Ruidos y susurros de las vanguardias - Medialab Prado

Another cause that encouraged us to undertake this research project to remake
artistic-sound work from the Historical avant-garde is that it has survived to our
time due to the lack of pieces of this nature. There are several reasons: one refers
to the fact that sound needs to use a score or to be recorded, which in many of
these cases is lost and or it was never recorded (taking into account that the
recording technology of these years was very limited and restricted); another
reason is due to the experimental character of the materials used, which often
escaped to the traditional materials of painting and sculpture (assemblies,
sceneries and wardrobe for ballets and theater plays, and public performances),
and they were only used for that moment, and then forgotten or destroyed, and
not valued at first by collectors. It is necessary to consider also that these years
correspond to the inter-war period, where a great deal of these artistic
movements were persecuted or had to leave the work to the chance of events.
After the second half of the 20th century, contemporary art museums and art
collectors, realized that many representative avant-garde works were lost. A
smaller art began to be valued, like magazines, manifestos, pamphlets…,
decisive to understand the sense of the avant-garde. They contained reference to
works and decisive manifestations of the avant-garde project that had
disappeared. First, the artists themselves were asked to reconstruct their work, in
order to ensure the value of the author. A clear example is the ready-mades by
Marcel Duchamp, where most of the objects he found between 1913 and 1917
were lost, although given their industrial character some of the series could be
replaced, the difference was marked by the artists' signature. In 1964, in the peak
of Pop Art (also called Neo-Dada), Arturo Schwarz makes a signed edition of
thirteen of his Ready-mades, in multiples of eight units, to be exhibited and sold in
his Gallery of Milan. This allowed that different museums or private collections
could have one of his toilet bowls or bottle carriers, key works of the twentiethcentury
art. This initiative - between heritage recovery and commercial operation-
could be understood by many people as contradictory with the initial anti-artistic
character for example of his Fontaine toilet bowl in the exhibition of the
Indépendants (1917). But an artist does not live on concepts only, and Duchamp
had to survive in difficult years - to a large extent -by working as a broker of his
avant-garde friends' works.
In these years, other essential modern art works were reconstructed, not
necessarily sculptures or paintings, but spaces created by the artists themselves
which for different reasons had been destroyed, like El Lisssitzky's Proun
Environment created in 1923 and reconstructed in 1965 for the Van Abbemuseum
of Eindhoven; the Flower Room (1925) by Theo van Doesburg, reconstructed in
1968. In other occasions remakes have been made from photographs, drawings
or films like the machine of electrical illumination Das Lichtrequisit (The Light-
Space Modulator, 1922-30) by Moholy-Nagy, which was made in 1970 by the MIT
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA) under the supervision of Laszlo
Moholy-Nagy's widow. Later on, in the 1980's, we should highlight the
reconstructions of Vladimir Tatlin's relieves made for the Annely Juda Fine Art of
London, and the Merzbau 1 called The cathedral of Erotic Misery (1920-36) by
Kurz Schwitters, located in his studio of Hannover, a space constituted by
materials found constantly progressing, but which was destroyed during a
- 141 -
bombing in World War II. On the occasion of an exhibition in the Sprengel
Museum of Hanover in 1988, this space was recreated by Peter Bissegger
following the advice of Ernst Schwitters (artist's son). We should also highlight the
reconstruction of the room where the First International Dada Fair was presented
(1920) in the Berlin gallery of Dr. Otto Burchard, key event in the proclamation of
Dadaism as a universal and influential concept. From the study of photographic
documents of the event, as well as from the printed images in magazines or the
works that had survived, the reconstruction was carried out in 1988 by Helen
Adkins, in collaboration with Hanns-Rudolf von Wild (technical management,
architecture) and Michael Sellman (art direction, pasquinades). This
reconstruction was made for the Berlinische Galerie of Berlin where it is
permanently exhibited.
So far, we have referred to plastic reconstructions, assemblages and creation of
spaces, which have thrown light to understand the origins of the art of the
installation and the use of new materials, but if we focus on the works where
sound language has been used simultaneously to visual language, we find fewer
examples (if we disregard the musical analogies in painting or sculpture),
because the documentation that has arrived to us has been more restricted,
specially as previously noted by the lack of sound recordings or the nonexistence
of a score, given their frequent extra-musical character. Some initiatives have
centered specially on the reading of phonetic poetry, which as it was published in
books of poems, magazines and pamphlets, could be read years later by their
own authors. This is the case of Dada artists Raoul Hausmann and Richard
Huelsenbeck who in the 1950's and 1960's recorded the sound poems they had
recited in the Dada sessions between 1916-1920. The attempt to recover all the
legacy of the avant-garde sound poetry in the same dimension as it was
conceived led contemporary poets to rescue from the silence the origins of this
poetry that served them as thread to their differentiating present proposals. In this
sense we should highlight the poet Arrigo Lora-Totino, who gathered in his
anthological edition Futura, poesia sonora (Milan, 1978), the interpretations
made by futurist, Dada, Zaum, Simultaneist...poems, until reaching the
contribution of current sound poetry, made by the authors themselves. Regarding
the initiatives in Spain, we should emphasize the early 1980's by the group Glotis -
composed by Javier Maderuelo, Maria Villa, Fernando Palacios and Llorens
Barber among others - with their series of radio programs called "phonetic poetry
and musics", where they performed phonetic Dada and Italian futurist poems;
also in Valencia, the visual poet and performer Bartolomé Ferrando, interpreted in
those years - as a performance - sound poems by Dada artist Hugo Ball (whose
original recording is not available). Currently, the greater availability of facilities for
sound recording allows to know phonetic poetry in the same dimension conceived
by the author, although these media no matter how perfect they are - are different
to live performances, which has caused that several sound poets use it as one
more creative element, and incorporate its possibilities of voice manipulation by
the recording systems and electronic processing (this current is called Text Sound
Compositions and it was already developed in the 1960's and 1970's in Sweden
and in the U.S.A..)
Apart from sound poetry, the most innovating and experimental works from other
fields like music, radio, invented instruments, theater or performance, have