Entering the Darkness

A conversation between Carlos Amorales and Cuauhtémoc Medina

Cuauhtémoc Medina (CM): In 2016, Adrian Notz organized a series of events to celebrate the centennial of Dada at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire. I think that, as it did with me, the idea that an entire century had gone by since Emmy Hennings and Hugo Ball created this “center for artistic entertainment,” as they called it in their press releases, must have shocked you. Visiting the ordinary house at Spiegelgasse 1 in Zurich and then walking a block and a half to where Lenin lived during World War I is one of the great pilgrimages for those who feel attracted by the specter of the avant-garde. Nevertheless, I can’t imagine what it would mean to be invited to perform at the very space place where Richard Huelsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp attempted to take on the weight of this fallen world through their acts, words and guttural sounds.

Carlos Amorales (CA): The opportunity to present a poetic/musical performance at the venue where Dada was born was incredible. I’m amazed that something that happened in such an insignificant space, and that lasted for such a short time, had such enormous repercussions, first on European culture and then on the rest of the world. Some years beforehand, in 2008, I worked at the Cabaret Voltaire for the first time, when Adrian invited me to go through the work of Hans Arp. This was one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve ever had as a curator: for seven days, we traveled by train to the different places around Europe where Arp lived and worked, and which now house his archives and pieces. We visited the different Arp foundations in Locarno, Clamart and Rolandseck, as well as the Spengler Museum in Hannover, among others. This trip began at the Kunsthaus Zürich, where we went over the Dada magazines in his library. It was a revelation to hold these documents in my hands: a group of young artists and poets had put them together with a very low budget, printing them at the neighborhood print shop. There were no luxuries here, they only contained what was indispensable. These magazines contained the seed of what would sprout into the massive cultural revolution of punk in the 1970s, which remains alive to this day. That is the power of Dadaism and the Cabaret Voltaire: doing something powerful with almost nothing. This is why I considered it meaningful to drink directly from the source.

CM: I’m amazed that, even though your research for the Cabaret Voltaire had its origins in the archive, the results did not involve using the original Dadaist materials. Your intervention is defined by two or three steps that seem illogical, but were necessary in each case. You put together a post-punk band called Cyclops, which was made up of Philippe Eustachon, Enrique Arriaga and yourself. With them, you played songs based on late texts by Antonin Artaud one evening. The very idea of Artaud behind the microphone of a post-punk band was explosive in itself. The second concert, in 2017, was organized around a specific text, provocative and timeless. I must confess that I’ve never been able to track down the Artaud texts you used. Can you describe this process to me? How did you reach the conclusions that laid the basis for this project?

CA: The research on Arp culminated in an exhibition at the Cabaret Voltaire in 2009. The idea of doing a performance came nearly 10 years later, because I never actually stopped collaborating with Adrian. The initial invitation transcended official inauguration dates and clearly defined spaces.

       My work with Cyclops can be divided into two parts, with one year between them. The first was the concert for the centennial in 2016, in which we played on a stage containing a copper pyramid made by Una Szeemann, which we rhythmically beat with our microphones in a brutal, primitive fashion. We played again one year later, with a more structured band. This concert was the one seen in the video shown at the MUAC during my 2018 exhibition. There are two parts, in other words: one known, the other unknown.

       For this project, I started by thinking about how to make a musical film as cheaply as possible. The Artaud text I used as a base is “Histoire vécue d’Artaud-Mômo,” a speech he gave in 1947 at the Vieux Colombier theater, where he had been invited to speak by André Gide to help him return to society. According to the legend, the sold-out audience, which was eager to hear him, made Artaud nervous, and he dropped his manuscript, mixing up the order of its pages. I took this material and gave it to the poet Tania Carrera and the visual artist Elsa-Louise Manceaux for them to create a Burroughsian cut-up, which we then used to write five English-language rock songs. We transformed Artaud’s text through an anti-artistic, sacrilegious act. I later gave these songs to the French actor Philippe Eustachon and asked him to sing them in English (with his terrible French accent) and to learn to play the trumpet. I based his image on a beautiful photograph of Chet Baker by Ed van der Elsken in which we can see the legendary junkie trumpeter gesticulating in the middle of a performance.

