Postwar Culture

By Gil J Wolman’s own account, his biography could be summarized as follows: “Wolman, born in 1929, met a few people, took part in a few events, did a few things.” But as Frédéric Acquaviva recounts, the details of Wolman’s life are far more colorful; in quick succession, Wolman alleges that he was a journalist at Combat, a member of the Communist Youth, a captain on the canal barge Rose Bayadère anchored in Paris, a knitter, an African hunter in occupied Germany, a poet at the CNE, a trafficker in the kasbah in Algiers, a trucker near North Cape, and a barman in Pompeii.        

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In 1950, Wolman joined the Lettrist circle founded by Isidore Isou. He became a central figure in the group, producing textual and sound works that sought to dismantle the ossified syntax of words and meaning, and he invented a new kind of guttural, breath-based poetic performance he called mégapneumies. In 1952, Wolman, together with Guy Debord, broke off from Isou, Lemaître, and the other Lettrists to found the Internationale lettriste (or Lettrist International), a break precipitated by their desire to engage linguistic and poetic experimentation with social and political discourse and action. Wolman was active in managing the production of the group’s publications, first their eponymous journal (1952-54), followed by a more informal newsletter format titled Potlatch (1954-57).

In 1957, Debord expelled Wolman from the Lettrist International, on the grounds that he was not politically engaged enough, and only a few months later Debord would go on to found the Situationist International. Wolman returned to some of the more aesthetically and artistically-oriented Lettrist circles, and he continued to produce experimental painting, collage, poetry and sound works, and films. Wolman developed a new kind of collage practice termed “Scotch art,” so called because the artist used adhesive tape to transfer text and images from print media. He is perhaps best known for his film L’anticoncept, first screened in 1952, which consists of blank illumination projected onto a weather balloon, accompanied by a fragmentary soundtrack of spoken staccato phrases and noises, which was banned by French censors shortly after its release.