A Thousand and One Look at Yugoslavian Architecture

[first published, in a different version, in ICON #114]

Modernism In-Between

Maroje Mrduljas, Vladimir Kulić

protographs by Wolfgang Thaler

Why we’re looking at Yugoslavian modernism now? Because the ideological war on interpreting the socialist legacy has taken a new phase; capitalist crisis brings socialist solutions back on the agenda as in most ex-communist countries discussing the past in a positive way was a taboo. At the same time, we had a triumph of postmodern vagueness in writing history, seeing traditional analysis as “monolithic”, which preferred to focus on random elements of defunct ideologies and philosophy of “memory”. This means we lost a wider image and that is why coffetable books with melancholic landscapes of deserted lands of communist utopia are now practically only books available on the subject. It’s not difficult to see how this approach limits our understanding of history in the current moment. People in the ex-Yugoslavia, like historians Maroje Mrduljas and Vladmir Kulic, who were involved in important research think tank Unfinished Modernisations, refuse to participate in a boring ideological war and with Modernism In-Between, provide a necessary compendium of socialist era architecture for the English speakers, in the times, where the Soviet or Yugo-modernism is suffering the label of "toxic", deadly, bad for you - just in time to demolish it and build there museums of modern art, no doubt to a "Bilbao effect".

I am not arguing for preservation of the ruins, but first we should know what caused them to become ruins. What we should try is to look at the buildings without the ignorant hatred of the past, but with an understanding of history. This isn’t a classic picture book, although it contains many photos by Wolfgang Thaler. But unlike the usual, the pictures do not base only on the extraordinariness of some of the best examples of fantastical from today’s point of view social housing projects on colossal scale. It does the justice to the architecture in all its variety, which even if some of it is crumbling, most is in good shape, and definitely of much better quality and architecturally superior to the post-transitional speculative housing, that emerged without much regulation. Neither pretentious nor just purely documentary, the photographs make us appreciate the variety of housing schemes and spectacular rebuilds, like Novi Zagreb, Novi Beograd or the new Skopje, built after the earthquake in 1963 by international team of architects, rather than picturesque stadiums, conference centers or operas.

Which doesn’t mean, that the Poljud stadium in Split, Opera in Skopje or churches, like Serefudin White Mosque in Visoko, shouldn’t be admired as stupendous examples of innovative architecture. Skopje’s case is discussed in the book in detail as one of those strange Cold War events, where the war between the blocks was suspended, as at the same time an international agreement in limiting the ban on nuclear weapons was signed. Yes, a  different historical scenario to the one we know now was possible. The world could’ve looked differently.

There's also ideology, mostly expresed in the now-exploited monuments - spomeniks. But Modernism in general rejects any black-white simplifications, which means we have to get deeper into the context. There’s a shocking amount of text for a picture book, in which architecture is not simply seen as a result of socio-political and cultural tensions, but, in this case, as an attempt at a paradoxical independence of its authors and an intervention in social reality.

The title’s “in-between” refers to the built environment in all its six republics (Serbia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, with Kosovo and Vojvodina having unofficial status) on many levels: we’re here between cultures, between various socialisms, between economical inequalities of the north-east and south-west, also, having have to deal with nationalisms, that were emerging again and again, and, on the top of that, strange positions between two cold war camps. 

If Yugo-sotsmodernism was “in between”, that meant it was attempting a kind of architectural universalism, to make “universalism one’s own”. It was against nationalistic fetishizations of style, instead investing in self-managed socialism, brotherhood, independent foreign policies. They were trying to follow demographical patterns, in a rapid urbanization assuming sometimes traumatic effects on often rural population, but still, from the contemporary view of housing shortages, it becomes relativised. Yes, the initiative to house everybody was a whole with the political program, but it really tried to improve level of life for everybody.

Yet, authors seem disintrerested in further discreditation of the idea of socialism, at the same time not succumbing to the Yugonostalgia. Mostly completely unsentimental about the shortcomings of the system: it didn’t realise its promises, it didn’t built enough, appreciate certain aspects of this inbetweenness, like trying to surpass the ethnic disruptions within the Yugoslavia, which resulted in such tragic way at the end of it. at the very least, the book allows us to see Yugoslavia not as a defunct land of memory, but as a once living organism.

The past and the present of Polish music avant-garde: two cases

Krzysztof Penderecki and Eugeniusz Rudnik in Polish Radio Experimental Studio,  late 50s/early 60s.

[both, in different versions, apeared in The Wire last year]

Krzysztof Penderecki

Awangarda

CD

Utrenja

CD

Polskie Nagrania 2011

Krzysztof Penderecki’s story is well known: a bold avant-garde composer in the 1950s/60s, one of the major forerunners of Polish School of Composition and champions of the newly emerging, strictly Polish version of atonality called sonorism, of which he was a precursor, suddenly, in the early 1970s, he gradually drops its principles and starts composing mainly grandiose symphonic music in the Romantic style of late 19^th century. He gave a famous statement, that “it’s not him, who betrayed the avant-garde, but the avant-garde, who betrayed the music”. It’s not the only case of an avant-gardist rejecting the experiment for the sake of classicism, but it is his early stuff, that remains the most famous and which made him successful in the West. Pieces compiled on Awangarda CD, composed between 1958 and 1964, were all unanimously appreciated and prized on international festivals, like Donaueschingen, exactly at the same time, when Poland was opening to the western world after years of Stalinism. Strophes for soprano, recitation and 10 instruments or Psalms of David for mixed choir, strings and percussion were prized in the post-Thaw Poland, 8:27 from 1961, called this way as a homage to John Cage and later renamed as Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, has become an all-time soundtrack classic, from Kubrick’s seminal use in Shining, Children of Men and Inland Empire and Polymorphia was used in The Exorcist, all becoming by accident somewhat universal sonic embodiment of radical evil. 

