The Festival at Fort Boyard

Another gem in the Chopin library is a tiny brochure for an imagined collaborative art fair in the late 1960s, Festival de Fort Boyard. Don’t let the unassuming cover fool you; the inside packs quite a punch.

Fort Boyard is a 19th century fortification that lies about 5 kilometers off the French Aquitanian coast, between Rochefort and La Rochelle. Originally intended to defend against maritime attacks from the British, Fort Boyard never saw much combat.  Since the turn-of-the-century it has been left unattended.  But the fort would reenter the French imagination in 1967, as the final scene of Les Aventuriers was filmed there.  Later in the 1990s a game show, also named Fort Boyard and a sort of precursor to “Fear Factor,” was shot on location.  And its lesser-known claim-to-fame, of course, was playing host to an avant-garde art festival extraordinaire in the summer of 1967, organized by our very own Henri Chopin, Serge Beguier, Antonio Berni, Gianni Bertini, Julien Blaine, Gil Wolman and others.

Fort Boyard, off the west coast of France

Program for June 10th

With ferries leaving from Rochefort on the hour for spectators, the festival ran a new program each summer weekend.  The book is a collection of the programs, various related (and seemingly terribly unrelated) images, and a history of the festival, written by Chopin from the year 69000000000000. In it, he remembers the legendary and ongoing event which “defies time,” and likewise his fellow future citizens fondly extol the one art show that flouts “idiotic traditions.” He insists that no monument, not the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, nor any natural wonder has been able to resist impoverishment by humans the way Fort Boyard has. And he explains why: “In 1967, a few anti-establishment, anti-culture, anti-festival pioneers thought there needed to be a festival that didn’t actually exist.”  No wonder it has held up so well.

What goes on at an art festival that doesn’t exist?  A lot, apparently: Each week was carefully curated and programmed, featuring multimedia performance/installation pieces, some that, naturally, do not seem physically possible to make.  For example, Dom Sylvester Houedard enacted a “typing ballet” by writing a poem live on an enormous typewriter that required him to jump, leap, and stride from key to key.  This was accompanied by a Beguier’s “barometric color show,” or a collection of paintings that shift in color with atmospheric changes.  A week later, Gil Wolman’s program is described as “During the night of June 14th and 15th, Wolman will fill the bottles drank during the night of June 14th and 15th,” and this sentence repeats several times.  The week after that, Bertini would project 15 of his paintings onto a curtain of smoke at sunset, while Chopin performed sound poetry. What each piece has in common is there ephemeral, irreproducible quality; they do not exist.

For Chopin, the Festival thought experiment was the “total work of art, the perfect work, the unprecendented child, beauty everywhere, absolute purity. . . . The true masterpiece after 20 centuries of trial and error.”  While Chopin and his collaborators clearly poke fun at the bloated arrogance of the art world and its obsession with consumer materiality.  In that vein, it seems this group successfully carries out a defense of plastic expression. The true work of art is the idea itself, the practice of imagination, and the fearless sensibility.  And the beauty of an art that does not exist is its total freedom from hegemony.  Mutiny in the barracks!

**Blogger’s note: After having studied this piece repeatedly, I was still unsure if this event actually took place or was conceived never to happen.  It did not occur, was never meant to, but one could entirely believe that it did. And I suppose that says it all.

Henri Chopin, part deux

Chopin’s library contains all kinds of quirky and fascinating volumes.  Many are collections of dactylopoèmes (examples of which mentioned in last week’s post) complete with wonderful titles, like: Passementeries (Trimmings), Riches heures de l’alphabet (The Alphabet’s Heyday), Folles folies des follies (The Foolish Folly of Follies), and Squelette du verbe et alentour (Skeleton of the Verb and Elsewhere). Other examples provide a colorful glimpse into Chopin’s wide network of friends, like Pour parler et pour cause, dedicated and written by fellow avant-gardist Gianni Bertini.  Inside the front cover lies a check from the “Banca della felicità et dell’amore” (Bank of Happiness and Love) made out to Chopin for 365 days of happiness. In one interesting passage, Bertini compares the act of writing a poem to a butcher wrapping meat–first it is cut, blood oozing, then weighed and swaddled tightly in sturdy paper. “We wrap words so that they cannot escape.”

