contextualizes cryptic legal lingo as dadaist poetry. The sole source of lyrics is the wealth of Portuguese laws, and these remain untouched.
Bionotes
Heitor Alvelos
.University of Porto / ID+: Center for Unexpected Media
.PhD Royal College of Art 2003, MFA School of the Art Institute of Chicago 1991.
.Professor of Design, University of Porto. Member, Academia Europaea.
.Director, ID+, U.Porto. Curator, FuturePlaces Medialab (since 2008).
.Course Director, PhD Design (U.Porto / UPTEC / ID+ / U.Aveiro).
.Chairman of the Scientific Board (HSS), Foundation for Science and Technology since 2016.
.Sound and AV work out on Touch, The Tapeworm, 333, Cronica Electronica, KREV, Radio Manobras. Has lectured and performed in four continents since 2001.
//benevolentanger.org
Anselmo Canha
University of Porto / ID+
.Currently a PhD student at PhD Design (ID+, University of Porto and University of Aveiro)
.MA Image Design (University of Porto, 2008).
.Graphic Designer since 1989: Incomun, Sino Design, A Transformadora.
.Musician: Repórter Estrábico, Stopestra, Before Surgery, Diário da República.
.Has extensively performed and co-organised impromptu sound workshops and concerts.
.Co-coordinator of Manobras no Porto, 2011-2012 (https://www.facebook.com/manobrasporto).
.Coordinator of Rádio Manobras since 2015 (radiomanobras.pt)
.Sound producer at Futureplaces.org.
INVISIBLE ENVIRONMENTS: CAyC AND COUNTERCULTURAL CYBERNETICS
Jye O’Sullivan (Dublin Institute of Technology, IE)
Abstract
In 1971 the artistic collective Centro de Artes y Comunicación participated in the Argentinian biennale with the exhibition Arte de Sistemas. Luis Benedit’s Laberinto Invisible, a dematerialized maze that required the interactor to navigate a complex series of invisible boundaries, formed the core of this exhibition. Expanding on his prior Laberinto de Hormigas (1970) Benedit, by taking the human as the variable element in a system of invisible control, created a distinct, cybernetically informed, political statement. Despite the international profile of this exhibition however, CAyC and Benedit have remained invisible in the art historical cannon. This paper: explores CAyC’s contribution to the global postmodern avant-garde via an engagement with cybernetics, makes explicit the difference between a counterculture within a neoliberal democracy and a military dictatorship and, through CAyC, demonstrates how employing a cybernetic manner of interpretation can illuminate otherwise obscured systems of communication and technocratic control.
Bionote
Jye O’Sullivan is a PhD candidate living in Dublin and researching artistic engagements with cybernetics at Dublin Institute of Technology. Presently his research is focused on Centro de Artes y Comunicación and viewing their work in relation to the second order cybernetics of Maturana and Valera. Furthermore, he is exploring and delineating the wider periphery network of engagements with cybernetics. His further research interests include: countercultural movements, decoration decoding and fractal iteration, autopoietic and adaptive homeostatic systems, systems theory, and wider Latin American post-modern art. Jye is a member of GradCAM and the Digital Studies reading group in Dublin.
15h45-17h15
MUSIC, SOUND/SOUNDSCAPE AND LITERATURE panel sessions
Chair: Pedro Roxo (New University of Lisbon, INET-MD, PT)
Amphitheater III
THE SAME PLACE FROM WORLDS’ APART: ELIMINATING THE CONCEPT OF STYLE
Stephany Tiernan (Berklee College of Music, USA)
Abstract
This presentation will focus on the idea of pure, abstract music, free from stylistic boundaries and expectations. It is a synopsis of a two-decade performance relationship between legendary jazz pianist JoAnne Brackeen, and myself, a Contemporary Classical Steinway pianist and composer in the contemporary music world. I will trace the development of a synergistic musical performance relationship based on improvisation that is completely free and spontaneous in a live performance setting by discussing the creative process involved by using the musical language alone to perform music in the moment. Through the use of video clips of former performances and CD, Which is Which, I will discuss the creative process and how the music is able to transcend stylistic labels, despite the fact that the two performers come from completely different musical backgrounds. The results are neither Jazz or Classical, but a new musical language.
