Lettrism

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The Lettrism (fr. Lettrisme to French. Lettre , letter ) is a 1945 by Isidore Isou in Paris , founded literary and artistic movement that in a consistent continuation and systematization among other dadaist and surrealist tendencies the decomposition of words into letters and their recomposition to aimed at meaningless sound structures.

development

Isidore Isou, a 21-year-old Romanian artist, announced the founding of the Lettrist movement in 1946. The new movement with around twenty members announced optimistically on posters in the Latin Quarter in 1948 : 120,000 young people will conquer the streets to make the Lettrist Revolution. The aim was to revolutionize traditional aesthetics. The Lettrists saw language as exhausted in their creativity; in the future, artistic production should focus on a purer and more profound element of poetry : the letter . This atomistic decomposition of language into its smallest, indivisible and purest unit, as well as the recombination of these individual elements, gives the poetic creation freshness and vitality which the Lettrists missed in language for a long time. Signs should be used instead of images . Isou called his theory hypergraphology. The aim was to replace figuration and abstraction in painting with letters and symbols.

Lettrists were known for adding letters and slogans to their clothing.

Dealing with architecture was also very important to the Lettrists. They put forward the thesis that the liberation of life follows the liberation of the city. It was important to them that the totality of the arts does not exist apart from reality, but is based on an activity worth living. Thus, the Lettrists were looking for a liberating urban development with a new lifestyle. This was at the same time the theoretical basis for the situationists.

There was a split in the group over the question of whether art and aesthetics should continue to be the field of work or Dadaist anti- art and sabotage are the necessary means to directly influence reality. The sabotage faction then founded the Lettrist International .

Guy Debord (who later distanced himself from them) and other protagonists of Situationism also emerged from the circle of Lettrists . In the lettrist movement a group had formed that gathered around Guy Debord. This group was first noticed when they kidnapped a priest on April 9, 1950 at an Easter mass in the Paris Cathedral Notre-Dame and replaced him with Michel Mourre, a representative from their own ranks. Mourre, disguised as a Dominican , gave a “sermon” in front of around 10,000 visitors to the mass, in which he proclaimed “God is dead”. In the resulting turmoil, the group of Lettrists who were present had to flee and only barely escaped a lynching by the angry crowd. After the group also tried to break up a press conference for Charlie Chaplin , Isou distanced himself from them, and the Debord supporters founded the Lettrist International , which later became the Situationist International .

In 1972 Mike Rose was the only German to come across the Parisian group of Lettrists. The "sign" pictures created during this time became internationally known. Eugen Gomringer wrote about Mike Rose: "Today he can quite rightly be called 'The German contribution to Lettrism'."

Richard Grasshoff defines lettrism in his dissertation as a "production strategy that unites mystical, ludic and decompositional character traits at its core" and accordingly distinguishes between the variants Mystical Lettrism, Ludistic Lettrism and Decompositional Lettrism; he advocates the thesis that the narrow understanding of lettrism as “nonsense poetry” or a purely avant-garde production strategy cannot be maintained.

Lettrism shows parallels to concrete poetry and especially to visual poetry and was also adapted from literary studies .

The most important works of early lettrist film include Le film est déjà commencé? by Maurice Lemaître (1951), Traité de bave et d'éternité by Isidore Isou (1951) and L'Anticoncept by Gil J. Wolman (1952). Isou described the fundamentals of lettrist cinema aesthetics in his Esthétique du cinéma (1953).

Quotes

  • […] And I found my people. There were alcoholics, very young alcoholics, like all of us. They got together in the afternoon and then there was music, noise, conversations all night [...]
  • Everyone is a child of many fathers. There's the father we hated, surrealism, and there was the father we loved: DADA. - Michèle Bernstein
  • We are the ones who will bring the only true anger into social struggles. You don't make the revolution by asking for 25,216 francs a month. You have to win your life immediately, your completely earthly life in which everything is possible:
  • We must support an insurrection that affects us that is proportionate to our demand. We stand for a certain idea of ​​happiness, even if it has always lost so far, an idea that every revolutionary program must first align itself with.

See also

literature

  • 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.
  • Fabrice Flahutez: Le lettrisme historique était une avant-garde. Presses du réel, Paris 2011, ISBN 978-2-84066-405-5 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Marcus: Lipstick Traces. 1992, p. 280.
  2. ↑ Marcus: Lipstick Traces. 1992, p. 337.
  3. ↑ Marcus: Lipstick Traces. 1992, p. 289 ff .: The attack on Notre-Dame
  4. ↑ Marcus: Lipstick Traces. 1992, p. 335 f.
  5. ↑ Eugen Gomringer in: Mike Rose. Bamberg 1959-1979. Catalog for the exhibition in the Neue Residenz, Bamberg: Mike Rose - a first overview of his work , Hanau, 1979, ISBN 3-921726-05-0

Web links