Despite being so well known, pieces collected here still give thrills, especially paired with less known Fluorescences, where apart from symphonic orchestra, Penderecki introduces sound smade by pieces of sheet metal, electric bell, saw, typing machine and an alarm siren. The aleatoric method of composition (a non-determined score, which gave the musicians space for improvisation) made them very difficult to perform in Poland, mutinying the players. Andrzej Markowski, who’s directing both on all the Awangarda pieces and the Utrenja (Morning Prayer), had a chief role in making many avant-garde pieces to be played at all. Utrenja (1970-1) is one of the most striking, uncompromising pieces of liturgic modern music, where the chthonic, non-western wailings (phenomenal voices of National Philharmonics soloists and choir) of Old-Church orthodoxy music is paired with the ruthlessly modern, fragmented, queasy, even ailing modern idiom, in a way that would satisfy the very Theodor Adorno. It can rival with Ligeti or Gubaidulina as a mastrepiece of religious music and convert anybody, if only for an hour; a timeless piece of music. Given its success, especially in the foreign audiences, the later denial by the composer of all this part of his work, must've been purely ideological. Perhaps the reason was easy: it wasn't the indie film fans, who were filling the concert halls, though with Penderecki's recent collaboration with Jonny Greenwood and a sudden comeback to his early work, this is certainly a subject to change.

PRES today

DJ Lenar

Re:PRES

Bolt CD
listen! listen

The title of yet another album from the revered series resurrecting Polish Radio Experimental Studio, Re: PRES, couldn’t be better put: here, the contemporary Polish minimal techno producer, improviser and musician, DJ Lenar is trying to at the same time “repeat”, but also reinvent, a very mysterious and fascinating part of the PRES archive: the hundreds of one if its flagship composer’s, Eugeniusz Rudnik’s so called “one-minutes”, vast collection of sonic miniatures, usually exactly no longer than the said one minute.

The genius of it is that it is and it isn’t an “archival” production – because the collection of Rudnik’s pieces was so huge, the Bolt producers thought the best way of presenting them to the listener won’t be an arbitrary “curating” of some samples of it, but to give them to a musician, who would rather creatively replay them and try to use Rudnik’s method of making music. And those methods varied from a momentary distraction using the cast offs that left after other sessions, to the improvisations and planned compositions, but all must've been brief.

This makes Lenar's 17 tracks, lasting from 30 seconds to 3,5 minutes, a contemporary rendition of the Studio methods, but with no trace of the hommage. We are rather to imagine Lenar simply trying out various moods, while playing, what is meaningful, on what used to be only the aides of music-making: amplifiers, gramophone, samplers, loopstation. Sometimes they are remixes, but more often variations over a piece. What is the most gripping in this beautiful series is how the genuine idiom of Polish electroacustic music: characteristic crookedness, crunkiness with a shine of madness and surrealism, clashes with the typical contemporary language of alt-electronica, filtered through glitches and loops.

It is hard sometimes to say though, what sounds newer and what belongs to Lenar, and what to Rudnik – it is clear though this music couldn’t be played in the 1960s. The original purpose of miniatures was for thetre and you can try to imagine pictures accompanying the microstructures od Lenar - filled with romantic prettiness, yet haunted. This meeting with the past has a slightly sickly, melancholic, tuberculosis charm of old laces - like meeting a beautiful girl from a past era, of whom we know she’s dead, afterall. It is a romantic Polish soul, in search for an absolute sound, bathing in slices of sounds from many different times.

the album is a part of an excellent series, including recent Assemblage by Boguslaw Schaeffer and wonderfully artsy Knittel/Sikora/Michniewski. Also, remember I wrote about this before, and a book I contributed to.

Beyond the Zone: Social and Political Costs of the 'Ruin Porn'

I'm having a hard-hitting essay published, on the political and economical costs of the aesthetisation of the Eastern Europe's poverty, and, at the margin of that, how it is a part of the 'ruin porn' (incidentally, there's a piece this week on that very subject about Detroit by Andy Beckett) in the Australian edition of Architectural Review. Here small fragments as a teaser, buy it or wait until the next issue to read the whole thing, or wait until my book is written:

(...) The former USSR has become a scene of such fetishization exponentially with its own economical demise after the collapse of socialist system and capitalist shock therapy. As pictures of heavy drinking, impoverished folk from Siberia populate the internet as “Hipsters from Omsk”, the tons of pictures from Pripyat notwithstanding, at the same time, Ukraine and Russia haven't had a poorer record from the western commentators since the dissolution, for things like jailing their liberal west-friendly politicians, like Yulia Tymoshenko, or anarchist punk bands, like Pussy Riot, performing anti-Putin gigs in front of cathedrals. (...)

(...) The ongoing fascination/repulsion of the capitalist West with the ex-Soviet Bloc started during the cold war years and prepared very well the ground for the flourishing of all sorts of urban and political myths, that were only confirmed by photos circulating in magazines like LIFE. They were consolidated by a few works by the most popular Russian director in history, a man with an extraordinarily distinct vision, Andrey Tarkovsky. Most notably it was his vision in Stalker, which, despite being shot in 1979, is popularly perceived as a “Chernobyl” film, for its uncanny prophetyism, endlessly reproduced in the company of the reactor-trips pictures and transformed into a Ukrainian-produced video game STALKER:Shadow of Chernobyl. There, instead of involving in philosophical debates, as in the film, one becomes an amnesiac urban explorer, whose one of the tasks is to kill a villain called “Strelok”.(...)

(...) And yet, Zona fascinates: fascinates the characters in the film and now, the scavengers, who want nothing more than to be there. Why? Slavoj Zizek suggests that this popularity is prompted exactly by its prohibition: Zone's properties are augmented by the fact they are somehow wrong, bad for you, a Lacanian interpretation of the Real as an area of exclusion prompting its power. The ex-communist area, as possessive of dark forces for that reason precisely is popular among the westerners. The problem is that what they do, the money they leave in the former East is based on this place staying toxic: remaining forbidden, radioactive, sick. And the guarantee this world can remain sick is precisely because where we come from, the West, is safe and healthy. in addition, macabrely, this film lead to a number of “victims”, a true chain of corpses behind it.  It was not shot in Russia, but in Estonia, near Tallinn, at the two deserted power plants at the Jagala river and several other toxic locations, like a chemical factory, which was pouring toxic liquids. At least three people involved in the production, Anatoliy Solonitsyn, Larissa Tarkovska and Tarkovsky himself, died of cancer in the aftermath. (...)