Bionote
.Steinway Artist, performing much of the world’s greatest contemporary literature, including her own compositions, in many of its’ prestigious halls.
.Composer, often inspired by her interest and studies in Irish culture and language.
.Author of book/video on Contemporary Piano Technique : Coordinating Breathe, Movement and Sound, published by Berklee Press/Hal Leonard.
.Over 40 years teaching piano and composition at Berklee.
.Chair of the Piano Department for 16 years. Presently, Chair Emerita.
.Her piano compositions are featured on her CD, “Hauntings:Scream of Consciousness” and her improvisation collaboration with JoAnne Brackeen is recorded on a CD called “Which is Which”.
SOUND AS MODEL: MURAIL VERSUS LUCIER
Bert Van Herck (New England Conservatory, USA)
Abstract
When the properties of sound become the center of the work, we might think of sound art. By focusing on the sound we might escape the traditional architecture of classical composition. However, sound art may be more an attitude than a focus on sound. When Tristan Murail composed ‘Mémoire, Érosion’ he had in mind the tape recorder, which, played in a loop, deteriorates the sonic properties of the sound. Exactly the same idea is used by Alvin Lucier in ‘I’m sitting in a room’, where he literally shows this process at work. The theory of Michael Polanyi is used in this paper to study and compare these two approaches with a specific focus how a composition is the result of the perspectives held by the composer – even if they take the same phenomenon as starting point.
Bionote
Bert Van Herck is faculty at New England Conservatory. He holds a PhD from Harvard University where he studied with Magnus Lindberg, Julian Anderson, Chaya Czernowin, Brian Ferneyhough, and Helmut Lachenmann. With Hans Tutschku, he studied electroacoustic music. In the fall of 2006 he was an exchange scholar at Columbia University, working with Tristan Murail. Besides his compositional activities, his interest in music theory has lead to presentations in international conferences on the music by Oliver Knussen, spectral music, and the music of Magnus Lindberg.
Going out. Peripatetic music and listening in the 60s
Elena Biserna (École Supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence, FR)
Abstract
This paper is part of a wider project focused on the relationships between walking, music and sound art since the 1960s. Drawing on Fluxus’ walking scores, on the Scratch Orchestra’s itinerant interventions and on the first listening tours organized by Max Neuhaus or Philip Corner, this paper explores the beginnings of this history: the 60s, when walking became, on both sides of the Atlantic ocean, a privileged way to expand music’s contexts and practices. On one side, walking emerged as a paradigm of the interest in anti-artistic actions that characterizes some of the tendencies of the decade. On the other side, walking became a material and symbolic act leading the composer outside of institutional venues to work directly in the public sphere. Therefore, it assumed a central role in challenging notions of “artwork”, “author”, “public” and, most of all, the definition of the boundaries between the aesthetic and the everyday sphere, becoming a prism to observe, more in general, the collapse of the autonomy of music and its dissolution into a process emerging directly from the urban; from its practices, its rhythms, its social and political dynamics.
Bionote
Elena Biserna is a researcher at Locus Sonus, École Supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence, and PRISM Aix Marseille Université, CNRS, Marseille, France. Her interests are focused on listening and on contextual, time-based practices in relationship with urban dynamics, socio-cultural processes and the everyday sphere. She gave talks and workshops at several institutions, taught at the Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna and wrote articles, essays and interviews for magazines, catalogues and books. As an occasional curator, she worked with several organizations: among others, Sant’Andrea degli Amplificatori (Bologna), Cona Zavod (Ljubljana), Xing (Bologna), Saout Radio, Radio Città Fujiko (Bologna), Sound Threshold (London).