Still other books attest to Chopin’s imaginative talents and neverending stream of multimedia projects.  Here a deeper look into The Cosmographical Lobster, a poetic novel.

The Cosmographical Lobster: slim volume and bright red sleeve

The Cosmographical Lobster opens with a nonsensical sum, alerting us to the novel’s playful relationship to conventional logic: 

22 + 8 + 7 + = 987678432 + 5 + 7 + 8 = 3 + 1 + 2 + 3 + 7 + 9 + 7 = 4789765456765536543423341

and insisting : THE ANSWER’S RIGHT.

–

He then goes on to introduce the novel’s key characters: ERnest (age 222222, 000000, 6666666, 888888, 4444444), the President of the World Government, and Mr. X, Governor of the Ciphered People.  For eons, the Ciphered People had lived without the WORD: “The word as such was of very little account – its function, which had previously been indispensable to the misunderstanding of human beings…” The ridiculous authors who had used it, Shakespeare, Molière, Plato, were “old museum pieces.”  Their favorite TV program, a masterpiece, was a “0″ on a white background. For the Ciphered People there was no more need for philosophers, poets because all of metaphysics could be summed up with  ” + added to – = “.  ”It was strictly imperative to listen to the speech of the Head of the Universe,” writes Chopin, “but of course it was strictly forbidden to comment on it or to understand it. In any case, understand means nothing.”

Lobster-esque dactylopoème inside front cover

But ERnest, the enlightened, craves to live once more among the Word. And so he quests to recreate the Universe because, as it is well-known, “In the beginning was the word.” With each of his succeeding thoughts and movements, ERnest regenerates the Cosmos, the Earth, and all living creatures. In a spaceship hurdling through time and space, the difficult voyage continues oward the rebirth of the word, attempting to reverse the damage of history: “Humanity, that had become dumb in the twentieth century, was thrilling to life once more.”  At last, the final proclamation: “THE SOUND OF THE UNIVERSE WAS HEARD.”

–

Throughout the novel, Chopin strings together entire paragraphs without spaces, spells words backwards, launches into rhyming tangents, makes verbs out of friends’ names (heidsiecking, gysinning) and employs scattered spacing, among many other puns and disruptions.  Naturally, the loose “narrative” is often occluded and hard to follow.  But it is a fun meditation on humankind’s simultaneous devotion to and repugnance for language.  The Word is at once fundamental to the universe and completely meaningless, a theme undoubtedly present in his sound poetry and typewriterpoems.  It seems Chopin also makes reference to the terrible power of language to influence the masses; he saw firsthand how propaganda and political rhetoric had ended in catastrophe in the 20th century. Perhaps, then, The Cosmo Lobster is a cautionary tale: we must be careful with words and appreciate the sounds proferred in the universe, lest we lose them. 

 

Henri Chopin: An Introduction

At left: Chopin at a sound poetry performance. At right: sample dactylopoème or typewriterpoem.

General Modern has recently acquired the library and archive of the late Henri Chopin, avant-garde artist and poet (1922-2008).  Following on the heels of French lettrisme, Dada, and Surrealism, Chopin is probably best remembered for his contribution to the budding discipline of “poésie sonore” or sound poetry.  Among other techniques, Chopin might swallow a microphone and record the minute vibrations of the human instrument, often layered on top of other recorded sounds, producing such works as “Throat Power,” “Digestion,” and “Interplanetary Rocket.”  He used very basic equipment and often tampered with the tape path by, for example, pasting matchsticks on the reel bed to create purposeful distortions.  (He would also perform his works, which is quite fun to watch; check it out here.)

By passing the same sheet of paper through the typewriter multiple times and at varying angles, Chopin achieves this design.

But throughout his 50+ year career, Chopin was prolific also as a painter, graphic designer, typographer, and film-maker.  He published dozens of volumes of his audio-visual magazines “OU” and “Cinquième Saison,” as well as many original books, collage works, installation pieces, and writings.  While he was careful to remain unaffiliated with any particular grouping–he called Lettrism “a dictatorship”–and cherished his artistic independence, he nevertheless collaborated and corresponded constantly with other leading figures of the European avant-garde.  A big portion of his collection are various books, letters, and art pieces dedicated to him by the likes of Raoul Hausmann, Brion Gysin, Francois Dufrene, William Burroughs and Gianni Bertini.  His connections across Europe and disciplines reveals he was a major point of contact on the international post-war art scene, and through tracking this network we can index the ever-shifting preoccupations of the avant-garde.

