surrealism is everwhere

Yesterday, students looked through piles of books and artists that relate to Surrealism directly or indirectly, including, Diego Rivera, Marcel Duchamp, Ben Shahn, Henry Darger, Salvador Dali, and others. We discussed how pervasive Surrealism ideas and techniques are and how it seems to be in everything still to this day.

Amy Cutler at Bowdoin

Last Wednesday we went on a road trip, post-Eraserhead, to see the works of Amy Culter: large drawings, prints, and paintings. Her all-women cast of characters and animals, who become interconnected, commingled, and uncomfortably interdependent are the threads Cutler uses to weave strange yarns about the domestic, the everyday, and states of being. Her meticulous rendering is undone when one comes close and the viewer is seduced by sparkly paint, doll-like shoes only an artist might wear, and strands of hair and patches of exquisitely patterned cloth, Durer-like grass and strings to nowhere and everywhere. Invented moments in a life that straddle pairings of Renaissance, instructional diagrams, fairy tales, and Sur-realsim to reveal her affinities, fears, and what is truly valuable, meaning from whatever is experienced.

Cutler's  gatherings of people and animals, everyday objects and spaces unfold longings, loss, loathing, and love. Relations of one thing to another, one animal to one person, or a group to a group, becomes a way to calculate and measure our capability and our failure. Her sense of a simultaneous vastness and limitedness seem to rub and irritate. Her figures are like dolls she clothes and holds on the page. Are they static or moving still. Grimaces, frowns, and scowls seem like old lace, or folds of cloth. They tell other stories of lives lived and disclose nothing more than a face.

Cutler's colors are quiet at times, 

Eraserhead:revisiting Surrealism

In class this week we viewed Eraserhead, David Lynch's contribution to the ongoing Surrealist movement.

It is an overture to materialism-materiality, and ode to the other, and laden with themes of excess, consumption, death, sex, sacrifice,  and the ever-migration of our ambivalence towards our own existence. Dada and Surrealists have been unfortunately lumped together, as if art was possible to coral or fence in by definitions, timelines, and groupings of work by theme or practice. The art that we relate to the terms dad and Surrealism has many tendencies, intellectual and formal, contextual and contradictions, which makes it so frustrating for many and captivating for others. Eraserhead is a kind of dada surrealist extravaganza, which could be seen as having great potential and great failure attached to it.

Georges Bataille's role and contributions to the so-called Surrealist period after World War One and before and during World War Two are finally more accurately represented and discussed, and his increasing relevance to contemporary art seems to poke at the discontent and malaise of our times, and the desire for profundity found in a junk or dung heap rather than some elite archeological dig site or scholarly study of a people w e can never truly know.  

Bataille's essay "Erotisme", for example, is his complex unravelling and defragmentating of consumption, excess, sacrifice, and social architecture; it is a deep look at the fault lines and structural back and forth of society through his lens of informe, or formlessness. Exchange and relationship in their most primal form manifest in our relationship to sex and death, their simultaneous connections and our attraction/repulsion to their power and mystery. Bataille's definition and use of the word informe (formelss) found in the book Visions of Excess translated by Alan Stoekl is:

" A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks. (some translators use the word "operation") Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it deisgnates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spier or tapeworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying  that the universe is something like a spider or spit." (p 31 Visions of Excess, University of Minnesota Press)

Lynch hurtles us into the black void of nothing, the big bang, the beginning of a world that never began and never ended, god with his handles on the controls is scarred all over his body, his face is twisted in torment, and a grimy, exhausted factory-worker like an image from Lewis Hinds, hunches his broad shoulders over  the simple control handles crowed into a tiny, dusty space with a broken window to the world he controls. God is everyman, a working man, a wounded man, a man whose power comes from repetitious toil and sweaty strife. 

God is vulnerable, perhaps his endurance is his ability to endure, rather than create life. So in the first few moments, we have the entire film caught and contained in an oversized drawer-room-frame-window.

