Louis Armand's Blog, page 3

DARK SEED

John Everett Millais’ pre-Raphaelite virgin suicide transposed into a fully-automated electric ball Ophelia Botti donut machine à la Kafka’s penal colony?

38 pages. PDF. 2022

DARK SEED by Louis Armand (2022) PDFDownload

DI/ODE

“having failed to discover
a single new fact in art
they settled on life”

mimeo pamphlet, A4, 24pp, PDF

DI/ODE by Louis Armand, section 1, February 2022 (PDF)Download

VITUS

“to observe secret police activity in files
each projectile
a broadcast medium”

Armand’s writing is a testimony, recorded in shorter & longer texts, of “the megaphones of Prague”: based on observation of these mouthpieces-of-anything, with their past & lived present: a definition of the city by way of loudspeakers, of orders & distributors of all kinds of messages, in a combination of poetry, photography, installation, collage: also an evocation of what lies beneath the megaphone, its surroundings, but also its time, as well as our personal subjective time, the moment we pass under it, what mood is affected, & the sounds we imagine the megaphone to be making. The megaphone might be mute, but it still resonates with a spectral voice. And then there’s the systematic longitudinal record, covering 25 years, creating a specific mosaic of the city, captured by way of various approaches & syntaxes, commentaries & documentary impressions: a report on a psychogeography. Josef Straka

VITUS by Louis Armand (1996-2021) (PDF)Download

They were once ubiquitous throughout Prague, these megaphones, lining the streets, proliferating in public squares, perched above the city like triffid sentinels, insuperable from the territory over which they presided. More proverbial “flowers of evil”: instruments of Nazi propaganda & terror (broadcasting the deathlists), of the Soviet puppet régime (providing the soundtrack of Normalizace). But also of their subversion: the May ’45 uprising was transmitted over the PA system (virus-like), Prague Spring, the Velvet Revolution. Nowadays, every Wednesday at 12 o’clock, civil defence sirens, uncanny enough to require a forewarning. In the course of a few decades of “Westernisation” the memory of these ranting machines has gradually abated as they themselves slowly but surely retreat from view, all but invisible now, their periodic (satiric?) eruption into music, static, public service announcement, claxon, come as if from nowhere, hinting at unbidden forces still able to supervene, a ghostly echo of His Master’s Voice that once bellowed from the sky, more disquieting because less obvious. Who knows if their day will come again? Or if it ever passed? Dispersed into the ether, the megaphone inside the head, or with a human face, written into the very substance of this place (no mere consensual hallucination), conducting a “St Vitus Dance” of its private & public realisms, like secret harbingers of the next 1000-year Reich, the corporate metaverse?

The material collected in VITUS represents a small part of an ongoing project, begun in 1996, of poetic research, guerrilla installation, appropriation, détournement, documentary, psychogeography, & various “ephemerisations,” of these banal yet eerily erotic mouthpieces of authoritarianism & insurrection, power & disempowerment, totality & obsolescence – & the fugitive consciousness of continuing to live in their shadow.

A HOUSE FOR HANNE DARBOVEN EIN HAUS FÜR

“heimat / house / mat / haus / bau / dormir / a dor / mouse: / sleepwindow”

A HOUSE FOR HANNE DARBOVEN was originally commissioned as a libretto by the Czech composer Ian Mikyska as a tribute to the work of the late German artist. Two incomplete versions were previously published, in Alienist & Cordite. The libretto was first programmed at the Barbican School, London (in an arrangement by Ian Mikyska for soprano), & was performed by the author & David Vichnar at Venuše ve Švehlovce theatre, Prague, as part of the 2017 Prague Microfestival.

A HOUSE FOR HANNE DARBOVEN EIN HAUS FÜR (2021) / 18pp / download PDF

A House for Hanne Darboven, libretto by Louis Armand, 2021 (PDF)Download

GLITCHHEAD

GLITCHHEAD, “a chaotic inventory of aftereffects in the wake of VAMPYR,” by Louis Armand (Miskatonic Virtual University Press, 2021). 86pp. ISBN 9781667147192. Paperback available via Lulu.

DESCARTES’ DOG

“To be caught dead is the first step to biography” / DESCARTES’ DOG (2000-2021) / 40pp / download PDF

VAMPYR

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A Chronicle of Revenge: forthcoming from ALIENIST (www.alienism.eu). Read an excerpt from Vampyr at Burning House Press.

THE GARDEN (DIRECTOR’S CUT)

[image error]In 1994, in the company of Italian anarchist & photographer “Dekaro,” the author travelled across Morocco & the disputed Western Sahara. The notebooks from that journey furnished the basis for The Garden which, after appearing piecemeal in magazines, was published as the inaugural title in the Salt Modern Fiction Series (Cambridge, 2001). Long out-of-print, this complete, unexpurgated edition restores to its full scope a work that more than twenty years after it was written remains confronting. Hashish-infused, amphetamine-driven & ranging in bold thematic cross-cuts from the seminal “garden” of the Book of Genesis to Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights & The Perfumed Garden of Shaykh Nefzawi to Pierre Guyotat’s Eden Eden Eden & Derek Jarman’s film of the same name, Armand’s The Garden is by turns excoriating & lyrical, political & pornographic, a blasphemous ransacking of literary & theological pieties – “a practice, an ascetic aesthetic,” as McKenzie Wark wrote in one early review, “for moving toward feeling in the pure form of its impurity.”

