Hans Bellmer, La poupée, 1935-1949.

frenchtwist:

I do not want to see anything, I do not want to see any more.

~ Hans Bellmer ~

Twenty-six of Bellmer’s dolls are at the link – one for each letter of the alphabet.

Otto Dix, Streichholzhändler I (Le marchand d’allumettes I), 141,5 x 166 cm, 1920, Galerie de la ville de Stuttgart, via hjg-sim.de

uriner

Le marchand d’allumettes qu’il représente en 1920 est un pauvre type, que la guerre a perforé de balles, un estropié qui n’a pas de pieds, pas de bras et, comme si cela ne suffisait pas, il n’a plus d’yeux. Les passants qui circulent en toute hâte sans y prendre garde, ne connaissent que trop ce genre d’individus, et si un teckel s’intéresse à lui, c’est uniquement pour uriner.

Rainer Metzger, Berlin les années vingt, Hazan, 2006, p. 111.

Audio

annadraconida:

György Ligeti: Study No. 2 “Coulée” for organ: Prestissimo, sempre legato

Incredible, haunting piece by the renowned modern composer (May 28, 1923 – June 12, 2006), who has collaborated with Stanley Kubrick 3 times, contributing to the soundtracks of 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining & Eyes Wide Shut  

illustrality:

theshipthatflew:

Max Beckmann, The Night, 1918-19, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf

La nuit

Juste après-guerre, Max Beckmann sondait déjà la réalité avec des mises en scène choquantes comme par exemple dans La nuit de 1919. La nuit jette regard impitoyable dans une pièce saisie par l’horreur. On distingue un groupe d’hommes, dans lequel chacun torture son prochain les membres des corps sont contorsionnés et les traits du visage déraillent, mais ce qui est véritablement troublant, c’est la tranquille normalité dans laquelle s’inscrivent ces sinistres agissements. L’homme au centre de la peinture porte un bandage à la tête et s’emploie en même temps à tordre le bras d’une pauvre créature dont la bouche grande ouverte laisse échapper un cri ; mais cet homme au centre, qui cumule les fonctions de victime et de tortionnaire, montre encore un troisième facette car il fume sa pipe avec une délectation extrême. C’est comme si cette «nuit» pouvait se reproduire toutes les nuits.

Rainer Metzger, Berlin les années vingt, Hazan, 2006, p. 110-111.

Max Beckmann, The Descent from the Cross, Oil on canvas, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1917.

darksilenceinsuburbia:

The Descent from the Cross, 1917 by Max Beckmann

Audio

acousmata:

Eliane Radigue: “Koumé” (except)

From the album Trilogie de la Mort (1988-1993)

A music of catastrophic slowness; a music that trembles on the precipice of absolute immobility; a music that confronts us with the infinitesimal margin of energy that separates motion from stasis, being from nothingness:  for the last 40 years, Eliane Radigue has cultivated a unique body of works characterized above all by the extreme dilation of musical time and the radical negation of rhetoric and gesture.  It is a music “infinitely discreet,” in the words of Michel Chion, “next to which all other musics seem to be tugging at one’s sleeve for attention.”

And yet it is the miracle of Radigue’s art that, once your ears have adapted to its tempo, its once-placid surface begins to throb with energy.  For sound, by its nature, is always moving: static music is a contradiction in terms.  But it is the phenomenon of imperceptible change which is the paradoxical animating spirit behind this music.  Again and again, we experience the purely retrospective recognition of formal movement: we perceive not that something is changing, but only that it has changed. This trompe d’oreille or auditory illusion, as simple in concept as it is endlessly rich in experience, constitutes the unifying thread between all the diverse manifestations of Radigue’s music. 

Radigue was born in Paris in 1932.  Her musical training began with conservatory studies in piano and harp.  Through a chance hearing of a radio broadcast she encountered the work of Pierre Schaeffer, and she soon became involved with the young art of electronic music: she worked with Schaeffer at the Groupe de recherche musicales (GRM) in the late 1950s and, a decade later, at the private studio Apsome with Pierre Henry.  From Schaeffer and Henry, Radigue absorbed the teachings ofmusique concrete, which consisted of not only the classical studio techniques of recording, manipulation, and tape montage, but also, and perhaps more fundamentally for Radigue’s later development, a rigorous and empirical discipline of listening grounded in a systematic investigation of the acoustic properties of objects.

But Radigue’s ears soon lead her astray from the already-canonized conventions ofmusique concrete.  While working with Henry she discovered the unexpected allure of electronic feedback, tape hiss, and other peripheral byproducts of the electronic music studio.  Radigue was fascinated by this discovery of what she called “the garbage of sounds,” and much of her music from this time was made with long, out-of-phase loops of recorded feedback, a material with which Radigue attained immersive sonic effects far removed from the virtuosic jump-cuts of Schaeffer and Henry. In 1970, Radigue went to the United States, in her words, “because there were no synthesizers in France.”   At New York University in 1970-71, she encountered the Buchla 100 series synthesizer, which had been installed in the NYU electronic music studio by Morton Subotnick just a few years earlier. She used the Buchla in her first work for synthesizer, Chry-ptos, composed in 1971.  Soon thereafter she acquired an Arp 2500, a massive unit that would serve as her primary creative technology for the next 30 years.  Radigue has described this instrument as the “Stradivarius” of modular analog synthesizers, a device whose capacity for nuance allowed her to work, in her words, “within the flesh of sound.”