Henry is his Adam, faithfully wandering and lost, gripping his paper bag, stumbling around in a broken garden of Eden, or an Eden unfound, an impossible Eden, which resembles an industrial graveyard. The backdrop initially is a minimalist's fantasy of grids, lines, mathematic symmetry, a world of rectangles and hard edges that time and use chew away at. Dirt is the living thing that is consummate, fecund, and the host to all manner of life. Dirt is the very thing we love and need, and the thing we are repelled by and loathe. Dirt is, after all, ourselves. Bataille thrust my own dirt inquiries into a spinning hunt for histories of trash, personal experiments with detritus as raw material, and down rabbit-doles of meaning and endless metaphor. I am sure! that David Lynch has been there with Bataille, and would be most surprised if he has not. 

Lynch numbs us with blowing winds, grinding machinations of ghost-machines, heavy darkness where particulate matter and things that grow unchecked and free in moisture and shadows thrive, including secrets, sickness, violence, and all manner of forbidden behavior. It is what we conceal that reveals the most about us. Henry's horizonatality links him with sex and death, and alters the ways he views and experiences himself, others, and the world. He is on vacation...from life, and yet, clearly, his life is no picnic in the park, but rather a string of events and sensations from within that he externalizes and possibly the other way around. Henry is never sure whether what he sees, hears, smells, tastes, touches, imagines, and dreams of. What he fears and desires commingle, those are interchangeable, flexible,and  impossible.

Mary, the woman he calls on, seems to be the pathetic creature who succumbs to convulsions, she is convulsive beauty (see Andre Breton), and her family is a portrait of what most families are: detached, self-involved, complicit, and in a state of perpetual decay. 

The poor monster-baby conjures every feministic psychoanalytic textbook from Freud to Kristeva, and is the very embodyment of the abject and the extremes within any one of us and life itself. This life, a mystery, and even the doctors did not know if it was a baby yet! One of the best lines in the film. Its sexless, limb-less body, wrapped in crude bandages, lies helpless on a table, needed to be spoon-fed, and we have no idea how the creature eliminates or processes food, and if it does so in a human, animal or other manner. This grotesque tender creature seems so harmless, helpless, and pulls at heartstrings, when the mother, Mary, screams at it, and Henry cuts it open to extinguish its life. Both Henry and Mary are suffering from their carnal knowledge, the sin of their loins, and careless sexual activity, and in the end the child, their progeny must suffer for everyone. The death by scissors creates the largest leaking of all, a kind of baby-formula-excrement that seethes and bubbles from the body cavity, which could smother-soil and nourish-bathe the world. WE are forced to confront ambivalences we have towards babies, mothers, lovers, neighbors, parents, and all other roles we play and personas we take on and encounter in a loopy-looped spinning of identities.

Language is reduced to Kurt Schwitters grunts, gurgles, spitting, and all manner of expulsion, vibration, leaking, spitting, sputtering, and utterances. Our human voice is examined and used in all of its capacity to vocalize our experiences psychological and physical from screams to laughter Artaud's poems come to mind, as do Bataille's girlfriend, Laure, who also howled through words.

This film makes me feel so uncomfortable and impossibly glued to its unpleasantly noisy, odorless mess. Now I feel compelled to go on about it for reams, and make all the connections I see to Bataille's informe, and like spit or worms, according to his description, I am ensnared and entangled in the undoing of an "operation" or job.

comics and history

People have been drawing on walls, bodies, objects, and other surfaces since the beginning of time and since we could figure out how to scratch and mark something. 

The history of illustration is  inherently linked to all other histories. This may seem obvious, but that is the point.

One can find certain obsessions or foci, which translate into currents and trends in illustration. For example, the obsessive cross-hatching technique, which so many artists and print makers developed and used centuries ago still functions  as a strategy to reflect movement, density, texture, shadow, and other illusion. This meditative and sometimes frenetic mark-making  speaks about fixation, the need to look, to stare (see James Elkin's book the Object Stares Back or read Susan Sontag On Photography, John Berger's Ways of Seeing, and  Roland Barthes Camera Lucida to read more about looking and seeing, making meaning, and visual language).  I recently came across some of Michelangelo's drawings and recognize contemporary artist's use of these kinds of marks, the needs to zero on on draping, the use of curves to suggest folds. This makes me think of R and Charles Crumb's early comics and then the obsessive writings of Deleuze and Guattari on folds and borderspaces in  the extensive book, A Thousand Plateaus.  

