Toward an Architecture

LC Bouteilles

Argument

Aesthetic of the Engineer

Architecture

Aesthetic of the Engineer, Architecture: two things firmly allied, sequential, the one in full flower, the other in painful regression.

The engineer, inspired by the law of Economy and guided by calculations, puts us in accord with universal laws. He attains harmony.

The architect, through the ordonnance of forms, realizes an order that is a pure creation of his mind; through forms, he affects our senses intensely, provoking plastic emotions; through the relationships that he creates, he stirs in us deep resonances, he gives us the measure of an order that we sense to be in accord with that of the world, he determines the diverse movements of our minds and our hearts; it is then that we experience beauty.

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МЫ. Вариант манифеста

WE: Variant of a Manifesto

We call ourselves kinoks – as opposed to ‘cinematographers’, a herd of junkmen doing rather well peddling their rags.

We see no connection between true kinchestvo and the cunning and calculation of the profiteers.

We consider the psychological Russo-German film-drama – weighed down with apparitions and childhood memories – an absurdity.

To the American adventure film with its showy dynamism and to the dramatizations of the American Pinkertons the kinoks say thanks for the rapid shot changes and the close-ups. Good … but disorderly, not based on a precise study of movement. A cut above the psychological drama, but still lacking in foundation. A cliché. A copy of a copy.

WE proclaim the old films, based on the romance, theatrical films and the like, to be leprous.

– Keep away from them!

– Keep your eyes off them!

– They’re mortally dangerous!

– Contagious!

WE affirm the future of cinema art by denying its present.

‘Cinematography’ must die so that the art of the cinema may live. WE call for its death to be hastened.

МЫ открытым лицом к осознанию машинного ритма, восторга механического труда, восприятию красоты химических процессов, поем землетрясения, слагаем кинопоэмы пламени и электростанциям, восторгаемся движениями комет и метеоров и ослепляющими звезды жестами прожекторов.

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VING-TROS MANIFESTES DU MOUVEMENT DADA

Dada Manifesto

No more painters, no more writers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more republicans, no more royalists, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more Bolsheviks, no more politicians, no more proletarians, no more democrats, no more bourgeois, no more aristocrats, no more armies, no more police, no more fatherlands, enough of all these imbecilities, no more anything, no more anything, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.

We hope something new will come from this, being exactly what we no longer want, determinedly less putrid, less selfish, less materialistic, less obtuse, less immensely grotesque.

Long live concubines and the con-cubists. All members of the DADA movement are presidents.

MIR*

Everything that is not me is incomprehensible.

Whether sought on Pacific sands or gathered in the hinterland of my own existence, the shell that I press to my ear will ring with the same voice and I’ll think it the voice of the sea and it will be but the sound of myself.

If I suddenly find it’s no longer enough to hold every word in my hand like pretty pearly objects, every word will enable me to listen to the sea, and in the mirror of their sound will I find no image but my own.

However it may seem, language boils down to just this I and whenever I utter a word it divests itself of everything that isn’t me until it becomes an organic noise through which my life unfolds.

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Liberating from the Ready-made Reality

… We propose liberating painting from its subservience to the ready-made form of reality and to make it first and foremost a creative, not a reproductive, art.

The savage happily drawing the outlines of a bull or a deer on a piece of stone, the primitive, the academician, the artists of antiquity and of the Renaissance, the Impressionists, the Cubists, and even to some degree the Futurists are all united by the same thing: the object. These artists are intrigued, delighted, amazed and gladdened by nature. They try to fathom her essence, they aspire to immortalize her …

Cubism killed the love of the everyday appearance of the object, but not the love of the object as a whole. Nature continued to be the guide of aesthetic ideas. The works of the Cubists lack a clearly defined idea of non-objective art.

Their art is characterized by efforts to complicate the task of depicting reality. Their complaint against the established prescriptions for copying nature turned into a formidable bomb that smashed the decayed metaphysics of figurative art into smithereens – an art that had lost all idea of aim and technique …

In its force and its clarity of perception, Futurism provided art with a unique expression – the fusion of two worlds, the subjective and the objective. Maybe this event is destined never to be repeated.

