World War I

Guillaume Apollinaire's poem, "It's Raining,"provides a strong connection between written words and imagery.  The words both speak of rainfall and are arranged to look like raindrops falling or rolling down a window.  It is a very different appraoch to the arrangement of a poem, to say the least.  Each letter positioned on top of each other makes it very difficult to read, though fun to look at.  Apollinaire focuses on sound in this poem--women's voices, auricular cities, ancient music--and reading the poem in its vertical arrangement where each letter seems to represent a raindrop, it is not difficult to imagine the sound of the rain the image creates.  I always think of rain with a sense of renewal.  Perhaps the rain is trying to wash away all of the damage and pain that came along with the war, preparing the world to start anew.

When I was initially reading Stieglitz's Dadaist magazine, I was struck by its connection to the Futurist movement through its appreciation of machines. The images in the magazine seem to strip people and the individual of their humanity by presenting them as machinal objects that serve a practical purpose. For example, the cover depicts an object that is hard to decipher, but reminds me of either a compass or a Swiss Army knife, both pratical tools. However, next to the image, the texts reads, "Here, here is Stieglitz, faith and love". There is no sentimentality to this image; it is graphical and geometrical. The viewer is left to wonder why he chose to write the words faith and love next to an image that strips Stieglitz of his humanity. In addition, the next page really drives the point home and clarifies his intentions. Another image is shown that is hard to decipher, again, but looks like a projector or some sort of machinery. Underneath the image, the text reads: "The saint of saints. This portrait is about me". Stieglitz chooses to represent himself as a tool or a machine, yet chooses to call himself a saint, implying his individuality and humanity. These two contradictory ideas seem to repeat themselves many times throughout the magazine.

I think that this art movement ties into WWI because the War stripped the soldiers and those on the homefront of their individuality, instead asking that they sacrifice themselves for the greater good. War is also a situation that strips people of their humanity and turns them into machines, so to speak. Stieglitz reminds the reader that each person still maintains their individual traits and their humanity even in situations where it has been stripped away.

Apollinaire’s poem, Il Pleut or Its Raining, is interesting to me in that I love how he is able to mesh two arts into one. It mocks the old cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words, especially when the picture is made of these words. But what I am really interested in is the fact that the images/paragraph is originally in French and then mirrored by its English counterpart. Besides the fact that he is French, I can’t really see any reason why he would go to the trouble to write the poem in his native tongue, then go back and translate the exact same thing into English. The only guess I have is that he didn’t want to lose the intensity of his emotions in the work, so he carefully worded it in English to match the passion.

The poem itself is a very dark piece-although I feel like it’s more whiny. It reminds me so much of Albert Camus’s works, dark and filled with nothing but self-pity. In short—depressing!

Stieglitz’s dada magazine reminds me of industrial innovation of the time. Everything depicted in the pictures, were commodities of the time. However, I can only guess three out to the five pictures. I see a camera on page1, a bustier sewing machine (p. 5), and an upside down headlight (p. 6). I do not know the significance of these pieces, and though they look avant garde, their meaning is allusive in my eyes.

I thought the readings this week were absolutely fantastic.  I was really intrigued by the avant-garde artists who viewed war as "the world's only hygiene" (Perloff 144). In the writings that Perloff cites during the years leading up to the war, the artists are disturbingly antagonistic.  I do understand that they were fed up with the blasé art to which Europe was in bondage.  However, considering the millions who died during WWI, their idealism is a bit off-putting.  Certainly, I say this with retrospective knowledge of the remainder of the twentieth century.  

Nevertheless, I do admire the intensity of artists like Dada, who wanted to "make literature with a gun in [his] pocket" (143).  Even more impressive were the Russian artists Goncharova and Larionov whose vision of nationalism "promot[ed] an exclusively Russian art." Really, this is mind-boggling!  My hat goes off to these performance artists who endeavored for revolution in a world where high-culture had become formulaic. 

Appollonaire addresses the beauty of newness in Thunder's Palace, "You can see that what's simplest and newest is / Nearest to what's called antique beauty..." (Apollonaire 227)  Industry and modernity usher the art world into a completely new era, where simplicity is praised in technology and utility.  Several lines in this poem reminded me of one of my favorite murals, which is housed in the National Palace in Mexico: 

As you can see, the artist, Diego Rivera (who was a communist and included Marx, Lenin, Trotsky in this mural) depicts industry as being the coming savior of the Mexican people.  Although this is just a tiny section of a massive mural (that took Rivera from 1929-1945 to complete), I think it demonstrates the beauty Apollonaire describes about the things that are new (since that which was old [genocide] resulted from bourgeouis expansionism).