Underappreciated in mainstream art historical dialogue, Chopin’s work plays with and challenges conventional notions of speech, language, music, sound, and semantics.  His sound poems and dactylopoemes shed previously held verbal or symbolic value, to focus instead on purely sonorous or decorative qualities.  The latin alphabet, he insists, “is more geometric than calligraphic for our vision,” and “consists of constructivist forms.”

An ode to the dynamism of the sound recorder, here depicted as the Paris metro in a series called “Tubes.”

By manipulating modern-age technology, Chopin seeks to access the primal expanse of communication, the infinity beyond symbolic meaning.  The tape recorder makes possible the elongation and elaboration of sound shapes, makes audible the normally inaudible.  Similarly, the typewriter, in its perfect repetitious typescript, showcases the “architectural skeleton” or pure form of letters and words. In this way, Chopin simultaneously engages the mysterious archaic and the mechanical state-of-the-art.

From his “Concerto en Zhopin mineur,” a simultaneous play on the “z” sound and the “z” formation.

Perhaps this interest in the intersection of modern and primal can be traced back to Chopin’s experience of the Nazi regime, with its prehistoric violent warfare and hatred in a modern technological context. After France fell under German occupation, he was captured and sent to a POW camp in the Czech Republic from which he managed to escape.  After spending time with the advancing Red Army, he was recaptured by German forces and sent west on a Nazi “Death March.”  It was then he discovered the power of “extra-verbal communication.” He also lost two brothers in the war, both, like him, renegade spirits who didn’t share Henri’s luck.  The sounds he creates, then–from vibrating nose hairs, to farts, hisses, and labial snaps–become profound expressions of human existence, made possible, perhaps, by his very own humanity having been called into question. Beyond the obvious quirk and hilarity in his work, there lies beneath a deeply poignant creative act.

Much of his library (around 500 books) is catalogued and available for study, and his amazing archive forthcoming.

Paris, Bizarre

Bizarre, nos. 1-2; new series, nos. 1-46 (Paris, 1953-1968)

Siné's Cover for Bizarre, no. 11/12 (May 1959), a special issue devoted entirely to "Jocondoclastie," or the playful misappropriation (and willful defacement) of the Mona Lisa

Founded by Eric Losfeld–who went on to publish Jean-Claude’s notorious Barbarella comics in the early 1960s–Bizarre lasted for just two issues before falling off the map in 1953. The magazine was soon revived, however,  by

Special Tarzan Issue, Bizarre, no. 11/12 (1962)

Jean-Jacques Pauvert and Michel Laclos, who kept its torrent of iconoclastic wit, cultural criticism, and artistic daredevilry running uproariously from 1955 right up to the eve of the Paris uprisings in the spring of 1968. No stranger to controversy, Pauvert made a name for himself in the immediate postwar years publishing (at times clandestine) editions of  Sade. His new bookshop on the Rue Bonaparte was quickly put under police surveillance when it opened  in 1956, just a year after he restarted Bizarre, and the besieged bookseller/ publisher   found himself at the center of the “Affaire

Special Issue on Lettrism, Bizarre no. 32/33 (1964)

Sade,” as the French government stepped in to ban the publication and sale of such works. Clashes with authority and public controversy also hounded other contributors to the journal, including its ‘s star illustrator, Siné. An anarchist with sharply anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, and (as many would later find) anti-semitic views, Siné felt pressured to quit his position as political cartoonist for L’Express due to his virulent opposition to the Algerian War, which provoked public outcry from many readers, and for a time in the early sixties he worked on Révolution africaine, a journal financed by the Algerian resistance organization FLN. When the uprisings came in 1968, Siné again joined with Pauvert to found the magazine L’Enragé, an important document of the rebellious spirit of the late sixties and early seventies recently acquired by Beinecke as part of the Philippe Zoummeroff Collection of May 1968 Paris Counterculture.

