“A History of the Avodion Through Five Artists” by Eric Horwitz

“The avodion has existed in some form or another for millennia: both the Chinese and the Arabs can point to possible predecessors. To this day the French still insist that the device and its practice were created by Saint-Just during the reign of terror when a cannon loaded with soap suds knocked a guillotine into a stained glass workshop. Tracing the origins of a medium is always difficult, but when we expand our understanding of avodia to a more conceptual level we see the issues of historization become almost insurmountable…” 

-Rhea Alto, The Last Avod: A Realization of the World-as-Avodion

Isaac Zuz was born in Prague in 1840. Contrary to popular belief he did not invent the avodion, if any one person deserves that distinction no one will ever know. But none deny that Zuz codified the avodion’s use and Zuz named its practice.

Records show that young Zuz left home to study military engineering at the Theresian Military Academy. The headstrong young adult lasted only a month before he ran away and joined a travelling circus. Primary sources are sporadic after that. One 1852 payment roll names him as the engineer responsible for assembling an extravagant production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for an aging Metternich. Another list identifies Zuz as a partisan volunteer for the Parisian Communards in 1871. He somehow must have avoided reprisals because historians can locate Zuz in Montmartre in 1882 demonstrating to small children amusing diversions he referred to as avods. Avod is Hebrew for work, this is the first recorded instance of that term being used. This initial diversion he titled Tuesday—presumably he had a unique avod for every day of the week. According to a journalist for Le Figaro, “The madman greased valves and positioned a few spiralling brass tubes, he unhooked several latches on one end of his Avodion and inserted a live butterfly and several drops of vanilla extract. ‘I’m going to bring Tuesday to the children!’ he exclaimed to a bemused crowd as he adjusted an accordion bellows to align with an array of lenses. He then pumped a pedal with his left foot and put all his energy into a great crank, and out of its apertures and flared horns came, inexplicably, Tuesday.” 

The performance was a sensation. Zuz performed commissions for the Parisian elite for the rest of the year, the year after crowds packed in music halls cheered his appearances, and the year after that a European tour. On Juneteenth 1884 he performed his avod Liberty to American Civil War veterans, and the next year he performed The Ocean to Queen Victoria. By 1890 he must have tired of his fame for he returned to Paris and ceased public appearances. He died in his workshop in 1899.

Zuz’s avods were always impressionistic. Unlike his rivals and contemporaries, who would attempt fairytale narratives or elaborate histories,  Zuz always examined naturalistic abstractions and simple themes. By heating the copper coils of his device to a glow and setting the tuning forks to middle C he produced his famous Summer Sun. Meanwhile his series of thirteen avods Variations on Melancholy only used heavy materials like dark fudge and lead ingots; Melancholy #4 required the diffuse light of a rainy day channelled through an array of mirrors, Melancholy #7 mimicked the plodding pace of a lame dog.

“The die is cast, the fuse is lit. The door these earlier pioneers opened–inadvertently, playfully even–cannot be unopened. There is a realm of matter and physics, a realm of grey flannel suits and breakfasts and briefcases; and there is a realm of art and the mind, a hobgoblin realm, the wonderland that children and artists and madmen can glimpse but not manifest. Not until the avodion.”

-Domingo Fauva, Material and Immaterial 

Friedrich Erzengel was born in 1855 in Munich, and throughout his life he rarely left Bavaria or its environs. His father was a polymath who worked in various capacities for Ludwig II: the young Erzengel was a favorite of the Swan King’s court. In 1870 he witnessed several battles of the Franco-Prussian war from a balloon, by 1876 he had an officer’s sinecure in the German Army. He didn’t have a chance to distinguish himself further in the military, a freak grenade accident blew off his left leg and Erzengel returned home, somewhat humbled. 

In 1884 Erzengel adopted the avodion as a medium and produced a trio of “fairytale” avods based on the stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann for the Wittelsbach court. The Sandman, The Mouse King, and Uncle Drosselmeyer were unique among these earliest avods through their scale and complexity. Here Erzengel’s tendency toward overwhelming size and force became apparent. The avodion he constructed for the court required six soldiers to wheel in. The Mouse King used the space in the great bowels of his avodion to roast a barrel of Christmas chestnuts and incorporate actual hobnailed boots in the signification of marching soldiers. Likewise he consistently struck a massive anvil throughout Uncle Drosselmeyer. Gigantism and overstatement are apparent influences throughout Erzengel’s oeuvre. Donner und Loge made use of burning jets of coal gas and a live Tesla Coil, his aborted attempt at a Brunhilde avod killed a dozen horses in one disastrous rehearsal, and later the battle scene in a production of Kaiser Rotbart struck his assistant avodionist blind and deaf. 

