Wurst Storm Rising

Our subject is the legacy of Dada implicit to the Burning Man phenomenon. Animate in the provocative output of fin-de-siècle French Symbolist writer and puppeteer Alfred Jarry, and filtered through the antics of the San Francisco Cacophony Society, Dada is foundational to the cultural aesthetic of Burning Man, by which we mean the event in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert playa (Black Rock City) and a global network of “burn” events. We address the significance of the Cacophony Society expedition that inaugurated the desert phase of Burning Man in 1990, “Zone Trip # 4: Bad Day at Black Rock.” Integral to the surreal tourism ventured by Cacophonists prior to the inception of Burning Man, and pivotal to its desert phase, the Zone Trip kindled “Burner” culture on the Black Rock playa and abroad. Exploring the Dadaist impulse affecting Black Rock City and woven into a worldwide network, informed by interpretative and applied methods, the article addresses art projects (including those designed and implemented by Vitos) at three regional events—Israel’s Midburn and Germany’s Burning Bär and Kiez Burn—visited in 2018 and 2019 as part of a multisited ethnography of the Burning Man movement. As these projects illustrate, the ghost of Jarry haunts, as the spirit of Dada animates, the transnational “burnscape.”

Towards a New Popular Theatre (?). Reflections After the Completion of UBUmaterial Performative Archive on Instagram

The article describes the building of UBUmaterial performative archive on Instagram during the COVID-19 lockdown by Papalangki Theatre Company in Greece (2020–2021). Through an innovative format, UBUmaterial started as the attempt of three actors-narrators isolated due to pandemic to rehearse and somehow present Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry. However, exploring the Instagram and play’s potentialities, the three actors soon would be transformed into narrators of their own effort, using their households and adopting a commenting stance on their everyday situation. Thus, the dramaturgy of UBUmaterial’s posts (videos) integrated most of the traditional popular theatre’s features and strategies. After a reflection on the contemporary meaning of “popularity” in theatre/performance, the article suggests that UBUmaterial (as well as other digital forms of theatre) may be considered a form of modern popular theatre.

Helicography

Part art history essay, part experimental fiction, part theoretical manifesto on the politics of equivalence, Helicography examines questions of scale in relation to Robert Smithson’s iconic 1970 artwork Spiral Jetty. In an essay and film made to accompany the earthwork, Smithson invites us to imagine the stone helix of his structure at various orders of magnitude, from microscopic molecules to entire galaxies. Taking up this invitation with an unrelenting and literal enthusiasm, Helicography pursues the implications of such transformations all the way to the limits of logic. If other spirals, from the natural to the man-made, were expanded or condensed to the size of Spiral Jetty, what are the consequences of their physical metamorphoses? What other equivalences follow in turn, and where do their surprising historical, cultural, and mechanical connections lead? This book considers a number of forms in order to find out: the fluid vortices of whirlpools, hurricanes, and galaxies; the delicate shells of snails and the threatening pose of rattlesnakes; prehistoric ferns and the turns of the inner ear; the monstrous jaws of ancient sharks; a baroque finial scroll on a bass viol; a 19th-century watch spring; phonograph discs and spooled film; the largest open-pit mine on the planet. The result is a narrative laboratory for the “science of imaginary solutions” proposed by Alfred Jarry (whose King Ubu also plays a central role in the story told here), a work of fictocriticism blurring form and content, and the story of a single instant in time lost in the deserts of the intermountain west.

À la rencontre de quelques avant-gardes choisies

This article undertakes a chosen journey through the various avant-garde manifestations that flourished since the end of the 19th century to the 60s. The reasons for their emergence and the excesses of their creations constitute the axes of this essay. Starting from the fanciful imaginary of Alfred Jarry incarnated by King Ubu, we will arrive at the sarcasms of Boris Vian singing La Java des bombes atomiques, to end with the convulsive beauty of Paul Éluard. By proclaiming themselves as the defenders of anti-art, they reject reason and rely on the absurd. They are characterized by chaos and imperfection, which leads them to sometimes commit destructive acts of mythical works whose sacred value is rooted in popular opinion. In turn, they advocate non-signification and contradiction as the guiding principles of their creation. Consistent with their aspirations for total independence and in whatever fields, including politics, they experience absolute creation freedom. Provocation, transgression, and subversion animate these texts eager to open new poetic horizons of writing and reading. From a double approach, theoretical and critical, we will try to forge a renewed vision of this disconcerting creation through contemporary expectations.