The Garden [Director’s Cut] is an amplified exposition of the original. In this complete version Louis Armand takes you into hyper-imaginative zones as astounding as a Moroccan garden – as seductive as its fragrance and as artfully designed. It’s a chimerical tale of disorientation and lust – the chronicle of a writer with debilitated perception “pouring His morose soul into His writing-machine.” (Pam Brown)

Conceived  “in the confrontation of light & intractable unlight,” this incredible piece of the supreme Manichean and above all, post-Epicurean writing, sums up the best traditions of contemporary “Western” literary thinking and that Eastern one, exemplified by Nizami’s Diwan or Attar of Nishapur’s The Conference of the Birds. Above all, this « novel » or the author’s travelogue breaths through the air and floats above the hot dunes of human history in the brightest daylight of contemporary fiction. (Nina Zivancevic)

Imagine being on a movie set of a film modernizing the story of Marduk and Tiamat, with a script based on the writings of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, and the actor playing the Marduk character asks the director for his motivation in the scene when he first meets Tiamat, unaware that the director is on speed. The director riffs The Garden. (Gregory L. Ulmer)

The Garden flows like boiling water you quickly have to catch before it spews all over the stove. There will be no periods stopping you as this is an unpunctuated piece of internal enjambment, annotating rhythmic genius. The experiences I had during this journey were both arduous and palpitating as this is a living, breathing piece of work. I constantly find myself returning and invariably glimpsing a new painting from this ever-changing and clean canvas. (John David Bull)

The Garden [Director’s Cut] is published by 11:11 press in Minneapolis, September 2020.

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GAGARIN

[image error]The Orbital continues like this, night after night. Slant of cosmic rain slashing the blacktop. Dopplered taillights receding. Not alone then. The great migration to outer. Not the sole survivor then. Focus on that. Focus on the drift, the undertow, the invisible line reeling in. A distributed mass of alter-egos. Vanishing. And each time around the same again. The same vanishing again. The same slant. The same outer. Till none left. No others left. Only the survival to survive. Repeating. After night: night. Eons of undone time. Focus on that. The second before & the second after. Nothing between. Nothing from nothing, but the random propulsion of an idea. Focus on that. An idea of “nothing.” First one, then the other. Gravity’s re-birth. The fall. A flashing blue enveloping light.

Louis Armand’s novella GAGARIN appears in its entirety in Always Crashing Issue Three, available to order via Bookshop, Barnes and Noble, Amazon. Read an excerpt.

MONUMENT

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Is this an end to torment? To the Great Cause? To Progress? To Civilisation? To Life As We Know It? To the gods of Chichen Itza? To the Pleasure Principle? To Knowledge? To your local Synthetic Chicken Franchise? To the Saturday Night Game? To the future of Martian exploration? To Xanadu? To race-, wage- & gender- slavery? To free optional extras? To certainty? To ideology? To evolution? To eat-all-you-can lunchtime specials? To literacy, the novel, the book, poetry? To poverty? To property? To patriarchy? To posterity? To perpetuity? To peeled pre-washed potatoes in plastic vacuum packs? Is this finally the end of the party? Of the road? Of the line? Of “us”? Of innocence? Of your favourite TV show? Of the Big Dream? Of the Revolution? Of days in the sun? Of your season pass? Of beachfront Caribbean tax havens? Of the shelf-life’s shelf-life? Of the Autumn Sale? Is it just the end of the Beginning or really the beginning of the End? Of the Free World? Of America? Of Mickey Mouse? Of boredom? Of our sentimental academic “sense of ending”? The categorical End to end all “ends”? The end, at last, of The End? The closing act with the forty-foot flag & chamber orchestra & the monument praising the bigots & the monument spouting its own virtues & the monument tipping its hat & the monument firing blanks at the sunset & the monument whipping up a frenzy of landfall & the monument telescoping botany & the monument collecting data & the male monument calling the Nereids to its side, eye on the bikini machine & usurping Dr Goldfoot & Vinny Price topping out the scales busting her lungs? The last beam in the last eye? The grand finale falling flat? The monumental pillars fall by wayside & build up pressure in the earth’s tissue – an undercurrented opening ceremony of No Future? The persecution attics of Aquinas parthenogenesis rounding off the Noah zoologies of the hecto-ring masses’ mass hysteria? The Ultimate Cash Register rounding down the sum of all zeroes to the square of ten? The show’s takings lambaste the irreverent tilt of the hat in the midlife streets of ’10n for which n is prime’ for a prime hecatomb of nonentities? We is accountable, we is, we is hammer & tong, we is mortar & pestle, we is aggregate & cement mixer quitting 24 hours of Nothing More, just to let the message to sink in? Repast & plaster cast, jewellery & scarabs bring glass cased visions: Le Corbusier of the all-mod-cons hypermodern elevated self-sustainable microcosm of Nothing? The

last train from the pyramid scheme of GOD Incorporated to Spaceship Earth crashlanding on the lone & level museumed sands of THE END? The end. The. End.

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Written in collaboration with John Kinsella between 2012 & 2020, Monuments is a tearing down of the museum of complacency, exposing foundations constructed from the tyranny of capital, obliterating the proprietary imprint.

ISBN: 9781916159488. 114 pages. 13 x 20 cm paperback Publication date: 15 April 2020. Cover design/artwork: Bob Modem. Hesterglock Press, Bristol.

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