Avant-garde from the Bloc(k)

[this was written for a certain website that then saw some obscure Polish music, got scared and changed their mind]

[I wrote on other Polish punk groups in English before, on Wielkanoc and on several included in the book Generation]

Kontrola W, Bossa Nova, on: Porzucona generacja (Deserted Generation, compilation, Noise Pop, 1998)

"Kontrola W is the best and most modern band in Poland today” – wrote Chris Bohn in the New Musical Express from 23.06.1983. Bohn or rather Biba Kopf, was going around communist countries in the early 80s looking for interesting music – having had spent some time in Germany, he went further east, stopping among other places, in Poznan, where there was held a Rock Arena (festival of otherwise big rock bands like Republika, Lady Pank, TSA, Lombard), before heading further to Russia. The band never released a record, the six tracks on "Abandoned generation" comp were registered in 1982 in Radio Łódź: “Manekiny", "Bossa Nova", "Ciągle w ruchu", "Centrum Przemysłu", "Radioaktywne", "To będzie koniec”.






Kontrola W (from Zduńska Wola, in industrial area of Poland) originally was named “Kontrola Władzy” (Control of Power), but probably because the group didn’t want to get in trouble, they decided to shorten it – at some gig when they were announced, someone from the crowd said: "but you cant control the power!" – "but it’s about us being controlled by the power" – the band replied (telling later that 'W' stands for Wrażenia (Impressions)). Still, the music, in its lyrics and militant, pugnacious (though having lots of new wave classiness) retro rockabilly elegance and postpunk erudition, brought to mind Burroughsesque topics of the control from the state, communist newspeak, atomic war, nuclear crisis, hiding in bunkers, imagining the end of the world, fear of pollution and radioactivity, state-controlled media brainwashing the society, erasure of the self by the mass culture, personality crisis – sound familiar?

All the typical disillusioned mindset of the punk and post punk idiom. On the top of that, they provocatively dressed with simplicity of hunky workers, with their 50s hair and shirts, as if they runned away from a construction site. But we must remember what was actually happening in Poland around the time the band came into existence: shortly after they got together, Martial Law broke in December 1981, which to many people in its first phase was like a real war: tanks, food crisis and rationing, curfew, people arrested, more or less accidental deaths on the streets, terror. Many people of the previous punk scene emigrated from Poland then (you can read interviews and testimonies from that era in a beautifully illustrated bilingual book with punk photos of Michal Wasaznik, Generacja (Ha!art 2011)). In this atmosphere Kontrola W took parts in still occurring from 1982 youth festivals, and a year later, when the war was over, foreign journalists like Bohn could hear them.




Says the leader Darek Kulda in an interview from 1984: "I wanted to make an ugly music. It was a period, when in Polish radio there was nothing apart from hard rock, which I was sick of. I decided to cerate a band whose music would be unclassifiable, neither rock, nor jazz, nor nothing. We failed, cos they put us under a label: new wave." It’s hard not to think of new wave/post-punk idiom though, listening to those 6 salvaged Kontrola W’s tracks, despite their poor recording quality, possessing instantly recognizable originality: precise and smooth as hell rhythm section (drummer Wojtek Jagielski in the ‘free’ Poland, funnily enough become a talk-show celebrity) drives the motorik of Bossa Nova, which starts from a few seconds of compulsive scratching guitar’s strings. Then the sexy drums and bass get us into the warped “Bossa Nova”, having little to do with the style itself, but much rather resembling the assured passages from Wire or Gang of Four.

Like an out-of-tune, sick, broken rockandroll, the song progresses in angular groans and whines of guitar, accompanied with a very assured, very capricious screech of Kasia Kulda, in which she’s trying to get rid of an importunate lover: When there’s nothing to talk about/ you persecute me at every step/ Crawling upon my feet (…)/ and if this doesn’t bring effect/ you can only sing this old tune: Bossa Nova!”. Kulda sings with sharpness and panache which Siouxie Sioux should be jealous of, if she knew about it. but it’s not Siouxie we should think of, but rather Altered States, where the singer is not a predatory dominatrix, but when the song doesn’t lean on the charisma of one member, but is an effect of a group effort.




In complicated ways of development of popular music in the Soviet Bloc it’s easy to classify bands immediately as some sorts of poor, oppressed oppositionists – I’d rather say, that in the case of Polish punks it was the same impulse as the one of their cold war peers from the other side of the curtain. Both felt that the current political order is wrong, that there’s no opportunities for people like them. The music rising everywhere in the punk era, regardless, eastern or western was directed by a similar impulse of disillusionment, of taking things in ones hands and ability to express anger and dissatisfaction. On both sides it was a manifestation of the dispossessed: the fact the western youth was rejecting yuppie lifestyle of baby boomers, and Poles had nothing to lose doesn’t change it.

The song was released 16 years after its registration at a ephemereal 1-person managed Pop Noise records in Poznań. Aborted for political reasons (martial law) and then put to a halt, when the band dissoluted in autumn 1983, when the 19 year old members chosen to study in Warsaw. They reemerged 3 years later in different personnel, as Cosmetics of Mrs Pinki, but never they regained the sharpness and acidic humour of the Kontrola W.

[in the next episode other memorable bands of Polish punk/new wave: Made in Poland, Śmierc Kliniczna, Kryzys, Wielkanoc, queens of pop synth and electro, disco divas and many many more!!!!]

Making Audible - Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennial

[based on a text I written for The Wire Nov 12]

Polish Pavilion at Venice Biennale

Katarzyna Krakowiak

Venice, Italy

At this years Biennale, full of clumsy pseudo-socially engaged statements, it was mostly the few art focused installations, that pushed the path of experiment. Perhaps it is impossible to make an exhibition as big as the Biennale something beyond polite mediocrity, to make people come back home happy. With the topic of ‘Common Ground’, the curator David Chipperfield tapped suitably into the contemporary economic crisis, bearing questions of ownership and communality within a capitalism-shaped world, but the outcome was rarely questioning anything beyond nostalgia after the western welfare state and modernism, beside the usual architects’ self-boosterism. Only one pavilion, by artist Katarzyna Krakowiak and curated by Michal Libera of Bołt Records, considered the relation between sound and architecture and took it to a new level, distinguishing itself strongly from its surroundings by an extremely sophisticated, if a little depoliticized installation, that can potentially change the direction of the sound art becoming increasingly conservative in terms of presentation – happening within white gallery walls, exploiting on and on the same subjects, for instance, the one of "the city" or making predictable installations, which think simply by using the sound they are sophisticated - not really adding anything new to the understanding of the sound.