When dealing with the Dada images, it seems pretty simple. The first idea is about modernism and how theses maybe images from the future. But when viewing them, you have to take a second or two to think about what is in front of you. For me, I am still looking at them and I am still scratching my head. This seems to be a strech to the future and what may come from the war ending, but other than that I am still scratching my head.

The poem "Its Raining" is the most interesting to me. Not only for the way the text is presented, but why it is presented the way it is. Looking at it from a far, it seems very innocent and very childish. It fits for what he seems to be intending to say. He people viewed the time he was living in, it seemed very innocent and childish. But once you take a closer look at the details, the poem and way the times were were much more complicated than what people made them out to be. The war made lives crazy, much as the poem says. But it shows how somethings look one way from a distance but when you truly look at something in detail, you will see how complicated it truly maybe.

The poems reflect what the war did to the people that lived through them and those who particpated in them. The images suggest how life might be after the war ended. It is hard to image now, but the future was the only real bright spot for the people who lived in the war time, and modern ideas were what got them through what they all witnessed.

Reading through the poetry for today, both by Apollinaire and in the Perloff text, I was quite struck by the strong primitivist note that permeated the words and images of Futurism.  Perhaps because I adore dystopian novels above all other genres, my image of the future is nearly the opposite of what was envisioned in these pre-war writings, of which my best description must be the words terrifying, destructive, and exuberant.  The future I tend to envision is a stark, sterile skyline that speaks of past glories and the potential of humankind, but which is bereft of that life which gave rise to it.  It is best embodied in Zamyatin's We, with its glass spires and blasted wastelands. 

In contrast, however, the Futurism of these poems is a rich, vibrant one full of the ecstasy of living, a paradoxically pure amalgamation of raw primitive humanity and the pristine, elevated intellect.  It embraces paradoxes of war and peace into itself, not resolving them but striking them against one another to make sparks, energy.  Hangars built from the bones of mammoths, the Red Square of Moscow at sundown (Perloff, 159), and even the hollow-eyed hunger of dead mice for dinner, stretched out on the table (Perloff, 156) --these images stuck with me.

In contrast, I turn to the art from Stieglitz's magazine, and I am--to be frank and bare my ignorance--at a loss.  The images are interesting, and from an artistic standpoint, I appreciate them, but they say nothing to me of the energy that bubbles from the texts.  They seem to attempt to capture the potential energy in machinery, as there is a definite motif of the mechanical about them, but I find them irreconcilably static after two hours of puzzling over them.  That said, I greatly look forward to discussing them in class and perhaps gaining a foothold.  The tension between energy and starkness in this entire set of material is killing me.

http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/dada/291/5-6/pages/back.htm

This work by Francis Picabria was used on page 5 of issues 5-6 of 291, and appears to be a simple line drawing of a lamp. The words "Voila Haviland, La poesie est comme lui" captions the piece; in English (courtesy of Google Translate), "Here is Haviland, Poetry is like him". Haviland most likely refers to Paul Haviland, one of 291's founders and a photographic artist in his own right. Like Picabria's other works in this series, the piece's caption seemingly has very little to do with its subject matter. Although, the image of a light-bearing lamp surrounded by a stifling black cordon suggests to me that Picabria is making a statement about the magazine's aesthetic principles in relation to society.

When I first saw this piece, I didn't know what to make of it at all. The image looked like something out of an assembly manual, and translating the caption didn't help much. At first, I tried looking for images within the main work: the lampshade looks a bit like a helmet, the black cord is shaped like an ear, etc. But, I think the representational aspect of this piece is secondary; its primary purpose is as an abstract symbol, presumably of Haviland himself. Picabria's choice to portray Haviland as a mechanical object which emits light, surrounded by an organic line of encircling darkness, suggests that the magazine's art and poetry (which is equated with Haviland himself) is source of illumination and aesthetic brightness, being stifled by society's pastoral, antiquated aesthetic.