By 1910 his avods grew to multi-day affairs. The City of Nuremberg converted an entire open air amphitheater into a giant avodion for Erzengel’s purposes. Erzengel’s last notes indicated feverish plans for “castle-sized, towering avodions where thousands of people would, at gunpoint, march in two by two and be converted into pure art.” He died of influenza in 1913. 

“Fauva grasped the intercommunicative potential of avodia but lacked the ability to realize it. I remember reading slack-jawed about his plans for a citywide avod, with avodion machinery that ran through building grates and sewers the way pipe organs were built into the architecture of churches. I used to stare at his illustrations for hours, I have a framed original in my lobby…”

-Ray Towner, Memoirs

Domingo Fauva was born Carlos Domingo Tintador in Buenos Aires in 1898. His mother Eva was a spiritualist; his father Alfredo a wealthy landowner, womanizer, and drunk. Mother and son would retreat into ouija boards and the tarot during every boozy outburst or tantrum from the elder Tintador. Eva Tintador sought to give her son a refuge, instill in him a belief in the spiritual realm as an alternative to the chaos of everyday life. Tintador’s father died when the young artist was only twenty-two and he inherited the entire estate. Nothing liberates quite like money! Within twenty-four hours the young man had moved to Paris, and by twenty-four he associated himself with Dadaists and Surrealists. He changed his name to “Fauva,” a final shedding of his father’s identity and an homage to the new art scene.

 For several years Fauva produced at a frenetic pace, often dozens of projects at the same time, dropping some almost as soon as he started them. Drawing, painting, sculpture, choreography, scriptwriting, performance art, an attempt at a pornographic movie; Fauva refused to stay focused on one medium for too long. Finally, after a suggestion from Andre Breton, he tried his hand at the avodion. Everything clicked together. It only took him a year to master the elementary form before his experiments started. 

He hired a hypnotist from Prague, “a literal Bohemian,” to assist his “unconscious avodia” series. In front of a live audience the hypnotist placed Fauva under a trance and instructed him to operate the avodion while channeling his subconscious. Readers to this day describe these avods as nonsensical, whimsical, disturbing, either laden with meaning or totally, infuriatingly, meaningless. Later Fauva regretted these earliest attempts at “automatic avods,” as necessarily limited by the materials at hand. By 1925 he popularized a parlor game with the Parisian elite: the “avod of consequence” in which each person in the room contributed one element to a collective avod that presumably coalesced into a psychic whole in the end. 

In 1939 the war drove Fauva back to Buenos Aires, where avodionship was a novelty. Within a year Fauva made a million, and the year after that he was the most famous man in Argentina. Many attribute this next artistic phase to the change of atmosphere, or his new fortune, or his separation from old compatriots, or perhaps his celebrity as premier avodionist in Argentina. Others suggest his mother’s death prefigured his creative shift. In any case he produced fewer avods and more megalomaniacal outbursts. 

In 1946 he presented a massive avod for Juan Peron’s birthday. The event was lavish; gigantic; chique; with elements of art deco and googie modernism, a futurist utopia packaged in a singular art piece, “the entire world’s fair compiled by one man alone,” remarked one reader. He remained the court avodionist for Peron, making technically impressive–but perhaps stylistically underwhelming–propaganda for his new patrons. 

In 1950 Fauva published Material and Immaterial, a Theory of the Ether, where he laid out his beliefs in an abstract world of pure art; included in the appendices were detailed plans on how to build and operate an entire city to act in conjunction as a supermassive avodion. By all accounts Fauva planned on making his avodion-city a reality in the Argentine Pampas but was shot by a disgruntled fan in 1952.

“What is the banker, the insurance agent, the financier, the stock trader, but miniature avodion assistants in their own right, blasting off pieces of their souls like the limbs lost by that poor chap who worked for Erzengel? What is international finance but an avod of hunger and growth, an avod lacking an artist like those of Paris all those years ago? Mankind can view the city-avod already, it lives in Wall Street and the City of London, it is more than this even, it is an international avod of consequence that merely lacks an operator…” 

-Domingo Fauva, Material and Immaterial

Ray Towner was born in 1932 to middle class parents in Long Island. They were for a while an upwardly mobile family, but the depression depleted their fortunes. Towner recalled his childhood “hunting for scrap metal and digging victory gardens… we were relatively comfortable, at least compared with others we knew, but I didn’t understand wealth until Cooper Union.” The Towners were ardent New Dealers, and many have argued that this plucky Rooseveltian liberalism later influenced Towner’s work. 

