#lessrism

[kurtsigns]

LESSRISM Nobody has used it before! This is BIG! It hooks me into the anti-art tradition and legacy by inference, laterally. Also, a form of art “uncycling”. You can see that the above images, “uncycled” from a work by Lessrism leading light Gabriel Pomerand, totally deconstruct and destroy the original. And so, just another average day for J Gluck, fake artist. So, we have now Nonceptualism, Zero Art, and Lessrism. Not bad. Hat trick. Next stop: Take Lettriste art images, deconstruct them, fuck them up, and rebrand with #lessrism. 

And I’m getting faster: from the first moment I read about Lessrism it was less than 30 minutes to making a series of images, processing them, finding the right “Dada font” (Superbal), and posting the first of them on Instagram. 

The essence of this particular practice is eliminating creativity. To be as functional, incidentally engaged and nearly oblivious to the actions performed in making these connections and images. A scorched urge policy, if you will? Why feel any interest in or empathy for my own work? It can excite me, but only in the way a rat is excited by an opened cage. 

Lettrism is a French avant-garde movement, established in Paris in the mid-1940s by Romanian immigrant Isidore Isou. In a body of work totaling hundreds of volumes, Isou and the Lettrists have applied their theories to all areas of art and culture, most notably in poetry, film, painting and political theory. The movement has its theoretical roots in Dada and Surrealism. Isou viewed his fellow countryman Tristan Tzara as the greatest creator and rightful leader of the Dada movement, and dismissed most of the others as plagiarists and falsifiers. Among the Surrealists, André Breton was a significant influence, but Isou was dissatisfied by what he saw as the stagnation and theoretical bankruptcy of the movement as it stood in the 1940s.

In French, the movement is called Lettrisme, from the French word for letter, arising from the fact that many of their early works centred on letters and other visual or spoken symbols. The Lettristes themselves prefer the spelling 'Letterism' for the Anglicised term, and this is the form that is used on those rare occasions when they produce or supervise English translations of their writings: however, 'Lettrism' is at least as common in English usage. The term, having been the original name that was first given to the group, has lingered as a blanket term to cover all of their activities, even as many of these have moved away from any connection to letters. But other names have also been introduced, either for the group as a whole or for its activities in specific domains, such as 'the Isouian movement', 'youth uprising', 'hypergraphics', 'creatics', 'infinitesimal art' and 'excoördism'.