From the Guts of Bin Bags Pt. 2

Continuing my series on books found in five bin bags left in front of a relatively famous poet's flat in Glasgow is this little number:

GERHARD RUHM - ADELAIDES LOCKEN (Edition Hundertmark, 1979. A book with 48 pages, offset print, 14 illustrations and a epilog to a poem by Johann Heinrich Füssli, including an instruction by Dr. E.Ricke)



"Gerhard Rühm (born in Vienna, 1930) is a radical experimenter, a restless explorer of traditions and genres, atomizing their elements in order to recompose them with conceptual precision and a multiplicity of compositional techniques. He has worked with music and visual art, but basically the world is language for Rühm, the dictionary its body, and the alphabet its backbone.
He began by studying composition and Oriental music, but came to devote most of his energy to literature, esp. concrete poetry. Concrete poetry, as it has come to be called, involves an exploration of language where the "material" of the poem is privileged above all else. The "material" for the concrete poet involves the sonic quality via phonemes and syllables, as well as the visual and optic via letters. Through a direct exploitation of typography, white space, shapes, sound and the visual landscape of the page, concrete poets attempt to evoke sensations, concepts, and ideas, while also rejecting poetry of expression and subjectivity.
In the 1950’s Ruhm became one of the founding members of an avant-garde collective know as "The Vienna Group," a group of poets, musicians and artists who experimented with visual and phonetic forms. The work of Rühm, who has experimented with a variety of forms--constellations and ideograms, phonetic and counting poems, montage, photographic and other types of visual texts--is the most widely known. Rühm has been most concerned with maintaining an organic relationship between the visual and the conceptual as can be clearly seen in his graphic text "bleiben" ("to stay"). The act of writing the word by hand beside a fine white line on a solid black page conveys the message "stick with it" far more profoundly than any number of ordinary sermons on the subject of following your own little beam of light. In "und zerbrechen" ("and something breaks"), the breaking apart of the word after a series of monotonous "unds" creates an ideogram with psychological, sociological and formal implications. "I have avoided being purely illustrative in the graphic presentation of concepts," Rühm states. "Rather I try to establish a tension relationship between both dimensions (the graphic and the conceptual), so that one dimension does not simply support the other but completes it, or the optical form fixes a definite aspect of the concept." – compiled from Burning Deck, Electronic Poetry Review and Concrete Poetry – A World View.



LISTEN TO THE MAN!


Gerhard Ruhm - Hymne an Lesbierinnen (1956) MP3
Gerhard Ruhm - Blatter (1965-73) MP3
Gerhard Ruhm - The Bird of Paradise (1975) MP3

These tracks are taken from the 1978 compilation LP Futura Poesia Sonora (Cramps Records, Milan) . The most comprehensive anthology focused on past and contemporary sound poetry currents ever produced! Other artists featured on the LP include Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Giacomo Balla, Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck, Kurt Schwitters, Antonin Artaud, Henri Chopin, Bob Cobbing, Isidore Isou and many more.

The following image is from the found book and is one of 14 illustrations by Ruhm.

From the Guts of Bin Bags Pt.1

While walking down a street in Glasgow last year I found five bin bags full of books dumped outside a relatively well know Scottish poet's flat. They were left out for the bin men (tut tut poet...have you not heard of charity shops?). Here's one of the gems I found within the blackness...

HENRI CHOPIN - CEOLFRITH 18 (published on occasion of the Henri Chopin Retrospective Exhibition held at the Ceolfrith Arts Centre, Sunderland, from May 12th - June 10th, 1972)




"Henri Chopin (born 1922) is an avant-garde poet and musician. He is a little-known but key figure of the French avant-garde during the second half of the 20th century. Known primarily as a concrete and sound poet, he created a large body of pioneering recordings using early tape recorders, studio technologies and the sounds of the manipulated human voice. His emphasis on sound is a reminder that language stems as much from oral traditions as from classic literature, of the relationship of balance between order and chaos. Since the end of the 50's has never ceased to defend the electronic explorations of the voice and the body, the grain of the voice, the vocal texture, the vibrations of the larynx, the labial snaps, and the hiss; first with the aid of the tape recorder, then, starting from the early 70's, by working in the best electronic music studios in Europe. A path extending from the exploration of the resonance of words, in 1956, to the new sound form of 1994, in collaboration with a cybernetic musician at Ircam, Marc Battier."

Henri Chopin - Le Ventre De Bertini (1967) MP3
Hneri Chopin - Indicatif 1 (1962) MP3

"Chopin is significant above all for his diverse spread of creative achievement, as well as for his position as a focal point of contact for the international arts. As poet, painter, graphic artist and designer, typographer, independent publisher, film-maker, broadcaster and arts promoter, Chopin's work is a barometer of the shifts in European media between the 1950s and the 1970s.
His publication and design of the classic audio-visual magazines Cinquième Saison and OU between 1958 and 1974, each issue containing recordings as well as texts, images, screenprints and multiples, brought together international contemporary writers and artists such as members of Lettrisme and Fluxus, Jiri Kolar, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Tom Phillips, Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs and many others, as well as bringing the work of survivors from earlier generations such as Dadaists Raoul Hausmann and Marcel Janco to a fresh audience." Wikipedia + Michel Giroud

A scan from the book:

And here's the man himself in the flesh showing da kidz how to do it:

HENRI CHOPIN - Live in France 2005