Ideas Have No Smell: Three Belgian Surrealist Booklets: Paul Nougé, Paul Colinet, Louis Scutenaire (Ugly Duckling, 2018)
I like to look at the sleeve of Ideas Have No Smell as a treasure trove. Or a treasure chest. As my fingers touch the textured paper and pull out what is contained within, I feel the value of joy that only I can know, the reader intimately locked into an incoming history lesson. A sense of fictional and self-imposed nostalgia. A bearing of mystery and radicality that will flip switches and produce great emergence. Contained within the sleeve is a beautiful micro-collection of avant garde documents, all translated from the French with heart-churning grace by M. Kasper: Transfigured Publicity by Paul Nougé; Abstractive Treatise on Obeuse by Paul Colinet; and For Balthazar by Louis Scutenaire. Holding possession over these voices, be they bleeps that puff like shaken dust or guffaws echoing across canyons of bookshelves, is a magical experience. They skitter across the desk in their flightiness. They cascade and maninpulate their image through the sorting and the shuffling. They are three siblings aligned with charm and quixotic presence. All are gently wrapped together into a compelling and illuminating essay by Mary Ann Caws, which is, in a mode of abstract rebellion, printed on the backside of a large Vispo text created by Paul Nougé. This text, partially broadside, partially map, is both minimal and bizarrely engrossing at the same time; there is a vortex of language that (as readers will discover in their own way) pulled from and given into Transfigured Publicity. With the involvement of Kasper and Caws, a gentle subtext of approval smooths out the ruffled process of three individual experimenters of the 20th Century and their collectivity in this publication. But despite the analysis, the thorough homework and critique and biography included within Caws’s essay and within the works themselves, the translated batch of titles feels strong on its own. “DON’T FORGET / IN / THIS / CITY / ONE CAN / WITH NO FUSS / PROCURE / AUTOMATIC PISTOLS / AND / SPEAKING MACHINES” reads a random page I open in the Nougé text. Transfigured Publicly (pulled together from a performance in 1926) is filled with these anti-aphoristic expressions, evocative and startling and absurd. That these books are surrealistic is a matter of history. That they read like the Futurists and Dadaists is quintessential. “LOOK / AROUND / YOU // LOOK / IN / YOUR / MIRROR // THIS / CORPSE / THESE / POOR / CORPSES / WHO / ARE / CORPSES / GLADLY” goes another. A burst of laughter is followed by my trembling, caffeinated composure. What is this breakdown in language? The full sense of an appreciated nihilism. An examination of the ruination of society, but in a way that is alleviating and enlightening. Nougé by way of Kasper bleeds the history of his contemporaries and predecessors, but now, with this iteration, there is a reinforcement of the clusters of brilliance from a hundred years ago. Part of the awe of Ideas Have No Smell is that the brilliance from the previous century is carried forth to now, to this moment, to this lens, and yet with it carries the history itself. While Nougé’s language might feel as contemporary and provocative now as it was when it was first composed (written, performed, and so on), Paul Colinet’s Abstractive Treatise on Obeuse (pulled together at various points throughout the 20th Century) feels distinctly from another era. It feels like Oulipo. It feels like absurdism. It feels like symbolism, and Dadaism, and it feels challenging separate. The juxtaposition with Nougé is dynamic and their perpendicular meeting point is water feeding flame, and otherwise. In the text, Colinet has created a character, as simple as possible, illustrated in the form of a black circle, colored in (a la scribble). “OBEUSE / IN ONLY ONE STITCH / (definitive edition)” the book begins, with the circle hovering above. The isolation is breathtaking, and yet disturbing. It is humorous and deadpan. It is conceptual and agonizing. The book continues page after page (for eleven pages total) collecting a form of examination (retrospection, even) the dissolves as minimally as it appears. The casual reader would blast through the work in under two minutes, and might not give it a second thought. I admit I leaned toward such a direction before reading the curious and thorough afterword provided by Kasper. The text, the treasure in the trove, has a story ranging from Breton to Magritte to Piqueray, and is deserving a good read. There is humor within the text itself, and there is humor within the afterword itself, for other reasons. It begs some understanding, perhaps a foray, into the dance between the biographer and the artist, between Kasper and Colinet, in a way that is rarely as shocking to understand in most publications. The mystery, in other words, is a tracing of the ghost of the self and the ability to vanquish the ghost and pounce towards history. History and mystery continue their place front and center in the final of the three volumes in Ideas Have No Smell, the rough and personal For Balthazar by Louis Scutenaire (published as a pamphlet in 1967). Utterly contemporary in tone and form alike, this tiny booklet is a single string of utterances and statements ranging from the philosophical to the narrative to the confessional. “No matter what, no matter how, no matter where.” begins the book. “So happy to ignore anything he doesn’t know.” ends it. There is an urgency that gets filled in with exclamatory nonsense, unstoppable personalization, and a giant warp of meaning. That Scutenaire had a varied background, going far beyond writerly experience to form his representational methods, is important to realize. That this sequence might as well be considered aphorisms despite its nature of connectivity and a larger plot is important as well. Ultimately, I read it and find it fleeting, but important. I find it a form of personal interrogation, and also distanced. For Balthazar may be a keystone to this writer’s significant other spaces and operations. Ultimately it might not strike out the way the other two pieces of the collection strike, but its lashing is long-lasting and affording a revisit. In thinking about the avant garde, Surrealism, and beyond, treasures like this will only aid us in learning about our own contexts. It’s fantastic that Ugly Duckling has done due diligence to craft the historic record and bring it to a beautiful, well-crafted fruition. It would be even more significant to see future translations made available of these writers and their obvious, intensely fascinating other writings.
