Isidore Isou

Isidore Isou (born January 29, 1925 as Isidor Goldstein in Botoșani in southern Bucovina ( Romania ); † July 28, 2007 in Paris ) was a French author , artist and philosopher . He founded Lettrism in the mid-1940s .

Life

Isidore Isou was the son of a restaurant owner of Jewish origin. At her own request, Isou left high school prematurely and worked for the Zionist underground magazine Palestine , which was life-threatening under the anti-Semitic regime of Ion Antonescu . At about the same time he was used by the Wehrmacht for forced labor. At the end of 1944 he founded the literary magazine Da together with Serge Moscovici , which was soon banned by the censors .

In August 1945 he settled in Paris and shortly afterwards proclaimed Lettrism , a literary and artistic movement based on the sign .

Isou caused a number of scandals, especially in the 1940s and 1950s, for example with his pornographic writing Isou ou la Mécanique des femmes (1949), for which he was sentenced to nine months probation and a heavy fine. The book itself was banned and has not been reprinted since. His pornography Initiation à la haute volupté , published in 1960, was also banned until 1977. His film Traité de bave et d'éternité (about: Treatise on Drool and Eternity) led to a riot at the Cannes Festival in 1951 . Despite almost unanimous protests from the press, he was awarded a prize awarded by Jean Cocteau and others.

Isou and his supporters called for an "uprising of the youth" and in 1948 founded a committee to promote this uprising. Their political designs were radicalized by some Lettrists around Guy Debord , who split off from the movement in the mid-1950s and established Situationism .

Isou, who had lived in seclusion since the 1950s, took part in documenta 8 in Kassel in 1987 . In 1994 he fell ill with a dysfunction of the cerebellum. In the last years of his life he was almost completely paralyzed .

plant

According to his own account, Isou got the idea for Lettrism on March 19, 1942 while reading a book by Hermann Keyserling . In the same year he drafted a “Lettrist Manifesto” which propagated the “destruction of words in favor of letters”. The lettristic autonomy of letters, signs and sounds led in the field of literature to sound poems , to a “pictoprose”, namely a connection of writing and image in the manner of a rebus , to “hypergraphic” novels that merge different writing systems, and the like Experiments. In addition to the sign, silence becomes "work material".

He soon transferred his poetological principles to music , the visual arts and film . In all of these areas, musical, pictorial or cinematic elements are replaced or superimposed by symbols. The signs of different origins lose their old meaning and gain a new one.

According to Isou, in all arts a phase that accumulates and expands (amplique) alternates with a decomposing and self-destructive (ciselante) phase. In literature the decomposition begins with Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé , in painting with Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne , in music with Claude Debussy . The first film of the "phase ciselante" is therefore Isous Traité de bave et d'éternité (for example: Treatise on Geifer and Eternity; 1951). It consists of material that was partly self-made and partly assembled from waste ( found footage ) into which characters have been scratched. The soundtrack , which is completely independent of the film images, offers a text that describes in a fictional way how the film came about and which iconoclastic ideas its maker connects with it.

In the fifties, Isou developed imaginary, perishable art forms and works of art that the viewer himself could create or complete, thus anticipating ideas from Conceptual Art , Nouveau Réalisme and Fluxus .

In his main work La Créatique ou la Novatique (1941–1976) , which originally comprised many thousands of pages , he explains the two basic concepts of his philosophy: the creative and the renewing. He does not refer to literature and art alone, but sees himself as a universal scholar . All areas of knowledge should be “cladological” (from the Greek κλάδος, “branch”), i.e. H. be sorted and renewed according to their own categories . Isou's very numerous writings therefore also include those on chemistry , linguistics , medicine , physics , psychology and law .

Fonts (selection)

• Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique , Gallimard , Paris 1947.
• L'Agrégation d'un nom et d'un messie. Roman , Gallimard, Paris 1947.
• Les Journaux des Dieux , Escaliers de Lausanne, Paris 1950.
• “Introduction à une esthétique imaginaire”, Front de la Jeunesse , 7/1956.
• Les Champs de Force de la Peinture Lettriste , Avant-Garde, Paris 1964.
• La Créatique ou la Novatique (1941–1976) , Éditions Al Dante / Léo Scheer, Paris 2003.

