Óscar Domínguez – { feuilleton }

Visite à Óscar Domínguez

Another artist portrait, this short silent film is one of the earliest cinematic efforts by Alain Resnais, following some amateur experiments which are now lost. Resnais made several of these artist films in 1947, before embarking on the longer documentaries that brought him to the attention of the French film world. Visite à Óscar Domínguez was followed by Visite à Lucien Coutaud, Visite à Hans Hartung, Visite à Félix Labisse, Visite à César Doméla, Portrait d’Henri Goetz, and Journée naturelle (Visite à Max Ernst) but the Domínguez, which was apparently unfinished, is the only one I’ve been able to find so far. The Max Ernst is the one I’d most like to see even though Ernst didn’t lack for documentaries—he was filmed regularly in later life, and also turns up as an actor in L’Age Dor and Dreams that Money Can Buy—but I’m curious to know what he was doing when Resnais paid a visit.

Óscar Domínguez (1906–1957) was a Spanish artist who was affiliated with the Surrealists for a while although this connection was over by the time Resnais arrived. In the 1930s, Domínguez gave the Surrealist artists a new spur for their imaginations, decalcomania, a technique which Max Ernst in particular used to great effect in his paintings of the early 1940s. Domínguez himself produced a number of decalcomania paintings but by 1947 he was settled into a period where all his work looks like an imitation of Picasso. It’s good to see him painting all the same—films of artists at work have never been very common—but I would have preferred to see him doing something that wasn’t so indebted to somebody else’s work.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Monaco on Resnais
• Providence on DVD
• Art on film: Je t’aime, Je t’aime
• Art on film: Providence
• Marienbad hauntings
• Les Statues Meurent Aussi, a film by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais
• Toute la mémoire du monde, a film by Alain Resnais

Ballard’s sextet

Cover artist unknown.

A selection by JG Ballard of six favourite Surrealist paintings, or five Surrealist ones and a Metaphysical picture if you want to be strict about the definitions. These were described but not shown in an essay, “The Coming of the Unconscious”, that Ballard wrote for issue 164 of New Worlds magazine in 1966, something I was re-reading yesterday. I have quite a few of the Moorcock-edited Compact editions of New Worlds, being paperback-sized they used to be a common sight in secondhand bookshops. Issue 164 also includes a guest editorial from Ballard which he fills with a report from his recent viewing of La Jetée, the influential time-travel short by Chris Marker which was receiving its first London screenings.

Ballard’s essay is ostensibly a review of two books about Surrealist art but he doesn’t really bother with these, being more concerned with exploring his own thoughts about the paintings which inform so much of his early fiction. It’s a very good piece, especially for the way it interleaves Surrealist theory with the Ballardian concerns found in the “condensed novels” that were eventually published together (with Dalí cover art) as The Atrocity Exhibition in 1970. The following list comes near the end of the piece, and shouldn’t be taken as a definitive selection on Ballard’s part. There’s no Yves Tanguy, for example, even though Tanguy’s art is referred to in The Drought. And no Paul Delvaux either, an artist who Ballard liked enough to commission Brigid Marlin to recreate the two Delvaux paintings that were destroyed in the Second World War. A still-extant Delvaux painting, The Echo, is mentioned in The Day of Forever, a story that Ballard was probably writing around this time and which was published in New Worlds 170.

“The Coming of the Unconscious” was reprinted several times after this: in a story collection, The Overloaded Man (1967), in the first RE/Search Ballard book in 1984, and in the essay and reviews collection A User’s Guide to the Millennium (1996).

The Disquieting Muses (1916–1918) by Giorgio de Chirico

“These mannequins are human beings from whom all transitional time has been eroded, they have been reduced to the essence of their own geometries.”

I’m guessing that this is the original painting. De Chirico was perpetually frustrated that everyone preferred his “Metaphysical” paintings of the 1910s to the endless self-portraits and other dull works he insisted on producing in his later years. In order to keep the income flowing he painted many copies of his older pictures, at least 18 of which are versions of this one, with several backdated to the time of the original. As Robert Hughes put it: “Italian art dealers used to say the Maestro’s bed was six feet off the ground, to hold all the ‘early work’ he kept ‘discovering’ beneath it.”