Throughout high school young Towner expressed an interest in and a talent for the arts, and by 1950 he had won a scholarship for The Academy at Cooper Union. His tenure there was revelatory, if only because his ambitions broadened. “I saw for the first what art uninterrupted by time, labor, or need could be capable of” wrote Towner in his autobiography. Art school also introduced the young man to the avodion. 

The decades before the 1950s had hollowed out the Avodionism Department at Cooper Union. Its size had shrunk from dozens per year at its height in 1900 to only one pupil expressing interest in 1952 – Towner. Americans saw the practice either as a nineteenth century fad or a foreign eccentricity; beyond an initial flourishing in New York during the Gilded Age it didn’t take hold. Already, in his early twenties, Towner could claim responsibility for resurrecting interest in the form among Americans. His avods were conservative, without any abstractions or structural deviations. Formalists have always derided Towner’s avods as boring, but his proponents insist that they miss the point; Towner’s mission was to cultivate a uniquely American body of avodionship. 

In 1952 Towner presented his senior thesis: Thanksgiving, an avod that incorporated an entire turkey dinner. Towner took his personal avodion, one that he hand-built, and turned on a diesel motor on the side. The machine hummed as Towner set some antenna to an unknown coordinate and a pair of oscillators to a certain frequency. Reels of magnetic tape spun, cathode ray tubes glowed, and a conveyor belt transported the contents of a turkey dinner into an opening in the device. First spoonfuls of mashed potatoes cruised into his machine, then the gravy, then the gravy boat, then the turkey, the vegetables and beets, pumpkin pie by the slice, the silverware, the china, the lit candles, and finally the checkered tablecloth. Within the machine hammers pounded on taut wires, needles pricked vials of fragrant oils, receivers translated invisible waves into patterns on a monochrome screen. Readers left the hall feeling satiated, sleepy, and somehow emotionally drained.  
This started a run of successful avods throughout the fifties and sixties. Eyes West projected the visual spectrum of a setting sun and required its readers to submerge their hands in Mississippi River mud. Towner arranged it as a permanent display in St. Louis, where it still projects to this day. In ‘63 he produced The March for Freedom, playable only in a cotton field while an assistant fed pages from Exodus into a manual feed. By the seventies Towner was a household name: at the same time beloved by American readers and derided by foreign avodionists for his stultifying conservatism. “We live in the age of Foucault and Fauva,” bemoaned one French critic, “what right does this sentimentarian with his nineteenth century relics have to my respect?” This disconnect did nothing to dampen Towner’s rising star. In 1976 he unveiled his Bicentennial Avod with President Ford in front of thousands packed on the National Mall. 

During the 1970s Towner expanded his talents into business. Cameras and personal computers were scaling down, why not avodions? Towner patented his miniature avodions which played premade “pocket avods.” Although this met some success, Towner still wanted to sell home-avodionism at a more conceptual scope. In 1979 he perfected the “decoupling method,” a process that separated a phenomenon from its physical cause. The noise of a stomp no longer needed a literal hobnailed boot: instead a machine could take the element of a “stomp,” distill it, package it into canisters, and sell it to a mass market. Likewise pure heat, the headache right before a pressure storm, general nostalgia, and most colors (although the company reduced these later to red, yellow, and cyan with instructions on how to combine them). Middle-class consumers had access to Towner’s Home Avodion at the same time as his release of the Catalog of Core Phenomena, an encyclopedia of the purportedly two thousand four hundred baseline external stimuli that in combination with each other make up the totality of human experience. It listed next to each entry a price tag and a serial number. At last, at a cost the average family could afford, individuals could create any avod they wished without having to worry about practical or financial restrictions. Just as synthetic ink eliminated the association of colors with their natural origins–indigo with the plant that provides its dye, purple with crushed porphyry stones–so too could anyone decouple such weighty subjects as the abstraction of fear or the heat of passion from their painful and restrictive origins.

The eighties, nineties, and early oughts marked the zenith of home avodionship. By 1990 perhaps every household in the United States could make their own custom avods. By 1995 Towner was one of the richest men in the world. 

In the last decade of his life Towner ran into a minor scandal. The latest home avodion models electronically sent their use-history back to a database in Cupertino, compiled as metadata and sold to advertisers. Nobody quite believed the company’s response that they only wanted to improve user experience, but by this point it was too late. Millions across the globe had inadvertently connected with each other. While pursuing their own artistic sensibilities they actually contributed to a world wide ‘meta-avod.’

