Text(s)Archive
Alvin Curran (Providence, Rhode Island, 1938)
Democratic, irreverent and traditionally experimental, Curran travels in a computerized covered wagon between the Golden Gate and the Tiber River, and makes music for every occasion with any sounding phenomena -- a volatile mix of lyricism and chaos, structure and indeterminacy, fog horns, fiddles and fiddle heads. He is dedicated to the restoration of dignity to the profession of making non-commercial music as part of a personal search for future social, political and spiritual forms.
EastWestNorthSouthTonalAtonalE
-from The New Common Practice
Reps Eléphant 306
ou un nouveau bestiaire à l'orphisme éléphantin
interview des éléphants du cirque Franchi (1962)
à leur propos et à propos de ce dialogue je notai:
Je suis en solitude totale et ce dialogue sans aucune réponse -si ce n'est quelquefois des appréciations lancées au hasard de mes paroles- est d'une intensité dramatique océanique : je suis seul irrémédiablement et mon langage est incompréhensible définitivement.
Puis l'extraordinaire, l'irraisonnable, le fantastique... présents.
L'éléphant "parlerà" (?) à la chute d'une de mes questions (la sixième du mouvement "A").
Je risque
12 questions pour obtenir
12 réponses, j'en obtiens
1 seule mais elle a suffì à prouver l'existence des
12 questions
Tout cet enthousiasme ne fut pas inutile. (...)
(In "à propos extérieur au dialogue" , Ailleurs N° 3 / 1964)
Je précisai:
Ce questionnaire a été enregistré en vitesse lente. Ces dous alternatifs retransmis en vitesse rapide permutent : mes paroles deviennent incompréhensibles, mais ! le langage de l'éléphant qui en vitesse initiale ne pouvait etre transcrit prend alors une valeur vocabularistique universelle : cet animal comme le lion qui se manifestera tout à l'heure parle par onomatopées et interjections quand on l'écoute en vitesse accélérée ; onomatopées et interjections pouvant etre écrites...
(In "Mouvement "A" en huit questions" , Op. Cit.)
Jackson Mac Low (1922 -2004)
The Drawing-Asymmetries comprise a series of words and/or word strings drawn by the Asymmetries method from whatever texts happened to be at hand and immediately lettered very freely and impulsively on the sheet of drawing paper with brush and/or pen.
Thing of Beauty
It was a thing
Of Beauty;
Small, precious
Not strong nor large,
But beautiful.
She was a thing
Of Beauty;
Slender, graceful
Not strong nor tall,
But beautiful.
He was a thing
Of Beauty;
Tall, Manly
Not small nor delicate
Like the other
Beautiful things,
But beautiful.
Come War
Came Slaughter
And Destruction;
Wrought for holy causes-
They said.
Both sides fought
For the Good
Of Mankind
By destroying
The things
Of Beauty.
The Small and Precious,
The Slender and Graceful,
The Tall and Manly;
Destroyed,
Transformed by men;
It, to a meaningless
Powder
She, to a shapeless,
Jellylike Mass
Of Matter
He, to a festering,
Limbless,
Decapitated,
Corpse.
The good of Mankind
Was served-
They said.
October 1937
Unmanifest
What the maker of a manifesto does not comprehend or acknowledge is the basic unmanifestness from which and within which each manifestation takes place. It is this neglect or ignorance that calls forth repugnance when a manifesto is proclaimed or published, especially one regarding art. As if what comes to being in and as the work of art could ever be totally manifest or even manifest at all without its abiding steadfastly in the unmanifest! A work of art is a manifesto only insofar as it is its own antimanifesto.
21 june 1983
New York