The Elephant Celebes (1921) by Max Ernst

“Ernst’s wise machine, hot cauldron of time and myth, is the tutelary deity of inner space, the benign minotaur of the labyrinth.”

The Annunciation (1930) by René Magritte

“This terrifying structure is a neuronic totem, its rounded and connected forms are a fragment of our own nervous systems, perhaps an insoluble code that contains the operating formulae for our own passage through time and space.”

An interesting choice mainly because Ballard didn’t usually mention Magritte; Dalí, Delvaux and Ernst were the painters he returned to the most. It’s typical, however, for him to choose a landscape.

The Persistence of Memory (1931) by Salvador Dalí

“The empty beach with its fused sand is a symbol of utter psychic alienation, of a final stasis of the soul.”

The one painting that even Dalí’s many detractors tend to like. Ballard, like Dawn Ades and a handful of others, developed his own opinions about Dalí’s oeuvre instead of following the consensus opinion (which often seems more like an unexamined prejudice) that everything the artist did after the 1930s was of little value.

Decalcomania by Óscar Domínguez

“These coded terrains are models of the organic landscapes enshrined in our nervous systems.”

Decalcomania is a process, not a picture, an addition by Domínguez to the many techniques of pictorial automatism (frottage, grattage, fumage, etc) developed by the Surrealists. With this entry you can make your own selection from the Domínguez paintings that use the technique. I chose Untitled (1936).

The Eye of Silence (1943–44) by Max Ernst

“The real landscapes of our world are seen for what they are—the palaces of flesh and bone that are the living façades enclosing our own subliminal consciousness.”

My favourite Max Ernst painting, and also a definite Ballard favourite. The Crystal World had just been published when this essay appeared, and both the UK and US editions used this painting on their dustjackets. Panther books followed suit when the UK paperback appeared two years later.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Echoes of de Chirico
• Max Ernst’s favourites
• Ballard and the painters

The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine

From One Dough (1996) by Martin Stejskal, Jan Svankmajer, Eva Svankmajerová.

From A Dictionary of Surrealism by José Pierre (Eyre Methuen, 1974):

Exquisite corpse. The most famous of the surrealist games takes its name from the opening sentence that materialized: “Le cadavre—exquis—boira—le vin—nouveau” (1925) (The exquisite corpse—will drink—the new wine). It was produced by five players writing in turn subject, adjective, verb, object, complement, each folding over the paper so that the next player could not see what had been already written. The violent whiff of strangeness and the droll effects obtained by these verbal collages reappeared in the drawn “exquisite corpses” in which Surrealist poets and painters often combined. Despite the fact that each contribution—especially in the case of painters—is relatively identifiable, the total effect (mostly in the form of a “personage”) results from the combined elements. In this, the “exquisite corpse” can claim to have scored a victory for collective invention over individual invention and over the “signature”.

Nude (1926–27) by Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, Max Morise, Man Ray.

Exquisite Corpse (1927) by André Masson, Max Ernst, Max Morise.

Exquisite Corpse (1928) by Man Ray, André Breton, Yves Tanguy, and Max Morise.

Exquisite Corpse (1928) by Man Ray, Max Morise, André Breton, Yves Tanguy.

Continue reading “The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine”

Chance encounters on the dissecting table

In times of great uncertainty about our mission, we often looked at the fixed points of Lautréamont and De Chirico, which sufficed to determine our straight line.

André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 1928

1: The metaphor, 1869

You can’t read the history of Surrealism for very long before encountering some variation of the most famous line from Les Chants de Maldoror by the Comte de Lautréamont/Isidore Ducasse: “beautiful as a chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella”. Translations vary, as do misquotations; the page above is from the Alexis Lykiard translation where you can also read the surrounding text. The context of the description is seldom mentioned when the quote is used, and reveals that the words are describing the attractiveness of an English schoolboy living with his parents in Paris. The insipid Mervyn is stalked, seduced and finally murdered by the villainous Maldoror. Lautréamont’s metaphor, like so much else in the book, carries a sting in its tail.

