Art & Academia

Tristan Tzara, 1921..

(*) “Dadaglobe Reconstructed” is precisely the kind of show that the #MuseumofModernArt should be doing, and very often has done of late. Memories of “Bjork” have pretty much been erased by an absurdly full roster of utterly unpandering projects.

For “Dadaglobe,” curators have labored to unearth a vast trove of material once intended for what was supposed to have been the ultimate anthology of the #Dada movement. The book was planned in detail by the Romanian avant-gardist #TristanTzara, in Paris around 1921, but a lack of funds torpedoed it late in the process.

All that remains are Tzara’s detailed records and the art works themselves that he’d meant to include, which MoMA The Museum of Modern Art has tracked down in surprisingly large numbers.

Today’s Pic is one of my favorite objects from the Tzara project, because it does such a perfect job of summing up modern art’s love of the new, and its disdain for those who resist it.

An unknown photographer has captured a dandified André Breton, not long before he helped found the #Surrealist movement, at the great #DadaFestival in Paris in 1920.

For the occasion, #Breton has put on a placard designed by Francis Picabia, bearing a target-like abstraction and the words “For you to like something, you have to have already seen and heard it for ages, you bunch of morons.”

Among other things, the placard’s concentric circles make an important point that we’ve lost sight of: Abstraction, in its first years, always came with an edge of #Dada absurdity to it – and maybe still ought to, if it’s to keep its original heft.

Jasper Johns, another target-maker, knew this; Kenneth Noland should have. Perhaps the utter sobriety of early pro-abstract manifestos was meant to counteract any remaining odor of Dada.

I can’t help feeling that Breton is quite literally and deliberately making himself a target of jokes, with the text that he bears as the disdainful rebuttal of a voiceless martyr. (The sacrificial effect is helped by the fact that he has centered the target on his gonads.)

#Breton’s silence makes sense of another element in the photo, and in #Tzara’s entire book project, that I’m not sure has been much noticed.

He is holding a copy of the very letter that Tzara sent out to solicit contributions to his “#Dadaglobe” anthology.

The sheet bears a carefully designed letterhead that reads MoUvEmEnT DADA, with the alternating large-and-small type that I’ve echoed here. The thing is, for any native French speaker who looks at this photo, or even at the Dada letterhead itself, the large capitals, along with the disappearingly small letters between them, can only make that mouvement read as muet – “silent” or “mute.”

#Dada was a noisy movement, for sure, and its artists enjoyed making a ruckus. But for all its deliberate absurdity, it had a space of focus and concentration at its core – as witnessed by the close-mouthed withdrawal of #Breton in this portrait.

#Dada pretended to be all about anti-art, but its artists knew perfectly well that in the process they were engaged in making great art, in the same lineage as #Leonardo and #Rembrandt and other makers of the telling and silent tableau.

The Daily Pic also appears at Artnet News.

"What I do in my films is very, I think, very distinctively, I think they are the films of a woman, and I think that their characteristic time quality is the time quality of a woman. I think that the strength of men is their great sense of immediacy. They are a “now” creature, and a woman has strength to wait, because she’s had to wait. She has to wait nine months for the concept of a child. Time is built into her body in the sense of becomingness. And she sees everything in terms of it being in the stage of becoming. She raises a child knowing not what it is at any moment but seeing always the person that it will become. Her whole life from her very beginning, it’s built into her a sense of becoming. Now in any time form, this is a very important sense. I think that my films, putting as much stress as they do, upon the constant metamorphosis, one image is always becoming another. It is what is happening that is important in my films, not what is at any moment. This is a woman’s time sense, and I think it happens more in my films than in almost anyone else’s."

At Land (1944) 

[letterboxd | imdb | kanopy]

Director: Maya Deren

Cinematographers: Alexander Hammid, Hella Heyman

“In my case I have found it necessary, each time, to ignore any of my previous statements. After the first film was completed, when someone asked me to define the principle which it embodied, I answered that the function of film, like that of other art forms, was to create experience—in this case a semi-psychological reality. But the actual creation of the second film caused me to subsequently answer a similar question with an entirely different emphasis. This time, that reality must exploit the capacity of film to manipulate Time and Space. By the end of the third film, I had again shifted the emphasis—insisting this time on a filmically visual integrity, which would create a dramatic necessity of itself, rather than be dependent upon or derive from an underlying dramatic development. Now, on the basis of the fourth, I feel that all the other elements must be retained, but that special attention must be given to the creative possibilities of Time, and that the form as a whole should be ritualistic…”

Meshes of the Afternoon

• began in 1924 and lasted until 1966

“Nature does not create works of art. It is we, and the faculty of interpretation peculiar to the human mind, that see art” Man Ray.

“Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality”-

“Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see”- Magritte.

• Surrealist artists aimed to delve into the unconscious mind in order to reveal the abilities of our imagination.

• Influenced by rationalism, literary realism, and heavily influenced by psychoanalysis.

• Beloved that the rational mind did not allow us to fully embrace our imagination.

• inspired by Karl Marx and aimed for the psyche to reveal contradictions within our everyday lives as well as spark a revolution.

• having personal imagination puts surrealist artists on the same line as Romanticism.

• their interest in myth and primitivism influenced many other art movements within todays world.

• Andre Breton described surrealism as “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express- verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner- the actual functioning thought”

• surrealism and the idea of automatism allows artists to go past the conscious mind and bring our visions and thoughts to life through our art, in turn allowing us to embrace chance.

• Sigmund Freud’s theory and his The Interpretation of dreams, (1899) was heavily influential within the surrealist art movement.

• Surrealist imagery is the most recognisable of the movement.

• Each artist engaging with this movement used their own motifs and ways of working in order to convey their thoughts of their dreams and unconscious mind.

• Many of surrealist imagery is described as outlandish, perplexing and at times uncanny.

Key Artists:

• Andre Breton

• Hans Arp

• Max Ernst

• Salvador Dali

• Alberto Giacometti

• Joan Miro

• Rene Magritte

• Man Ray

• Yves Tanguy

• Leonora Carrington

• Pablo Picasso

• Meret Oppenheim

• Hans Ritcher

• Hans Bellmer

• Luis Bunuel

• Claude Cahun

• Remedios Varo

• Andre Masson

• Gala Dali

• Paul Eluard

• Louis Aragon

• Charles Baudelaire

• Arthur Rimbaud

Overview:

• Anti-rationalism of the Dada art movement.

• Made effective and work that was outwith the norms of the art world and gave a new direction for artists.

“creativity is that marvellous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from the juxtaposition”- Max Ernst.

Beginning of Surrealism:

• grew and developed from the Dada movement and was a rebellion against middle-class’s known judgements and ignorance against others.

This art movement was also inspired by Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico, Gustave Moreau, Arnold Bocklin, Odilon Redon as well as Henri Rousseau.

Artists from the Renaissance period were also inspiration for Surrealist artists, these included Hieronymus Bosch and Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

Breton is at times described as the 'Pope' of Surrealism as he officially founded the movement in 1924.

the term "Surrealism" was founded in 1917 by Guillaume Apollinaire.

Breton's manifesto, La Revolution surrealiste this included art and writing.

The Bureau for Surrealist Research or Centrale Surrealiste established in Paris in 1924.

Surrealism: Concepts, Styles and Trends

Artist utilised their fantasy and dream imagery to create works using a wide range of media in order to convey their inner minds in an eccentric, bold, and symbolic ways. In turn this exposed ones anxieties allowing the artist to use their art to help themselves.

Surrealist Paintings:

works like Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy and Rene Magritte's paintings were create with hyper-realistic imagery were all objects were depicted in very sharp and crisp detail with a three-dimensional quality, in turn drawing attention to their dream-like appearance and atmosphere.

works like Joan Miro and Max Ernst used many techniques and media such as; collage, doodling, frottage, decalcomania, and grattage to create their surrealism artworks.

Rise and Decline of The Surrealism Art Movement:

global war and political issues had negative effects on the views towards the art movement as civilians were in a state of crises during the 1930s and 1940s.

During World War 2 many Surrealist artist emigrated to the Americas which resulted in their ideas and work being recognised on a larger scale.

Ideas and views towards Surrealism changed and challenged due to the rise of Existentialism.

Abstract Expressionist artists were inspired by Surrealism, however Abstract Expressionism took over and invented new techniques in order to convey the unconscious.

British Surrealism:

Female Surrealist artists; Eileen Agar, Ithell Colquhoun, Edith Rimmington and Emmy Bridgwater.

The British interpretation of the Surrealist movement was towards thoughts of humans relations to their surrounding natural environment, specifically the sea.

Paul Nash had an interest in the object trouve which involved collecting objects from the beach.

The International Surrealist Exhibition (1936) in London, a major event for many British artists, in turn allowing the Surrealist art movement to thrive in the UK.

The Persistence of Memory (1931) by Salvador Dali

How does this relate to my work?:

"Man Ray gives the female body, through his photographs, an unexpected dimension, a spectral eroticism, a surreal intensity. Primacy of matter over thought, represents the quintessence of Man Ray's work, in its vocation to sublimate the soul, to reveal the unrevealable, to materialize the dream. The subject lying down, naked, and enveloped in an irradiating light, invites the spectator to go beyond the mechanism of recording the visible and disrupts his "classical" perceptions." ftp