Rule and Constraint

Rule and Constraint
Daniel Rourke
d.rourke@kingston.ac.uk

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917)
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

In William Camfield's Marcel Duchamp's Fountain: Its History and Aesthetics in the Context
of 1917
"Duchamp stated many years later that the pseudonym "Mutt" came from the Mott Works
[J.L. Mott Iron Works, manufacturer of the urinal] but was modified because "Mott was too
close so I altered it to Mutt… and I added Richard [French slang for money-bags]. That's not
a bad name for a "pissotiere." Get it? The opposite of poverty. But not even that much, just
R. MUTT."
R. Mutt, a pun on the German, Armut, or poverty
The initials R.M. = ReadyMade?

Dada
(1915/1916)
Marc Lowenthal, in I Am a Beautiful Monster:
Poetry, Prose, And Provocation
“Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and
sound poetry , a starting point for performance
art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence
on pop art, a celebration of antiart to be later
embraced for anarcho-political uses in the
1960s and the movement that lay the
foundation for Surrealism.”
(èl ache o o qu),
"Elle a chaud au cul",
"Her ass is hot" / "She is really horny"
Key figures: Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Hans Arp,
Raoul Hausmann, Richard Huelsenbeck, Georg Grosz,
John Heartfield, Hannah Höch, Johannes Baader,
Tristan Tzara, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp,
Beatrice Wood, Hans Richter, Kurt Schwitters

Kurt Schwitters
(1887 - 1948)

Ursonate (1922–32)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?

Hannah Höch
(1889 – 1978)
‘inventor’ of the photomontage

Surrealism and ‘Automatism’
Andre Breton, Surrealist Manifesto (1924)
Surrealism is based on the belief in the
superior reality of certain forms of previously
neglected associations, in the omnipotence of
dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It
tends to ruin once and for all other psychic
mechanisms and to substitute itself for them
in solving all the principal problems of life
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
(1911)
“...there is a psychological technique which
makes it possible to interpret dreams, and that
on the application of this technique, every
dream will reveal itself as a psychological
structure, full of significance, and one which
may be assigned to a specific place in the
psychic activities of the waking state.”

While psychiatry
considers automatism reflexive and
constricting, the Surrealists believed it was a
higher form of behaviour.
For them, automatism could express the
creative force of what they believed was the
unconscious in art.
In physiology, automatism denotes automatic
actions and involuntary processes that are not
under conscious control, such as breathing; the
term also refers to the performance of an act
without conscious thought, a reflex.
Psychological automatism is the result of a
dissociation between behaviour and
consciousness.
automatism --> Automatic Writing
Andre Breton, Surrealist Manifesto, (1924)
Dictionary: Surrealism, n. Pure psychic
automatism, by which one proposes to
express, either verbally, in writing, or by any
other manner, the real functioning of thought.
Dictation of thought in the absence of all
control exercised by reason, outside of all
aesthetic and moral preoccupation.
André Masson, Automatic Drawing.

Les Champs Magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields)
André Breton and Philippe Soupault (1920)
Extract (English) :
It was the end of sorrow lies. The rail stations were dead, flowing like bees stung from
honeysuckle. The people hung back and watched the ocean, animals flew in and out
of focus. The time had come. Yet king dogs never grow old – they stay young and fit,
and someday they might come to the beach and have a few drinks, a few laughs, and
get on with it. But not now. The time had come; we all knew it. But who would go
first?

Letters, Numbers, Forms: Essays, 1928-70
By Raymond Queneau, pg. 36
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=aJZQJZl9eKgC&lpg=PR15&ots=vI_XU7BNZQ&dq=Queneau%

(workshop of potential literature)
(founded in 1960 by Raymond
Queneau and François Le Lionnais)
Raymond Queneau, Cent mille milliards
de poèmes, 1961
The N+7 procedure, invented by Jean Lescure:
replace each noun in a text with the seventh
one following it in a dictionary.
Slenderizing: remove all instances of a given
letter from a source text. (i.e. dearth becomes
death, heat becomes hat). The resulting text
must make sense.
Georges Perec’s used the ‘Knight’s Tour’ to
describe the rooms of a Paris apartment
building in his book: Life: A User's Manual.
Try out some Oulipian constraints:
http://lab404.com/oulipo/

