Faultlines in 20th century art

Fault lines caused by an ancient earthquake

Faultlines in 20th century art

The classification above is indebted to Sex in History by Gordon Rattray Taylor (see Matrism and Patrism) and the work of Camille Paglia, especially Sexual Personae. Both theorists classify along Apollonian and Dionysian axes.

Lost and found: biomorphism

Unidentified Art Nouveau/Art Deco object

The previous post by >dmtls Merzbau on Carlo Mollino prompted me to Google for the term biomorphism once more and there it was, the image I had found on the web a couple of years back but had since been unable to find again. Biomorphism connects with anthropomorphism, zoomorphism, Casa Milà, Surrealism, the grotesque, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Isamu Noguchi, Carlo Mollino, Luigi Colani in the visual realm and with literary tropes in the work of H. P. Lovecraft and Lautréamont; and provides a potent antidote to sexless modernism.

Baudrillard, Alan Tex and Carlo Mollino

>dmtls Merzbau is back from a prolonged break.

I missed his writing as well as that of Ombres Blanches (who is unable to post at the moment). Another fave, Esotika, is posting very lightly these days. A recent interesting post by Esotika was on Hour of the Wolf by Bergman. Esotika’s film viewing habits have changed which prohibits him from writing more frequently. His film corpus is one of the more interesting ones on the web.

Avez-vous déjà giflé un mort ?

Un cadavre

Un cadavre

Un cadavre (A corpse) is a 1930 virulent pamphlet against André Breton organised by Robert Desnos  to which dissident surrealists such as Georges Bataille contributed. Its title was based on a 1924 pamphlet by the Surrealists against Anatole France. Read more here.

The quote in the title of this post was taken from the Louis Aragon contribution to the 1924 pamphlet and translates as: “Have you ever slapped a dead person?”

 

Mr. Bataille loves flies, so does Boiffard

Mr. Bataille loves flies. Not we: we love the miters of old evocators, the miters of pure linen to whose front point was affixed a blade of gold and upon which flies did not settle, because they had been purified to keep them away.” -André Breton

The photograph of the Papier colant et mouches is by J.-A. Boiffard, first published in 1930 as an illustration for George Bataille’s article “L’esprit moderne et le jeu des transpositions,” in Documents, 1930. No.8, p. 488.

Via Contact Images by Georges Didi-Huberman

See Bretonian and Bataillean strains of Surrealism and toilet philosophy.

See also this wonderful post by Mark Dery on the big toe.