lettrism

Four decades later, the Situationists and Lettrists in France and Pop movements in Britain and the USA did it again.

As the Lettrists declared back in the 1950s, the cultural heritage of mankind should be cut-up and used for partisan political purposes.

The range of reference is catholic: The trail moves logically enough from the ambit of the Situationists and their predecessors, the Lettrists, into the student riots and workers' strikes in France in 1968, then emerges more unexpectedly into punk and post-punk, T-shirts, postcards, cartoons, and eventually back onto a university campus, now in California.

A rejection or critique of bourgeois views of art seemed to necessitate a generalized rejection or critique of bourgeois society, culture, and politics, evident in the revolutionary sympathies of the Surrealists, Futurists, Lettrists, and Situationists.

The list is long from Picasso, Stuart Davis, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Braque, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, Max Ernst, Hannah Hoch, the Situationists, Lettrists, all of pop art from Warhol and Lichtenstein to Romare Bearden, much of photorealism, postmodernism in the work of Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Jenny Holzer, Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, to the current work of Jane Hammond and Susan Bee.

The Lettrists were committed to the idea that innovations in language could change material reality, and Pomerand's desire for "geometric priestliness" is a desire for tomb-writing that somehow defies death.

There he met the Lettrists, a movement of poets and painters

According to Saper, the literary, visual, and performance experiments of concrete poets, the lettrists, and Fluxus artists can be read as a form of sociopoetic research in tune with today's network culture.

And while his peers quote statesmen, belle lettrists and such eminences as David Ogilvy, his take on the human condition evokes the late Jim Morrison: "I'm not here for a long time...

Though inevitably underrepresented in this volume, the performative dimension of the Yale "symphosophia" is present in the interspersed poetic fragments and color plates from Eugen Gomringer, Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos, Ana Hatherly, Anne Tardos, Severo Sarduy, Charles Bernstein, and Jackson Mac Low; or indirectly suggested in the descriptive analyses of Haroldo de Campos's multilingual/multimediatic productions, Oliverio Girondo's neobaroque intertexts, Severo Sarduy's highly formalized pictorial poems, the hieroglyphic rebus of the French Lettrists, the synesthetic techniques of "Polipoesia" in Spain, the "non-intentional" intermediatic art of the Fluxus project, or the sensual concrete poetry of Sweden.

To the contrary, they take the view that "belle lettrists" and advocates of the "gentlemanly ideal" have no standing to contest the "competence of the best scholars in the humanities today," which is "remarkable." Humanistic thought "must be free to pursue questions as far as possible without knowing what general use or relevance the answers might prove to have," they write, as they "assert the value not just of specialization but of professionalization also."

(The two artists compared it to the Bayeux Tapestry, perhaps in homage to their own reverse Norman invasion of Paris, perhaps in order to signal a shared concern with documenting not only the heroic events of royalty but also the unrecorded everyday life of the times.) The title, with its pure Lettrist rhythmic sonority, derives from word fragments found within the visual field: ACH at bottom left, probably from Bach; and ALMA-MANETRO at bottom center, a splicing-together of bits of ALMA-MARCEAU and METRO (likely an indication of the nearest subway stop to the Theatre des Champs-Elysees) to produce just the sort of nonsensical, exotic sound favored by the Lettrists in their poems.