Channeling undercurrents of political unrest and cultural discontent, as well as a simple delight in mockery, Bizarre became an important artistic expression of the culture of protest that peaked (at

(Cosmetic?) Surgery on the Mona Lisa, Bizarre, no. 11/12 (May 1959)

least initially) in the revolts of May ’68. Bizarre excelled in the scavenging techniques of détournement and bouleversement wielded by avant-garde poets, artistists, and cultural critics in the Paris of Situationism and Lettrism (one issue of the magazine is entirely devoted to a critical engagement with the latter). Siné’s cut-out design for the cover of Bizarre no. 11/12 (shown at top) cloaks the Mona Lisa (La Joconde) in the garb of a heavily

"Miss Mona Lisa 1957," shown with labels for Mona Lisa brand cheese and cigars and a pin featuring the Eiffel Tower, Bizarre, no 11/12 (May 1959)

decorated (and heavily wounded) military officer, but inside the covers one finds a medley of playful misappropriation, commercial exploitation, disfigurement, and material destruction. There are paint-by-number Mona Lisas, Mona Lisa gag postcards, crossword puzzles, postage stamps, posters,  Mona Lisa comic strips and

Mad about MAD: "Les limitaions de Mad à l'égard de la ségrégation sont celles du libéralisme american dans son ensemble ... Cette hypocrisie de bonne foi qui pousse les plus honnêtes à considerer que la mystique anti-nègre ne constitue même pas matière à scandale, à l'accepter passivement sans se sentir troublés par leur propre silence, est un des éléments les plus inquiétants de l'idéologie américaine." Bizarre no 6 (November 1956)

measurements of her physique, “typographical” portraits of the Mona Lisa, and countless other permutations, all gathered around Jean Margat’s tongue-in-cheek theoretical treatise, “Introduction à la Jocondoclastie” (Introduction to Mona-Lisa Iconoclasm). The last dozen or so pages are devoted to “exercises” in this new art–”découpages,” “clivages,” “déformations,” “trucages photographiques,” “chirugie,” and “destructions matérielles.”

Cinema and pop culture were also popular themes. Tarzan, Boris Karloff, Bela Lagosi, Brigitte Bardot share layouts with “monsters” from circus sideshows, film noire, comic strips, and lots of American beauties pointing guns at the viewer. A jarring flux and flow strongly reminiscent of the illustrations of Internationale Situationniste that were being published in the same years. The editors of Bizarre had a penchant for revealing the dark side of American popular culture, as in this stinging critique of MAD magazine, chastized for its lily-white heros and its complete silence on the topic of racism and the civil rights movement in the United States. The rising wave of détourned political comics, which spread quickly throughout Europe in the early sixties and became a staple visual component of protest literature in the wake of 1968, certainly ripples through the 48 issues of Bizarre from first to last.

The Cinema Industry and the Third Reich

Der Film-Kurier: Theater, Kunst, Varieté, Funk, 11 volumes (1935-1940). Over 850 issues of one of the most important trade journals of the German cinema industry prioto 1945, all from the Nazi era.

Headlines from Der Film-Kurier on November 14, 1935: "Jews No Longer Allowed to Attend Any Cinema"

Published in Berlin from 1919 to 1944, Der Film-Kurier documented many different facets in the development of the film industry, first in the Weimar Republic, then under the  growing shadow of the Third Reich. Stories of popular interest, photos of the latest stars, ads for new pictures jostle alongside specialized articles for professionals engaged in the production, distribution, and projection of cinema. Debates over taxes, licensing, building codes; statistics about film production and cinema attendance; the latest technical advances in sound and color; shifting alliances among the major players in the industry itself provide a singular resource for scholars of cinema in a time of immense historical importance.

But these volumes do much more than follow the paper trail of cinema. The side-by-side overage of industry news and commercial advertisements with headlines such as this –”Jews No Longer Allowed to Attend Any Cinema: Participation in Offerings of German Culture of Any Kind Prohibited” –powerfully document the transition from business-as-usual to kitsch propaganda machine as the power of Goebbel’s ministry gradually invaded every sphere of everyday life. Varying degrees of complicity, surviving enclaves of relative autonomy, blinkered concentration on narrow interests and technical developments are all to be found  here, revealing a nightmarish landscape in which many perished or fled while others sought to help or hinder them or simply pursued their own interests. A splendid resource for anyone interested in exploring the world of modern cinema confronted by the brutality and terror of the Nazi regime.