Krakowiak specialises in complex, often inspired by classic texts on sound, borderline explorations, making us realise how our world is visual, optical. In a series of events called Expectative she mixed the F. Murray Schaeffer notion of soundscape with a 17^th century scientist’s Athanasius Kirchner. There, Krakowiak embraced ideas derived from the acoustic ecology movement, with the artist looking at how sounds and echoes occur in the noise of a modern city. In Venice she goes further, putting the whole idea of a “pavilion” into question, as her work, entitled elaborately Making the walls quake as if they were dilating with the secret knowledge of great powers (after Dickens' novel Dombey & Son), relies solely on the assimilation of sounds from the mechanical construction of the Polish and the four neighboring pavilions: Romanian, Egyptian, Venetian and Serbia. All are a part of a heavy and sinister Fascist-era style structure on the border of the Giardini side. 

First, she stripped the previous additions to the architectural construction of the interior to the brick walls, to get to the rudiments’ (walls, floors, ventilation) genuine natural vibration – together with the acoustician Andrzej Kłosak, they discovered the building had a 6 second long reverberation. Then the building’s acoustics were examined thoroughly. This way what is subsequently, via filters, amplifiers and speakers, turned into a perceptible sound, is not just simply the sound of the building, but it’s orchestrated – Krakowiak made the resonant frequencies of the space audible, orchestrating them with a sequencing software. She decided which elements generated more interesting sound and augmented them in the final effect.

For instance, she installed sound absorbers behind the building where normally nobody goes, or in the walls of the neighbouring pavilions, which, in effect, are “eavesdropped”, so that we learn about the secret existence of those spaces. The floor hides the speakers, which send powerful shivers to the building and walls, which were newly covered with a layer of concrete to create more interesting echo. In turn, the speakers hung above the entrance to “push” the unaware public inside and make them walk in search of the sound. Suddenly, all the niches, vestibules, apses, bays of this pseudo-classical fascist interior “sing”. And we walk around this fairly sinister space, whose asutere, grey areas make it strangely beautiful. But what we hear is not “music”, not ambient, nor sound art: it’s the unreal, ethereal consequences of the construction of this particular building made audible. The noises were brutal, heavy, even disturbing. Stripped of all architectural elements, they embodied the final point of pivotal situations from the 20^th century experimental art: an echo chamber of John Cage or Alvin Lucier's claustrophobic Shelter for amplified vibration pickups and enclosed space. Or in fact, they try to define a space for performing sound as such. Music is usually played in an interior, which is often ignored.

Things I enjoyed this year

the queen is only one

Some things I enjoyed this year, this time without the terror of ordering.

MUSIC

newbies:

Lana Del Rey, Born To Die (though I wish Lana on the next album stopped her litanies to the bad boyfriends and took to slashing them or summat; and smiled a little)
Gudrun Gut Wildlife (especially T. Turner's cover the Best)
Julia Holter Ekstasis
Pye Corner Audio
Burial EP
Crystal Castles
Carter Tutti Void
Rouge's Foam compilation (incl. eg. Lotic, Mama Testa, Blunt & Copeland)



about which I'm in between:
still trying to convince myself to the new Scott Walker
Jenny Hval, kindof, which I consider an exponent of the so called by me "clitoris kitch"

Oldies

a lot or Polish Radio Experimental Studio for research
anything, in any form, by Roxy Music, Andrzej Korzyński (especially Possession, and dusting his soundtracks to Andrzej Wajda films)ABBA, Bowie
Philly soul, various dubs & reggaes courtesy of Owen
everything by DAF
Izabela Trojanowska, Kora, Urszula and other Polish punk rock/new wave divas
Harmony & Style Lovers Rock in the UK comp
Kraftwerk Electric Cafe
Krzysztof Komeda
Disco Inferno; This Ain't Chicago UK acid house comp
AR Kane, very much; Grace Jones
Ute Lemper, especially Punishing Kiss & her renditions of Kurt Weill/Brecht & anonymous Berlin interwar cabarets
Goblin & people doing music for Jean Rollins' films.

BOOKS

Most books I've read concerned my topic, that is the cold war, ideologies thereof, communism and postcommunism, eastern Europe, the Thaw, art of the eastern bloc, especially cinema & music, yugoslavian modernism & selfmanagement, popcommunism, consumption in peope's republics, avant-garde vs realism, marxism & modernism. Here a selection.

Marci Shore: two of her books, The Taste of Ashes and collected essays Modernity and its Discontents (only in Polish) concerning the topic of legacy of communism in Europe and so called "Judeo-communism" were my absolute highlights of the year.

reading long essays in LRB & NLR, especially Neal Ascherson, Fredric Jameson, TJ Clark and Tony Wood

Eyal Weizman's The Least of All Possible Evils, for which I interviewed him, full version soon.

Kapuscinski's biography by Artur Domoslawski, first authentically good book on communism & aftermath from a perspective of its flag reporter, from this part of the world.

Jodi Dean, Communist Horizon, which's greatest feature is disenchanting the C-word and making a strong argument for a communist renewal without slipping into the "full communism" idiocy.

Several books from Zero: Daniela Cascella's En Abime, Neil Kulkarni, Architecture of Failure, iCommunism, Art Kettle, Brave New Avantgarde, Folk Opposition, The Sacred and the Profane.

rereading Bruno Jasienski's I Burn Paris in English!

Miron Bialoszewski, Diaries

Stanislaw Czycz, super obscure Polish writer and his experimental legacy.

David Crowley on socialist music, Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius on maps. Piotr Piotrowski on avant-garde.

Looking forward to reading Anne Applebaum's Iron Curtain, still looking awry at it.

FILMS

It was an intense year of watching horror and exploitation films, which I've been avoiding basically most of my life. Since late 2011, I re/watched all of the Argentos, and what was available by: Jean Rollin, Mario Bava or Aldo Lado. The star was Macha Meril and her absolutely astounding performance in Night Train Murders. Lado's Who saw her die, an inspiration to Roeg's Don't Look Now, will remain a somewhat unexpected favorite. I also came back to the cheesy soft porn, enjoying early Emmanuelles and Story of O. similarly with the French neobaroque, with the stress on Jean Jacques Beneix. I also finally watched: Downfall, which I hated, and several Hammer classics, which I loved, especially The Quatermass series. I also spent fair amount of time watching the East German classics form DEFA, from which Konrad Wolf (Solo Sunny, Sunseekers, Divided Heaven, I was 19), The Rabbit is Me and Murderers are Among Us were the best. Trier's Melancholia. A lot of the BFI Flipside, with, finally, Skolimowski's The Deep End as the greatest. I watched and wrote on Christoph Schlingensief. Fassbinder's The Year of 13 Moons was probably the best film I saw this year, category-less.

