Breaking the Rules

Cabaret Voltaire

Too long away from the blog - travels to The Hague and Paris intervening, a plethora of meetings and nterviews, and then it's catch-up with e-mails etc. The exhibition is going well and interest in showing abroad. This weekend we should be up to 90,000 visitors. And on Tuesday it's the Futurist Banquet.

Looked at 'Cabaret Voltaire' (1916) tonight. Edited by Hugo Ball, in an edition of 500 and at 1 Swiss franc unbound, it includes Huelsenbeck, Janco and Tzara's simultaneist 'L'admiral cherche une maison a louer', Apollinaire's 'Arbre', an etching by Picasso which is 'Mademoiselle Leonie' from his illustrations to Max Jacob's 'Saint Matorel', Marinetti's parole in liberta, 'Dune' and Blaise Cendrars' 'Crepitements' - this has always been regarded by his editors as 'unauthorised', and has an additional line 'comme dans le manifeste futuriste signe Apollinaire'.

The magazine shows quite a mix of Dada, futurism and cubism as well as showing the international nature of the 'little magazine'.

But how did this version of Cendrars' poem get here?

More writing

This weekend's task has been an article for one of the big daily newspapers - 1500 words. It's difficult getting the last article out of my head. A different approach is necessary so the focus is on the exhibition layout and the differentials between 'Breaking the Rules' and other exhibitions on Modernism, Undercover Surrealism, Dada etc. Cendrars and Klebnikov get another mention. And Futurism is looming larger and larger as the umbrella of all the isms - whether it's Marinetti in London, Moscow, St Petersburg, or being translated into Czech etc. I once defined the Dadaists as 'futurists who disliked futurism' - and there is a lot of truth in this. I end the piece with the Nazi Book Burnings of May 1933 - this included some of the works in the exhibition - Sander, Roh etc.

Ambient Sound

Geraldine rings to get me down to discuss ambient sound. The idea is to have a white space gallery-like introduction to the exhibition with a single Kurt Schwitters Merz painting with collaged printed material on its surface, as a preface to the noisy materiality of the manifestos, artists' books, little magazines etc. I want some sound to bleed between the two areas - a Schwitters reading of 'Ursonata' and Marinetti's 'Battle of Adrianople' poem. Both are text-based but emphasize phonetic qualities of words, consonants and letters. Whilst the Marinetti still has a figurative relationship to the real world - the onomatopoeia of explosions and machine guns, the Schwitters is more abstract, stressing the phonic qualities independent of any referent. But both are remarkably similar.

(My favourite anecdote is that the birds of the forest where Schwitters practiced the 'Ursonata' started to imitate him - and are still reciting it to this day!!)

David, the sound consultant, suggests a collage of the two. We look where to have the sound in the now cavernous void of the exhibition space and come up with four speakers on the pillar and oppposite wall at the bottom of the stairs between the intro and the main space. We discuss the intervals between silence and sound, and the need to be able to turn off for gallery tours etc.