Missed: Undercover Surrealism

April 1929, first edition of Documents

Undercover Surrealism explores the ’subversive climate’ of the dark undercurrent within Surrealism in the late 1920’s spearheaded by Georges Bataille. The exhibition draws together work by Picasso, Miro, Masson, Giacometti as well as imagery from the magazine Bataille edited from 1929 to 1930 called DOCUMENTS :

“..a shocking and bizarre juxtaposition of art, ethnography, archaeology and popular culture in such a way that overturned conventional notions of ‘primitive’ and ‘ideal’. Bataille described himself as Surrealism’s ‘enemy from within’… ”

The exhibition ran at the Hayward Gallery till the 30th July 2006.

Via Desert and Sea

Robert Benayoun

 

Robert Benayoun, photocredit unidentified
Image source here

Érotique du surréalisme (1965|1978) – Robert Benayoun
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Robert Benayoun wrote in the tradition of Ado Kyrou, Eric Losfeld, Joseph-Marie Lo Duca and Jean-Pierre Bouyxou, with an absolute disregard for the perceived boundaries between low and high culture. If you follow the source link of the photograph, there is a Spanish article on Benayoun’s work Érotique du surréalisme.

Regarding the publishing house of Eric Losfeld, Éditions Le Terrain Vague, I’ve always wondered if there were German and British equivalents of it. In the United States houses such as Grove Press come to mind, but I know of no equivalents in Germany or the UK.

Don and Dreams

PCL linkdump has a trailer (listen to those drums) from the 1978 film Don and via Greencine comes the Google video of Man Ray and Hans Richter’s Dreams that Money Can Buy.

More on Dreams and the people who made a new soundtrack for it:

“This is a Story of Dreams mixed with Reality”.

When Marek first showed me Hans Richter’s film ‘Dreams that Money Can Buy” as a potential project, I knew from this introductory salvo that I was in. It’s a difficult, deeply flawed film in many ways but it is also remarkable, extraordinary, ground-breaking, massively influential, comic and poignant in turns. It says things about Surrealism, film, art, the American Dream, dreaming in general and the emergence of therapy-practitioners as the new priestly elite, that hadn’t been said before – and possibly haven’t since. It captures the mysterious, confusing, meaningless-meaningfulness of Dreaming in a way that few films have – apart from perhaps David Lynch’s work – and it’s obviously no coincidence that Lynch himself has declared it as a major influence. —theclerkenwellkid

Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947) – Man Ray, Hans Richter

I wrote this summary on Wikipedia, feel free to contribute:

Dreams That Money Can Buy is a 1947 American experimental feature color film written, produced, and directed by surrealist artist and dada film-theorist Hans Richter.

Collaborators included Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, Darius Milhaud and Fernand Léger.


It won a special prize at the 1947 Venice Film Festival.

 

See also: surrealism in film

Take Yo’ Praise

‘Take Yo’ Praise’ is a 1975 song by Camille Yarbrough of her The Iron Pot Cooker album which was sampled in 1998 by Fatboy Slim.

I’ve just heard the original for the first time on French online radio station Radio Nova and it’s sublimely life and love affirming.

I have to praise you when you hold me
when you work your way around
ain’t a part of me left over
that your sweet love ain’t found
you make my (my) moan turn to whisper
you make my whisper turn to call
you make me scream
and scream that I love you
when you (when you) make me rise and fall

The track is available on Nova Classics series, volume 6

Nova Classics 5 (2004) – Various Artists [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Lunacy: new Svankmajer

David Hudson at greencine reports on a new film by Jan Švankmajer.

Here is the trailer.

Wikipedia has this:

Lunacy, also known as Sílení is a 2005 film by Jan Švankmajer. The film is loosely based on two short stories by Edgar Allan Poe and inspired by the works of the Marquis de Sade.

And here is a sample of Švankmajer’s sculptural work:

Beethoven by Arcimboldo (1993) – Jan Švankmajer
image sourced here.

Aug 2006 update: The Evening Class has two excellent posts: one with YouTube footage here and one on Lunacy here.

Sherwood Anderson and grotesque fiction

Winesburg, Ohio (1919) – Sherwood Anderson
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

In fiction, a character is usually considered a grotesque if he induces both empathy and disgust. (A character that inspires disgust alone is simply a villain or a monster.) Obvious examples would include the physically deformed and the mentally deficient, but people with cringe-worthy social traits are also included. The reader becomes piqued by the grotesque’s positive side, and continues reading to see if the character can conquer his darker side.

In European literature, Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame is one of the most celebrated grotesques.

In American literature, one often cites Sherwood Anderson’s short story collection Winesburg, Ohio.

The most recent literary theory on the grotesque has been by two American scholars: Philip Thomson (1972) and David Lavery (a continuing online contribution).

I’ve cleaned up my own pages on the grotesque somewhat and transcribed some lists to Wikipedia. Please follow the links.

A final question, the beautiful cover painting on Anderson’s novel (a larger picture here), is it by Edward Hopper, that architect of American loneliness who recently guided me through chapter two of de Botton’s The Art of Travel?

Blind Beast

Blind Beast (1969) – Yasuzo Masumura

[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

 

Dadanoias has a video excerpt of the 1969 film Blind Beast, which I recently had the pleasure of seeing at the Brussels Arenberg cinemas.

I cannot recommend the whole film, but the first 15 minutes are beautiful (the gallery scene, the first scene in the warehouse with the sculptures of the body parts). The entire middle sequence is boring. The final scene is hilariously and grotesquely entertaining. The scene that Dadanoias has found (via El Blog Rarito) is from the end of the first 15 minutes, where the blind sculptor is trying to catch the girl in vain). Note the music by Hikaru Hayashi. The film is based on a novel by Japanese mystery writer Edogawa Ranpo.

I love moss

Detail of a photograph of some mossy stones, at Kylen, nr. Osby.

Detail of a photograph of mossy fallen branches, at Kylen, nr. Osby.

I love moss, my daughters know this well. Il Giornale Nuovo posted some photos of mossy trunks of which he writes:

Unlike the woods around Aickman’s Kurhus, these were clearly seldom traversed, being crossed here and there by old, low stone walls, by felled, mossy trunks, or blocked with thickets. Even so, it wasn’t hard for me to feel a faint something of that transcendence he hints at, as I stopped to admire a sunlit clearing after squeezing through mushroomy, spiderwebbed undergrowth.

I also love ferns. When I was reading Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard a couple of weeks ago I learned that if you burn the fronds of ferns and dissolve its ashes in water and let that water evaporate, you get a pattern of ferns at the bottom of the glass. I picked some ferns three weeks ago and burnt them two weeks ago. The water is evaporating but it is still too early to say whether the experiment will succeed.

To round this post off, an illustration of mosses by Ernst Haeckel:

Muscinae from Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (Artforms of Nature) of 1904.

Ron Mueck’s body art

 Ron Mueck’s work is currently on display at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh.

While Ron Mueck’s work may not be body art in the strict sense of contemporary art terminology (that category is reserved for artists such as Orlan), his work is body art in a grotesquely metaphorical sense.