Since the publication of her debut poetry collection Ballada az ezüstbicikliröl (Ballad of the Silver Bike) in 1969, Katalin Ladik has established herself as one of the leading figures of the Eastern European neo-avant-garde. As a member of the experimentalist Grupa Bosch+Bosch (1969–76) and an affiliate of the New Art Practice generation that emerged during the 1970s in what was then Yugoslavia, Ladik has for more than fifty years explored the intersections of literature, visual poetry, sound poetry, experimental music, and performance with seemingly inexhaustible inquisitiveness and verve.
Central to Ladik’s practice is an exploration of the (female) voice, as suggested by the title of her survey Ooooooooo-pus, which opened last week at Moderna Museet after stops at Haus der Kunst in Munich and Ludwig Forum in Aachen. Just so, in the exhibition’s introductory wall text, curator Hendrik Folkerts enjoins visitors to “say the exhibition title out loud: nine times ‘O’, rounding your lips and vibrating your vocal cords, a short pause at the dash, and then the gentle push of ‘pus’. You have now entered the world of Katalin Ladik.” As though the mouth and larynx were gateways to a beyond.
There is, in fact, a sense in which the artist’s explorations of language’s musical and asemantic sonic dimensions – phonemes, yes, but also shapes, textures, vibrations – open onto utopias of a kind. With their searching, multidirectional, and sometimes contradictory energies, the works presented here are of a piece with the countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s and their liberatory ambitions. Much on view evokes the residual documents of Fluxus and early performance art (her contemporaries affectionately referred to her as the “Yoko Ono of the Balkans”) and mirrors the serial form of much early conceptualism.
Prominently featured are the artist’s collages and visual scores, the best of which incorporate knitting charts and sewing patterns. Some, such as Ausgewählte Volksleider (Selected Folk Songs, 1973–75), target issues of national identity, while others, like Die Frauen (The Women, 1978) and Duet (1979), aim at gendered labour and sexual relations. Several are also accompanied by audio recordings, which play ambiently on speakers distributed throughout the galleries. Grating silences and abrasive utterances erupt at intervals that are hard to clock, making it difficult to track correspondences between performance and score.
Not that they are so terribly important. Ladik’s readings seem fairly loose and intuitive – more expression than interpretation. This is particularly the case in Genesis I-XI (1975), a series of colour photographs depicting circuit boards removed from domestic appliances. Listening to the artist reciting these scores in piercing tones, nasal trills, and breathy plosives is strangely disorienting and almost hallucinatory. Works by experimental poets Bob Cobbing and Jackson MacLow come to mind. But so do the veladas of María Sabina, the Mazatec healer revered by the Beats for her verse-like channeling of spirits and who is often credited with sparking the psychedelic revolution.
However, Ladik’s poetics isn’t simply anchored in the ancient poetic vocation of intermediary. Nor is it programmatically bound to more avant-garde notions such as pure sound or the emancipation of the signifier. As critic Diedrich Diederichsen writes in the accompanying catalogue (which boasts an impressive list of contributors including Dieter Roelstraete, Pierre Bal-Blanc, Monica de la Torre, and Quinn Latimer) Ladik’s use of language closely resembles that of oral tradition and ritual, where words exceed their signifying dimension and instead take on the more utilitarian “character of a ‘thing in the hand.’” The artist’s own term for her practice is “logopoiesis.” Rooted in language’s transformational and performative potentials, she is the thinking woman’s shaman.
Documentation of key performances such Shaman Poem (1970) and R.O.M.E.T. (1972), a ritualistic embalming of the pharaoh Tutankhamun, are presented inside vitrines containing archival material. At the opposite end of the exhibition, a series of colour photographs shows the artist floating in rocky shallows surrounded by a cloud of her menstrual blood (Painting the Sea, 1982). Such actions don’t exactly lack the antagonism of works by, say, Carolee Schneeman, or the reparative gestures of a Cecilia Vicuña performance, but rather soften them with a certain playfulness and theatricality. The results are not always so convincing, as in the performances for camera Androgin and Poemim (both 1978) where the lightness of tone doesn’t quite match the gravity of what is at stake. Yet in stopping short of efforts, typical of the period, to integrate the poem into daily life – that is, into a shared set of normative rituals and routines – Ladik’s attempts at poetic extension manage to traverse weirder terrain.
Arguably, Ladik’s work is best when it is heard. Standing beneath a speaker playing her breakthrough sound poem Phonopoetica (1976), I was reminded of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s quip, in his seminar on James Joyce, that the ears are the most important bodily orifices because they are the only ones that cannot be sealed, shut, or closed off. The ears’ openness makes us particularly receptive to the lure of the voice, Lacan claims, but also gives rise to the unconscious enjoyment involved in listening. In Ladik’s ecstatic vocalisations, loaded as much with asignifying elements as with echoes of the siren call, we hear what tethers language to the body. It is something strange and uncomfortably intimate – disturbing, even. But that is precisely what makes it enjoyable. In the transformative vocabulary of the shaman, the ear becomes a mouth, and vice versa. A Romantic poet would simply say “O!”
