Castillejo, José Luis - Modern Writing / La escritura moderna (1970)
Regular price $125.00
Modern Writing / La escritura moderna.
Bonn: José Luis Castillejo, 1970.
7.9" x 5.1"
Light foxing to left side of Modern Writing.
Card printed in green on recto and verso in English and Spanish.
"José Luis Castillejo was a diplomat, poet, and critic. He was among the members of the Zaj who were not trained in music but rather in philosophy and literature. In 1966, Castillejo met Hidalgo and Marchetti and became a member of the artist group Zaj until 1969. His oeuvre includes collections of experimental poetry, artist’s books, recordings, graphic works, and ephemera concerned with the hybridizations between the written and the visual, language and typography. His work emphasizes the absolute autonomy of writing, articulating reality using only its most essential elements of expression. Examples include The Book of I’s (1969) and The Book of Eighteen Letters (1972)."
"Formed in July 1964 in Madrid by Juan Hidalgo, Walter Marchetti, and Ramón Barce, the group chose as its name a made-up, meaningless word—”ZAJ.” In 1956 Hidalgo and Marchetti met John Cage, an event that greatly contributed to the open-endedness of ZAJ’s actions, and in 1970 Esther Ferrer joined the movement, thus completing the most famous—yet most difficult to define—artistic group in contemporary Spain.
In the somber, repressive panorama of the Franco era, the objects ZAJ carried through the streets, their concerts of shrill music, and their writings, riddled with nonsense, passed practically undetected by ignorant government censors. Somehow they also slipped by many who considered themselves members of the avant-garde. Nor did many of the means used by ZAJ to make themselves known—actions in streets, squares, trains, high schools, universities, artists’ studios, and, on rare occasions, in galleries—exactly facilitate reception by a public ill-prepared for heterodoxy.
However, ZAJ was not deterred, and the group continued to carry out all sorts of activities, including sending cardboard and cards—what they called “signs of excellence”—through the mail in an effort to communicate with the public. Humorous and ironic, these communiques contained notes that said things like, “If while strolling along the street you should hear or read the word ‘Spain’ change your direction.” A message that was sent to Wolf Vostell in 1970 pronouncing “We are not interested in this exhibition,” constituted the group’s participation in his “Fluxus & Happenings” show, while it articulated the group’s desire for artistic independence. Hidalgo has compared the relationship between Fluxus and ZAJ to that between Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers. This should give some idea of the international scale of ZAJ’s project. Nonetheless, many have failed to recognize ZAJ as an autonomous group, confusing it with Fluxus, and forgetting that ZAJ’s deployment of diverse strategies, as well as its conflation of impoverished materials and subtle elegance, depends on the blurring of boundaries. ZAJ “concerts”—each consisting of a succession of actions or what they call “etceteras”—contain Zen quotations, erotic allusions, and references to a “family” of figures that include Duchamp, Cage, Durruti, and Marinetti."
- https://www.artforum.com/events/zaj-212342/