Posts tagged Romania
No one reads Daniel Spoerri, a visual artist known for his snare-pictures, and also the author of a classic literary snare-picture, An Anecdoted Topography of Chance—an unfortunately difficult book to track down.
The premise of An Anecdoted Topography of Chance is simple: the map above is of Spoerri’s room, drawn on the afternoon of October 17, 1961. After numbering the items in his room, the author set out to inventory each object, providing in the process an autobiography unlike any you’ve read. Each page lists a single object (illustrated by the inimitable Roland Topor) followed by an entry describing the object. Sometimes laconic:
44 Very Pretty Dark Blue Bottle
with a large neck, bought in a shop opposite the Galerie Raymond Cordier, rue Guenegaud, one day when for no apparent reason I visited the gallery; said bottle is topped by a socket and bulb, the whole forming a bedside lamp.
And at others elaborate, like number 66, a bottle of Sauze (a cologne), to which are appended three footnotes and five pages of text that ends with the following anecdote:
I myself was so drunk that evening that I’m certain it was there I infected my finger, and not in the door of a taxi, as I once supposed; after two days the infection had spread almost up to my shoulder, and I was sent to a doctor: if I had come two days later, he said, I probably would have died of blood poisoning.
To get a better idea of how the book works (and to see how easily it could be adapted to an online text), see this page.
And for an article about “chance art,” see Dario Gamboni piece in Cabinet Magazine.
No one reads Ghérasim Luca (1913-1994), a member of the Romanian Surrealist Group who was declared by Gilles Deleuze as “the greatest French poet.” Luca left Bucharest for Paris in 1954, where he later killed himself by jumping into the Seine.
A writer of hermetic, delirious, and erotic prose, Luca was also the creator of the game of “Objectively Offered Objects,” a variation of Salvador Dalí’s symbolically functioning objects, in which a found object was transformed into one imbued with deep psychic meaning by a member of the game. (For a comprehensive essay on OOO, see Sean Sturm’s blog.)
An excerpt from Luca’s Passive Vampire will give you an idea of the writer who believed that “everything must be reinvented”:
I close my eyes, as active as a vampire, I open them within myself, as passive as a vampire, and between the blood that arrives, the blood that leaves, and the blood already inside me there occurs an exchange of images like an engagement of daggers. Now I could eat a piano, shoot a table, inhale a staircase. All the extremities of my body have orifices out of which come the skeletons of the piano, the table, the staircase, and for the very first time these ordinary—and therefore non-existent—objects can exist. I climb this staircase not to get to the first floor but to get closer to myself. I lean on the banisters not to avoid vertigo but to prolong it.
For more:
- Read the entirety of Luca and Trost’s manifesto, Dialectics of the Dialectic
- Twisted Spoon published Luca’s legendary and obscure Passive Vampire (trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski) from which the photograph above is taken. Read a review at Bookforum.
- Black Widow Press published his Inventor of Love, translated by Julian and Laura Semilian.
- Ubuweb has audio of Luca reading some of his poems
No one reads Cioran.
“It’s not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.” More quotes. Hat tip The New Inquiry. (And why I like him.)
In English (these books go in and out of print):
