Ruidos y susurros de las vanguardias - Medialab Prado

communicate that overcomes distance and loneliness:
Where is the nest
of this mechanical song?
The sleepless antennas of remembrance
collect
the wireless messages
of some worn-out good bye
shipwrecked women
who err their transatlantic
ways;
and the voices
of help
like flowers
burst in the strings
of the international chords
Also in 1923, a few months after the emission of “T.S.H.”, the journal Irradiador
appears in Mexico city, directed by Maples Arce and the stridentist painter Fermín
Revueltas. The name of the journal again refers to the image of radiation or
irradiation as a symbol of the avant-garde ideology. The subtitle Revista de
vanguardia, proyector internacional de la nueva estética, joins the images of the
antenna, the irradiator and the projector to mean the avant-garde desire of
diluting space and time frontiers: rather than by the message to transmit, the
avant-garde is defined by analogy with the radio medium. The medium is, then,
the message; the avant-garde is the adaptation of literature and music to the
development of the new mass media.
In the first issue of Irradiador there are two clear proofs of the complicity of the
stridentists with the newly established commercial radio stations. On one hand,
two propaganda radio spots by the radio stations La casa de la radio and El
Universal Ilustrado, the latter presented as “T.S.H”. And on the other hand, and of
much more importance is the article, probably written by Maples, Irradiación
inaugural, in which the metaphor of irradiation is widely developed, using again
the image of the antenna and a vision of the city in which the bright colors of the
advertisements transform the buildings into talking façades:
Irradioscopy. The city is full of dynamo installations, of gears and
cables. And the talking façades powerfully shout their bright colors
from one side of the street to the other. Cervecería Moctezuma and El
Buen Tono. Refacciones Ford. Aspirina Bayer Vs. Lanford Cinema 0 1
p the farewells sail out to the sea.
You are overwhelmed, but we ideologically always conclude our
extravasal plane of expression, emotion and suggestion, relationship
and intraobjective coordination (abstractionist theory -fundamental
system) fragmentary exhibition, nunism, synchronism, intellectual
fatigue (senestesia), and thematic enumeralization. Algebraic
schematization, Jazz Band, oil, New York. The city all sparks polarized
on the antennas of an unlikely radio station
As it can be seen, the stridentists use the concept of the radio to provide a vision
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of the city and of the modern world led by the idea of a universal irradiation, in
which the machines, ads and buildings project on the citizen-spectator, stimuli
that alter his perception of the space-time relationship.
That same year of 1923 the book of poems by Germán List Arzubide Esquina is
published, whose structural procedures are based on the systems of cinema or
radio newsreels (Schneider, 1970, 81). Each verse seems to be taken from an ad
to form the fragment of an absent discourse, isolating meanings that by losing
their relation with the original text compose a chain of moving metonymies. The
verses of Esquina, like earlier the verses of Prisma, respond to what List and
Maples call multiemotional image and equivalentist image, whose intention would
be to catalogue the imaginable simple perceptions, as in cubism. But the most
perfect expression of the similarities of this poetic movement with the structure of
the radio will be Kyn Taniya's poem book (pen name of the stridentist poet Luis
Quintanilla) Radio. Poema inalámbrico en trece mensajes (1924).
The book was conceived as a radio program or, rather, as an anthology of voices
captured by the radio receiver when moving the dial from one end to the other.
Like the walker that takes pictures of the city from one corner or the observer that
projects his prismatic sight on the city, also the poet captures messages that travel
through the sound waves. The turning of the radio dial, whose noise is reproduced
onomatopoeically in one of the poems, is the prototype of the stridentist image,
since, as Kyn Taniya says, it would consist of grabbing all the sounds that swing in
the kilometric hammock of the waves. In Schneider's words (1970, 88), the poet
constructs in these thirteen poems an unreal, cosmic or astral scenario: as if he
were interested in documenting, painting the wireless waves (…) the technique of
radio news or radio broadcasts forms the basic structure of his poems.
Roberto Montenegro's drawing for the book's front cover, perfectly transcribes the
space evoked by Kyn Taniya's poems: the letters of the word radio together with
some stars in white illuminate a black background formed by waving masses like
waves; rays and broken lines radially laid out complete a composition dominated
by a vibrating fast rhythm. Montenegro embodies in this way some of the key
images of the book, like that of the poem “Midnight Frolic”, in which the words
launched to space by the radio fly free in an electrified atmosphere:
Silence
Listen to the dialogue of the words
in the atmosphere
There is an unbearable mess of earth voices
And of weird
far voices
the hair bristles in contact with the Hertzian waves
Blasts of electric wind blow
in the ears
With the creation of this universe of Hertzian waves, Quintanilla transforms the
natural landscape and draws the sea as a space plied by waves, words, music
notes. This is the image that in the book structures the different poems: ethereal
messages that travel through infinite spaces, shining words that, like stars, leave
back a luminous trail. Thus, for example, in “Marina”: