Una delle piu’ silenziose teoria contemporanee e della critica d’arte sulle storie polifoniche dell’arte audio. Composto sia da saggi originali che da diversi documenti tradotti recentemente, questo libro offre alcuni dei momenti più significativi e sonori del « secolo sordo », concepiti ed eseguiti da artisti come Raymond Roussel, Antonin Artaud, Marcel Duchamp, Andre Breton, John Cage, Hugo Ball, Kurt Weill e William Burroughs. Dalla fine dell’Ottocento agli anni Sessanta, i saggi svelano i fantastici scenari acustici proiettati attraverso gli scritti di Raymond Roussel; gli oggetti sonori di Marcel Duchamp; la proposta di Dziga Vertov per un « laboratorio dell’udito » fonografico; il linguaggio ZAUM e Radio Stregoneria evocati da Velimir Khlebnikov; i naufraghi iconoclasti de La Radia di F. T. Marinetti; le musiche distrutte dei surrealisti; le noise band di Russolo, Foregger, Varese e Cage; il contorto talk show radiofonico di Antonin Artaud; i labirintici viaggi interiori invocati dal tedesco Hoerspiel; e la contaminazione da rasoio e il ventriloquio cut-up di William S. Burroughs.
« …One would expect to find the accumulation of studies of modernism, post-modernism, the avant-garde, and post-war experimentalism a more faithful attendance to the cultural preoccupations of hearing— one of the two major senses, the « public » ones, as John Cage described them for their ability to make contact from a distance— especially when one remembers that there are few arts that are mute. It would also be reasonable to expect a stronger curiosity about earlier artistic responses to the audio and radiophonic technologies that so successfully submerge us now in a mass-media din. Yet the literature on the arts of recorded and broadcasted sound, and of conceptual, literary, and performative sound, is scant at all levels, from basic historical research to theoretical modelings. Thus, while other historical fields may be busying themselves with things more detailed, the study of relationships of sound and radio to the arts is open to a full range of investigations, including the most general… »
Contributo di
Juan Pablo Macías