Towner died in his sleep in 2012.

“What will I do if my little game becomes old? I made my silly contraption because everyone was playing the same old damned songs on player pianos and the same old damned Punch and Judy acts on the stage. I wanted something different and if everyone in Europe starts aping me too I suppose I shall have to make something different again. Why not?”

-Isaac Zuz, Diaries

Rhea Alto was born in 1970 in Queens to a Bahamian immigrant mother and a white father. Her history after she ran away from home in 1985 is murky. In 1990 she fell in with a group of amateur avodionists in Oakland who pioneered “kitbashing,” mashing together two or more prepackaged phenomena into strange combinations and running them through home-modified Towner Avodions. She excelled at this, and became a darling of the underground avod scene. In 1995 the Northern California Avodion Institute offered exhibition space and a stipend to showcase her work, although they forbade her illegal use of modified parts. Undeterred, Alto borrowed from the public domain. The night of the exhibition she unveiled her personal avodion next to an almost identical device. The avodion, when cranked, projected Erzengel’s Twilit Avod–a short and immediately recognizable piece. The second device cranked in the other direction and, according to one reader, “it drew the classical avod back in! The familiar tingling in the arms departed, a pair of trumpeted tubes sucked away the starry lights, the sounds became higher and reedier as they too were siphoned back into this anti-avodion.” Alto opened a hatch and out came the original components of Erzengel’s piece: first the two turtledoves, then the handful of quartz gems, then the small vial of laudanum, then the iron manacles. These she then fed into the first avod, which produced a totally different effect, only barely recognizable. She then withdrew that avod into the anti-avodion and out came material components Erzengel could never have used: a live armadillo, a spray bottle of bleach, earrings from Claires. She repeated the process, running the reverse over and over again, each time producing disparate ingredients and components. The end result, after a dozen repetitions, was a nonsensical, fragmented avod of conflicting rhythms and visual cues. She then pronounced the name “Erzengel’s Twilit Avod” and left the chamber. 

The wider artistic scene shared the bafflement of those first readers when she published the remix and insisted it was identical to the original item. Alto welcomed the inevitable lawsuit from Erzengel’s estate. While her lawyers frantically insisted that Alto’s avod was a different phenomenon altogether, she actively undermined her case with the repeated claim that her piece and the classic were identical. Whether she did this for the publicity or as a statement against intellectual property is unknown, but it made her famous. Very rarely can one find the definitive birth of a practice, but here was a rare example: Alto invented “anti-avodionship.” It was easy to modify Towner Avodions to make them run backwards, and the cheeky reduction of established avods to their core elements and replaying them to strange new results became almost so common as to be a party game. 

Alto’s experiment pioneered the field of the postmodern avod, and injected new life into what was otherwise a dying form. But it wasn’t her true thesis. She hadn’t intended to demonstrate the meaninglessness of the avodion but instead a potential diversity of meaning, accidental or otherwise. This idea was the bedrock of her next demonstration. She placed a white stone and a black stone on either side of an empty room and insisted that this was an avodion and the experience of sitting in the middle was the avod. She played with this theme some more: spraying water from a hose into a bucket, clapping cymbals together, shooting a gun. “The content is less important than the form,” she said to a critic, “the message is subordinate to the medium. The avodion is greater than the avod.” She expanded this idea even further, her Ecce Homo sat a naked man on a stool with x-ray equipment around him; that the body was an avodion and the man an avod was lost on no one. The framing was revolutionary and at times exasperating. The boats at a seaport; nails, boards, bricks, mortar in a building; the pieces of a tailored suit were all avodions of a kind which projected constant automatic avods to unsuspecting readers. The workers, machinery, walls, and roof of a factory constituted an avodion whose avods were packaged snacks or plastic figurines. The army made an avodion with soldiers as components and whose avod was death. ”I suppose everything is everything,” complained one critic.

She aborted her next project: the Interconnectivity of Automatic Avods, whose idea was to realize Fauva’s attempt at an avodion-city by appropriating an existing metropolis: San Francisco in this case. Instead she went into an extended period of isolation, only recently releasing her manuscript that this brief history seeks to introduce.

“It came to me in the dead of night, as it always does. Everything is everything! Look at a child’s drawing of a globe: squiggly water lines, continents, ice caps. This is the world as avodion, humankind as components, experience is an avod, to exist is to be an abstract art piece. The Last Avod is also the first and only one, the entirety of existence is medium and experience is art.”

-Rhea Alto, The Last Avod: A Realization of the World-as-Avodion

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