Georges Perec, La
Disparition (literally, "The
Disappearance") 1969
Gadsby (1939) Ernest
Vincent Wright.
Warren Motte, from an article on Perec in the literary magazine Context:
“The absence of a sign is always the sign of an absence, and the absence of the E in A
Void announces a broader, cannily coded discourse on loss, catastrophe, and mourning.
Perec cannot say the words père ["father"], mère ["mother"], parents ["parents"], famille
["family"] in his novel, nor can he write the name Georges Perec. In short, each "void" in
the novel is abundantly furnished with meaning, and each points toward the existential
void that Perec grappled with throughout his youth and early adulthood. A strange and
compelling parable of survival becomes apparent in the novel, too, if one is willing to
reflect on the struggles of a Holocaust orphan trying to make sense out of absence, and
those of a young writer who has chosen to do without the letter that is the beginning and
end of écriture ["writing"].”

Translated from the original French the novel becomes, A Void
Noon rings out. A wasp, making an ominous sound, a
sound akin to a klaxon or a tocsin, flits about.
Augustus, who has had a bad night, sits up blinking
and purblind. Oh what was that word (is his thought)
that ran through my brain all night, that idiotic word
that, hard as I'd try to pun it down, was always just an
inch or two out of my grasp - fowl or foul or Vow or
Voyal? - a word which, by association, brought into
play an incongruous mass and magma of nouns,
idioms, slogans and sayings, a confusing, amorphous
outpouring which I sought in vain to control or turn off
but which wound around my mind a whirlwind of a
cord, a whiplash of a cord, a cord that would split
again and again, would knit again and again, of words
without communication or any possibility of
combination, words without pronunciation,
signification or transcription but out of which,
notwithstanding, was brought forth a flux, a
continuous, compact and lucid flow: an intuition, a
vacillating frisson of illumination as if caught in a flash
of lightning or in a mist abruptly rising to unshroud an
obvious sign - but a sign, alas, that would last an
instant only to vanish for good.
(translated by Gilbert Adair)

Fluxus
(1965ish)
name taken from a Latin for "flow, flux“ / "flowing, fluid“
1.Fluxus is an attitude: it is not a movement or a style
2.Fluxus is intermedia (Dick Higgins)
3.Fluxus works are simple: making the mundane seem magical/profound
4.Fluxus is fun: humour is an important element of Fluxus
Alison Knowles (born 1933)
Proponent of the ‘event score’: a
written instruction that can be
acted out and changed according
to the context in which it is
performed.
‘Make a Salad’ (originally
performed in 1962)

Cut Piece
(first performed in 1964)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYJ3dPwa2tI

Play it by Trust, (original 1966)

Chris Marker, La Jetée (1962)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqMEc0oe4yc

Dogme 95
The Vow of Chastity, Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg (1995)
1.Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular
prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found).
2.The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not
be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot.)
3.The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is
permitted.
4.The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for
exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera).
5.Optical work and filters are forbidden.
6.The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)
7.Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes
place here and now).
8.Genre movies are not acceptable.
9.The film format must be Academy 35 mm.
10.The director must not be credited.

Thomas Vinterberg, Festen (1998)
Lars von Trier, The Idiots (1998)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4CJrpiubYs

Harmony Korine, Julien Donkey Boy (1999)
Harmony Korine, Gummo (1997)
http://youtu.be/gtY_545-ST8?t=33s

Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick,
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
http://www.youtub
e.com/watch?
v=UzrOjposiMY

Lars von Trier, Melancholia (2011) http://www.youtube.com/w
atch?v=9UkBTrFRhKk

Harmony Korine, Spring Breakers (2013) http://www.youtube.com/w
atch?v=n7n3gF7j2V4

Bernd Becher (1931 –2007),
and Hilla Becher, (born 1934)
“systems”

Andreas Gursky, Paris Montparnasse (1993)

Andreas Gursky , 99 Cent (1999)

Constraints of The Contemporary?

Cory Arcangel, Super Mario Clouds (2002)
also… Data Diaries, (2003)
http://turbulence.org/Works/
arcangel/index.html

Rosa Menkman, Vernacular of File Formats (2009/10)
http://rosa-menkman.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/vernacular-of-file-formats-2-workshop.html

Takeshi Murata, still from Untitled (Pink Dot), 2007
http://archive.rhizome.org/artbase/54108/

Takeshi Murata, Get Your Ass to Mars, 2011
http://www.ratio3.org/exhibitions/2011/takeshi-murata-get-your-ass-mars

Rule and Constraint

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