Salvador Dalí – { feuilleton }

Minotaur Ballet – Swansea Surreal

October is still Spook Month as usual but this year it’s also the 100th anniversary of the publication of André Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto, something I wrote about back in January. Many events have been acknowledging the anniversary including Minotaur Ballet – Swansea Surreal, an exhibition curated by David Greenslade and Incunabula Media which will be running at Volcano Theatre, Swansea from now to the end of the month. I’m one of the contributors with prints of my Alice in Wonderland posters. Lewis Carroll’s books were rare examples of British culture that Breton was enthusiastic about—he made Alice the “Siren of Dreams” in the Surrealist card deck—while Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst both created illustrations for the stories. I would have preferred to have made something new for the event but other work intervened.

The exhibition…will feature mainly Welsh artists, most of them from Swansea, alongside guests from Australia, Ukraine, Romania, Czech Republic, Egypt, Ireland and other parts of the UK.

ARTISTS INCLUDE
George Ostafi, Mark Sanders, Alexandria Bryan, Neil Coombs, John Goodby, Ricardo Acevedo, Carla-Francesca Schoppel, Dagmar Stepankova, David Rees Davies, Matt Leyshon, Jennifer Allan, Ben Faircloth, Wynford Vaughan Thomas, James Green, David K Mitchell, John Coulthart, Ian Walker, Premysl Martinec, Roger Moss, Julia Lockheart, David Greenslade, Simon Evans, Syd Howells, Keith Bayliss, Anatoly Shmatok, Maria Dolorosa de la Cruz

FILMS OLD AND NEW BY
Kenji Siratori, Zac Ferguson, Jane Arden (Norah Morris), Ricardo Acevedo

And a special screening of Blue Scar (1949)

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Scenes from a carriage
• Dalí in Wonderland
• Surrealist cartomancy

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

Art on film: Crack-Up

Continuing an occasional series about artworks in feature films. The Dark Corner (1946) was the subject of the last entry which ended with the words “I’ve been wondering what other Dalínean references might be hiding in American feature films from this time”. This post is one answer, being a further example of a reference to Salvador Dalí’s painting in a film from the 1940s. Crack-Up was written by John Paxton, Ben Bengal and Ray Spencer, and directed by Irving Reis. Like The Dark Corner this is another film noir from the noir-heavy year of 1946, with both films concerning mysteries set in the New York art world.

The crack-up in question is a mental collapse sustained by art curator George Steele (Pat O’Brien) who believes he’s been involved in a rail crash even though there’s no physical evidence of the disaster. The film has an intriguing Twilight Zone quality for a while although this evaporates once the machinations of the plot show themselves. The Dalí reference occurs in a flashback to the events that lead to the psychotic episode when we see Steele giving a lecture to members of the public at the museum where he works. His talk demonstrates his authority on artistic matters while also reassuring the film-going audience that he isn’t one of those egghead types with a taste for “incomprehensible” modern paintings.

Steele’s aesthetic conservatism is confirmed when he reveals this Dalínean item which summons derisive laughter from the assembly, and which he admits he doesn’t like. As with The Dark Corner, the critical dice are loaded against Dalí (and against modern art in general) by showing a deliberately poor pastiche. Crack-Up goes further by setting the faux Dalí next to The Angelus by Jean-François Millet, a painting which Steele has shown the audience a few moments before, and which prompts sighs of appreciation.

This comparison between Millet and Dalí threw me out of the story for a few seconds while I wondered whether the choice of The Angelus was a deliberate one by the writers and director, or merely coincidental. Anyone with a more than cursory knowledge of Salvador Dalí’s work will know that Dalí was obsessed with The Angelus for most of his life, frequently borrowing the figures for his own paintings and even creating new variations on the original. In 1938 he wrote a book-length analysis of the picture, The Tragic Myth of The Angelus of Millet, although the text was lost for many years and wasn’t published until the 1960s. There’s a further curious detail here, in that Dalí believed that Millet had originally shown the couple mourning the death of a child, and that a child-sized coffin had been painted over to make a more generally religious scene. Dalí’s insistent claims about the absent coffin eventually prompted an X-ray examination of the painting. The results were inconclusive but the investigation adds a further layer of coincidence to the Crack-Up lecture when Steele moves his discussion to the technique of X-ray analysis which he says can reveal the earlier stages of a painting or even expose forgeries. This turns out to be a crucial plot element later in the film.

Before the lecture ends there’s a further dig at modern art when a small man with a Hitler moustache and a foreign (Germanic?) accent loudly complains about the dismissive tone of the discussion before being forcibly removed from the hall. If the heckler’s moustache is supposed to connect Modernism with the recently-deceased Führer then this is another calumny on the part of the film-makers, the Nazis having been forthright in their loathing of what they called “entartete kunst“, or “degenerate art”. New York in the 1940s was filled with exiled European artists, Dalí among them.

The heckler’s outburst leads Steele to end his lecture with a joke at the expense of the art movement which had until this moment gone unnamed. One of the ironies of the film’s dismissal of the Dalí-like painting and the consequent dig at the Surrealists is that André Breton and his American acolytes were equally dismissive of Salvador Dalí. The Crack-Up audience could at least laugh then turn their attention to other things, but the Bretonites had to watch Dalí promote his own brand of Surrealism, unable (or unwilling) to admit that it was his abilities and attention-seeking antics that gave the word “Surrealist” its popular currency outside the galleries and art magazines. Without that provocative persona Surrealism in America would never have been newsworthy enough to be mentioned in a film such as this.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Art on film: The Dark Corner
• Art on film: Je t’aime, Je t’aime
• Art on film: Space is the Place
• Art on film: Providence
• Art on film: The Beast

Weekend links 719

The Decoy (1948) by Edith Rimmington.

• “Among other things, [Dalí’s] storyboards involved [Ingrid] Bergman turning into a statue that would then break up into ants.” Tim Jonze talks to film scholar John Russell Taylor about the storyboards for Alfred Hitchcock’s films, including the ones for Spellbound which Taylor found in a bric-a-brac sale.

• “Of all the pop acts that proliferated in the early 80s, it was Soft Cell who retained punk’s sharp, provocative edges.” Matthew Lindsay on 40 years of Soft Cell’s This Last Night In Sodom.

• Coming soon from White Rabbit books: Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines and Tomorrow’s Music Today by Simon Reynolds.

Anathema to many philosophical systems, or perhaps philosophy itself, Lovecraft’s philosophical project fundamentally holds that contemplations of higher reality or the nature of things can never be fully realised. Ultimately, the search for knowledge does not constitute some telos, some purpose, for humankind, but rather leads to the violent dissolution of the self. Higher reality is that which the limited human psyche can never fully comprehend.

Sam Woodward on the cosmic philosophy of HP Lovecraft

• At Public Domain Review: Grotesqueries at Gethsemane: Marcus Gheeraerts’ Passio Verbigenae (c.1580).

• “Here is a remarkable form of popular heraldry.” Mark Valentine on the mystique of old inn signs.

• At Bandcamp: Brad Sanders on where to begin with Lustmord’s cosmic ambient.

• New music: Eleven Fugues For Sodium Pentothal by Adam Wiltzie.

• At Aquarium Drunkard: Jason P. Woodbury talks to Roger Eno.

• Gomorrha (1973) by Can | Sodom (1978) by Can | Spellbound (1981) by Siouxsie And The Banshees

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”