avant-garde, Lettrisme - book - 1985 - Letterism and Hypergraphics: The Unknown Avant Garde 1945-1985

Letterism and Hypergraphics: The Unknown Avant-Garde 1945-1985
Jean-Paul Curtay
Franklin Furnace
1985
78 pages

Letterism (in French, Lettrisme) is one of the forgotten avant-gardes of the 20th century, having been overshadowed by its predecessors, Dada and Surrealism, and its successor, the Situationist International led by Letterist defector, Guy Debord.  The Letterists were originally formed in 1942 with the writing of the Letterist Manifesto by Isidore Isou, a young Romanian poet who, like Tristan Tzara and Constantin Brancusi before him, left his home to make a name for himself in western Europe. Isou was originally focused on creating letter poetry in the tradition of the Dadaist, Raoul Hausmann, who wrote fsmbw (a title which also makes up the bulk of the poem’s content) in 1920. Isou, in his manifesto, put things under headings such as “The destruction of words for letters” and “the order of letters” revealing an interest in reducing language to its basic form, and creating a poetry that is necessarily typographical.  

The original Letterist movement did produce letterist poetry (were they mentioned in a novel I’ve read? I have a vague memory of them being referenced in a scene of a Canadian novelist, either by Mordecai Richler or Robertson Davies). They also became an anarchistic movement that pulled off pranks such as the Easter morning address at Notre Dame in Paris in 1950 where it was declared by Lettrist Michael Mourre that God is dead.  And they produced abstract films.  They were, in essence, a belated Dadaist unit operating during wartime and then the post-war period.  In addition to these films and letter poems produced by Isou, he also developed what he called ‘hypergraphics’, a mode of writing that freely mixes words with images, or even small symbols or signs set into a sequence to convey some kind of meaning. Letterism and Hypergraphics is a kind of small catalog to an exhibition, currated by Jean-Paul Curtay (who wrote the bulk of the text for this small volume), held in 1985, that features a number of hypergraphic works by Isou and his Letterist allies.

This catalog is significant for being one of the few (very few) English texts to discuss the Letterist movement in a sustained fashion.  Elsewhere, the Letterists are referenced largely as a lead-in to a more deeply focused discussion on Guy Debord and the Situationists.  Debord is certainly mentioned in Curtay’s catalog, but only as part of the timeline of Letterist activity, as much of the text focuses on Isou, his work AFTER the split with Debord, and the influence Isou has had elsewhere (one of the pieces in this book is called Hypergraphics and America). In addition to Curtay’s writing about the Letterist’s, their history and their work, the book contains numerous reproductions of hypergraphic drawings as well as still-shots from some of the experimental films produced by these artists. The text and all the images are printed in some kind of violet.  Because this is an exhibition catalog, it focuses pretty closely on the art of the movement, and it does not actually discuss things like the above mentioned Notre Dame fiasco.