Three Review Questions

1. Compare and contrast the two "schools" of Surrealism: one led by Andre Breton and his highly ideological Surrealist philosophy, and one by Georges Bataille, who explored the erotic and dream-like states of human existence. Draw comparisons between the (at the time) newly emerging field of Freudian psychoanalysis and Surrealism.
2. It can be argued that Surrealists felt they acted as vessels through which an artistic impulse flowed, and that their art, while technically virtuosic, was impulsive and based on fleeting mental images. Oulipans, by comparison, believed in repetition and constant creative output as a way of honing one's skill, and that art is defined by its limitations or the parameters by which the piece was created (hence the arbitrary obstructions governing many Oulipan works). Explore the two modes of artistic creation used by the Surrealists and Oulipans, citing specific artists or works that seem most indicative of the respective schools' creative philosophies.
3. Where do you perceive art in the future? As the world becomes more enmeshed with itself through social networking (the rise of internet-based collaborative art [http://inbflat.net/], large-scale performance art pieces organized online [http://improveverywhere.com/], fully anonymous interactive literature ["Mass Fiction" or "Mass Poetry" from http://www.smalltime.com]), will art become more of a social action? Remember that Dada and Surrealism were both created as reactions to the world in which the artists lived; what sort of art could you imagine in the future? What issues would it address, and how would the art manifest itself?

Our discussion on Bogg's Bills got me thinking of another form of art that deals with money; it is substantially less intrinsic or detailed than Bogg's works, but still entertaining in a way that engages aesthetic sensibility: money artwork.

In essence, the idea behind money artwork is little more than altering currency to make it look like something else, be it George Washington as various incarnations of Lady GaGa, Andrew Jackson as Gene Simmons of KISS, or Ulysses S Grant as Macho Man Randy Savage. These creations draw on (no pun intended) the playful sensibility of the Fluxus movement, as well as some Dada aspects of art. It presents itself as little more than passing entertainment, but invites deeper introspection to those who want to search for it.

One could argue that these drawings, while borne from idle hands, carry a deep message about the illusory state of currency; indeed, it almost makes a postmodernist statement about money being nothing more than an agreed-upon illusion, and that paper currency does not deserve elevation above any other medium as a place of artistic expression. By the same token (again, no pun intended) this is simplistic and juvenile; the artists are not likely trying to tackle the issues of identity and social agreement in their pieces, but like the Dadaists and Flux artists they are creating works with valuable meaning, so long as one is willing to look for it.

Tehching Hsieh: Performance Art and the "Unique Significance of Particular Experiences"

Hannah Higgins says in "Fluxus Experience 1" that she believes "the ultimate goal of Fluxus [is] to form multiple pathways toward 'ontological knowledge' and the expansion of the 'setting of the human experience.'" ("Fluxus Experience 1," page 38). Her argument is that the experiences of a specific human does much more in understanding the whole of humanity than a concept of universal knowledge, such as the Jungian collective unconscious.

There is a performance artist named Tehching Hsieh who made a name for himself in the 1970s as someone who explored the boundaries of his own body through acts of personal deprivation. The boundaries he set were almost Oulipian in their arbitrary nature, but he adhered to them to the letter. As an example, (the one I will use to discuss his relation to the Fluxus movement, however tenuous it may be) Hsieh undertook a one-year project wherein he would take a photo of himself every hour on the hour for a full year, wearing the same outfit every time he took the picture. This performance, which was simply titled One Year Performance (1980-1981) (http://www.one-year-performance.com/) explores the idea of elevating the mundane in a very Dada-esque way.

The photos Hsieh took were actually individual frames of film on a camera; every time he punched a time clock to show he was present for the picture every hour of the year, the camera would expose a single frame of film so that by the end of the year Hsieh had a nearly seven minute film showing him gradually aging over the course of the year. Individually, the photographs mean nothing. They are not particularly well-framed or aesthetically pleasing, and they don't show anything particularly groundbreaking in and of themselves. Strung together into a film, though, they make a strong statement about the passing of time and the nature of humanity with relationship to time. There is a video of his performance piece on YouTube, which is definitely worth exploration. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVpyMfeqoBY

Hsieh would be demonstrating Higgins' idea of the "unique significance of particular experiences" ("Fluxus Experiences 1," page 38) to show something about the whole of humanity while using only himself to make this statement. There is no effort on his part to try to make this an overarching narrative on human life or the effects of time on the body, but those are both evident. This piece is playful, in spite of its somber tone, because of the arbitrary nature of its rules, and this is what makes me consider it a Fluxian, or at least neo-Dada piece.