Surely cartooning is more than short-hand or code, it is also a process of drawing and working things out, and that incorporates the satisfaction or compulsion to make marks, link them, and create pages of them.

From Guston to Herriman, Peter Bruegel the Elder (inspired by my favorite Bosch) to Max Ernst, The Greeks to Keith Haring, it seems every time period has its mark makers who tell stories through their scratchings and ask the world to look at them, and at themselves.In Max Ernst's graphic novel,  Une Semaine de Bonte, he collages images found from old books and catalogues. The images are completely made of lines, whose vertical, horizontal, and diagonal directions clash and butt up against one another creating tensions, lights and darks, variations in texture and form. These strategies and the language of collage, cut and paste, further emphasize his queer pairings of animals and humans, natural elements with architectural spaces. The juxtaposition becomes form, content, and context. In true Surrealist fashion,nonsense become meaningful, and sequence and narrative are turned upside down and redefined.

Illustrators, comic book artists, zinists, and others have used the conventions of art against themselves to find new value in their work, and process raw material. Artists must be in a constant state of flux and change which is more true to the daily ebb and flow, flotsam and jetsam one encounters in daily life. It is those conflicts and tensions that interest artists, and cause them to locate methods and materials that match more acutely those sentiments and experiences.

Persepolis:portrait of a childhood and identity in the comics

Today we will be discussing Persepolis an autobiographical graphic novel written and illustrated by Marjane Satrapi.

histories

Our Introduction to the Discipline class focuses on various ideas, contexts, and methods which concern illustrators primarily, and which expose the blurry boundaries between all of the arts, as well as the contradictions inherent in any social constructs. 

We began the semester with various definitions of illustration. Illustration, we discovered, requires a context, or a setting in which ideas are couched and directed, an audience is considered, and the format, materials, and methods support and further the transformation of mere representation to a visual language that communicates its message cogently and moves beyond aesthetics or pure expression. The visual piece must translate well or the illustration fails. It cannot be only a thing of beauty or enigmatic phrasing of something.

Illustration has always had a distinct purpose to reach its specific audience, and language persuasion, point of view, narrative, or instructive information. Illustration is by all means a people's art, which records histories, shares a commentary about what those histories are made of and from whence they come, and will endure as evidence of the multiplicity of our humanity.

Most recently,  we looked at the earliest influences and origins of American illustration from the Lascaux cave walls to petroglyphs in the Southwest, from the Puritans to the early American colonialists, who settled this country and who in those days came primarily from Northern countries like England, Germany, Switzerland, and Holland, ( cold and unforgiving climes), so we can better understand why illustration in America is what it is currently and what those beginnings mean for us still to this day. Those Puritanical origins set the tone for how we would identify ourselves, depict the world, and paint. It also invited challenges by artists like Thomas Eakins, or the mythologizing of Frederick Remington, whose works create a foundation for the genres of realism and the Western, which still influence the discourses of culture and identity today.

  We are in the process of researching artists whose impact on ideas and perception has been most notable, such as Goya or Howard Pyle, Philip Guston or others, who engage in a a process of unraveling themselves and humanity through drawing. These critical approaches are important to contextualize illustration and its link to concepts, its origins in the most primal of responses and always attached to changes in technology and methods. Each student has been researching other artists on their own, by looking at books in the library and making further inquiries through thinking, writing, and other research. 

A few weeks ago, we viewed four videos of artists from the Art21 PBS series: Kara Walker, Terence Hancock-Doyle, Kerry James Marshall and Walton Ford, all who use drawing in their work. We were struck in conversation afterwards by how these artists all make comments about the freedoms they experienced in childhood, which they return to through the use of certain materials like collage or crayons, or the approach, as in more spontaneous open-ended creations to become more connected with the work. They value experience, memory, and the opportunity art affords to explore imagination, tensions between realities, as well as, potential and failure.

These artists address identity, challenge the norms of what is expected, and at the same time could be seen as complicit in artworld systems, which rely on hierarchies of preference and privilege. We are hoping to expand this discussion as we move into dialogues about Persepolis, zines,  and collaborate on a joint project and workshop with the Print Department this week and next. Stay tuned!