15h45-17h15
AVANT-GARDES REVISITED V panel sessions
Chair: Jorge dos Reis (University of Lisbon, FBAUL, PT)
Room 5.2
DUMB, MUSICAL AND MEASURABLE: A CLOSE READING OF A STUPIDOGRAMM
Maggie Rosenau (University of Colorado at Boulder, USA)
Abstract
My paper presents a close reading of Swiss artist Dieter Roth’s poem “Some Variations on 44” (1957) and expounds on how both processes of reading and seeing are necessary to make meaning of it. “Some Variations on 44” communicates something to us, though we have no words or phrases to read it out loud. In a sense, it is dumb. It is also fun. And stupid? Stupidogramm makes sense. The linguistic title of this otherwise almost unutterable text frames and directs the poem towards meaning. The word ‘variations,’ for example, invites traditional musical elements of poetry, like rhythm and alliteration, to materialize visually. In this close reading, I show how Roth’s ideograms demand a different kind of mental activity in terms of perception due to how they articulate the visual aspect of the verbivocovisual.
Bionote
Maggie Rosenau is a PhD student in German Studies at CU Boulder where she also earned her Professional Certification in Museology. She teaches beginning language courses in the German Department, and curates exhibits and instructional classes at Special Collections in Norlin Library and also at Middlebury’s German Language School. Her dissertation explores the implications of blank space in postwar Swiss avant-garde works, particularly those of Dieter Roth and Eugen Gomringer. Her additional interests include the intersection of literature and museology, archives and collections as social memory, and the translator as creator.
VOCAL UTOPIAS, VERBAL MAGIC AND SOUND PAINTING IN RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE POETRY
Vladimir Feshchenko (Russian Academy of Sciences, RU)
Abstract
The paper discusses the role played by glossolalia as “vocal utopia” (M. de Certeau) in poetic texts of the Russian avant-garde. Verbal magic in a general sense implies the incantatory function of language in poetic speech, the primacy of sound in its repetitions and variations. Magic of the word can manifest itself in charms, glossolalia, zaum, nonsense, gibberish, muttering, interlingual experiments and other forms of suggestive speech. Russian poetry of the twentieth century demonstrates a special interest in the “magic”, “secret” and “phonic” side of the poetic word.
Bionote
Vladimir Feshchenko, PhD. Author of over 80 publications in theoretical linguistics, poetics, semiotics, translation studies and four books: Laboratory of the logos: language experiment in avant-garde creativity (2009, in Russian) and The creation of the sign. Essays in linguistic aesthetics and semiotics of art (2014, in Russian, co-authored with O. Koval’); The Adventures of Untovarich Kem-min-kz in the Land of the Soviets: E.E. Cummings and Russia (2013, in Russian); The Transatlantic Avant-Garde: Anglo-American Literary Movements (1910-1940) (to be published in 2017). Translations of G. Stein, W.C. Williams, M. McLuhan, M. Palmer, E.E. Cummings, E. Jolas, W. Lewis, E. Pound into Russian.
THE IMAGO DEI OF WILLIAM BURROUGHS: RELIGION & LITERARY CLOSURE IN THE NOVA TRILOGY
James Leveque (University of Edimburgh, GB)
Abstract
This paper examines William Burroughs’ fixation on word and image both in their sacral senses of Imago Dei (man in the image of God; the biblical identification of God and Word), and as a means of closure and control. The Nova Trilogy (1961-1964), his most extensive example of the ‘cut-up’ technique, was regarded as a potential means for exposing and dismantling forms of control embedded in language’s imposition of imagery – using religion as a primary target (‘Burn the books – Kill the priests.’). However, the Trilogy also demonstrates Burroughs’ fascination with Last Words, and the selection, ‘The Last Words of Hassan Sabbah’, is subjected to the cut-up, which is inherently antagonistic to literary closure. Did Burroughs hope to escape language as such, or does the self-cancellation of Last Words retain word and image in a sovereign sense, but freed of the closure and determination suggested by the Imago Dei?
