Ruidos y susurros de las vanguardias - Medialab Prado

constant is the direction: emphasized throughout all the poem, deconstruction is
unidirectional, it appears as the only form of construction.
The question then is how to make expressive, in a version of the poem, the idea
on which it is based on. Upon identifying, from a particular perspective, the
elements that structure the work under this analysis (the deconstructive
direction), an expressive whole has to be created that, although fragmentary,
does not fail to mention that whole shown in absence in the work. In other words,
it is necessary to design a poem-device that, similar to the rotating poems
(“poemas-giratorios”, name given by Huidobro himself to the fragments of poems
or unfinished poems which then make other poems), allows to explain the sense
of Altazor.
Therefore, a poem-device has been produced, whose application is to emphasize
that direction shown as a column for Altazor. Thus, while the poem loses its sense,
rhythm has been included as a structuring element, whose gradual dissolution
follows the poem's and the parachutist's way; therefore, rhythm appears as a
prosthesis element, whose incorporation reinforces the direction as well as
reveals what has been left outside.
Finally, two aspects should be noted: the intention of this poem-device is not
based on the "nationalizing" of Altazor, since Huidobro's aim was to avoid Latin-
American and Chilean local variants, in a search for a European sense (what, in
fact, constitutes a characteristic of a rather mixed culture like the Chilean). Also,
the aim is not either to reconstruct a contemporary variant of this work; if it were
so, Altazor's ultimate sense would be altered. These two observations attempt to
make it clear that this is nothing more than a version, whose objective consists in
revealing the medular character of Huidobro's poem.
Miguel Corella Lacasa
Stridentism (El Estridentismo) and the radio. Statization and politization of
the radio in the Mexican avant-garde.
1. The aesthetics of the avant-garde movements and the radio.
Stridentism and the radio appear in Mexico at the same time. The trigger of the
Mexican unique literary and artistic movement that completely follows the
vanguardist canon was the manifesto Actual nº1, signed by Manuel Maples Arce,
and published at the end of December 1921, the same year that Constantino de
Tárnava broadcast the first radio program in the capital of the Republic, and the
same year that the Secretariat for the War commanded General Fernando
Ramírez the establishment of an experimental radio station. On the other hand,
when the commercial radio started in 1923, Stridentism participated in the new
mass media with the presentation of a poem by Maples Arce at the opening of the
radio station La Voz de América Latina (March 1923). The military use of the radio
and its aesthetization by the literary and artistic avant-garde represent two
different manifestations of the spirit of that time. As it usually happens in the
historical avant-garde movements, the cult to the machine and to the
technological development walked in pace with the mystification of action and of
its highest expression: War. As it has been so many times explained, the term
avant-garde comes from the military jargon and subsequently moves to the
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cultural domain, keeping its meaning of a troop that goes ahead the main troop
and breaches the enemy's ranks, it being either tradition, the old world or the old
aesthetics. As Luís Mario Schneider stated, the most relevant representatives of
the movement, the stridentists, as conscious vanguardists, burst into the Mexican
cultural scenario ready for provocation, noise and verbal scandal: the word was
not only language any longer and transformed into a physical cause, into
something corporeal, into an epidermal quiver. The word thus was action,
imposition, manipulation. The word was a weapon and not a means for meeting
(1981, 65). Based on these ideas and on the concept of literature as a war
weapon, the stridentists found in the new mass and advertising media the most
efficient tool for propaganda: The vanguardist sought the advertising media
because he knew that it was there, in that field, where aggressiveness can be fed
then being easier to introduce new theories and speculations. It is there where
proselytism spreads massively. It is there where the opponent can be defined and
the sympathizer comes out and joins the movement (1981, 65). The efficiency
propaganda on the radio was as a consequence of the structural conditions of the
medium: its aggressiveness, its ability to be heard destroying the bases of the
jealous conservative subjectivity. As the aesthetic convictions came in hand with
the political intention in the Mexican avant-garde, the political use of the radio
necessarily involved its statization. The radio thus became a metaphor of the
avant-garde movements, conceived itself as the emitting antenna of a message
that destroyed the old individualistic subjectivity and split the public opinion into
two halves: that of the followers of the movement and that of the enemies. In the
historical evolution of the stridentist movement, its first period was marked by the
aesthetizing push, in which the radio, like the automobiles, the airplanes and the
motorcycles, were a symbol of the new; as Stridentism acquires a more clearly
political meaning, the radio becomes the symbol of the political agitation of the
avant-garde movements.
Appealed by all the manifestations of modernity, Stridentism is the first Latin-
American artistic movement that makes an effort to transform the city into a poetic
object, projecting on the Mexico of 1921 a model of cosmopolitan and technified
city inspired in the New York of Arensberg, of Stieglitz or of Mario de Zayas.
Maples Arce's manifesto Actual nº1 participated completely of the vanguardist
idolatry to modernity. Even its title reflects this ideology by defending the need for
a modern art and literature that, as Baudelaire had claimed, considered the big
city as an aesthetic object. In this context, the appearance of the radio necessarily
fed the cult to the machine and to the technological development that the
stridentists had learnt from the Futurism and Dada movements.
The wireless dissemination of messages to long distances the great advance of
the radio over the telegraph or the telephone seemed to them the perfect
representation of the cosmopolitan ideal, the most efficient weapon to destroy the
spatial barriers. In the same way, the fragmentary structure, like a collage, of the
messages and radio spots represented a valid model for the stridentist poem,
constructed by the juxtaposition of poetic images that broke the traditional
syntactic linearity. Similarly, the radio broadcasting antennas became metaphors
of the new aesthetics, broadening a repertory that had started when Marinetti
published his foundational manifesto of Futurism in 1909: lights, irradiating
projectors, missiles, cannons, voltaic arcs …