The British Library is minutes from where I work. I can escape there at lunch time and cleanse myself, at least for an hour. The Magna Carta, the Gutenberg bible, Leonardo's notebooks, medieval maps, Bach's original scores... I mean, fucking hell: bliss. It's the closest I get to experiencing a feeling of sacredness.
They usually have a special exhibition too: and currently it is "Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 1900 – 1937"
"Mainly through the medium of print, Breaking the Rules throws new light on Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism, Suprematism, Constructivism, Surrealism and other movements; on the artists who changed the face of modern culture for ever; and on the cities that experienced their work, from Brussels to Budapest, Vienna to Vitebsk.
Star items include Marinetti’s futurist experiment with words, type and visual text, Zang Tumb Tuum; the Burliuk Brothers’ Tango with Cows; and the notebooks and corrected proofs of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake."
The exhibition consists mostly of little artists books and pamphlets and magazines and and and... It's a joy. I become flushed - you can feel the energy coming of those pages. the experimentation, the iconoclasm. And also it feels... almost naive. What now feels charmingly optimistic. Open. Despite the ravages of the first world war, the Russian revolution - or perhaps because of that suffering - the desire to sweep away the imperialitic past, and create anew. It's all very touching. I hate today's jaded cynicism.
I felt a certain ambivalence about some of the work, and I wondered if the srtists did too. The effect of the machine - of mechanisation - were celebrated by the likes of Leger and Marinetti and other futurists. Maybe. The futurists changed their view somewhat after the mechanised slaughter in the trenches. But, no doubt man and machine had merged.
In the end, what I found most enchanting weren't the printed works, but sound and vision. There were a number of recordings of the antics of the Caberet Voltaire, and sound poems, and achromatic music. Miroslav Ponc - where can I get his colour music?
Kurt Schwitters, who I previously only knew for his extraordinary collages, well... his 1932 sound poem ursonate hovers between song and the spoken word.
There were a number of films too. I loved the flock of bowler hats in Hans Richter's "Ghosts before breakfast" (1927)
Yeah, I felt a little lighter.
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