TQW Magazin
Caroline Lillian Schopp on unspelling by Andrea Maurer

he he he he … corruption in the living room

 

he he he he … corruption in the living room

Why concrete poetry in times of “fake news”? What is one to make of, or what can one still make with, language when it seems to have been degraded and evacuated of significance? In unspelling Andrea Maurer sets out, as she puts it, “to steal back words and build our own house.” The piece exhibits how shaky and makeshift the constructions built with the stolen rags of language will be. Far from a house of one’s own, the remnants of language outline a vagrant space. The performance explores the “corruption in the living room,” to draw on a cobbled phrase snatched from its first minutes.

unspelling mines the front page of the New York Times from September 27, 2019. Together with Sara Manente and Lissie Rettenwander, Maurer dismantles the headlined articles that focus not incidentally on “strong men”: an opinion piece on Donald Trump, “The rally cry of ‘impeach’ is terrifying,” a feature article, “Fixation on Ukraine led to crisis for Trump,” an obituary of Jacques Chirac under the heading, “French leader championed European identity,” and, at the center, “Buying the world’s silence,” a report on the complicity of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan with Xi Jinping’s “incarceration of more than one million Turkic Muslims in China.” In the bottom-right corner, an ad for Turkish Airlines states “Hospitality: more than just a word,” printed over the only woman pictured on the front page, a flight attendant smiling graciously.

At the beginning of unspelling, Maurer and Manente, each covered in a blanket made of newspapers that have been taped together, recline together on a little stage. They seem to read to each other from booklets that are pasted with cut-out images and text from the NYT front page, of which the audience have also been given a copy. Their voices steadily distill perplexing soundbites at the level of letter and syllable: “t t t,” “f f f,” “er er er.” Rettenwander, seated at the far end of a nearby bench, plucks at a zither. This traditional instrument, which is plugged in to synthesizers and speakers, makes anything but traditional sounds, filling the minimally installed space with discordant reverberations. Gradually, Maurer and Manente arrive at phrases, or what sound like phrases: “the powers of his agenda,” “corruption in the living room,” “a congratulatory call,” “a e o.”

Maurer’s artistic practice evokes the tradition of concrete poetry, with which she has often been associated. Concrete poetry emerged in the postwar period as a utopian project that aspired to constituting a universal community on the basis of visually self-evident signs. In the pages of the Swiss journal for concrete poetry and art, “Spirale”, the project was presented as one of “absolute abstraction” that sought to find a non-representational art understood to be “new” and “concrete.”[1] In the fifth issue of “Spirale”, published in 1955, editors Eugen Gomringer and Marcel Wyss insisted: “we are strongly against irrational creations, and we support design that creates measurable orders of an aesthetically general character.”[2] unspelling could be said to share the utopian vision of “Spirale” insofar as it seeks to rescue language and words from “irrational” or “fake” use in order to constitute a utopian space worth living in.

But while the Swiss model envisaged a universal space opened up by concrete poetry, Maurer and Manente are caught up in more local and singular entanglements with the text. They wrap themselves in the very newspaper-blankets that they are reading – as if trying to constitute a haven of withdrawal within the interpellations of the journalistic and advertising language that saturate everyday life. Standing up, they transform these textiles into rustling shelters and disappear beneath them, shuffling despondently about the space as if trying to steal away, while continuing half-heartedly to utter syllables, fragmented words, phrases. Manente carefully folds her blanket up into a square, while Maurer crumples hers loudly into an unruly ball. These precarious refuges are then abandoned on the little stage for the rest of the performance – shoddy, inhospitable things that belong to no one. Rettenwander drags her fingers along the zither, rubbing the strings, clawing at them.

With all this messiness, the performance can be seen to belong to a specifically Viennese interpretation of the project of concrete poetry. Members of the Vienna Group like Friedrich Achleitner, Gerhard Rühm, and Oswald Wiener all published concrete poetry in the pages of “Spirale” in the 1950s. However, they were also engaged in altogether rowdier affairs. It was the performativity of concrete poetry, and the implication of the body in language, that took center stage in their work. In what they called “literary cabarets,” they performed concrete poetry along with chansons and jokes (most in very bad taste). The first “literary cabaret,” which took place on December 6, 1958 in the cramped quarters of the artists’ association Alte Welt, began with the performers concealed behind a curtain playing the Austrian national anthem on slide whistles. As Oswald Wiener would recall: “Almost all of us had a good ear,” yet, “after the first few lines we all burst out laughing and had to intermittently stop to collect ourselves.”[3] Humor and the comic – the rendering ridiculous of language and its forms – were arguably essential to the utopian space that the Vienna Group sought to construct through the means of concrete poetry. Not a few of their performances were hilarious – to audiences and performers alike. Surveying the viewers and performers of unspelling, this was most definitely not the case.

I ask myself: why so serious? The performance seems to emphatically disavow its potential for humor. A zither is not a slide whistle. And whereas Rühm once described the Vienna Group’s collaborative dissection of language as a Wittgensteinian game, “tossing sentences to each other like balls,”[4] listening to Maurer, Manente, and Rettenwander, I was struck at times by how they seemed engaged in a haphazard and rather desultory game of hangman: the closer they got to articulation, the deader the language, the deader the man.

Perhaps this dour performance of concrete poetry says something about the times it sets out to engage – times defined here by the front page of the International Edition (in English, of course) of the New York Times. The three women collect on Rettenwander’s bench, sitting behind blown-up versions of the front page that obscure them completely. “he” one says. “he he” they say together. “he he he and his his he he was and he is he has been of his he he he he.” In this repetition of “he” one would like to hear nothing but a syllable, to rescue language from its inculcation in a world that can still be abbreviated in the male pronoun “he” – but it is not possible. This is perhaps their revision to the utopian project of concrete poetry. We cannot build a house from scratch – there is not so much as a letter that is not corrupted. The “he he he he” always falls just short of the giddy laughter that it might otherwise promise. Ending the performance, Maurer ever so slowly and ponderously tips a white screen wall to the ground on top of her body. Is this the final collapse of their efforts to construct a living room? The significance of this gesture is yet to be spelled out.

 

Caroline Lillian Schopp is University Assistant in the Department of Art History at the University of Vienna, where she teaches modern and contemporary art.

 

[1] Marcel Wyss, Spirale 2, Bern, 1954, unpaginated.
[2] Eugen Gomringer and Marcel Wyss, Spirale 5, Bern, 1955, unpaginated.
[3] Oswald Wiener, “das ‘literarische cabaret’ der wiener gruppe,” in Die Wiener Gruppe. Achleitner, Artmann, Bayer, Rühm, Wiener. Texte, Gemeinschaftsarbeiten, Aktionen, ed. Gerhard Rühm. Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1967, p. 405.
[4] Gerhard Rühm, “vorwort,” in Die Wiener Gruppe. Achleitner, Artmann, Bayer, Rühm, Wiener. Texte, Gemeinschaftsarbeiten, Aktionen, ed. Gerhard Rühm. Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1967, p. 22.

 

 

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