Retrograde Chapbooks
In Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone system, retrograde refers to the operation of time-reversing the tones in a musical series, while maintaining the original pitches and rhythms on the sequence. As a literary counterpart to Schoenberg’s retrogression technique, Retrograde Chapbooks presents existing texts from the history of modernism and the avant-garde, where all sentences have been re-arranged in the inverse order. The immediate meaning and readability of each sentence is maintained, but the overall sense is displaced within the text as a whole.
Retrograde Chapbooks aims to celebrate the original texts, while at the same time proposes an inquiry on the forward linearity of historical development in culture, by performing a literal “going back” movement to modernist paradigms.
Titles:
- Futurist Manifesto - Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
- Dada Manifesto - Hugo Ball
- Dada Manifesto - Tristan Tzara
- De Stijl Manifesto - Theo van Doesburg
Published by the artist
Edition of 10
2015
Freely availbale as e-book publications (PDF)