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No Finis: Triangle Testimonies, 1911 by Deborah Woodard (Ravenna Press, 2019)
mechanically, she gripped the air’s one rung (from “Mr. Steuer and Edward G. Worth, Battalion Chief, Fire Department”) Tragic moments can be made beautiful. They can be recovered moments that retell a story, an act, a consequence through a humanized lens. In doing so, the past gets supported while the individual people within that past are provided with new life. In following tragedy, there is always room for more life, more experiences, more time to reconcile, grow, and find new memory and remembering. Those artists who take it upon themselves to preserve and enhance history have much to risk; they are working with lives and the fragility of those lives may be ruptured. The risk of the causing of or potential for additional harm may make some artists pause. It may also be the risk that spurs action. In No Finis: Triangle Testimonies, 1911, a new book by the Seattle-based writer Deborah Woodard, the risk is taken, and the steps are treaded lightly. Tragedy in the case of this book concerns the horrifying Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which occurred in early 1911 in the Asch Building of New York City. This fire, which still gets taught in grade school history lessons throughout the United States, led to the death of 146 workers who were trapped through barricaded/locked doors and enflamed elevators. The details of the results are, objectively, grim and the occasion for grief is infinite. Still, within No Finis, Woodard carefully maneuvers through the loss to the life after the fire: those lives that continued on, those people who did not die in the fire, those who had opportunity to tell their story. The book is written through the perspective of a defense attorney of the building’s owners, who were tried to death but made it through court with their lives intact. Thanks to Max Steuer, their attorney, the trial resulted in acquittal. The book is about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire as much as it is about this trial that followed. The lives of those who survived are expressly and thoroughly examined through small sequences (call them micro-fiction, call them poems) of the exchanges of the court. What results, what is born out of the tragedy of history and the history books, is an absurd, pensive, and occasionally heartbreaking situation between a man doing his job and a group of people who share trauma and an identity of survival. I dream two scars where the wings should be. I see the mechanical up and down of the feathers each time I breathe. (from “Mr. Steuer and Ida Okan”) Woodard’s ability to humanize these individuals through the setting of the court is stunning. The book challenges our removal through space and time via empathy. Each of the witnesses and their testimonies are individual and lovable. They are humans with voices and lives. Positioned against the heinous and appearing-sociopathic Steuer, whose own sense of empathy is null, the entire courtroom and its inhabitants becomes a space of caring, a space to want to heal and to hope for retribution and resolution. The building’s owners make no appearance in Woodard’s book, nor should they: they have been replaced by (displaced by?) the stalwart, discriminant Steuer through which the entirety of the “new” narrative (the book) is controlled. This situation, carefully constructed by Woodard, provides entry to empathetic moments and a grueling, growing disdain for the callous men in power within the courts of the early 20th century. This book is short and its individual sequences rush by and fade. The sequences are, of course, representative of how Woodard has interpreted the testimonies and defenses of the survivors. The sequences are, too, poetically positioned to support one another in the shadow of the strategy of Steuer (and the Court, which might through its own blankness of bureaucracy be a character of this story). In total, they create that humanized lens, that balance to tragedy, and that fullness of visitation into the pains of a very acute history and inconceivable loss. Did you cry out for your sisters, then? (from “Mr. Steuer and Joseph Brenman”) Illustrations are included in the text in No Finis. Created by John Burgess, they appear hand-created, almost rough on the edges, very consistently bringing the abstract and the representative together. Diagrams of the movement and location of the fire, and illustrations of floor plans and city blocks are placed before and after the textual sequences, put into position in front of the survivors of the fire, unlocking or locking doors through conceptual confusion. Each comes with a description and footnotes, and the illustrations form their own sequence titled, by Burgess, “Testimony.” Perhaps, then, the illustrations tell their own story, offer their own perspective, deserve their own voice. Woodard in her introduction writes of the illustrations collection: “[It] underscores the cramped geometries of the work lofts, with its grid of tables and hard-to-access exits [. . .] Strewn dots, indicating the burial sites and memorials to the victims, suggest a scattering of seeds—the ongoing potential for regeneration and redress.” These words should be applied to this book as a whole, which ultimately is a literary memorial for those who not only faced horror head-on, but found the strength to continue going through and beyond to new challenges, to further survival. |
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All reviews by Greg Bem unless marked otherwise.
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