Ardengo Soffici: BÏF§ZF+18: Simultaneità e chimismi lirici (1915–) [Italian]

“BÏF§ZF+18 Simultaneità e Chimismi lirici [BÏF§ZF+18. Simultaneity and Lyrical Chemistry] is a poetry book and artist’s book published in 1915 by the Italian futurist Ardengo Soffici. Despite its rarity, the book has become famous as one of the finest examples of futurist ‘words-in-freedom’, and has been described as ‘absolutely the most important book that came out of Florentine Futurism’.

The book is divided into two roughly equal halves; the first, Simultaneità, contains 12 ‘simultaneous’ poems laid out in standard typography; the second section, Chimismi lirici, contains 10 poems that use multiple fonts, signs, adverts, brand names, repetition and onomatopoeiac devices that are contemporaneous to Marinetti‘s similar experiments in Zang Tumb Tumb, and prefigure Marinetti’s later, more abstract Les mots en libertés futuristes, 1919.” (Wikipedia)

First published by Voce, Firenze, 1915.

New, expanded edition
Publisher Vallecchi, Firenze, 1919
110 pages
via Bibliothèque Kandinsky

Commentary: Dirk Vanden Berghe (2012).

WorldCat

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Rab-Rab: Journal for Political and Formal Inquiries in Art, 2 (2015)

“The second issue of Rab-Rab is in two volumes, all together in 500 pages. The focus of the second issue is ‘noise against culture.’ The contributions deal with the formal theory of noise, politics of contradictions, the device of estrangement, materialist film, music and violence, Futurism, Russian avant-garde, improvisation, void, heterophonies, swearwords, communism, ideologies of marriage, class wars and electricity.

Departing from our programme based on the understanding of art practice as a confrontation between formal and political inquiries, our aim in this issue is to use noise as the name for this difficult, disturbing, loud and coercive exploration. In many cases the formal and political aspects of noise are two separate things: the former is seen as an issue of information or perception, whereas the latter is usually reduced to a metaphor of spontaneity. But if we change these parameters of discussing the noise from measurable coefficients of failed communication, or from elusive metaphors of contingencies, towards the conceptual references related to ideology and class struggles, then what is understood as noise turns into something else. It can become a valid concept of inquiry, refusing to be pinpointed to conventional academic banalities silly phenomenological artistic fantasies immersed in.”

Contributors to volume A: Dror Feiler, Mazen Kerbaj, Ozren Pupovac, Ben Watson, Michel Chevalier, Jean-Claude Moineau, Taneli Viitahuhta, Henrik Heinonen, Grégoire Rousseau, Bruno Besana, Ivana Momčilović, and François Nicolas.

Contributors to volume B: Darko Suvin, Anthony Iles, Grupa za Konceptualnu Politiku, Mattin, Jyrki Siukonen, Rahel Puffert, Martin Krenn, Jaakko Karhunen, Max Ryynänen, Antti Eskelinen – Eze, Gert Raeithel, Aeron Bergman, Alejandra Salinas, Milica Tomić, Christine Delphy, Peter Gidal, Giovanna Esposito-Yussif, Kari Yli-Annala and Sezgin Boynik.

Edited by Sezgin Boynik
Publisher Rab-Rab Press, Helsinki, Sep 2015
ISSN 2342-4885
278 & 278 pages

Publisher (Issue 2A)
Publisher (Issue 2B)

Issue 2A: PDF, PDF
Issue 2B: PDF, PDF

Marjorie Perloff: The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986)

“Marjorie Perloff’s stunning book was one of the first to offer a serious and far-reaching examination of the momentous flourishing of Futurist aesthetics in the European art and literature of the early twentieth century. Offering penetrating considerations of the prose, visual art, poetry, and carefully crafted manifestos of Futurists from Russia to Italy, Perloff reveals the Moment’s impulses and operations, tracing its echoes through the years to the work of “postmodern” figures like Roland Barthes.”

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 1986
ISBN 0226657310, 9780226657318
xxiii+288 pages

Reviews: Gregory L. Ulmer (Criticism, 1988), Hank Lazer (South Atlantic Review, 1988), Timothy Materer (Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 1988), Patricia Hopkins (Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, 1988), Willard Bohn (Comparative Literature, 1989), Jean-Michel Rabaté (Jacket2, 2012).
Interview with author (Harriet, 2013)

Author
Publisher
WorldCat

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