Ruidos y susurros de las vanguardias - Medialab Prado

confront it with the present. For our research group it also entailed the origin of the
concept of intermedia, of those hybrid artistic practices that open new possibilities
of creation and communication.
The period of the works to reconstruct is between two noteworthy dates: 1909 and
1945, which correspond respectively to the first Futurist manifesto (movement
with a clearly avant-garde project of transformation of all the spheres of life
despite its contradictions) and to the publication of the first manifesto of a Spanish
avant-garde movement, Postismo, which fostered what was left of the previous
avant-gardes, and which also dealt with the sonority of language, with aspects
and attitudes that were developed later on in the post-modern age. This date is
also the end of World War II, which affected all the spheres, and art was not an
exception.
We wanted to deal not only with the works of the great movements (Futurism,
Dadaism, Bauhaus, Surrealism), but also with other less known European
movements (Hungarian Activism or Portuguese Surrealism) or Latin-America
(Veidrinismo, Diepalismo, Simplismo, Creacionismo…) and Spanish (Ultraísmo,
La Orden de Toledo, Postismo…), to finally pay special attention to Valencia
(through Altavoz del Frente) which was also in the vanguard of the battlefield,
through the commitment of intellectuals in the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War.
In the process of reconstruction of the works chosen we have found the
antecedents of many present artistic manifestations, such as Depero's futurist
"motor-noise systems" and his sound sculptures; the gramophone record
manipulations by Moholy-Nagy; Hindemith and ErnstToch with their concrete
music and the work of DJ's; the public actions of the Berlin Dada artists and their
social activism; the descriptions of Russolo's book "The Art of Noise" with the
sound landscape or the use of the sampler in electroacoustics; the escapes
without destination of the Orden de Toledo created by Buñuel, Lorca, Dalí or
Alberti with the Teoría de la Deriva by the situationists…, and many other
examples that have allowed us to discover the origin of current concerns,
although the context and the sense have changed.
Throughout this journey we have counted on the collaboration and enthusiasm of
many people who have helped and participated in the accomplishment of the
project, like for example to carry out Foregger's "mechanical dances" ; those who
have offered their voice to recite phonetic poetry in different languages; those who
invited us to visit the streets of Toledo and listen to the nuns singing at six o'clock in
the morning; also the people of the historical archive of futurism in Italy who kindly
and patiently contributed to our enthusiastic search…, and certainly, the pleasure
to listen to an old lady's anecdotes on futurist Fortunato Depero in the café Due
Colonne in Rovereto, who overcome by emotion told us about the noises and
whispers of "Depero, my friend…". This research has allowed us to find other
surprising facts like when we found out that in Valencia, during the postwar period,
there was a group of friends called the Flying Bicycle (because they all flew to
other places) and the literary group that emerged from it that was very close to
Postism. They published several modest publications in the shape of an envelope
called the Literary envelope, where they put together poems and drawings, where
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one of its collaborators was our colleague and master Jose Esteve Edo, the
sculptor. Thus, feeling the echoes of our friends so close has been one of the main
results of this project.
Miguel Molina Alarcón
Remaking, recreating or revisiting the resonance of avant-garde sound art
(version or perversion?)
Nowadays, Sound Art is no longer a strange term; it is already included in the new
dictionaries of Modern Art and many exhibitions in museums and galleries
contain it in their titles. This has led to its subsequent theorizing and of course to
the creation of a differentiating product for the artistic market (it is no longer a
volatile sound for a concert hall, but the sound turned object/concept for a gallery
or museum).
In Arts, practice is always before theory, since it was just thirty years ago (end of
the 1970's) when Sound Art was first used, and that does not mean that it did not
exist previously, it is just that as it happens with languages - it is necessary to
write about it, establish a differentiating grammar that grants its own place and
specificity, although its result comes from a crossbreeding (a characteristic of the
identity of any artistic medium). Therefore, previous terms were used as adjective
extensions of recognized artistic media: musicalism, phonetic poetry, sound
sculpture, absolute cinema, graphic or visual music, audio-installation, etc.
If we search for the origins of this practice, we will hardly find it in kinetic art only or
in the Historical avant-garde itself, because any sound expression in the past
could not be separated from the architectonic space, from its links to sculpture,
painting or any other visuality of the context (either political, religious or social)
where this sound was performed. Thus, an example like a medieval cathedral,
could be conceived as a great artistic installation, where we could affirm that it is
related to Sound Art, Performance, Assemblage, Op Art, Food Art, Public Art…, or
even the five senses. Perhaps, historiography has presented a
compartmentalized study of the arts that offers a quite different meaning to us
than if we studied it in its own relation and conjunction.
The truth is that there has always been a reciprocal communication and influence
of all the arts throughout history, although the specialization itself has separated
its study and education. Precisely, one of the reasons to initiate this research
project in the context of this University and specially from the Department of
Sculpture of the Faculty of Fine Arts of Valencia, is to recover a language the
sound language in its close relationship with the language of visual arts. The old
nineteenth-century dichotomy between space and time arts has to be broken to
liberate their own space-time transgressions. Over the last years, the teaching of
the language of sound has progressively been incorporated in Fine Arts Studies,
not only by the new audio-visual and multimedia technologies, but by its links with
other arts: sculpture, painting, performance, installation, public art…, which, in
addition, in some centers has its own entity like Sound Art (from material to art
matter).