Sadie Murdoch, OMNIPULSEPUNSLIDE, 2016

Omnipulsepunslide is the first artist’s book by Sadie Murdoch (b. 1965). Murdoch immersed herself in the poems and manifestos of the Dada artists Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Emmy Hennings, Mina Loy, Juliette Roche and Gertrude Stein.

The book’s title Omnipulsepunslide is a portmanteau word, a blend of multiple words and their sounds, combining their meanings into a new word, in homage to the Dada sound poetry of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and a play on words in the manner of Marcel Duchamp:
Omni = all
Pulse = the body and desire
Spun/pun = wheels and cogs in machines, a play on words
Slide = to touch and slide your hand over an object or surface.
As Sadie Murdoch says “desire is the interplay of language and images.”

The artist’s intent is to re-route and re-position the history of the New York and Zurich Dada movement. She cuts up and re-assembles poems and manifestos, placing them alongside reconfigurations of photographic archives and disarticulated fragments of her body. The texts and images in Omnipulsepunslide function as thematic resources from which narrative structures are derived as intimate yet transient variations.