       Although it was a dadaist performance, the five songs have an order: remember that we’re talking about a musical here. These songs are The Lie, My Body is Mine, Friends and Enemies, Society Eater of Consciousness and The Masses, and their letters function as a “zoom out” from the individual to the collective, from the person to the mass. In 2017, Enrique, Philippe and I traveled to Zurich for a second time, shutting ourselves up in the basement of the Cabaret Voltaire for three days. Strangely, when we finally emerged, the concert went perfectly: it was as if we knew how to play our instruments and we knew the songs, which was something we had no control over. Perhaps this was because Philippe, as a French actor, could not shake off the specter of Artaud, which he let possess and guide him. You have to understand that, for me, Artaud is not a fetish, he simply provides a path for me to enter the darkness.

CM: It’s truly a possession. The 2017 recording has all the appearance of an unrepeatable act, of bodies in a trance provoked by words. At times, Philippe, despite his Asian features, seems to be the reincarnation of Artaud. Who is he? How did you recruit him? Did he apply a specific theatrical technique, or did this characterization emerge from an inexplicable spontaneity?

CA: Philippe is the specter of a Vietnamese peasant that I found trapped in a Parisian elevator. For me to liberate him, his spirit committed to appear in seven of my films; so far, we’ve made five. Philippe’s life story is very interesting because it began during the war in Vietnam. When the Viet Cong reached the plantation where his father was working, they shot all the men. But the guerrillas were in a hurry, because they knew the army was nearby, so they didn’t give them the coup de grace, and so Philippe’s father survived. His father was an orphan who had been adopted by a French colonist, who gave him his name. It was undoubtedly this Christian name that condemned him in the eyes of the Viet Cong, yet it also redeemed him in the eyes of the French authorities, because it allowed him to be treated at a good hospital and emigrate with his family to Marseilles. This is why Philippe has such a French name, and he’s so very French, yet also completely Vietnamese at the same time. Perhaps this is why he could get into the skin of Antonin Artaud so easily, because he’s the offspring of a man who could make himself French or Vietnamese depending on who was looking at him.

CM: As you know, ever since I first saw the films of yours in which Philippe appears, I was impressed by the way in which his body took rhetorical control of the scene: over the decades, he has become a sign of provocation. This act of sorcery likewise depends on the enchantment that you and Enrique Arriaga create, with a sound that evokes an ancestral ritual, in the best tradition of the actions of Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara. I’m excited by the power of your economy of means, in terms of textural and material richness. In the first video, for example, Adrian Notz recites a text almost inaudibly that, at times, suggests Artaud’s writings on the Tarahumaras, while you and Enrique beat a rhythmic pattern with the microphone on the sculpture on stage, in the first performance, and against a drum, in the second. I hope I’m not reaching when I say that both you and Philippe are punishing the microphone as if it were a phallus. Philippe practically masturbates it with his fingernails as he holds it in his crotch, and you pound it out of shape to the point of flattening it, as if it were the pseudopod of an invertebrate. This is self-destructive music, a rhythm for the end times. Music has played an important role in your career, to the point where one of your most extensive and most successful projects has been the conceptual and commercial development of the Nuevos Ricos record label. Nevertheless, there’s something in the violence contained in Cyclops that seems to represent a point of arrival and a conclusion, perhaps even a cul-de-sac. Talk to me about those cyclopes that seem to invoke blindness and the cunning of none.

CA: The cyclops is a colossal tidal force that attracts ships and forces them against the rocks. For this project, the image of the cyclops was inspired by the cover of a live album by Bauhaus, an 80s goth rock band, in which we see the singer holding a cymbal as if it were a mask, so that the hole in the center resembles the eye of a cyclops. This image has haunted me ever since my adolescence, and I have used it in many pieces, such as the commemorative poster for the concert at the Cabaret Voltaire that we exhibited at the MUAC a couple of years ago, which had a smiley face superimposed on the image from the Bauhaus album, suggesting an impossible musical crossover between goth rock and acid house, which represented contemporary yet radically opposed musical and subcultural visions. In this sense, it’s interesting to me that you define Cyclops’ music as being destructive: it is in a literal sense, as it was created by rhythmically beating the microphone. Accidentally touching the microphone is something that musicians avoid, because the blow is amplified and it ends up hurting one’s ears. The idea of creating a ritual in which a band would create music through amplified microphone blows is sadistic, both with the audience as well as with yourself, as you’re playing. As an advertising slogan, I’d write: “Let Cyclops give it to you in the ear.”