Among the newbies:

The Young Adult, first truthful film about people living in crap modern towns & thirtysomething single women.
Barbara, quasi-successful take on living in the late GDR
The Consequences, first Polish film on the war-time pogroms on Jews...
also Margaret by Kenneth Lonergan was excellent.

ART (note: some of that may be in, heaven forbid, eastern Europe!)

exhibitions: William Klein and Daido Mariyama in Tate Modern, Tate's perm. collection, esp surrealism & John Heartfield, Sounding the Body Electric in Lódź Museum of Art, astonishing Art Everywhere on the, on the surface, Warsaw's fine arts academy until the 1940, in practice, a great survey on Polish modernism & art deco; Bratislava's National Gallery show on socialist realism; Unfinished Modernisations in Maribor & Belgrade; right wing at in Warsaw MOMA; Harun Farocki in Warsaw CCA, Kaliningrad scene in the same gallery; Patrick Keiller & Picasso's legacy show & in general, random visits in Tate Britain for their permanent modern expositions, especially Vorticists; Bruno Munari: My Futurist Past in Estorick Collection, London; Calvert 22's NSK & Sana Iveković, Soviet Modernism in Vienna's AzW; Ballgowns in V&A.

going to Venice Architecture Biennale for the first time & enjoing especially Kasia Krakowiak's installation.

seeing Laibach live for the first time and in Tate's Turbine Hall, despite giving them a scathing review, was a powerful experience.

disco party at Unsound in Cracow in the old ostalgic hotel Forum, which looked like straight from The Shining: nevermind the music, mind the Eyes Wide Shut feeling.

I feel lucky to have travelled to: Belgrade (and then to Ljubljana on a night train), Amsterdam twice, Rotterdam for its "madness of the new"; Bruxelles for the first time and seeing its Musee de Beaux Arts from Auden's poem, travelling with my beloved to Venice and Naples, and visiting finally its Archeological Museum and Museo di Capodimonte; I was shocked/seduced by Naples and its brusque haggardness, piles of trash and communist symbols sprayed on the walls more than with anything I saw this year. Also, doing the Vienna-Bratislava-Budapest KK of Austria & Hungary tour could've easily turned me into one of those horrific 'Mitteleuropa' nostalgic bores, but luckily, it didn't!

Separate category - Things I still haven't heard a single time, seen or read:

Frank Ocean, Holy Motors, Berberian Sound Studio, new Bond, Azealia Banks, any new Rihanna, Taylor Swift, sea-punk & gifwave (ok, by now I saw some), huge part of the Wire's top 50 (shame, shame), Tabu, Impostor, Two Years at the Sea, Patience by Sebald, Marx's Capital (but I've read Proust and Man Without Qualities and whole Mann & Dostoyevsky!).

Things that I thought were rubbish: The Master, the new Batman, most of the new sleepy music popular in the music press & festivals, the new Badiou 'for the militants', Shame (unlike Hunger), the New Inquiry, blog male bonding, Geoff Dyer's Zona, The new Stedelijk Museum (or rather the unimpressive effect after the 9 years and the money they spent on it), food in the UK, general up-tightness, music festivals, UK columnists, UK press, debates about 'bashing the rich' with the privileged posing as 'victims', and then privileged ppl on the left asking for stopping the debating of the privilege on the left, needless to say, all of the contemporary politics and bashing of the leftwing voices, the Polish misery & homogenisation. The shit we're in.

this year I was regularly jobbed in UK magazines and national broadsheets, which, considering my nationality & short stay in Britain, I dare to call a success.

I also still haven't finished my book, which is the main goal for the beginning of the 2013.

oh, and I've set up a tumblr, out of sheer contempt for being a net-technical idiot.

Portrait of a Woman as a Young Emigrant

Recently I had nothing but work on my mind, and despite the looming Xmas, this is unfortunately not the end for me...Here I'm just listing the recent publications:

- I wrote twice for Guardian's Comment is free, once on the silencing of the left, later, last week, on the reasons for the lack of cultural impact from the enormous Polish emigration, as the latest census revealed. Both have much longer versions, which I will share in here soon. Im still somewhat overwhelmed by this, as writing it in English made me ponder many unanswered questions about what do I do in here, that I preferred perhaps to remain in the dark: who am I, who am I as a journalist living abroad, what can I really say, and finally, am I "happy"?? (sic)

I have mixed feelings after publishing both: both provided me quite a lot of criticism, but also encouragement. I was, among other things, accused of undermining the cultural influence we have by some of the "creative" part of our minority; on the other hand, I had a feeling, that I couldn't really write about perhaps the much more important aspect of our stay in here: how does the Polish presence on the Isles express itself politically, if at all. This 800,000 people seem to have little interest not only in dropping their dayjobs for the sake of "creativity"; moreover, they are, similarly as in Poland, quite passive in gaining a political voice.

Last summer I happened to translate the leaflet for the Ken Livingstone's Mayor of London campaign, from English to Polish, designed especially for the Polish community in London, to encourage them to vote. Leaflet got published a bit late, but this is not to be blamed on the little turnout (and the loss by Ken). It is rather their disilussionment in whether they can make any difference or perhaps, disbelief they will stay here long enough to try to make an impact. Also, if anything, the latest few articles about Poland in the Guardian revealed lack of language: still fresh, we don't (including me) know how to express the meaning of this situation. It revealed an interesting position of a community in flux, whose language is also, by neccessity, shaky, but which, hopefully, will find itself able to express many issues that, no doubt, pervade this group: anxiety, anger, alienation, fear in confrontation with a stronger culture (no doubt, if all of us gained a similar upbringing: God, Honour & Homeland and so on, simmered in a deeply Catholic sauce; patriotism, that can turn into xenophobia) but also we will learn a lesson in tolerance - since the war, Poland, a multicultural country, where Poles, Jews and many other ethnic groups lived, albeit, as time showed, not peacefully, was turned by the USSR into a monolithic, nationalistic country, with no experience of multiculturalism. Stay in Britain can change that, especially, when we'll come back home. It's good some initial effort to discuss our status was done, maybe some wisdom will emerge from those bubbling tensions. Let's not be politically naive, let's be aware of what is going on.

- In this BBC 3 appearance at the Nightwaves programme I'm trying, cursed by the lack of time and suggestions like "aren't you jolly good in integrating??", to address some of those issues.

