Ruidos y susurros de las vanguardias - Medialab Prado

On top of each wave
a star dances
drunk notes of freshness
do not find their way any longer
The transatlantic messages
lie down on the sea weeds
or frolic in the water with the ivory fish
restless antennas shake out annoying atoms
that come and go
There are frozen words that die
in the moon silvery river
And sighs that are lost in the touch
with a crystal froth
CLEAR IDEAS LEAVE A TRAIL IN THE SEA
The synthesis of the radio and the landscape, of the machine and nature, covers
in Quintanilla the two possible directions. On one hand he mechanizes the
landscape, and on the other, he naturalizes and humanizes the machine by
transforming the electric power of the waves into voice and music. Thus, in
“Noche verde”:
Light
becomes music for the souls
and is the echo of some universal song
The possibilities of communication opened by the new medium are, to the poet's
view, ways of freedom for the individual and also of fusion with a spirited cosmos,
represented by the poetic image of noche verde:
From side to side
I will go through all your hours
I will swim through all your lights
Diaphanous magnetic currents
will take me to rest on the space reefs
and thus slowly
I will swim throughout all the green hours of the night
In this attempt to renew the romantic stock of poetic images (the sea, loneliness,
the night), Quintanilla also transforms the topics about the woman to present
feminized machines or mechanical women. Some times, the radio seems a
woman, as when in “Alba” (one of the poems of Radio) we read: and the frolic
antennas / enjoy electric shocks of freshness. In some other cases, the antennas,
like light lamps, irradiating projectors … form a repertoire of phallic images. In
Quintanilla's poem ¡Oh ciudad infantil! (1926) the city seems a strange animal:
the city / it was all trembling with blond antennas / that grew on the front and
reached the sun. In another of his poems, Todo ella, published in 1926 and
dedicated to the Argentinian actress Berta Singerman, the woman is: Body. /
Sound body, all vibrating like a weak lustful antenna, / like a weak antenna that
shakes out the spasms of the message.
But the most representative illustration of this kind of humanization of the radio is
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the poem “Telepatía”, published in El Universal Ilustrado, 01-09-1927. Its author,
Elías Nandino, although belonging to the group Contemporáneos, seems in
these verses very close to the stridentist aesthetics, especially in his association
of the amorous seduction with telepathy, as if the glance of his lover lit up the
heart-antenna of her lover:
Your glance spreads
by the back of air
and quivers
like the water skin
In the antenna of my heart
wireless cuddles
tie up
and feels the magnetism
of your eyes
wrapping up my soul ...
To conclude, we can say that the radio played a relevant role in the development
of the stridentist aesthetics, becoming a frequent motto in their poems and in
some of their drawings and illustrations. Similarly, we have presented the
conceptual keys that explain the stridentist interest for the radio, the authentic
metaphor of modernity, a technological advance that in the optimistic and naive
eyes of the stridentists, should enhance the development of a universal
cosmopolitan culture. After the publication of Actual by the end of 1921 and the
first flirts of the group, like Irradiación inaugural in 1923, Maples Arce was in the
position to tackle in 1924 the definition of the aesthetic bases of Stridentism. Of
great importance in this theoretical effort was the article published in El Universal
Ilustrado (3 July 1924) with the title “Jazz-XY”. As it had happened with the radio,
contemporary music, and Jazz in particular, indicates the course to poetry. The
new mass media (cinema, radio, but also the automobile and the aircraft) and the
associate artistic forms (jazz, publicity, posters, graphic design, etc.) represented
authentic experimental laboratories for the new aesthetics. Jazz, like also the
radio, was a part of the amount of fetishes of the urban culture of New York that the
stridentists admired so much. Not in vain, from the few data known about the
reading of “T.S.H.” on the radio, we know that musician Manuel M. Ponce was
responsible for its music, starting the collaboration between the stridentist poets
and the musicians closest to the group that gave their best fruits in the figure of
Silvestre Revueltas. According to Maples in the article above mentioned, jazz as
well as the stridentist poetry, educate the listener in a new sensitivity, beyond the
traditional concept of tonal harmony, and opening their minds to the unstable
vibrations and to the tonal decompositions. Whereas for the traditional sensitivity
educated in the romantic style, jazz music, with its African archaic touch, would be
nothing but only noise, for the stridentists' ear it would awake the enjoyment for
the changing, unstable and disharmonic. The preponderance of rhythm in the
new musics and the fusion in the same piece of different rhythms and beats would
be according to Maples the musical equivalent to the structure of the stridentist
poem. One and the other operate based on the principles of overlapping and
juxtaposition of simple images, renouncing to the ideal of organic totality. The
destruction of the melodic linearity replaced by a fast and obsessive rhythm in
Jazz would have its equivalent in the breaking of the traditional syntax and its