{ feuilleton }

Weekend links 707

Dragon and Tiger—Designs for Lacquer Inro (no date) by Mori Genkosai.

• “But where have all those copies of Corridor of Mirrors gone? Sometimes I entertain the thought that an obsessive collector has amassed them in his library lined with looking-glasses, so that nobody else can possess the book but he, and he can see them all, multiplied to infinity, as he stalks up and down in his scarlet smoking hat and velvet coat, and gloats.” Mark Valentine on the mysterious unavailability of Corridor of Mirrors (1941), a novel by Chris Massie. The film adaptation made a few years later is one I’ve managed to miss, despite its starring Eric Portman and featuring the first screen appearance of Christopher Lee. Future viewing, I think.

• “The intrepid logician Kurt Gödel believed in the afterlife. In four heartfelt letters to his mother he explained why.” Alexander T Englert explains Gödel’s explanations.

• At Open Culture: Hortus Eystettensis (1613), “the beautifully illustrated book of plants that changed botanical art overnight”.

• Mix of the week: Aquarium Drunkard presents The Secret Hemisphere: New Age, Fusion and Fourth World, 1970–2002.

• New music: Phases Of This And Other Moons by Field Lines Cartographer.

• Why Graphic Culture Matters is a new book of essays by Rick Poynor.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Japanese Designer New Year’s Cards of 2024.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Chutz.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s Barbara Steele Day.

• The Hall Of Mirrors In The Palace At Versailles (1970) by John Cale & Terry Riley | The Hall Of Mirrors (1977) by Kraftwerk | The Room Of Mirrors (2000) by Harold Budd

First Papers of Surrealism, 1942

As I was saying a couple of weeks ago, Surrealism will be 100 years old this year, if you mark the movement’s birth from the first manifestoes (there were two different ones) published in October 1924. Surrealism doesn’t really have a definite beginning, however, either in 1924 or earlier on; the movement evolved over several years, with different factions competing for followers while squabbling over intentions. After a great deal of ferment the manifestoes from the opposed groups led by Yvan Goll and André Breton were a declaration that something substantial had been happening that required definition. I’m not sure why all of this interests me as much as it does just now, but I’m looking forward to seeing where the interest leads. Don’t be surprised to see more posts on the subject in the coming months.

So, then… Fast-forward to 1942 and First Papers of Surrealism, an exhibition of paintings staged in New York City by the Coordination Council of French Relief Societies in October of that year. The exhibition was curated by André Breton with the assistance of Marcel Duchamp, Breton having recently arrived in the United States after escaping from Nazi-occupied France together with a small group of Surrealist artists, some of whom were represented in the show. Duchamp’s main contribution was His Twine, an installation of a large quantity of string threaded around the exhibition space through which the visitors had to peer in order to see the paintings. Duchamp also invited a group of children to play ball games inside the gallery on the opening night. This wasn’t the first Surrealist exhibition to be held in New York—Julien Levy had introduced the city to the latest art movement at his own gallery in 1933, and had been showing Surrealist paintings and Joseph Cornell’s artworks in the years that followed—but First Papers on Surrealism was an important event, with many major artists represented.

What you see here are pages from the exhibition catalogue, a publication which is more like one of the smaller Surrealist magazines than a mere list of the pictures on display. Marcel Duchamp designed the die-cut cover (those holes make me wonder whether these were also originally threaded with string), while the catalogue interior contains an intriguing collection of quotes, captions, photographs and illustrations. Breton’s “Great Transparent Ones” raise their invisible heads again, while the artists and curators are all depicted in a series of “compensation portraits” which stand in for an absence of suitable photos.

Continue reading “First Papers of Surrealism, 1942”

02024

The Devil’s Wife and her Eldest (1924) by Harry Clarke.

Happy new year. 02024? Read this.

L’Inhumaine poster (1924) by Georges Djo-Bourgeois.

Counter-Composition V (1924) by Theo van Doesburg.

The Thief of Bagdad poster (1924) by Anton Grot.

Linea Capricciosa (1924) by Wassily Kandinsky.

Continue reading “02024”

Weekend links 706

Sea Change (c.1966) by George Wallace Jardine.