- I also wrote on one of the most visually rewarding "luxury books" of the year, Neville Brody's & Jon Wozencroft's brainchild, brilliant FUSE 1-20 anthology. It made me ponder many important things: the 90s, when my adolescence took place; beauty as it expresses itself in time; a weird story of punk and postpunk's romance with the avant-garde; contemporary "curatorial approach", that seem to consume many of the even most interesting artistic efforts; effortless beauty of this era, where the style was god and how much I miss it. When one had the style, and not necessarily the money. It's for Blueprint, which seems not to have actualized its website for some time, but is now at least edited by the wonderful Shumi Bose. It's a good 'un, if I may say so immodestly, so go an geddit ( though I may post it some day!).

- also, as every month, you can read me in the Wire. In November issue I wrote on the wonderful Venice Biennial installation by Kasia Krakowiak in the Polish Pavillon; in December issue I recommend equally passionate, delicate yet strong, new, poetic book by Daniela Cascella, En Abime, on how listening helped her to save her existence, briefly (ha!); Daniela also has a blog; I also share a lot of her anxieties/ views/ feelings about being a foreigner in the UK, so reading it was as moving as it was soothing; in the next, January issue I share my end-of-year thoughts and favorite records in the 2012 roundup. Next issue will hopefully have my 3 articles as well. My full list of this year's favorites will be up in here shortly before the end of the year.

- I also wrote for Icon, issue #113, another yet different approach to the legacy of Yugoslavian Modernism, this time on the basis of a good book by Maroje Mrduljas & Vladimir Kuić, with great photos by Wolfgang Thaler, Modernism In-Between; I also answer some quite hilarious questions about, warning, the weather! Longer version on here soon.

- there's as well an essay on the aesthetisation of Chernobyl, the legacy of Tarkovsky and how the current urb-exes have their role in abusing the living population in there, for the Architectural Review Asia and Pacific, issue #128, out Dec 31st, finally.

- moreover, a still unpublished, long review of Jodi Dean's Communist Horizon for The Guardian's Review, which, I'm told, will be finally published in the issue on January, 19th. Here we're in the future, so shall say no more, but reader, there's a lot to wait for.

- there'll be also an essay on Kaliningrad's emerging art scene and the neocolonialism within the former USSR. Are you ready for this gem? It'll be published at the forthcoming Calvert Journal, launched soon by the lovely Calvert 22 gallery, focusing on the art from the Eastern Europe. Can't wait for that.

Barney Bubbles ceratively "stealing"from Polish abstractionist-constructivist Henryk Berlewi, initiating the (unfortunately, ongoing) romance between the punk and early avant-garde esthetics, some good photos in here

- and a short recapitulation of the recent "Sowjetmodernism" trend in the forthcoming issue of Architecture Today.

- if this is not enough, Im also writing 3 other long articles right now (among others, a long essay on Polish "Judeo-communism" for a Polish journal, and and essay on avant-garde...), two book contributions, several translations and also trying to write MY bloody book (sic!!). I am truly reaching the levels of the Stakhanovite comrade Hatherley. I was never looking so much forward to Christmas (= rest) as this year, despite hating it since adolescence. Sorry I've been such a shoddy blogger this year, haven't even properly learnt English or posting pictures, and haven't realised so many of my blogging intentions, so many.... Have a good one, but don't forget: cynicism is a feature of intelligent people. This is all for now, Merry Xmas!!!!

An anthology on the Experiment in Eastern European Art & Science with my contribution

Today i want to recommend to you a new exciting Book with my contribution - thought as an inbtroduction to the practices, history and people involved with the Polish Radio Experimental Studio, an outstanding, today we'd say "collective", or rather, a communist era radio studio devoted to recording new electronic types of music, that, with the allowance of the state, could practice all sorts of new music without the necessary censorship or scrutiny of their actions. I wrote on them before. The book is divided into two parts: anthology and the lexicon, including entries on all sorts of experiments, from all around the world, with a focus on art & (a bit) on science or their mutual ways. In my entries (and a text on the "Warsaw experimentators") I tried first of all to excavate certain views and practices which I consider still unpopular in Poland: influence of socialist economy (and social control) on art, art and the environment, experimental architecture, competition between the Blocs, collectivity, reassesment of the early avantgardes and the social role of an artist under the socialism. You can purchase the book in here and as it contains also some English translations, it won't be wasted on you.

New tumblr devoted to my book

I have a brand new tumblr devoted solely to the book I'm writing, Poor but Sexy. Read it, like it, reblog, share, encourage me! #workinprogress

Music of Our Time

[I am posting this while listening to a mixtape I got this morning from a friendly Rouges Foam, Heck, You will hit something that looks like Mount Everest. He also become, for this sake, a cut-and-paste collage master - lovely! - but not really sure what to think of this sport imagination (below) - you must've become very americanised, my friend, during your stay in the US! It made me think though I should post this spiked live review for the Wire, which didnt get the editors' approval, making me think what is it, that I'm possibly getting wrong here? Why I find myself unable to appreciate the new music, at least from certain post-hauntological spectrum, find it boring, uneventful, conjunctural, moribund-without-a -reason. Rouge's mix, which encompasses much more than post-hauntology, shows at least certain interesting creative ricketiness, de rigeur moribundity, sure, but at least soundscapes in which something happens; the more 'happens' in music, the better, in my view; too much is just enough. Recently I was giving a lecture at the Krakow's Unsound festival about the end of personality in music: how lack of authorship, from interesting (from ballardian The Normal and such industry-jokes as Silicon Teens to anonymity of techno & house and then hauntology, Burial and so on) becomes today just a pose, just another element of reversed fashionable identikit. Characteristically, also in terms of sound, of things actually happening in the music, post-hauntology is rather uneventful and hollow, so alienated, so bleak (and so depoliticised). How strange, but also how apt, given this generation was born already to neoliberalism, from the beginning saturated in "there's no alternative"...Anyway, here're my thoughts after going to a gig of some of the hottest artists of the season, trying to at teh same time reflect on a style, of which Tri-angle roster seem most obvious exponent]

[wrote sometime betw. June-July 2012]

Holy Other + Vessel + LIE + Haxan Cloak + Evian Christ

Islington Mill, Salford, UK

There must be a method behind the intense, exhausting boringness of contemporary electronica shows: a group of people stand in complete darkness, listening to hisses and breaks coming from nowhere, while a stroboscope glides over their eyes from time to time. On some level it appeals to me: it helps contemplation. It seems to me musicians are trying to demonstrate the identitylessness of music-making in the times of the disappearance of much bigger things. Or indeed they transmit this identitylessness. Hidden under mysterious monikers and all that, in the darkness, amongst strobes and huge amounts of dry ice, Holy Other, Vessel, Haxan Cloak and Evian Christ, new artists on Brooklyn’s Tri-Angle label, presented themselves recently to the Mancunian public.