These are difficult texts for me to comment on. One defining aspect of modernism was the widespread feeling that a rapidly changing world demanded a search for new forms of literary expression. The formal inventiveness that we see here is one aspect of that search. Although the presentation of "It's Raining" is meant to challenge how we visually receive poetry, the text is much more concerned with suggesting aural impressions: "its raining womens voices" ... "a universe of auricular cities" ... "listen to the rain" ... "an ancient music" ... "listen to the fetters". The poem conjures up the idea of rain as both a visual and aural experience, and links them with memories and regrets; the rain seems to be a spiritual deluge which emanates from the past. I'm particularly struck by that phrase "a universe of auricular cities," which suggests a vast, intricate sensory environment, a reality large enough to get lost in. If I'm right in thinking that the poem has to do with memory, or "marvelous encounters of my life," does this suggest that the kingdom of memory represents an escape from the physical realities of war? Perhaps, but that escape is double-edged, even another kind of prison, because the memories seem to be so melancholy. The rain is a literal thing, falling from "clouds," but it is also an "ancient music" wept by "regret and disdain." It's a spiritual and physical force, and it binds both the mind ("high") and the body ("low"). The image I get is of a soldier in the trenches, soaked to the bone, imprisoned in both the physical present and a cage of memories.

Much of De Zayas' piece in the Stieglitz magazine strikes me as incomprehensible, but I am intrigued by the phrase "He married Man to Machinery and he obtained issue." De Zayas is talking about photography, but there may be other applications to be found there. The phrase aptly, for instance, describes a page depicting some kind of mechanical object with the heading, in French, "Portrait of a young American girl in the state of nudity." The other images (also by Picabia, praised by De Zaya as having "married America like a man who is not afraid of consequences") have similarly ironic captions: "Here, this here is Stieglitz; faith and love." "The holy of holies; it's me that is in this picture." "I have seen and it is of you." "Poetry is like this." (I was never a very good French student. Others may be able to translate better than I.) This expresses a pervasive fear of modernism: faith, poetry, and the human being are all equated with quasi-mechanical forms. But these forms remain elegant and pleasing to the eye. The are aesthetic impressions of mechanization, rather than depictions of any kind of real functionality. For all De Zayas' complaints that American art is cold, artificial, methodical reather than organic, Picabia's visual representations are alive, irrational, creative, surprising. That said, the images of "Stieglitz," "me," and "you," are much more interesting and varied than the image of the "young American girl." So although the artistry displayed in these drawing seems to undercut its message about the mechanization of the human, the message of European elitism remains intact.

When observing the assigned works for today, I find myself utterly at a loss to make a particularly insightful comment on any one particular piece, as such, I will attempt to make some sense of both the Apollinaire poems and the Stieglitz magazine in this post.

When reading the Apollinaire poetry, I detect an attempt to negotiate whether or not art which comments on something horrific, in this case WWI, can or should be considered "beautiful", as is traditionally the goal of art. I detect this most in the poem "It's Raining." This poem, when viewed from a distance, strikes the viewer as looking kind of cute. The letters here being arranged to appear like falling rain in a poem about rain seems almost like something a child might make. However, when one takes the time to read the poem, the reader discovers a hounting description of a vaguely ominous approaching storm. This trend continues in his poem, "Thunder's Palace", which describes a barracks dug in a WWI trench as having a sort of primitive beauty, something I can't help but feel is meant to be ironic by Apollinaire. I believe that by  combining these generally pleasing images with haunting words and descriptions, Apollinaire means to communicate the disconnect one would have felt when going from home, where one would hear talk of glorious war, only to find the horrors of WWI on the battlefield.

I find the Stieglitz magazine to be the much harder text to decipher. Here, I find myself greeted with pictures that like like anything from a spark plug to, what appears to be the blue prints for some sort of rube goldberg machine, accompanied with descriptions such as "to me this is the holiest of holies." As for the meaning behind these, I find myself utterly perplexed. When considering the obsession which had surrounded machinery in the years prior to the first World War, I feel as though these images mean to communicate just how ridiculous it is to view machinery with such veneration.

http://courses.utulsa.edu/wwi/files/apollinaire-rain.pdf

I found Apollinaire's "It's Raining" to be an interesting mix of text and picture. The words are written in lines down the page, with each letter falling below the one before. Looking at it at first glance, I thought it was a set of dotted lines extending the length of the page, like oddly linear raindrops. Upon closer inspection, it became clear that they were actually lines of letters, and that those letters made up the words of a poem. For me, this called more attention to each individual word, because I had to work harder to read and make sense of them.

The text itself is a poem, describing rain and things that are like rain for the speaker. It has a sad and melancholy feeling to it. The line "listen to it rain while regret and disdain weep an ancient music" was particularly powerful to me. I see this poem as reflecting the very sad and almost hopeless sentiment that people would've felt during and after the war. The poetry expresses this, as well as the image. It's rain, but to me it's also like tears. I think this was much more powerful written in this format than it would've been written in a normal poem, or prose like form.