Following her stint at NYU, Radigue held residencies at the University of Iowa and the California Institute of the Arts in the early 1970s.  In 1974 she arrived at Mills College in Oakland, then the epicenter of the West Coast experimental music scene.  At Mills she presented her breakthrough composition Adnos, which established the basic elements of Radigue’s mature aesthetic: pure electronic tones, gently throbbing detunings, and a glacial slowness of unfolding that could bring the listener into a meditative state of heightened perception.  In a possibly apocryphal encounter which has become ensconced in the Radigue mythology, she was confronted after the concert by a group of French music students who asked, “You do realize that it’s not you creating your music?”  Radigue, who had not consciously sought to express anything particularly spiritual through her work, was deeply moved by the notion that she was merely the human conduit of a kind of sonic meditation, a musical bridge to higher states of consciousness.  The students referred her to a center for Tibetan Buddhism in Paris, and, upon returning to France a year later, Radigue visited the center and converted soon thereafter.

After becoming a Buddhist, Radigue entered a three-year period of spiritual retreat during which her beloved ARP fell silent, and she even considered abandoning music altogether.  But, at the behest of her spiritual master, Radigue returned to composition in the late 1970s.  Her music did not change substantially after her conversion, since, in her own words, it was music that led her to Buddhism, and not the other way around.  However, in the 1980s, supported by commissions from the French government, Radigue composed two works that were inspired directly by her Buddhist faith: Songs of Milarepa and Jetsun Mila. These pieces were the product of an intensive engagement with the artistic means of electronic music, on the one hand, and the spiritual and metaphysical concerns of Buddhism on the other, an engagement which culminated in the composition of what is widely regarded as Radigue’s magnum opus, the Trilogie de la Mort, composed from 1988 to 1993 and inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Radigue has stated that L’Île Re-sonante, completed in 2000, is likely her final piece of electronic music.  In the past decade, she has begun to compose in collaboration with select performers, writing for traditional instruments for the first time since her student days.  Her first such work, finished in 2003, was Elemental II, a composition for electric double-bass processed by MAX/MSP, which was created especially for the bassist and electronic musician Kaspar Toeplitz. 

 In 2005, at the request of the American cellist Charles Curtis, Radigue began composing the first part of a new composition entitled Naldjorlak.  The music was collaboratively conceived as a series of gestures to be played by Curtis on a specially detuned cello; in Radigue’s words, it is “not a piece for an instrument, but a piece for an instrumentalist.”  Naldjorlak was later expanded to a second movement, composed again in intimate collaboration with the basset horn players Bruno Martinez and Carol Robinson, and a third movement for all three instruments together.  The complete composition, which typically takes 2½ hours to perform, has no score, but rather exists in what Radigue calls an “oral tradition” in which the boundaries between composer and performer are almost entirely effaced.  The complete Naldjorlak cycle was premiered in Paris in 2009.

Concerning her compositions for traditional instruments, Radigue has written: “What a strange experience after so much wandering, to return to what was already there, the perfection of acoustic instruments, the rich and subtle interplay of their harmonics, sub-harmonics, partials, just intonation left to itself, elusive like the colors of a rainbow.”

John Heartfield, “Der Reichsbischof richtet das Christentum aus.” “He, der Mann da, das Kruzifix etwas weiter nach rechts!”, AIZ N°3, 18 Jan 1934, via imagebank.vulture-bookz.de

pitrerie

Impossible d’imaginer Dada sans pitreries ; aussi l’origine du mouvement Dada de Berlin, est-elle d’une rafraîchissante absurdité. Le 17 novembre 1918, pendant une messe à la cathédrale de Berlin, Baader se fit remarquer en hurlant «Jésus-Christ, on n’en a rien à faire», a près quoi il fut bien entendu écarté du lieu. Puis loin de laisser reposer l’incident, il le propulsa au contraire dans les sphères du débat public à coup de lettres de lecteur. Dada fut la première manifestation d’une idée qui s’imposera tout particulièrement à Berlin, l’idée que la culture du spectacle n’a absolument rien à voir avec la qualité de ce qui peut éventuellement être représenté, mais qu’elle diffuse massivement ce simple constat : «J’existe, je suis celui qui a de l’importance». Dada a anticipé certains mécanismes qui accompagnent la célébrité aujourd’hui encore. Le fait que la part de non-sens soit de nos jours plus importante que la part de sens transmis c’était le fondement de la réflexion.

Rainer Metzger, Berlin les années vingt, Hazan, 2006, p. 99.