The clinamen principle in the poetics of Alfred Jarry

The article examines the specificity of the aesthetic programme of one of the most extraordinary writers in the turn of the 20th century, in whose creative activity the features of the transition period are concentrated, and the gap with previous traditions is clearly visible. The basics of Alfred Jarry's artistic views are studied. The main attention is paid to the principle of «clinamen», which is the foundation of his artistic system. Taking this into consideration, we analyse such his works as «Les Minutes de Sable mémorial», «Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician», «Absolute Love» and the others, in which the features of Alfred Jarry's writing style are reflected most obviously. It is stated that Alfred Jarry's artistic system, based on the «clinamen» principle, approves the power of universal relativism that connects oppositions. The limits of knowledge, the limits of meaning in Alfred Jarry's work are constantly being pushed back – Alfred Jarry's absolute subjectivism is the result of disappointment in metaphysical thinking. In this connection, it is concluded that the strategy of knowledge, determined by such coordinates as truth, God, centre, universal meaning, loses its value. The faceless «clinamen» replaces the God-meaning. Alfred Jarry’s word, which acts on the principle of «clinamen», is the only way to withstand the chaos of existence. Willfully rejecting the original existing order, it creates its own world, which is built on semantic despotism, resulting from the deviation of meaning from the original meaning of the word.

Izotopie w praktyce analizy dzieła muzycznego – na przykładzie "Arabesque" Zygmunta Krauzego

The aim of the paper is to reconsider the question of usefulness of the category of isotopy in semiotic analysis of a musical composition, on the example of Zygmunt Krauze’s Arabesque (1983) for prepared piano and instrumental ensemble. Adopting a suggestion by Nicolas Meeùs, the author undertakes an attempt to transpose Rastier’s differentiation between semantic isotopy and isotopy of the plane of expression (isotopie de l’expression) into analysis of music. Following Michel Arrivé, she presents a model example of isotopic relations in the plane of expression (signifiant) from the novel Les jours et les nuits (Days and Nights) by Alfred Jarry, and finds that isotopy of the plane of expression is for linguistic semioticians an alternative to semantic isotopy in providing cohesiveness in the layer of signs that construct meaning. She then discusses the extent of application of isotopy in music semiotics and draws attention to the semantic capacity of this category in Eero Tarasti’s theory and interpretive practice, where it undergoes metaphorisation and a kind of universalisation. She also refers to the proposal of Jean-Pierre Bartoli to use isotopy in analysing Orientalistic exoticism, which constitutes an example of a return to the level of the simplest constitutive units and the condition of their iteration, i.e., to the structuralistic-semiotic conceptions of isotopy in the approach of Greimas. Moving on to an analysis of Krauze’s composition, the author puts forward the view that Rastier’s categories of isotopy of the plane of expression as „conditions of grammaticality” (conditions de grammaticalité) of an utterance can only apply to specific cases of compositional techniques which are utterances in systemic „musical languages”, and this condition is not met in the case of the work analysed. The argumentation presented in the article is based on an analysis of particular features of the organisation of the sound material, the texture and syntax of Arabesque, as well as references to the composer’s claim to have been inspired by the mystical paintings of Władysław Strzemiński and the oriental connotations of arabesqueness in music. In seeking the musical meaning of Krauze’s Arabesque the author focuses on identifying its intentio operis.

UMA IDEIA DE DRAMATURGIA MENOR NO INFINITO DE UBU REI: APRENDER A PRATICAR UM TEATRO MENOR

O presente artigo se propõe a realizar um deslocamento conceitual do princípio de “literatura menor”, conceituado pelos filósofos Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari (1977), e aplica-lo à escrita do texto teatral a partir de seus princípios constitutivos para, a partir daí, elaborar uma hipótese da própria ação de representação enquanto um possível teatro menor. Para tal, aqui serão observados possíveis devires do princípio de “menor” na obra do dramaturgo francês do final do século XIX, Alfred Jarry, em específico sua obra mais popular, Ubu Rei (1972, 1986, 1987 e 2007). Assim se testará o quão maleável pode ser o conceito do qual se parte e de que maneira ele se adaptaria à literatura teatral, bem como se desprenderia e reinventaria no momento em que a arte teatral transcende o escrito em seu texto pretexto e assume a materialidade do tempo do processo criativo cênico e, tanto quanto, da representação.

A paixão do Entusiasmo, em Diana Luz Pessoa de Barros. Elucubrações semio-patafísicas

Este texto de homenagem à nossa sempre mestre e guia teórico, Diana Luz Pessoa de Barros, pretende indicar breves pistas de estudos semióticos sobre a paixão do entusiasmo, tomando por inspiração a fina análise modal que Greimas fizera sobre a paixão da cólera, nos anos 1980, mas, desta feita, advertida quanto aos movimentos tensivos da semiótica de Zilberberg. A ideia foi mostrar que o estilo de pesquisa e de atitude teórico-acadêmica de Diana está balizado numa verdadeira paixão de entusiasmo, intenso, perante as ações de si própria e perante as ações do outro. Num segundo movimento do texto, a homenagem utiliza expedientes da ciência patafísica de Alfred Jarry para tecer certas elucubrações sobre onomástica, aplicada às quatro grandezas que definem o nome da homenageada: Diana, Luz, Pessoa, Barros.