voice-body, body-writing

Bob Cobbing, Worm (1966)

I love the images in your last post - both the image from Derek Beaulieu's Flatland, and the images of physically tracing a text in order to read it (and therefore make the text "real").

Immediately, I had a number of half-formed thoughts, mostly connected with the work of Bob Cobbing: -

1. Bob Cobbing - "communication is primarily a muscular activity"

Music for Dancing:
COMMUNICATION is primarily a muscular activity It is potentially stronger than everyday speech, richer than those monotonous seeming printed words on the page.... Say 'soma haoma'. Dull. Say it dwelling on the quality of the sounds. Better. Let it say itself through you. Let it sing itself through you. The vowels have their pitch, the phrase has potential rhythms. You do it with the whole of you, muscular movement, voice, lungs, limbs. Poetry is a physical thing. The body is liberated. Bodies join in song and movement. A ritual ensues. 1972

2. Cobbing's Alphabet of Fishes and ABC in Sound (1965) are somehow the essential accompaniment to Teige's Abeceda.

I think you saw, Jenny Cobbing performing from the ABC in Sound at Flat-time House, but to my mind it seems to do with the body materially what Teige's alphabet alludes to visually - it is a physical stretching and shaping of the mouth to produce a voice through the material of the body.

3. Somewhere I read the poet Peter Finch write that: “I guess the most important thing that Bob taught me was that the voice could learn from the machine.”

I like this sense of both the material and machine-like nature of text here. While most of my short comments above allude to voice (as distinct from text), I think that the point is for Cobbing these weren't separate so that the visually expressive form of a letter or word, was also produced through the body. And of course, as this final short quotation from Peter Finch suggests - when Cobbing worked with the duplicator and then photocopier these machines became a kind of body for performance also (the performance-production of text-voice with his own body in collaboration).