A
prodigy from a
petit-bourgeois family in
Romania, Jean-Isidore Goldstein came to
Paris at the age of twenty in 1945, promptly changing his name to Isidore Isou, and beseiging the publishing house of
Gaston Gallimard with the
manuscript for his book
Introduction à une Nouvelle Poésie et à une Nouvelle Musique and fictional claims that he was a journalist. The book was a work of inspired
gobbledegook, expressing Isou's theory of
culture, namely that the most basic instinct of
society was not survival but creativity, an
artist was
God and God was merely the ultimate artist, and after the initial period of society's "
amplification", there began a stage of "
decomposition" back into primordial slime, during which period any new
aesthetic form would work as a
metaphor for life itself.
Charismatic and impossibly
sexy- in pictures he looks like
Elvis with much better
fasion sense, with big, pouty lips and determined eyes- Isou still couldn't get his book published. But he attracted young
disciples within Paris to his new
cult of
Lettrism. On 1946, the Lettrists attended a play by
Dadaist
Tristan Tzara, and proving their filial relationship to that earlier doctrine, they interrupted the lecture by
Michel Leiris, preceeding the play, with cries of "We know about dada, M. Leiris- tell us about something new! For example- Lettrism!", "
Dada is dead! Lettrism has taken its place!", "Long live Lettrism!", "You're kidding! You've never head of Lettrism?", etc.
The resulting
publicity, as well as threats of
arson on his offices, led Gaston Gallimard to publish
Introduction à une Nouvelle Poésie et à une Nouvelle Musique.
Isou explicitly stated his aims of
godhood, and many of his followers- there were over two dozen by 1946- took him as such. Under his direction the lettrists published reviews, including
The Lettrist Dictatorship and
Ion, both of which ran for only one issue. They made
letter and
sound poetry, a technique for
negating language in favor of its components which Isou claimed to have invented, accusing the Dadaist
Raoul Hausmann, its true originator, of
plagarism. Intent on destroying every art form, Lettrism produced works of
deconstruction, such as
Gabriel Pomerand's gibbering book
Saint Ghetto de Prêts. But its work was political and militant as much as artistic. Organising the lettrists as the
Youth Front, an extensive radical movement with chapters and membership cards, Isou led publicity stunts including a raid of the notoriously brutal
Auteuil Catholic orphanage. His appeal to
youth, whom he defined as people of any age who did not yet coincide with their
socioeconomic function, was as
revolutionary in 1950 and it was clichéd by the time
Robert F. Kennedy spoke of youth as a
state of mind in 1968.
In 1952, the Lettrists
Serge Berna,
Guy-Ernest Debord,
Jean-L. Brau and
Gil J Wolman published a pamphlet denouncing
Charlie Chaplin for preaching
passivity. When Isou dissociated himself from their action, they declared themselves to be the
Lettrist International, and expelled him from that organization, a movement that he had effectively founded. This is where the naming gets complicated, though, because Isou's Lettrist group continued to operate, in fact its members are still making sound poetry in Paris today. After breaking off, the Lettrist International went
underground, publishing the journal
Potlatch and codifying their philosophy, which departed from Isou's in that they effectively rejected art altogether, stating that the
beauty of the future would be "provisional, and lived." The Lettrist International reemerged in 1957 when it fused with the
International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus. to form the
Situationist International.
Works by Isidore Isou:
Source: Lipstick Traces, by Greil Marcus, pp. 245-358