World War l | Richibi's Weblog

Tag: World War l

October 1, 2014

Jackson Pollock / Tristan Tzara

“Blue Poles (Number 11)“ (1952)

Jackson Pollock

_____

How to Make a Dadaist Poem

To make a Dadaist poem:

Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
Shake it gently.
Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will be like you.
And here are you a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.

Tristan Tzara

_________________

though the idea at first seems fanciful,
outrageous, think of Jackson Pollock,
and his “action paintings”, great art
produced by the instinctual wisdom of
musculature, its preconscious impulses

Tristan Tzara, 1896 – 1963, was one of
the originators of Dada, an influential
art movement of the early Twentieth
Century that rejected all traditional
forms of art for having led to the
havoc of World War l

Richard

September 28, 2014

Bill and Flossie Williams

“Hitler Invades Poland“ (1939)

Arshile Gorky

________

it must be understood that World War l
changed everything, the old order,
orders, had been discredited, new
states were formed, territories allotted,
-isms proliferated, the arts had to, of
course, reflect that, and did, as many
-isms were hatched in the art world
as in the political world, indeed,
many more

which is why much of it at first
seems questionable, practitioners
were learning anew how to talk, paint,
make music, they were creating a new
conceptual universe to replace the one
that had been roundly discredited, the
one that had been around in the West
for the last two thousand years

therefore Schoenberg, therefore
Picasso, and therefore “Finnegan’s
Wake“, for instance

we’ve been studying American
Modernists in the classes on the
Internet I’m taking, none of whom
I find interesting, and I’m, contrary
to all expectations, losing even my
early enthusiasm for the much too
thorny, I think, Emily Dickinson

but here’s another abstruse poet
that I like in this poem

though I much prefer his wife
Flossie’s sardonic reply, which
follows

________________

This Is Just To Say (1934)

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

William Carlos Williams

________________

Flossie’s Reply (1934)

Dear Bill: I’ve made a
couple of sandwiches for you.
In the ice-box you’ll find
blue-berries–a cup of grapefruit
a glass of cold coffee.

On the stove is the tea-pot
with enough tea leaves
for you to make tea if you
prefer–Just light the gas–
boil the water and put it in the tea

Plenty of bread in the bread-box
and butter and eggs–
I didn’t know just what to
make for you. Several people
called up about office hours–

See you later. Love. Floss.

Please switch off the telephone.

Florence Williams

____________

go Florence, I say, but you can
see, of course, why I’d say that

Richard

January 16, 2013

“Dumbo”‏

“View of Murnau“

Wassily Kandinsky

______________________

once again a movie for children of all ages –

including for Zoë, incidentally, whose birth

date is coming up in May – “Dumbo“ is another

Walt Disney masterpiece, and once again

fraught with the tropes, the creative novelties

and devices, of the most modern arts

it’s not difficult to intuit the influence of

Saint-Saëns‘ – an awful lot of sibilants

in the possessive case of only those two

capitalized syllables, by the way – his, I say,

“The Carnival of the Animals“, its dance,

especially, of the elephants, for Disney‘s

famous sequence here of elephants on

parade, wherein psychedelia makes an

appearance in 1941 no less, years ahead

of its historical, and revolutionary, great

fruition, surely informing Warhol,

Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, and just

generally the entire Pop Art coterie

he was transferring however what he’d

been learning from the German especially

Expressionists, their attraction to bold,

dissonant colours, flat uninflected

surfaces, arbitrary and malleable

dimensions

what Disney brought significantly to the

mix was essentially the spirit of fun, which

is what transformed all art after the First

World War, that generation’s response to

the utter failure of all that had come before,

politics, economics, ideologies, even the

very concept of the existence of God, none

of these had prevented the horror that had

been that signal event, the best defence, as

we said in the Seventies, was living well,

therefore the Roaring Twenties, therefore,

for that matter, the Seventies

we haven’t retreated from that imperative

yet, be it for better or for worse remains

still to be seen, for faith or fun, the opposite

poles of personal responsibility, both fell

and heal

animals, incidentally, courtesy of the spirit

of Henri Rousseau