There is an argument that the actual performance, which took place over the course of a year, is far too long for a Fluxus piece, since most Fluxus artists aimed for brevity in their work, keeping everything simple and concise. I would argue that the film is the end result of the project, though, and that it should stand alone in consideration as an art piece. That Hsieh took a year to make the piece is impressive and remarkable, but his documentation of the performance is the true art piece. At less than seven minutes, the film could definitely be considered a Fluxus piece.

Oulipo and Surrealism

It almost pains me to say this. For years I was a strident follower of the works of Dali, being enthralled in his dreamlike paintings and eccentric personality. I was drawn to the idea of Surrealism as something that allows for uninhibited expression of one's innermost thoughts through wildly subjective representations. Surrealism was more than an art form; it was, in my mind, paradigm-altering and represented a clear schism between traditional art and modernist art. There was little that could convince me there was something remotely as interesting as Surrealism.

Then I learned of Oulipo. Initially I couldn't quite understand why I was so drawn to Oulipo, which seemed to be a group of writers resorting to semantic gimmickry and entirely whimsical boundaries as influences to their work. Selecting a specific restriction and then observing it as law. I wasn't impressed with the movement until I learned of Queneau's book Cent mille milliards de poèmes that I finally understood the impact of this movement; fourteen individual sonnets bound together was nothing particularly special, but the true ingenuity of slicing the pages so that every line of every poem could be matched with lines from other sonnets within the same book floored me. Queneau had written the longest book in the history of literature, and it was thinner than most television operation manuals.

This was how I came to understand that Oulipo is a movement that pushes for originality and inventiveness. It applauds writers that can operate within constraints and make something truly original from these constraints that reads as literary. Unlike the Surrealists, who believed creativity to be entirely ethereal, spawned in hypnagogic states of altered consciousness, Oulipo writers (Oulipans?) felt creativity had to be pulled from one's self through repetition and constant exploration of the edges of creative thought. This is not to say Surrealism is without merit, of course. To do that would be folly. But while Surrealism seemed to encourage (consciously or otherwise) acting as a vessel through which creativity could manifest itself and in essence having an external locus of control with regards to creative output, Oulipo placed the creative weight squarely on the shoulders of the writers. Their purpose was to experiment, and to show others whether their experiments worked. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't, but that's the beauty of experimental writing.

It is difficult to imagine where literature as a creative art would be without the incredibly prolific efforts of the Oulipo writers, who in their pursuit of bringing experimentation on par with that of any physical science helped to define what does and does not work in unleashing the creative genius within themselves altered the course of creative writing and critical analysis for decades to follow.

"Exercises in Style" Project: Main Text and Two Variations

MAIN TEXT

(I've altered my main text after realizing I was, in essence, glamorizing a mundane moment in an attempt to make it less so. Since this runs contrary to the spirit of the assignment, I present a new and more banal main text below.)

As my father drove our van through the flat, seemingly infinite plains of Kansas I passed the time by staring off into space. Having not brought any books with print large enough to read in a moving vehicle without becoming carsick, I rested my head against my window and tried to make out shapes in the clouds. Sadly, in Kansas even the clouds are nondescript.

Dad was quiet, left arm resting on the window sill. Hot wind tumbled into the car, accompanied at one point by a fly. The fly righted itself against this sudden change of location, flying dizzily around the car. I followed its movement, watching as it landed on my window. It crawled up and down the glass, stopping only to rub its front legs together. As time went on it grew panicked and began to fly at the window, baffled by this new barrier. Repeatedly it flew into the glass, punctuating the humming of its wings with small tink sounds.

Before long it flew up front where my father was sitting. It buzzed around his head. Dad shooed it away with an irritated wave of the hand. It moved left to dodge the hand and was suddenly pulled back into the hot Kansas summer air. I went back to staring at the clouds.

FIRST VARIATION
Retelling the story using nothing but nouns

Father. Van. Kansas. Summer. Plains. Books. Carsickness. Window. Clouds. Boredom.

Dad. Arm. Window sill. Wind. