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thearistocratsblog · 5 years ago

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What is Lettrism?

Lettrism is a multi-disciplinary creative movement born in Paris in 1946 under the guiding force of Isidore Isou. The movement soon expanded by attracting numerous creative people, such as Gabriel Pomerand, Maurice Lemaître, Gil J Wolman… (and over the years, many others joined for particular periods or specific contributions). Lettrism systematically took on all the fields of knowledge, principally in the arts (Poetry, Painting, Novel, Cinema, Photography…) but also in the social sciences (Economics, Law, Psychology…) and natural sciences (Chemistry, Medicine,…).

Lettrism is a new philosophy of creativity and aims to transform society by a creative method – “La Créatique / Creatics” – and by a new understanding of the branches of knowledge – Kladology. The writing and symbols used in Lettrist works are not to be seen as carrying a useful message, but solely as the object of art, as a third visual material after the figurative and the abstract. In Lettrism, kladology, the science of the branches of knowledge, allows one to approach each discipline fully aware and desiring revolution, with conscious creative positivism that prohibits chance mixtures of genres like the today often favored all-in-one. The happening as a creation is thus rejected by Lettrists. Lettrists keep the theatrical, artistic or poetic dimensions separate, including when they use the supertemporal, which invites the participation of the spectator, but in a well-defined context.

Even today, the movement continues to produce numerous creations as well as propose areas for reflection.

This movement was named Lettrism because in its historic phase it was first of all involved in upsetting poetry, which was judged to be exhausted when it was conveyed by words and concepts. Poetic Lettrism clearly and systematically for the first time (after a few hints, for example, by Dada) proposed a new conception of poetry entirely reduced to the letter, thus eliminating all semantics. The use of new letters, symbolized by the letters of the ancient Greek alphabet, and then by numbers on the scores of this music-poetry, calls on all the sounds that a human body can produce, integrated into a sort of super-score, anticipating the later movements of sound poetry and performance art. Lettrist poetry is also music, but without instruments and rejecting its secular concept, the notion of pitch. Thus Lettrist music-poetry requires a certain flatness while introducing original sound and noise combinations.

In the same way, Lettrism latched onto other art and produced an impressive number of visual works using letters as the exclusive compositional element. To avoid any confusion, one must understand that Lettrism is not a language and thus the writing and symbols used in these works are not to be seen as carrying a useful message, but solely as the object of art, as a third visual material after the figurative and the abstract.

Lettrism thus requires rigorous critical judgment: for instance a foreigner who speaks and is not understood, is not an unknown Lettrist poet, and any writing, even if framed and exhibited, is just a manuscript and cannot be called a work of art.

Besides, the absolute systematizing of Lettrist practice, combining numerous works by several artists with a wide range of visual art personalities, is clearly different from the sporadic use of written forms, as seen before Lettrism and much more since the appearance of the Lettrist movement.

Lettrist visual art quickly added to its palette all the signs of all past, present, as well as invented cultures, overthrowing the meaning that naturally distinguishes it from calligraphy. For more clarity and because letters become only one element of this super-writing, this section would be called Hypergraphics. Thus, the majority of Lettrist painting is really Hypergraphics, an art of signs that is truly prophetic in our society full of pictograms, logos and other graffiti.

But the true importance of Lettrism is to simultaneously attack all the fields of knowledge and artistic expression, for example cinema, photography, theatre, dance, and also economics, mathematics, chemistry, law, theology. Lettrism, unless seen in its totality, which is the only way to grasp its true dimensions, is thus an artistic and intellectual upheaval of great significance, and the precursor of numerous developments in society.

Isou, who created the founding concepts within which the members of the group would carve out their own places, insisted for example on the amplifying and chiseling (or deconstructing) periods of each art, where after being raised up and constructed, it is reduced and eventually destroys itself, before being reborn in a Lettrist form (e.g. painting reborn in Hypergraphic form). Thus in cinema, which Isou overthrew once and for all with his film Le Traité de bave et d’éternté / Treatise on Venom and Eternity (1951), begins the phase of chiseling film when Isou destroys the concept of the classical image by using scraps of film found in trash bins, scratching graffiti on these images to make them unrecognizable. He goes even further in radically disassociating the sound and the image, viewed as two totally independent channels, discrépant or discrete (like later works in music by John Cage and in dance by Merce Cunningham, for example).

In 1956 Isou went beyond this art of the letter and the sign by creating imaginary or infinitesimal art (also called esthapéïrisme / esthaperism), which allows one to imagine a work that would be conceived in the mind, starting from a concrete sign, whether poetic, cinematic, or pictorial. It is the conceptual art par excellence and one of the most productive fields opened up by Isou. In 1960, Isou added the supertemporal framework, which calls on spectators or listeners to participate in working on an art work, which is constantly renewed and goes beyond the finite time-frame of a classical art proposition.