But the ideological gnosticism of Futurism had no effect on the damned consciousness of the majority who, to this day, continue to reiterate that Futurism marks a radical break in the course of world art, a crisis of art …

Our time is one of metal, its soul is initiative and technology: the Futurists brought technology to its full potential …

Until the Futurists came along, artists used to express movement in the following conventional manner: a maximum expression of movement resulted from placing forms on the surface of the canvas parallel to the perimeter of the canvas, and a maximum static expression resulted from the placing of the forms parallel to the surface of the canvas.

The spectator did not sense movement in the picture. All he saw was a rendering of movement …

For the Suprematists, the painting has ceased, once and for all, to be a function of the frame.

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Dada Manifesto, Each thing has its word, but the word has become a thing by itself

Dada is a new tendency in art. One can tell this from the fact that until now nobody knew anything about it, and tomorrow everyone in Zürich will be talking about it. Dada comes from the dictionary. It is terribly simple. In French it means ‘hobby horse’. In German it means ‘good-bye’, ‘Get off my back’, ‘Be seeing you sometime’. In Romanian: ‘Yes, indeed, you are right, that’s it. But of course, yes, definitely, right.’ And so forth.

An international word. Just a word, and the word a movement. Very easy to understand. Quite terribly simple. To make of it an artistic tendency must mean that one is anticipating complications. Dada psychology, dada Germany cum indigestion and fog paroxysm, dada literature, dada bourgeoisie, and yourselves, honoured poets, who are always writing with words but never writing the word itself, who are always writing around the actual point. Dada world war without end, dada revolution without beginning, dada, you friends and also poets, esteemed sirs, manufacturers, and evangelists. Dada Tzara, dada Huelsenbeck, dada m’dada, dada m’dada dada mhm, dada dera dada, dada Hue, dada Tza.

How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How does one become famous? By saying dada. With a noble gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness. How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, europeanized, enervated? By saying dada. Dada is the world soul, dada is the pawnshop. Dada is the world’s best lily-milk soap. Dada Mr Rubiner, dada Mr Korrodi. Dada Mr Anastasius Lilienstein. In plain language: the hospitality of the Swiss is something to be profoundly appreciated. And in questions of aesthetics the key is quality.

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He had suddenly perceived, where it was trying to surge upwards in a flowing tide of sound, the mass of the piano-part, multiform, coherent, level, and breaking everywhere in melody like the deep blue tumult of the sea

Or quand le pianiste eut joué, Swann fut plus aimable encore avec lui qu’avec les autres personnes qui se trouvaient là. Voici pourquoi :

L’année précédente, dans une soirée, il avait entendu une œuvre musicale exécutée au piano et au violon. D’abord, il n’avait goûté que la qualité matérielle des sons sécrétés par les instruments. Et ç’avait déjà été un grand plaisir quand au-dessous de la petite ligne du violon mince, résistante, dense et directrice, il avait vu tout d’un coup chercher à s’élever en un clapotement liquide, la masse de la partie de piano, multiforme, indivise, plane et entrechoquée comme la mauve agitation des flots que charme et bémolise le clair de lune. Mais à un moment donné, sans pouvoir nettement distinguer un contour, donner un nom à ce qui lui plaisait, charmé tout d’un coup, il avait cherché à recueillir la phrase ou l’harmonie — il ne savait lui-même — qui passait et lui avait ouvert plus largement l’âme, comme certaines odeurs de roses circulant dans l’air humide du soir ont la propriété de dilater nos narines. Peut-être est-ce parce qu’il ne savait pas la musique qu’il avait pu éprouver une impression aussi confuse, une de ces impressions qui sont peut-être pourtant les seules purement musicales, inétendues, entièrement originales, irréductibles à tout autre ordre d’impressions. Une impression de ce genre, pendant un instant, est pour ainsi dire sine materia. Sans doute les notes que nous entendons alors tendent déjà, selon leur hauteur et leur quantité, à couvrir devant nos yeux des surfaces de dimensions variées, à tracer des arabesques, à nous donner des sensations de largeur, de ténuité, de stabilité, de caprice. Mais les notes sont évanouies avant que ces sensations soient assez formées en nous pour ne pas être submergées par celles qu’éveillent déjà les notes suivantes ou même simultanées. Et cette impression continuerait à envelopper de sa liquidité et de son « fondu » les motifs qui par instants en émergent, à peine discernables, pour plonger aussitôt et disparaître, connus seulement par le plaisir particulier qu’ils donnent, impossibles à décrire, à se rappeler, à nommer, ineffables — si la mémoire, comme un ouvrier qui travaille à établir des fondations durables au milieu des flots, en fabriquant pour nous des fac-similés de ces phrases fugitives, ne nous permettait de les comparer à celles qui leur succèdent et de les différencier. Ainsi à peine la sensation délicieuse que Swann avait ressentie était-elle expirée, que sa mémoire lui en avait fourni séance tenante une transcription sommaire et provisoire, mais sur laquelle il avait jeté les yeux tandis que le morceau continuait, si bien que, quand la même impression était tout d’un coup revenue, elle n’était déjà plus insaisissable. Il s’en représentait l’étendue, les groupements symétriques, la graphie, la valeur expressive ; il avait devant lui cette chose qui n’est plus de la musique pure, qui est du dessin, de l’architecture, de la pensée, et qui permet de se rappeler la musique. Cette fois il avait distingué nettement une phrase s’élevant pendant quelques instants au-dessus des ondes sonores. Elle lui avait proposé aussitôt des voluptés particulières, dont il n’avait jamais eu l’idée avant de l’entendre, dont il sentait que rien autre qu’elle ne pourrait les lui faire connaître, et il avait éprouvé pour elle comme un amour inconnu.

