25/05/2021
It's nice to have❗ Fabrice Flahutez❗as our third keynote speaker at the BTC2021, with his paper:
💥 Upside-down Theatre. Lettrism and the Legacy of Dada and Surrealism Avant-gardes (1945-1968)💥
➡ABSTRACT:
Lettrism, founded by the Romanian poet and theorist Isidore Isou in 1946 in Paris, immediately positioned itself in a certain continuity with dada and surrealism. The reasons for this assumed filiation are multiple, but the first being the radical rejection of the order imposed by the Cold War celebrating categories as formalism (abstract and non-abstract painting) which consolidated the rivalry of the two geopolitical blocs that are the West and the East. For more than two decades (1945-1968), art in Eastern Europe, but also American art or what was done in France, were cataloged according to these categories deemed obsolete by the Lettrists. According to Isou, art had to be constantly an adventure of creation and constantly changing the world and sensitivity. There would therefore be no question of conforming to a system of images to satisfy an order of the world. Based on this observation, Isidore Isou claimed a filiation with Surrealism and a fortiori with Dada which were internationalist currents of thought and especially whose poetic or plastic creation was to be freed from established aesthetic categories, national considerations, etc. His total project, which he calls Créatique, would therefore revisit Dada, Surrealism and the European Avant-garde in order to bring out another way of making art connected to life. His project would also be supported by a desire to reissue forgotten texts and Dada works and to make the critical reception, retrace the history of Dada and the creation of the twentieth century. So, we rediscovered in Paris thanks to them, texts and a whole history of protest. It is interesting to note that in this enterprise of refounding the arts, Isidore Isou would work the theatre, but also dance and music, photography or painting as media needing interpreters, guides, in short, audiences to exist. Painting, for example, would become theatre, cinema would become performance, photography would become text, etc. It is about nothing more than showing that these proposals aimed to involve artists, but also people in very Dadaist performative practices and to rebuild links between people that wars and partitions had weakened. Art mixed with life at the foundation of Dada was therefore also at the heart of the new international avant-garde that had been Lettrism.
➡ABOUT SPEAKER:
Fabrice Flahutez is Professor of the History of Art at the University of Lyon-Saint-Etienne in France. He is the author of many books and articles on Lettrism and the Situationist International, including Le lettrisme historique était une avant-garde 1945-1953 (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2011), as well as several edited volumes with Fabien Danesi and Emmanuel Guy, La fabrique du cinéma de Guy Debord (Paris: Actes-Sud, 2013), and Le Lettrisme et son temps (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2018) . He is currently working on the ‘Global Surrealism’ exhibition at the Tate Modern and the MET New York, as well as curating ‘Lewis Carroll and Surrealism’ at the Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art.
PHOTO: https://har.parisnanterre.fr