Bionote
I received my PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Edinburgh in 2015, with a dissertation (currently being prepared as my first monograph) on prophetic and apocalyptic themes in Ezra Pound, Guillaume Apollinaire and F. T. Marinetti. I have published articles on a variety of subjects, such as the Bible in the avant-garde, apocalyptic literature in the Modernist period, surrealism, and futurism. I also have interests in poetics, literature and sociology, and Marxist literary theory. Though a native of California, I have lived in the United Kingdom since 2009.
A NEW COHESIVE ELEMENT: ABSTRACT ART AND IAN HAMILTON FINLAY
Natalie Ferris (University of Oxford, GB)
Abstract
This paper will consider the extent to which Ian Hamilton Finlay’s proposed “new cohesive element” in poetry took as its source the models offered by abstract art and the ways in which this permitted the extension of literary forms beyond the confines of the page, with particular focus on the poem constructions and one-word poems. Evident from their longstanding correspondence, Finlay and the poet Dom Sylvester Houédard were arguably the most sensitive of the British practitioners to the prospects offered by abstraction, adopting the critical vocabularies of constructivism, cubism, expressionism, fauvism, and suprematism to define the subtle tonal variations across the experimental reaches of the movement. Drawing upon archival research and unpublished correspondence, this paper will place particular emphasis upon the encouragement Finlay took from the constructive designs of the German abstract artist and educator, Josef Albers.
Bionote
Natalie Ferris is a writer and researcher based in London and Lisbon. She recently completed her AHRC funded DPhil project, “Ludic Passage: Abstraction in Post-War British Literature 1945-1980” at the University of Oxford, which she is currently developing into a monograph. She is the Deputy Editor of the Cambridge Humanities Review and the English Editor of the architecture journal SPACE.
17h30-18h30
BUS to ZDB Gallery
18h30-20h30
FILM SESSION: TREATISE ON VENOM AND ETERNITY, 1951
(Traité de bave et d’eternité , 1951)
by Isidore isou
Introduction by Kaira Cabañas (University of Florida, USA)
Terrace
Abstract
The late 1940s and early 50s in France witnessed the opening of the Cannes Film Festival, the establishment of the Cinémathèque Française’s first screening room, and the concurrent rise of Hollywood cinema: An American in Paris won Best Picture in 1952. In the margins of this context, Lettrist “film” posed a challenge to cinema’s established conventions as well as the necessity of its image support (i.e., filmstrip) in order to generate new conditions and communities of viewing. Drawing from her book Off-Screen Cinema: Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Avant-Garde, Kaira M. Cabañas introduces Isou’s practice of “montage discrépant” and examines the historical specificity of the first screening of his Traité de bave et d’éternité (On Venom and Eternity, 1951) at the Cannes film festival. Key to her discussion is Isou’s attempt to “separate the ear from its cinematic master: the eye.”
Bionote
Kaira M. Cabañas is Associate Professor in Global Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Florida, Gainesville. She is the author of The Myth of Nouveau Réalisme: Art and the Performative in Postwar France (Yale University Press, 2013) and Off-Screen Cinema: Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Avant-Garde (University of Chicago Press, 2014). In 2012 she curated (and edited the catalogue for) the exhibition Specters of Artaud: Language and the Arts in the 1950s at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. Her writings have appeared in a wide range of scholarly journals and museums catalogues and include essays on postwar art and film in Europe and Latin America.
20h30-21h30
FINAL COCKTAIL PARTY
THE DRIFT PRINCIPLE: CIRCUIT BENDING PERFORMANCE
by LOÏC BERTRAND (FR)
w/ home-made electronics (toys, radios, tapes and CD players) – 15’
Terrace Room