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L’arte dei rumori, the logical consequence of your marvelous innovations

A Roma, nel Teatro Costanzi affollatissimo, mentre coi miei amici futuristi Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrà, Balla, Soffici, Papini, Cavacchioli, ascoltavo l’esecuzione orchestrale della tua travolgente Musica futurista.mi apparve alla mente una nuova arte che tu solo puoi creare: l’Arte dei Rumori, logica conseguenza delle tue meravigliose innovazioni. La vita antica fu tutta silenzio. Nel diciannovesirno secolo, coll’invenzione delle macchine, nacque il Rumore. Oggi, il Rumore trionfa e domina sovrano sulla sensibilità degli uomini. Per molti secoli la vita si svolse in silenzio, o, per lo più, in sordina. I rumori più forti che interrompevano questo silenzio non erano nè intensi, né prolungati, né variati. Poiché, se trascuriamo gli eccezionali movimenti tellurici, gli uragani, le tempeste, le valanghe e le cascate, la natura e silenziosa.

In questa scarsità di rumori, i primi suoni che l’uomo poté trarre da una canna forata o da una corda tesa, stupirono come cose nuove e mirabili. Il suono fu dai popoli primitivi attribuito agli dèi, considerato come sacro e riservato ai sacerdoti, che se ne servirono per arricchire di mistero i loro riti. Nacque così la concezione del suono come cosa a sé, diversa e indipendente dalla vita, e ne risultò la musica, mondo fantastico sovrapposto al reale, mondo inviolabile e sacro. Si comprende facilmente come una simile concezione della musica dovesse necessariamente rallentarne il progresso, a paragone delle altre arti. I Greci stessi, con la loro teoria musicale matematicamente sistemata da Pitagora, e in base alla quale era ammesso soltanto l’uso di pochi intervalli consonanti, hanno molto limitato il campo della musica, rendendo così impossibile l’armonia, che ignoravano.

Il Medio Evo, con gli sviluppi e le modificazioni del sistema greco del tetracordo, col canto gregoriano e coi canti popolari, arricchì l’arte musicale, ma continuò a considerare il suono nel suo svolgersi nel tempo, concezione ristretta che durò per parecchi secoli e che ritroviamo ancora nelle più complicate polifonie dei contrappuntisti fiamminghi. Non esisteva l’accordo; lo sviluppo delle parti diverse non era subordinato all’accordo che queste parti potevano produrre nel loro insieme; la concezione, infine, di queste parti era orizzontale, non verticale. Il desiderio, la ricerca e il gusto per l’unione simultanea dei diversi suoni, cioè per l’accordo (suono complesso) si manifestarono gradatamente, passando dall’accordo perfetto assonante e con poche dissonanze di passaggio alle complicate e persistenti dissonanze che caratterizzano la musica contemporanea. L’arte musicale ricercò ed ottenne dapprima la purezza, la limpidezza e la dolcezza del suono, indi amalgamò suoni diversi, preoccupandosi però di accarezzare l’orecchio con soavi armonie. Oggi l’arte musicale, complicandosi sempre più, ricerca gli amalgami di suoni più dissonanti, più strani e più aspri per l’oreccbio. Ci avviciniamo così sempre più al suono-rumore.

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