Frédéric Alix, Philippe Blanchon, various
Fragments pour Isidore Isou
Author(s) François Coadou
Format softcover book
Year 2017
Language(s) French
Pages 152 pages
Artist(s) Frédéric Alix, Philippe Blanchon, François Coadou, Cristina De Simone, Fabrice Flahutez, Corinne Melin, Vanessa Theodoropoulou
Description
A collective work bringing together the proceedings of two study days organized at ENSA Limoges on the founder of Lettrism, Isidore Isou. It offers a series of texts by specialists aiming to situate the man and his vision in History as well as to examine the contemporaneity of the notions and creations inherited from the Lettrists and from Isou's work.
What remains today of Isidore Isou (1925-2007)? A name in the rumor of art history, and that of the movement he founded in 1946: Lettrism. A manifesto film with images disconnected from the soundtrack and scratched: Traité de bave et d'éternité (1951). A strange vocabulary, which exposes him to possible hermeticism. A bad reputation, of quarrel and pretension. This book proposes to look more closely. Without claiming to be exhaustive in the face of a vast and complex body of work, it examines some decisive notions and inventions (letter poetry, metagraphy, hypergraphy, infinitesimal art, super-temporal art, etc.), evokes contexts and sources, draws some parallels and perspectives, to try to restore in its own coherence and in its place in History, a singular vision of man and creation.
What does it mean to be contemporary? To be out of phase with the given of the present; to know that it is constructed, in other words deconstructible and reconstructible: to reappropriate it insofar as it is History. At the crossroads of art and politics, the "Perspectives inactuelles" collection proposes, through precise historical and philosophical reexaminations, to contribute to this.