“Take a Larousse dict. and copy all the so-called “abstract” words. i.e., those which have no concrete reference.

Compose a schematic sign designating each of these words. (this sign can be composed with the standard stops.)

These signs must be thought of as the letters of the new alphabet.

A grouping of several signs will determine

(utilize colors – in order to differentiate what would correspond in this [literature] to the substantive, verb, adverb declensions, conjugations etc.)

Necessity for ideal continuity. i.e.: each grouping will be connected with the other groupings by a strict meaning (a sort of grammar, no longer requiring a pedagogical sentence construction. But, apart from the differences of languages, and the “figures of speech” peculiar to each language – weighs and measures some abstractions of substantives, of negatives, of relations of subject to verb, etc, by means of standard signs. (representing these new relations: conjugations, declensions, plural and singular, adjectivation inexpressible by the concrete alphabetic forms of languages living now and to come.).

This alphabet very probably is only suitable for the description of this picture.”

(Duchamp, note from The Green Box (published 1934), trans. George Heard Hamilton.)

“. . . And all the while, accompanying my every step, The Photographer is sounding in my head, purling incessantly through my clamped-on Walkman; it’s a good piece, Glass’s homage to Muybridge, minimalism used to maximal effect: with its repeating rhythms, endlessly rechurning, the music resembles a wave that doesn’t move, a standing wave; that’s what you listen to, the change and unchange of the wave, not any emergent melody: listening not above, but within; nowadays, I sit in Meador Park for hours on end plumbing the piece, turning the cassette over and over to extend it indefinitely; and it goes, the music just goes, without faltering, without hesitation, not depleted through repetition, but enriched; and as it goes – without faltering, without hesitation – the rapid-rushing piece instantly becomes the soundtrack to what I am looking at, regardless of what it may be: the varied tilts of oldsters’ hats, wind-gusts corduroying the park’s grass, the sparkling of pram wheels, children stepping onto the water fountain’s access ledge and hunchbacking behind their button-pushing hand and jutting lips; the music suits it all perfectly, uncannily, as absolutely apt accompaniment, the spirit of vision converted into onflowing sound; further it works just as well in the other direction: whatever I see also functions as a perfect illustration of The Photographer’s ceaseless undulant nattering; every event and gesture in my visual field – bicycle-spokes fanning, pinkie balls trickling across the ruffling green – seems to spring from some hidden imperatives of this unheard music: sight and sound have adhesive properties of which I had never before dreamed . . .

. . . It’s a question, really of figure and ground, of learning to integrate the two: of linking the landscape to the flamelike cypress thrusting up within it, of considering the World along with Cristina: dissolving patterns into particles . . . ; and I, for one, am perfectly positioned to make such investigations: I am either a bland assemblage of denim, sweatcloth, sneaks, connecting flesh and Walkman scudding through the streets of Springfield, barely perceptible in its random passages, or an indrawn 19-year-old with slightly stooped posture who has run away; it depends on whom you ask for the description: me, or anyone else in the world but me; figure and ground; figure or ground; but who, since Muybridge, even looks at the ground?; and Cristina was a cripple—”

(Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook (1995), pp.8–9)

A Something
Else Manifesto
by Dick Higgins

When asked what one is doing, one can only explain it as “something else.” Now one does something big, now one does something small, now another big thing, now another little thing. Always it is something else.

We can talk about a thing, but we cannot talk a thing. It is always something else.

One might well emphasize this. It happens, doesn’t it? Actually, everybody might be in on this Something Else, whether he wants it or not. Everyman is.

For what is one confined in one’s activity? Commitment on a personal level can be plural. One can be committed to both salads and fish, political action and photographic engineering, art and non-art. One does, we hope, what seems necessary, or, at least, not extraneous, not simply that to which one has committed oneself. One doesn’t want to be like the little German who hated the little Menshevik because the little German always did his things in a roll format, and when the little Menshevik did that kind of thing too, the little German got into a tizzy. If one is consistent and inconsistent often enough nothing that one does is one’s own, certainly not a form, which is only a part of speech in one’s language. One must take special care not to influence oneself. Tomorrow one will write Schubert’s Fifth Symphony, cook some kohlrabi, develop a non-toxic epoxy, and invent still another kind of theater; or perhaps one will just sit and scream; or perhaps . . .

