DAVID-BAPTISTE CHIROT: Gabriel Pomerand's SAINT GHETTO OF THE LOANS/Deux homages a l'ange Gabriel/ART BRUT

Note: This is a reposting of blog entry for 11/29/06, by request, and is also a kind of appendix for the previous entry re Tim Gaze and his work, interests and the Book of Noise.

stencils & photos: arofish

Welcome to celebration for Gabriel Pomerand & his Saint Ghetto of the Loans

1950's rubber stamps

david-baptiste chirot pour l'ange Gabriel

Today's page is in conjunction with the publication of a review by d-b chirot of the Lettrist "Archangel", painter, poet and performer Gabriel Pomerand's SAINT GHETTO OF THE LOANS at
http://galatearesurrection4.blogspot.com

Beneath each page of rebuses here is its bi-lingual facing page in the text. (There wasn't space to have them side by side and still be nice and clear for viewers/readers.)

d-b chirot pour l'ange Gabriel

Gabriel Pomerand with handwritten sound poem "Tabou" for Cafe Tabou where he performed his Lettrist works, 1950

Pomerand with light application of Lettrist makeup, 1951
(Face painting with visual/sound signs earlier used by Russian Futurists and Dadaists.)

Saint Ghetto of the Loans (Saint Ghetto des prets) has been out of print since a small edition was published in 1950. Until Ugly Duckling published this bi-lingual edition this year, only a few pages of the book could be found, shown in various book of/about lettrist work. Until now it has been very rare and its legend has grown at the same time its elusivity made it ever more desirable, the stuff dreams are made of. Truly an "underground classic", so underground as to be really a "lost classic" and now found again.

In 1946/7, the same years Isidore Isou's first major Lettrist works were being published, the painter Jean Dubuffet began exhibiting works from his first two years of collecting what he named in 1945 "Art Brut".
While completely unrelated, some Art Brut works share with Lettrism the creation of signs free of previously known meanings, the creation of new scripts, alphabets, calligraphies, asemic writings and sound languages.
They also share in many pieces/artists a compulsive energy that won't be held back, what Lettrist founder Isidore Isou saw as the fundamental drive of life--not the will to survive, but the continual drive to create.

Carlo creates repeating patterns of "letters" which in their varying sizes are reminiscent of the Berlin Dadaist Raoul Hausmann's 1918-21 Optaphonic Poetry, in which the size, thickness and boldness or lightness of the letters (Hausmann used Roman letters, none made up) indicate to the performer how loud and long to pronounce the letter-sounds.

Walla uses both the Roman alphabet and his own widely varied invented scripts.
His room looks like a living visual sonic environement, an organism that he inhabits and keeps contributing to its growth, from the inside as it were.

Carlo, and his "Birds and People"

The great Adolf Wolfli, creator of thousands of works

A proto-Lettrist clothing design--
from the Prinzhorn collection--
Prinzhorn published in 1922 the landmark book Bilderei der Geisteskranken--Artistry of the mentally Ill--which first opened the doors to what would become called Art Brut, outsider art, etc. For Dubuffet, Art Brut includes work by persons whether they are mentally ill or not. This set him apart from earlier investigators, who worked inside asylums. The Surrealist Andre Breton, at first allied with Dubuffet in the Art Brut project, broke with him over this question. Breton wanted to limit Art Brut to the mentally ill. Dubuffet's emphasis on the art aspect regardless of sanity actually was to bring respect to people previously considered only in terms of a diagnosis, rather than as creating beings. This aspect would fit in with Isou's ideas, contra Breton--whom Isou was very much contra! Isou wasn't involved in this dispute, but it is interesting how Art Brut and Lettrism are affirming many of the same things at the same time, in the immediate post-war period in France.
The first to make a direct connection between Modern Art and what would be later known as Art Brut but at the time was considered "artistry of the mentally ill"only, were the Nazis. In 1937 they mounted the 20th Century's first traveling blockbuster show, viewed by 2 million people. Called "Entartete Kunst" (Degenerate Art) it brought together modernists like Paul Klee, Chagall, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Nolde, Kokoshka and exhibited them side by side with the works of creators inside aylums--among them Adolf Wolfli.
Dubuffet saw in Art Brut a proof that art is not the property of an elite, trained in skills and appreciation, but is open with all. The "common person" is equally an artist, a creator. Again, this is similar to the Lettrists' ideas regarding creation becoming part of every area of life, rather than being seperate from it.