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.