literature

• Jean-Paul Curtay: La poésie lettriste . Seghers, Paris 1974
• Greil Marcus: Lipstick Traces. From Dada to punk. Cultural avant-garde and their ways from the 20th century . German by Hans M. Herzog and Friedrich Schneider. Rogner & Bernhard at Zweiausendeins , Hamburg 1992. ISBN 3-8077-0254-7
• Michael Lentz : Sound poetry / music after 1945. A critical-documentary inventory . Edition Selene, Vienna 2000
• Michael Lentz: Once upon a time ... Il était une fois ... . Edition Selene, Vienna 2001
• Fabrice Flahutez , Le Lettrisme historique était une avant-garde , Les presses du réel, Paris / Dijon 2011, ISBN 978-2-84066-405-5 .
• The signs of the Messiah. Special issue from copybook (magazine) No. 78, 2012
• Sami Sjöberg: The Vanguard Messiah: lettrism between Jewish mysticism and the Avant-Garde (= European-Jewish studies / contributions , volume 21), De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin / Boston, MA 2015, ISBN 978-3-11-042779-0 .
• Nicolas Liucci-Goutnikov (ed.): Isidore Isou, Center Pompidou, Paris, 2019, ISBN 978-2-84426-844-0
• Frédéric Acquaviva: Isidore Isou , Editions du Griffon, Neuchatel, 2019.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Biographical data of Isidore Isou in: New German Literature , Issues 535-540, Volk und Welt, Deutscher Writer Association, 2001, p. 125.
2. ↑ So Isou himself in Frédérique Devaux: Entretiens avec Isidore Isou. Charlieu, Bartavelle 1992, pp. 38-41.
3. ↑ Isou in his autobiographical novel L'Agrégation d'un nom et d'un messie . Gallimard, Paris 1947, p. 162.
4. ^ Bernard Joubert: Histoires de censure. Érotique anthology. La Musardine, Paris 2006, pp. 91-95. Also: Bernard Girard: Lettrisme - l'ultime avantgarde . Presses du réel, Dijon 2010, p. 28.
5. ^ "Radical outsider: French author Isidore Isou has died" , Die Presse , August 1, 2007.
6. ↑ On the fate of film at the Cannes Festival: Frédérique Devaux: Le Cinéma lettriste (1951–1991). Paris Expérimental, Paris 1992, pp. 55-62.
7. ↑ Isidore Isou: Traité d'Économie nucléaire. Le Soulèvement de la jeunesse. Escaliers de Lausanne, Paris 1949.
8. ↑ On this, Guy Debord and Gil J Wolman : “Pourquoi le lettrisme?”, Potlatch , 22/1955 .
9. ↑ Michael Lentz: Once upon a time ... Il était une fois ... Edition Selene, Vienna 2001, p. 9.
10. ↑ Isidore Isou: L'Agrégation d'un nom et d'un messie. Gallimard, Paris 1947, p. 152.
11. ↑ Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique , Gallimard, Paris 1947, p. 15.
12. ^ Isidore Isou: Précisions sur ma poésie et moi (1950). Exils, Paris 2003, p. 11ff. See also Michael Lentz: Sound poetry / music after 1945 | Sound poetry / music after 1945. A critical-documentary inventory . Edition Selene, Vienna 2000, p. 315.
13. ↑ According to Isou, it is important "to form a meaning out of the emptiness of the signs that exceeds the capacity of purely aesthetic pleasure." Mirella Bandini: Pour une histoire du lettrisme. Translated from the Italian by Anne-Catherine Caron. Jean-Paul Rocher, Paris 2003, p. 16.
14. ^ Frédérique Devaux: Entretiens avec Isidore Isou. Charlieu, Bartavelle 1992, pp. 70f. See also Jean-Paul Curtay: La poésie lettriste . Seghers, Paris 1974, p. 24, and Bernard Girard: Lettrisme - l'ultime avantgarde . Presses du réel, Dijon 2010, pp. 73ff.
15. ↑ See Frédérique Devaux: Traité de bave et d'éternité d'Isidore Isou . Yellow Now, Crisnée 1994 and Gabriele Jutz: Cinéma brut. An alternative genealogy of the film avant-garde . Springer, Vienna / New York 2010, pp. 205–211.
16. ↑ Cf. Stefan Ripplinger : "Mundomanie. An introduction to thinking by Isidore Isou", writing booklet , 78/2012 , pp. 23–31, especially p. 23 and P. 30; also Mirella Bandini: Pour une histoire du lettrisme . Translated from the Italian by Anne-Catherine Caron. Jean-Paul Rocher, Paris 2003, pp. 20ff.
17. ↑ See the bibliography and works catalog compiled by the Lettrist Roland Sabatier ( Memento of November 10, 2007 in the Internet Archive ).

Web links

• Site Isidore Isou ( Memento of November 10, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (French, accessed November 15, 2009)