One of the other fundamental dimensions of the movement is economics, with Isou’s Traité d’Economie Nucléaire /Treatise on Nuclear Economics, and his first prophetic political manifesto Le soulèvement de la Jeunesse / Youth Uprising, of which the first volume appeared in 1949. On the occasion of this publication Isou and Lemaître met, a momentous meeting that started a mutually enhancing relationship. Indeed, these two will be practically the only consistent members of the group or more accurately, of the groups, in view of their constant metamorphoses over sixty years. Their vision of transforming society led Lemaître to present his candidacy for the Legislature in 1967, and Isou in 1993. Still today, Lemaître sends out manifestos attempting to promote the innovative concepts that seek to be an alternative to Marxist or capitalist models, based on a society basically involving the notions of creation and innovation.

If Isidore Isou created Lettrism in 1946, launching this movement through a journal with the provocative title La Dictature Lettriste / The Lettrist Dictatorship, he was joined by various first class creators such as Gabriel Pomerand, nicknamed the archangel of Lettrism, who became a Lettrist activist and wrote some of its most emblematic Lettrist pages. His hypergraphic novel (originally called a metagraph) Saint-Ghetto des prêts / Saint Ghetto of the Loans, his oil paintings, and his Symphonie en K / Symphony in K are part of the basis of Lettrist esthetics. And whereas Pomerand soon left the Lettrist group, Maurice Lemaître was the one who faithfully stood shoulder to shoulder with Isou. Author of a prolific canon that is detailed in the other pages of this site, Lemaître clearly became the major Lettrist film-maker as well as the greatest photographer of the movement. He has been a prolific writer, but his acute sense of polemic would lead him to a public isolation that was the lot of all the Lettrists during their lives. This public isolation and misunderstanding is now progressively overcome by high quality exhibitions and catalogs, showing the true contributions of this group, not in a confusing or partial manner, but by an enlightened and well-documented choice.

The history of this group is naturally plural and the numerous strong personalities that pass through it are like so many currents, more or less in relationships with Isou’s initial ideas. Pomerand and Lemaître, like later on Jacques Spacagna, Roland Sabatier, Broutin or François Poyet and Jean-Pierre Gillard … represent some of the exciting possibilities of the Isouian line, even though sometimes upsetting it. At the same time, other no less important Lettrists, starting with Gil J Wolman, adopt a more divergent view, both using and challenging the new Lettrist concepts. Nevertheless, and this is the case for Wolman and his megapneumies (deep breath poetry), his film L’Anticoncept / The Anticoncept, his Lettrist paintings and even some of his scotch tape art, they would also write some essential pages in a movement that would be diminished without their participation.

As for François Dufrêne, he would concentrate on Lettrist poetry (and also film) while Jean-Louis Brau would be involved in everything. The case of Guy Debord remains rather amusing and marginal in the sense that, dazzled by Isou in 1951, he joined the Lettrist gang only for a year, but a year during which he would make his major film, Hurlements en faveur de Sade / Shouts in Favor of Sade, before going on to found a Lettrist International (1952-1957) with Wolman and Brau; this movement would be the antechamber to the future Situationist International that would permit him to become this French National Treasure* that still is often the first gateway to Lettrism.

The complexity and longevity of Lettrism make it a difficult subject to grasp; it claims to be a completely different species from other groups of its time or even of the past. For example, the infinitesimal makes it similar to what the Fluxus movement would develop later, even though it is opposed to it. In Fluxus art and life are mixed together, while for Lettrism, kladology, the science of the branches of knowledge, allows one to approach each discipline fully aware and desiring revolution, with conscious creative positivism that prohibits chance mixtures of genres like the all-in-one. The happening is thus rejected by Lettrists. Lettrists keep the theatrical, artistic or poetic dimensions separate, including when they use the supertemporal, which invites the participation of the spectator, but in a well-defined context.

If one thinks of the ultimate goal of Lettrism: “la société paradisiaque concrete,” the concrete paradisiac society, a sort of heaven on Earth: a world made up of creators, a world where contrary to the anarchical “Neither God nor master,” a person must change into “All Gods, all Masters”, then one understands better the gulf that has been dug out between the Lettrists, the most radical and innovative group of the second half of the twentieth century, and a society that seems in a hurry to consummate its loss, incapable of recognizing the still living creators.

* Artist’s archives cannot leave France

-Frédéric Acquaviva

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