The evening at this former working mill, now artists’ residences, seems very much of a piece, a homogenously designed environment. Similar murky moods sweep into each other with no irritating changes. The most interesting of the pack is Holy Other, not for their sampling of soul singers, but because their sound seems to have more substance and physicality. Theirs is an airy, spacey music, like an all-encompassing cloud over which beats, samples and clicks occur, strangely deprived of the sensually charged atmosphere of R&B and hiphop. Evian Christ produce a similarly slowed down, foggy take on dance music using hiphop and R&B cut-ups. Vessel finally provides some opportunities for dancing within this stasis, with more readable beats and breaks. Haxan Cloak’s set has a Lynchian (or Badalamentian) moodiness, with violin and cello parts played from computer, but unfortunately this evokes a cheesy soundtrack to an improvised black mass rather than existential shivers. And as I understand this may be the beginnings of some of those very young artists playing live, and how this may differ from the recorded and mixed material, I can still expect from music to grip me, to take me, transport me with it. I see where they're going: Joseph Beuys on the cover, strong fascination with Joy Division, love for GYBE! And nowhere may be a still interesting place to be,  no doubt, but to me, this is still too uneventful even for a limbo. 

 

Tri-Angle (and not only, cos those artists now transcended their initial label) initially attempted to achieve a contemporary Gothic a la 4AD, but with various forms of urban music as source material. Its output may be juxtaposed with some of the music only a few years earlier, associated with Hauntology – not necessarily through how they sound, but in the mental climate they evoke. Hauntology has been criticised for empty miserabilism, philosophical vacuousness and occultist nonsense, but artists associated with it, like Rolan Vega or Burial, were at least addressing issues such as the decline of social democracy or the death of rave culture. The music of younger generation represented by Tri-Angle doesn’t match the activity of that same generation on the streets, though. but it’s telling, how much it is a music of the cold late capitalist world: with its energy as if from the start stifled, sucked in. Here, mourning has developed into melancholy and can’t really place its reference anymore. Fascinated by darkness, they make music which evokes depression in form, but seems to suffer from the more general malaise - lacking the potentially activating political claims. They add a different set of nostalgic references, sampling hiphop, crunk, triphop (Vessel’s Sebastian Gainsborough is from Bristol), UK garage or r’n’b, but the result seems purely decorative, very much ‘late internet’, where all those elements collide and mix into a nondescript mass.

There’s something Catholic about the show, but without the dramaturgy, leaving pessimism, eschatological thoughts and, finally, misery. There’s no doubt those musicians are adept at putting music together in a lush, Gothic way, but the paralysis they induce is sometimes unbearable. This is not music to bliss out to, like My Bloody Valentine, nor anything holding a hidden menace, like, say, Basic Channel or Tricky: it is a continuous wallow. A live recording from this gig could be added to Dominic Fox’s Cold World, a book on depression and melancholy, but whereas Fox sees a chance to turn passivity into militant negative euphoria, I can’t see much in this music beyond the contemplation of mental paralysis. There is a huge turnout – Salford is now a newly emerging space for indie culture – but while the gig may have taken place in a post-industrial space, its direct surroundings are a mass of recession dereliction, the ruins of new Great Britain, casting a longer and longer shadow.

Architecture of Pleasure

Lina Bo Bardi, Museum on the Seashore, Brazil, 1951

[longer version of a review for Architecture Today #232)

Rowan Moore Why We Build

Agata Pyzik

Rowan Moore’s ambitious book starts with an image that is hard to beat: as a prominent critic of The Observer and a former Architecture Foundation director, he is taken by the Dubai’s satraps for a helicopter flight over the now so familiar landscape of thrilling, yet deeply unsettling city. The list of financial excesses and cost of the inaugural parties can be probably matched only by the declining Roman Empire. And just like with the Romans, the Emirates' millionaires seemed decadently aware of the fall that was just round the corner. Moore sees a greater meaning in this, and as if responding to people, who’d like to see architecture as something purely functional, makes a quasi-antimodernist argument: architecture was, is and will be built partly as a result of our madness, as a folly responding to our desires to change the world according to our visions.

VDNKh Moscow

The motor may be love for beauty, for money or for vice, or for power – all of those wishes are reflected in the madness of Dubai, as they are in seemingly much less controversial projects. His book then continues as a catalogue, or an atlas of human follies as architecture. His greatest interest and fascination lies with the fantastical. The most inspiring chapters consider the fake in architecture (or the fake that becomes real), the spaces for love and lovemaking (or simply sex trade) and spaces, that are expressions of power. He discusses alongside each other, Richard Rogers flag projects of Centre Pompidou in Paris and Lloyd’s in London, Stalinist Moscow’s metro and the unbelievable VDNKh, the All-Russia Exhibition Centre for all the Soviet Republics; John Soane’s uncanny house-museum, the billionaire Larry Dean’s Xanadu or rather Dynasty-like Dean Gardens, and the driven in its literalness phallic brothel by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, famous inventor of “architecture parlante”. He’s interested in how an even single building may change the city, always ready to give dozens of examples and in our fascination with power, stating very truthfully, that “we often like a presence of force in a  building, as long as we feel it’s not directed at us”.

Dean Gardens

My definite favorite is the erotic chapter, where Moore assumes a role of an infinitely interested observer, yet not a pornographer, with a wit confirming London’s reputation as a city of vice much surpassing anything ever done by the French. He gently mocks Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos, both erotomaniacs, who were in love with Josephine Baker, and their male fantasies about women’s sensuality and sexuality. Let's not pretend in the case of many of the cherished great inventors in architecture, starchitects as well as their less monied, less talented, but still powerful colleagues (all no doubt The Fountainhead lovers), their sexual (sometimes not only) fantasies laid way to many ridiculously self-indulgent projects. Money and power meaning abuse of women shocker; to which probably the chapters on fascinating brutalist Italian architect Lina Bo Bardi, as well as Zaha Hadid can be a counterbalance. Architecture remains a hopelessly men-dominated area and as I would oppose simplistic oppositions, it is rare on Moore's part to point out what often is hidden behind the spiky ambitions.