Der Film-Kurier joins a growing number of other titles documenting the vicissitudes of the German film industry in the 1920s and 1930s, including yearbooks, “Cinema Calendars,” official promotion and publicity for film stars published by firms like UFA, Tobis, Gloria, and others, as well as government statistical surveys and reports on the industry commissioned in the Third Reich and after the Second World War. Much of this material is still uncataloged, so be sure to check out our “Uncataloged Acquisitions” search engine to find more.

Russian Satirical Magazines–Soviet Style

Buzotër (The Troublemaker), nos. 1-3 (1924), 4-28 (1925), and 1-24 (1926). Three complete years, bound in two volumes, of a heavily illustrated Russian satirical magazine that ran from 1924 to 1928.

When the first Russian Revolution broke out in 1905, writers and artists leapt at the chance to fill the void opened by the sudden collapse of censorship. No less than 309 new satirical magazines started publication during the brief window of 1905/1906, though most survived only for a few issues before being shut down and (in many cases) their editors being put in prison. The lavish use of color illustration make these underground papers a startling document of the intellectual ferment, but also the artistic sophistication of a milieu that suddenly had the opportunity to express itself boldly and in the public domain. Most of the artists who contributed to this first generation of radical satirical magazines were associated with the revival of Russian arts and international currents of the Symbolist movement, most strongly represented by the Mir Iskusstva group, which was heavily involved in the revolutionary outpouring of art and vitriol. While many of them later avoided association with the Bolshevik revolution and the Bolshevik regime, artists such as Evgenii Evgenievich Lansere, Isaak Izrailevich Brodskii, and Msislav Valerianovich Dobuzhinskii participated in the artistic outpouring after 1917, although by then a younger generation of Futurists, Constructivists, and Suprematists led the charge (at least until they were suppressed under Stalinism and the doctrine of “Socialist Realism.”

Buzotër is a fascinating product of the ecclectic currents at work in the early years of the Soviet Union. The magazine itself displays strong similarities to the satirical magazines of 1905/1906, in format, content, and the strong use of color in bold illustrations not only on the covers but also in between. Yet stylistically, much of the caricature here is inflected through the lens of later movements–Constructivism, Expressionism, and Dada are particularly apparent–and many of its contributors belonged to the younger generation that had declared its independence from Mir Iskusstva and Symbolism already before the First World War. Among the new “Troublemakers” contributing to the magazine were Vladimir Ivanovich Lebedev, Aleksei Radakov, Nikolai Kupreianov, and others.

For an extensive sampling of complete issues from the first wave of Russian satirical magazines, see our link from the digital library: http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/digitallibrary/russiangraphic.html

Bilibin’s Folktales

Ivan Iakovlevich Bilibin, Skazki, 6 vols. (St. Petersburg: Expeditsii Zagotovleniia Gosudarstvennykh Bumag, 1901-1903).

Cover of Skazki, no. 3 (May 18, 1902) Peryshko Finista Iasna-Sokola

A complete set of six folktales lavishly illustrated by Ivan Bilibin expands the Beinecke’s holdings of Russian graphic art and, more particularly, the Mir Isskustva (World of Art) group. Published in St. Petersburg between 1901 and 1903, the six volumes date from the period just after Bilibin had joined the group, and several of the illustrations in them were displayed at Mir Isskustva exhibitions.Drawing on an ecclectic mix of traditional art forms–the icon, the lubok, Persian miniatures, and medievel book illustration–Bilibin fuses them together with contemporary currents of the late 19th century to create a rigid and highly stylized unity that marks the culmination of the style russe as it was propagated by the “World of Art.”