When you touch a fact it is a fact. No idea is clear to us until a little soup has been spilled on it.

So when we are asked for bread, let’s give not stones, not stale bread. Maybe we have no bread at all, anyway. But why not give a little chicken?

Let’s chase down an art that clucks and fills our guts.

(From Manifestos, a Great Bear Pamphlet from 1966 containing various manifestos.)

“. . . . Among these one of the first I examined was that often there is less perfection in works composed of several separate pieces and made by different masters, than in those at which only one person has worked. So it is that one sees that buildings undertaken and completed by a single architect are usually more beautiful and better ordered than those that several architects have tried to put into shape, making use of old walls which were built for other purposes. So it is that these old cities which, originally only villages, have become, through the passage of time, great towns, are usually so badly proportioned in comparison with those orderly towns which an engineer designs at will on some plain that, although the buildings, taken separately, often display as much art as those of the planned towns or even more, nevertheless, seeing how they are placed, with a big one here, a small one there, and how they cause the streets to bend and to be at different levels, one has the impression that they are more the product of chance than that of a human will operating according to reason. And if one considers that there have nevertheless always been officials responsible for the supervision of private building and for making it serve as an ornament for the public, one will see how difficult it is, by adding only to the constructions of others, to arrive at any great degree of perfection.”

(René Descartes, Discourse on Method, beginning of Discourse 2, pp. 35–36 in the translation of F. E. Sutcliffe.)

“The idea that colours inhere in objects is, naive as it may seem, strengthened by evidence that, unlike objects, non-existent colours cannot be imagined. Fusions of existing colours can, as hybrid creatures can – a centaur, a mermaid – but a colour as such cannot. Imaginative combinations of colour with objects, to convey, by metaphor, a mood or special tone attaching to the object as it is felt, are commonplace. But imagination cannot, in a dream or otherwise, contrive a blue that never existed. ‘A blue such as you never saw,’ somebody might say; but that blue is only a potentiated colour, and the statement about it is tinged with hyperbole. Even colours manufactured (in the pursuit of novelty) for textiles are only invented variations on existing ones, with the hues chemically intensified or softened. So we content ourselves with combinatory codes, such as the alligator-mouth red of oilcloth on the kitchen table, the dawn-rose cheeks of a Japanese schoolgirl. Forget the self-evident dog’s tongue, stoplight, the Burgundy, the bayonet.”

(Christopher Middleton, “In the Vale of Soul-Making”, pp. 79–80 in Crypto-Topographia: Stories of Secret Places)

“One would want, too, all the scenes of torture, from the very beginning of social life down to recent events in the prisons of the Holy Inquisition, when the Monks of Redemption, equipped with their instruments of iron, spent their leisure time over the years in massacring Moors, heretics, and Jews. And the cruel interrogations that have gone on in the prisons of Germany, Italy, France, the Orient, everywhere, why not those too? The camera, aided by the phonograph (they are near of kin), could reproduce both the sight and the different sounds made by the sufferers, giving a complete, an exact idea of the experience. What a salubrious course of instruction or the grade schools, to purify the intelligence of modern children – perhaps even adults! A splendid magic lantern!”

(Villiers de l’Isle Adam, The Future Eve, trans. Robert Martin Adams, pp.542–543 in The Decadent Reader)

“By one means or another Duchamp affirms that the work is not a museum piece. It is not an object of adoration nor is it useful; it is an object to be invented and created. His interest – indeed, his admiration and nostalgia – for the religious painters of the Renaissance has the same origin. Duchamp is against the museum, not against the cathedral; against the ‘collection,’ not against an art that is founded on life. Once more Apollinaire has hit the mark: Duchamp’s purpose is to reconcile art and life, work and spectator. But the experience of other epochs cannot be repeated and Duchamp knows it. Art that is founded in life is socialized art, not social or socialist art; and still less is it an activity dedicated to the production of beautiful or purely decorative objects. Art founded in life means a poem by Mallarmé or a novel by Joyce; it is the most difficult art. An art that obliges the spectator or the reader to become himself an artist and a poet.”

(Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare, trans. Donald Gardner, pp. 86–87)