If the erudite delicious passages about the French neoclassicist architecture, bathed in erotomania have any predecessor, it will be the Anthony Vidler’s Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely or Robert Harbison’s unique Eccentric Spaces or Reflections of Baroque. Both are stylists, who want to take the architectural writing to somewhere more interesting, than just sheer journalism. The postmodern era in building spawned not only the atrocities of Philip Johnson (who gets kicking), but also some the most sophisticated writing devoted to make it an expression of the personality of both author’s and the strangeness of the built space.

The consequences of the financial aspect of those follies are present, but not those, that drove the Pomo architecture into the atrocities of the zero degree of architecture, which is speculative housing. The quality and at the same time problem of this book is that Moore doesn’t want to focus on mediocrity, and if so, only on the splendid, larger-than-life mediocrity, like China Central TV Headquarter, project in Beijing by OMA/Rem Koolhas or their Olympic Stadium from 2008. Despite pointing out the cynicism of the authorities, who publicly aim at the ‘openness’ and internationalism, it’s hard to resist an impression Moore is sparing us the final word. The time now is hectic and the readers become more and more aware of the political complications of the last 30 years in building – Moore resists yet an overarching argument, which would turn his book inevitably into a diatribe. Although it announces at the beginning it’s purpose is to “explain this universal drive to build”, we’d still expect more of an erudite of his sort.

LIna Bo Bardi, SESC Pompéia Sao Paulo, 1977

 This book is not a manual, the charm lies rather in those little snippets of information, some great lines ready to be quoted, especially on Soane, Ruskin or sex. it is a formidable puzzle trying to hold together as an answer to how we build and how we used to build, written with grace, a bit in the way of ancient, renaissance or baroque authors of architectural treatises. But what is sometimes lacking is the future tense here. for those willing to know more on architectire t is a great journey though, which in the end, makes us read his author’s and our own judgment between the lines.

Auf wiedersehen, Mr Beckett!

[text written and then shortened as a review for The Wire #333 which was in September last year]

Deborah Weagel

Words and Music. Camus, Beckett, Cage, Gould

In a way, relationships between words, especially poetry, and music, are self-explanatory, because poetry started as music or music started as poetry (Orphic hymns, oral epics, vocal music, oratorios, masses, operas). In turn, the idea of synthesis of arts, and especially a kinship between word and music appears first in the Greeks as ekphrasis, which is, in literal sense, an “expression” of an idea, a rhetorical device of expressing one art via another and perhaps also first ever definition of intermediality. Modern view on correspondences comes from German Romantics, who insisted on the idea of the interdisciplinary. Since then the idea of synthesis of arts was attractive to many, with Wagner’s Gesamtkunswerk as a most famous example and all kinds of 20^th century avant-garde experimentation: Dada poetry, visual poetry or even concrete and sonorist poetry or contemporary hypertext. All that was usually evoking musical language, but treated rather as a metaphor, neglecting its primary meaning. Yet something about the idea of blurring the distance between music and literature still haunts the humanities and interestingly it is usually the literary scholars than musicologists, who want to prove it.

In Words and Music Deborah Weagel interestingly overlooks all the literary avant-garde traditions, from symbolism to dada, and chooses to focus on four artists, two writers and two composers/musicians, Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, John Cage and Glenn Gould respectively, which also happen to be well established High Priests of Modernism. She also states from the beginning, that what interests her are only two aspect of musicality of literature: music in literature and literature and music. First surprise may be engaging Camus to this crowd, whose work is not obviously musical. Yet, as it is exposed, author of L’etranger had a great affinity with both Mozart and Bach, believing, that music is an expression of “the unknowable world”, asscribing to certain natural phenomena, such as the look of the morning sun or of the sea thinkgs, like tonality and counter-tonality. Camus lived in an era full of all sorts of experimentation in music, from Schoenberg to Stravinsky or Messiaen, but it was a traditionalist Honegger, that composed music to his play. As we realise, the most common and perhaps basic way Camus and many writers understood musicality was a simple sonata form, A-B-A, that is: a topic, its variation(s) and a reprise. Yet the banality of the idea seems to be able to express itself in infinite number of ways.





In turn, there’s no doubt of Beckett’s interest in avant-garde music: minimalism and experimentalism of his work, from Godot to Krapp’s Last Tape invite comparisons to music and in his case rightly so. Sensitivity to voice, pitch, resonance and duration often make his manuscripts look like musical scores. There’s clearly parallelism between Beckett’s and some avant-garde artists, culminating in his collaboration with Morton Feldman on the play Neither. Playing with the idea of test/textlessness, Beckett’s primal element was word, and again, depending on what we understand by musicality of literature, we can take those experiments as inventing a new form or simply densifying of the linguistical texture. In turn, John Cage, everybody’s favorite avant-gardist, used certain musical procedures in his texts, such as Lectures on Nothing and Something or his famous book Silence. They were avant-garde, so not rooted in music or language yet – what gave an interesting, but perhaps one-off effects, that cannot be really pursued by anyone else. Cage’s elusive philosophy of work remains ever attractive, but it wasn’t actually a more flexible language of art, because it only can be bowed to Cage’s experimentation.



The last chapters, devoted to genius interpreter of Bach Glenn Gould are perhaps the least predictable and focus on his rarely discussed amazing radio works and auditions, like Solitude Trilogy, highlighting the piety and obsessive perfection, with which Gould approached editing and recording of sound. Trilogy is three sound documentaries, exploring the lifetime obsession of Gould, the counterpoint, with the spoken word, using the sound of the sea or train as basso continuo and exploring culture of Canadian Mennonites combined with songs of Janis Joplin. The author of The Prospects of Recording believed in the improving role of technology in maintaining our environment. Various kinds of sounds and the account of his less known work sound fascinating.

Yet, while being very informative, extensively footnoted Words and Music contribute less new to the general subject: it gathers the material, but do not attempt to demystify or challenge artists’ methods. What about Schwitter’s Ur-Sonate, Cage’s important influence: it’s a musical score written for speech apparatus, but there’s no meaning to it, then what does it have to do with literature, apart from its looks? You could say that these classifications aren’t necessary, that they impoverish an artform that is completely self-sufficient. Does this mean the efforts are futile? Not at all: it makes us contemplate the mystery even more.