2: The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse, 1920

Man Ray, like Mervyn, was a foreigner living in Paris when he created this artwork. The “enigma” may be taken as referring both to the wrapped object (a sewing machine sans umbrella) as well as to the mysterious author of Les Chants de Maldoror, who died at the age of 24 after writing his explosive prose poem, and about whose life little is known. I first encountered Ducasse’s name in art books showing pictures of this piece which is one of the earliest works of Surrealist art. For a young art enthusiast the enigma was more in the name itself: who was this Ducasse, and why was he enigmatic? The original of Man Ray’s piece was subsequently lost, like many of his pre-war sculptures, but may be seen inside the first issue of La Révolution Surrealiste. Editions of the work that exist today are recreations made in the 1970s.

3: An illustration for Les Chants de Maldoror, 1934

Salvador Dalí created 30 full-page etchings and 12 vignettes for an illustrated edition of Lautréamont’s work published by Skira in Paris in 1934. Dalí must have seemed an ideal match for a book whose prose descriptions offer copious atrocities and mutations but, as with many of Dalí’s illustrations, the pictures owe more to his obsessions than to Lautréamont’s text, and could easily be used to illustrate something else entirely. Plate 19 does, however, feature a sewing machine.

4: Electrosexual Sewing Machine, 1935

A Surrealist painting by Oscar Dominguez which emphasises the sexual nature of Lautréamont’s metaphor, or at least the Freudian interpretation of the same. Breton and company took the sewing machine for a female symbol, while the umbrella was male; the dissecting table where their encounter takes place is, of course, a bed.

[In Electrosexual Sewing Machine] the dissection appears to be under way. There is a strange abusive surgery being undertaken, the thread of the sewing machine replaced with blood which is being funnelled onto the woman’s back. The plant itself may even echo de Lautréamont’s umbrella. Domínguez has taken one of the central mantras of Breton’s Surreal universe and has pushed it, through a combination of painterly skill and semi-automatism, in order to create an absorbing and haunting vision that cuts to the quick of the movement’s spirit. (via)

5: Sewing Machine with Umbrellas in a Surrealist Landscape, 1941

More from Dalí who was hired by Fritz Lang to create images for a sequence of drunken delirium in the film Moontide. The commission arrived four years before Dalí’s work for Hitchcock on Spellbound, and if successful might have even dissuaded Hitchcock from hiring Dalí, but Lang left the film once shooting had begun, and his replacement, Archie Mayo, disliked the artist’s contributions. This surviving concept painting seems lazy compared to the Spellbound sequences (which were also trimmed by the ever-interfering David O. Selznick): the colonnade is a bald swipe from De Chirico, while the umbrella-bedecked sewing machine makes clumsy and literal use of the Lautréamont metaphor which is better left as a provocative collision of verbal imagery.

6: “As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissection table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella…”: Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp, 1976

A painting by Philip Core, part of a series in which well-known cultural figures (eg: Harold Pinter and Joe Orton) encounter each other in rooms that reflect their works. Core wrote a biography of Andy Warhol, so maybe he knew something that I don’t, but I’d be very surprised if the Pop artist ever played a game of chess in his life, never mind being proficient enough to win so many pieces from the chess-obsessed Duchamp. As for Marcel, he’d raise an eyebrow at that wrongly positioned chess board…

7: Nurse With Wound, 1979

Lautréamont infects another medium. Steven Stapleton’s music group/art project has been infused from the outset by a pranksterish Dada/Surrealist spirit, so the purloining of the metaphor for the title of the first Nurse With Wound album is entirely fitting.

8: L’Ombrello E La Macchina Da Cucire, 1995

Unlike this album by the very prolific Franco Battiato which Discogs describes as “experimental”. The first piece on the album uses the same title as the album, and is anything but experimental, especially compared to the improvised racket created by Nurse With Wound.

9: Maldoror, 2003

A jazz album by Erik Friedlander which I haven’t heard but which takes its track titles from phrases by Lautréamont.

Do other examples exist? No doubt they do, but the more recent uses of Lautréamont’s words only demonstrate how over-familiarity dulls an effect that was once shocking and original.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Santiago Caruso’s Maldoror
• Jacques Houplain’s Maldoror
• Hans Bellmer’s Maldoror
• Les Chants de Maldoror by Shuji Terayama
• Polypodes
• Ulysses versus Maldoror
• Maldoror
• Books of blood
• Magritte’s Maldoror
• Frans De Geetere’s illustrated Maldoror
• Maldoror illustrated