Bilibin had studied under Il’ia Repin at a private art school founded by Pricess Tenisheva, one of Mir Issustva‘s most important patrons and a fervent supporter of the revival of Russian folk art at the turn of the 20th century. Introduced to the group by Leo Bakst in 1899, Bilibin wrote several important treatises on Northern Russian peasant art of the 17th and 18th centuries.  Yet while enamored of early modern sytles, Bilibin rejected all notions of attempting to revive or recreate them, insisting instead that a new genuinely Russian style could emerge only through direct engagement with modern artistic currents. Here Bilibin took his cue not so much from the English arts and crafts movement of Ruskin and Morris, but instead from the German Kunstgewerbebewegung,

which likewise embraced the modern and emphasized the importance of innovation in graphic design. “[O]nly the Germans, and not the French, understand the art of the book,” Bilibin later wrote, reflecting the lasting influence of his exposure to these currents during an early study visit in Munich before the turn of the century. Like many others in Mir Isskustva, Bilibin was attracted to stage design as well as book design, and he worked on sets for Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Snegouochka in Prague in 1904 and Sergei Diaghilev’s production of Boris Godunov in 1908. When the first Russian Revolution broke out in 1905, Bilibin joined many others from the Mir Isskustva circle in contributing to  the stunningly illustrated satirical magazines that briefly flourished in the absence of censorship After the Revolution was crushed, however, Bilibin returned to a more moderate and anti-political stance. Leaving Petersburg for the Crimea in 1917, he avoided the brung of the Bolshevik revolution, and after a five-year sojourn in Egypt, he settled in Paris in 1925. Bilibin eventually returned to the Soviet Union, however, and he died in Leningrad in 1942.

More of Bilibin’s striking images can be found, alongside those of his Mir Isskustva comrades, in Beinecke’s collection of Russian satirical magazines from the Revolution of 1905. A large portion of the collection has been digitized and is publically available at: http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/digitallibrary/russiangraphic.html.

Architectural Fantasies of the “Soviet Piranesi”

Iakov Chernikhov, Architekturnye Fantazii: 101 Kompositsiia v Kraskakh, 101 Architekturnaia Miniatura (Leningrad: Mezhdunarodnaia Kniga, 1933). 102 pp., 101 leaves of color illustrations.

Fantasy #67: Linear Resolution of 3-Dimensional Architectural Rendering in Axiometric Perspective

Between 1929 and 1933, Iakov Chernikhov published three major works that together compose a vivid documentation of Constructivist architecture in Soviet Russia. It was above all the last of these, Architektura Fantazii, that earned him the reputation of being “the Soviet Piranesi.” Featured here, the color plates at the back of this volume capture the interplay of architecture, painting, interior and graphic design that was a hallmark not only of Russian Constructivism, but also of many other modernist movements–De Stijl, Bauhaus, Elementarism, to name a few–that likewise strove to integrate the creative arts in a way that would not only reflect the new utopian societies they imagined, but would actually serve as vehicles for their realization as well.

Chernikhov’s bold use of line, color, empty space, and multivalent form seems to blur the distinction between painterly abstraction and  architectural drawing, much as Lissitzky’s prouns had done a decade or so earlier, but from the other direction. A latecomer to Contstructivism , Chernikhov had himself long been interested in relations between painting and architecture. After graduating from the Odessa School of Art in 1914, he moved to Petersburg, where he initially continued his studies in painting at the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, but in 1916 he switched to architecture and eventually graduated as a certified practicing architect in 1925. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Chernikhov devoted much time to teaching at various Soviet schools, where he focused on providing his students with a necessary introduction to “graphic literacy,” devising courses on “Methods of Depiction,”  “Projection Sketching” and “Projection Drawing” while simultaneously striving to compile an “Encyclopedia of Geometric Drawing” and “A Course on Curves.” The fruits of these efforts appeared in two large textbooks published at the end of the decade, Osnovy Sovremennoi Arkhitektury (Fundamentals of Modern Architecture, 1929-30) and Konstruktsiya Architekturnykh i Mashinnykh Form (The Construction of Architectural and Machine Forms, 1931). But his Architectural Fantasies remain unrivaled as an expression of his vision, inspiring generations of architects in the later twentieth century and beyond.

Earlier this year, Beinecke acquired Chernikhov’s first two textbooks (check out the “Uncataloged Acquisitions” search engine on the Beinecke’s homepage), for which the Fantasies now make a fine companion volume as welll as an exquisite addition to the General Modern Collection’s holdings of Russian Constructivism and European avant-garde architecture.