Ruidos y susurros de las vanguardias - Medialab Prado

Bartolomé Ferrando
Gadgi Beri Bimba
This image, with the elongated hat-tube throwing smoke by the head, was made
in 1998, at the Festival of Nagano, where I presented this piece. Its title
corresponds to the first invented words of the poem by Hugo Ball Verse ohne
Worte, in the Cabaret Voltaire, in Zurich, in 1916. On that occasion, for the reading
of the poem, Hugo Ball, besides dressing a metallic gorget and having his legs
covered by blue cardboard, he had on his head an elongated and narrow hat with
blue and white stripes, that I evoke in my piece. The composition of Verse ohne
Worte had the intention to relinquish language and resort, in Ball's words, "to the
alchemy of the verb", thus pointing towards the search and construction of
unknown words, which gave shape to the poem, and which were pronounced
slowly and solemnly, "adopting the ancestral cadence of the sacerdotal
lamentations".
My piece consisted of two parts. In the first one, after wearing the hat shown in the
picture, made up with pipe pieces, I recited Hugo Ball's poem just as he wrote it,
and following as far as possible the guidelines suggested for its declamation. But
when I began to read the second part, from the top of the hat it began to appear a
red smoke first and then blue, which surrounded and covered the space and all
the audience. I wrote the text of this second part based on the decomposition of
Ball's poem, and then recompose it back again. And thus from bluku terullala
zimzim, I formed other words like uruku zingtata terubimbala, and I transformed
the words glassala binban into brussala bran, while both words were surrounded
and crossed by a large cloud of red and blue smoke.
Felipe Lagos Rojas, Luis Montes Rojas
Altazor or A Voyage in A Parachute
As it is well known, Huidobro's concerns focused on the rupture from the
traditional canons on the form of poetic construction, reflection that is in line with
what Octavio Paz has called the "tradition of rupture" which would represent the
avant-garde movements of the 20th century. Huidobro himself, in his Manifesto
Creacionismo (entitled "Non Serviam "), states that poetry must create new
worlds and not continue being a reflection of "the real" world. Thus, "Non Serviam"
stands as a call to emancipate from art's subjugation to Nature, which has been
serving without being allowed to display all its power. In "Arte Poética" he asks in a
provoking way: "Why do you sing the rose, oh Poets! Make it blossom in the
poem".
Altazor, however, is structured as a double tension on this creationist variant. On
one hand, the historical context in which this poem is produced accounts for the
permanent crisis of sense of social life, in a double movement between
transformation and destruction of humanity, where the figure of the parachutist,
simultaneously creator of his own aim and out of control, is an emblematic figure
for Huidobro. The aesthetic vanguards shared the attempt to justify this social
tension. On the other hand, the metapoetic reflection that guides "Altazor" is
based on the internal tension (dialectics) to the poem between order and disorder,
between construction and deconstruction.
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The "Preface" to Altazor (subtitled "A Voyage in A Parachute") includes some type
of manifesto of Huidobro's intentions, which will be developed in the chants that
follow. The reflection about the loss of sense, which sometimes appears with
almost Nietzche-like tones (the figure of the "death of Christianity" appears
recurrently as the explanatory axis of this loss), is constructed from the figure of
the parachutist, who although does not decide the place of landing, maintains
throughout all the voyage a descent that seems like the only direction. The
decision to "jump" is voluntary, it is a necessary search for the attainment of the
rupture project. If this search results in the death of the parachutist-poet (which, in
strict terms, is a suicide, given the voluntariety of the act), evidently the
descending direction of the project appears for Huidobro as unavoidable.
The Chilean poet, thus, assumes the indivisibility of the Ego-poet / Ego-lyric in the
work as a condition of the revision of classical canons of poetry, that is, the poetspeaker
indivisibility characterizes the pretension of authenticity validity of the
construction of his own avant-garde project: As the linguistic-phonetic element is
the support of poetry, poet and parachutist are, in fact, the same subject that is in
its language. Therefore the tension between construction and deconstruction
involves the Ego-poet himself in the work; about the middle of Canto IV, the death
of the writer is announced ("Here lies Vicente, anti poet and magician/ You are
blind if you cry… "), which does not make a distinction with the Ego-lyric because
this agonist attitude is unavoidable for the poem as well as for the poet's utopic
project: this phrase emphasizes the material possibility of death, as well as its
voluntariety in the eagerness to throw to new poetic forms, death which,
according to what has been said, corresponds to the suicide of the Ego-poet, Egolyric,
and especially the death of the means in which this is carried out: language
itself.
The form in which this resource develops towards the unavoidable of "the
parachute voyage", is given because the project of creationism is taken to the limit
in "Altazor", presented as an exercise of deconstruction of the poetic language as
rupture with the referential language. This exercise begins with a metric
deconstruction, where the verses are assuming relations with rather classic ideas
in the history of poetry, making the canon reappear at the moment in which the
deconstruction of this canon is demonstrated. Thus, the semantic deconstruction
that follows and that is progressively carried out in the poem shows that, to be total
and radical, it must also be the deconstruction of the syntactic order that allows
the text to be maintained as order, of the speech as well as of the speaker
(Altazor). This point is reached in Canto VII, where sense and syntax are lost in
pure allusive phonetics to impossible to arrange expressive states
(unmanageable by any "talking nature").
The link between this form of linguistic deconstruction and certain pretension to
"forget the mother tongue" is evident (in reference here to the order principle of
referential language). The deconstruction is then a process of un-learning,
inverse, for example, to the language learning process of children: The passage
of "tralalí tralalá" to the ordered and normal form to talk about the world - objective,
social or subjective - is inverted, because what is questioned is the objective
necessity of this form of expression. Thus, as in the parachutist's voyage, the only