A paucity of links this week thanks to the Xmas blight which reduced my RSS feed to a wasteland of no activity at all or too many of those lazy listicles devoted to “our top ten things of the year”. There was, however, this from Simon Reynolds:

I miss the inter-blog chatter of the 2000s, but in truth, connectivity was only ever part of the appeal. I’d do this even if no one read it. Blogging, for me, is the perfect format. No restrictions when it comes to length or brevity: a post can be a considered and meticulously composed 3,000-word essay, or a spurted splat of speculation or whimsy. No rules about structure or consistency of tone. A blogpost can be half-baked and barely proved: I feel zero responsibility to “do my research” before pontificating. Purely for my own pleasure, I do often go deep. But it’s nearer the truth to say that some posts are outcomes of rambles across the archives of the internet, byproducts of the odd information trawled up and the lateral connections created.

Setting aside the inter-blog conversation, which I was never very interested in, Reynolds articulates precisely why I still enjoy posting things here. I also agree with his comments about the psychological constraints that doing the same for Substack or similar would impose: a paying readership creates responsibilities that would make the whole thing feel like another form of work rather than play. To Reynolds’ comments I’d add that I also enjoy having a tiny area of the internet over which I exercise complete control. If I fall out with my webhost, as I did in the summer, I can move the entire site to a new location.

Reynolds expanded on his article at his regular forum, blissblog, where he examines the current state of the thing that people used to call the blogosphere. My thanks to Simon for including this place in his list of diehard operatives. I can’t say I’ve noticed the younger generations picking up the habit (then again, I haven’t really been looking…) but the small percentage of any generation who want to do more than simply follow the herd will always find outlets for their interests. And the tools for doing this have never gone away. This particular medium may not suit most people, but for those who can accommodate themselves to the format it’s a better way to spend your time than marinating your soul in the corrosive sump of social media.

• Elsewhere: Among other things, 2024 will be the year that the earliest manifestation of Walt Disney’s ubiquitous rodent enters the public domain in the USA. Jennifer Jenkins lists some of the more prominent books, films, songs, etc that will be following suit.

• At Open Culture: The Beautiful Anarchy of the Earliest Animated Cartoons.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Another day for Shirley Clarke.

• Suspended Animation (1980) by Bernard Szajner | Animation (1983) by Cabaret Voltaire | Reanimation (1996) by Bill Laswell feat. DJ Rob Swift

The Great Transparent Ones

Le Grand Transparent (1947) by Jacques Hérold.

The Great Transparent Ones

Man is perhaps not the centre, the cynosure of the universe. One can go so far as to believe that there exist above him, on the animal scale, beings whose behaviour is as strange to him as his may be to the mayfly or the whale. Nothing necessarily stands in the way of these creatures’ being able to completely escape man’s sensory system of references through a camouflage of whatever sort one cares to imagine, though the possibility of such a camouflage is posited only by the theory of forms and the study of mimetic animals. There is no doubt that there is ample room for speculation here, even though this idea tends to place man in the same modest conditions of interpretation of his own universe as the child who is pleased to form his conception of an ant from its underside just after he has kicked over an anthill. In considering disturbances such as cyclones, in face of which man is powerless to be anything but a victim or a witness, or those such as war, notoriously inadequate versions of which are set forth, it would not be impossible, in the course of a vast work over which the most daring sort of induction should never cease to preside, to approximate the structure and the constitution of such hypothetical beings (which mysteriously reveal themselves to us when we are afraid and when we are conscious of the workings of chance) to the point where they become credible.

I think it necessary to point out that I am not departing appreciably from Novalis’ testimony: “In reality we live in an animal whose parasites we are. The constitution of this animal determines ours and vice versa,” and that I am only agreeing with a thought of William James’s: “Who knows whether, in nature, we do not occupy just as small a place alongside beings whose existence we do not suspect as our cats and dogs that live with us in our homes?” Even learned men do not all contradict this view of things: “Perhaps there circle round about us beings built on the same plan as we are, but different, men for example whose albumins are straight,” said Émile Duclaux, a former director of the Pasteur Institute (1840–1904).

A new myth? Must these things be convinced that they result from a mirage or must they be given a chance to show themselves?

André Breton, Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto, or Not, 1942

Le Grand Transparent (1947) by Jacques Hérold.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Execution of the Testament of the Marquis de Sade by Jean Benoît
• Chance encounters on the dissecting table
• The Marvellous
• Surrealist cartomancy