Ruidos y susurros de las vanguardias - Medialab Prado

narrative linearity in the stridentist literature.
On the other hand, as already mentioned, both the jazz and the avant-garde
music composed by Silvestre Revueltas, have the value of rescuing the most
archaic and lively aspects of art, repressed by the conservative culture. In a
paradox typically vanguardist, this primitiveness of the new musics would also be
the perfect expression of the modern city life. By converting the noise of the
machines into an aesthetic object, contemporary music is, for Maples, the
expression of the modern world, but also of the rhythmic and expressive values of
the popular or extraoccidental music. As it had already happened with other
manifestations of the modernist culture, also in this case a certain old-fashioned
regression paradoxically characterized the utopian anticipation of future. Maples
discovers in Jazz the relevance of such values by considering it the manifestation
of the North American urban culture and of the authentic expression of the African
music. The corporal and tactile values of the African rhythm fuse with the
automation of the mechanical noises, both against the tonal harmony and
melodic syntax of the conservative music. Revising the theory of Noisism by the
futurist Luigi Russolo, Maples proposes that the difference between noise and
sound is based on the instability of the vibrations in the former, instability that
allows the listener to go beyond the classical notion of tonal harmony, increasing
his capacity to enjoy with the changing noises.
3.- Radio station Estridentópolis.
The year 1925 will mean a change in the stridentist aesthetics to more clearly
political concerns. This inflection had its precursor in the publication in 1924 of
Maples' book Urbe. Super-Poema bolchevique en 5 Cantos, and became clear
from the mid 1925, when the group moves to Xalapa. Living in the capital of the
state of Veracruz as a magistrate and then as the Secretary of the State under the
command of General Heriberto Jara, the governor of the State, Maples Arce
brings Germán List Arzubide to the city, who will be the editor of the journal
Horizonte, and the painters and illustrators Ramón Alva de la Canal and Leopoldo
Méndez,.
In this new scenario, the activities of the group greatly developed with a clear
political, propagandist and educational meaning. Far from the Mexican literary
meetings and immersed in the political fights of the nation, the stridentists spread
their avant-garde strategy of agitation in different sectors, reflected in Horizonte.
“Revista Mensual de Actividad Contemporánea. In its first issue (April 1926), List
established the editorial guidelines of the journal that intended to be the vanguard
in a political sense, like a guide to orient the crisis of a nation that, feeling
necessary to destroy the past, went to fight and broke it down, and once
triumphant, it finds itself alone, owner of all the roads but not knowing which one to
follow. The publications and activities of the group changed from being the
guiding line for the Mexican artistic renovation and scourge of the so-called comecazuelas
literarios to being the guides of the Veracruz people in their fight against
the reactionary force of the local right party and against the interests of the North
American oil companies. The literary avant-garde became, in this way, the
political avant-garde, as it happened with the mural movement, and List joins the
Communist party, as also did Diego Rivera, Tina Modotti or David Alfaro
Siqueiros.
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But for this politization of the avant-garde were also useful the metaphors of the
literary group and, thus, the journal self-defined as flashing light that indicates the
path in these convulsed moments (...) tribune of the modern political, social,
philosophical and aesthetic doctrines that clarifies the route and appraises the
effort. These different scenarios had their place in the journal, that in its ten issues
published articles relative to all these topics, as well as texts of a practical and
educational nature, like the text published with the title of “Instalación de la antena
aérea”. The radio was conceived as an efficient means for the purposes of the
political avant-garde and the antenna was the perfect metaphor of the artistic
avant-garde.
The book by Germán List Arzubide, El movimiento estridentista (1928),
constitutes a passionate chronicle of that aesthetic and political experiment of the
avant-garde. Some fragments that show the stridentist fascination by the radio
allow us to complete the tour of a trip that Stridentism and the radio walked
together, from their beginnings in 1923 with the reading of T.S.H. to 1928, when
the group of Xalapa dissolves and the commercial radio triumphs. In El
movimiento estridentista List chooses two images as symbols of the activity of the
group in Xalapa. The first image is a photograph by Pedro S. Casillas Torres de
radio de Estridentópolis; the second is a xylograph by Ramón Alva de la Canal, La
estación de radio de Estridentópolis. In both of them, the antenna of the radio
station symbolize the dream of converting Veracruz city into the diffusing center of
the avant-garde aesthetics, of the revolutionary ideology of the group and of the
policy of technological development started by General Heriberto Jara, protector
of the stridentists. Xalapa, capital of the state of Veracruz and the headquarter of
the government, was renamed by the young poets as Estridentópolis and the
radio antenna appears in the illustration by Alva de la Canal as a symbol of the refounded
city. The radio towers of Estridentópolis, List says, harangued the
continents with this voice of victory, provoking telegraphic adhesions (1928, 90).
Inspired by this radio metaphor of the agitating and propagandist activity of
Stridentism, List refers to the high words launched by the group, as well as to the
capacity of the radio to melt the temporal and spatial limits in the emission of the
message. Through the radio antennas flow the outcries of the day and the infinite
concentrates in its woken nights of ultra-sky messages. The radio becomes the
editor of newspapers that construct the aerial universe; the radio programs are
the scream of its light drilling the distance of the stars with its mechanical truth; the
radio messages awake time to throw it to the infinite. The antenna is also the
beacon or the North of the magnetic attraction, and its signal a compass that
guides people: men have placed the compass pointing towards Estridentópolis
(…) The crowds hear a gallop of wings pass through and let their robust breadth
go towards the beat of the sleepless voices that, divergent of the past, open to
unknown horizons. When List remembers the start of the movement in Mexico
city, he recalls the atmosphere of El café de Nadie, the place that gathered the first
activities of the vanguardist group: mechanical café where the waitresses order
the drinks by the radio and the piano plays the music full of Martian concerts in
their discourses of worn-out paper. List also reproduces his poem “Ciudad
número 1” and the xylograph by Alva de la Canal published in the journal
Horizonte; there where the radio again becomes an image that synthesizes the
stridentist vision of the city: The scream of the towers / in steps of radio / the wires
of the telegraph / introduce the night. In one of Maples' poems selected by List, the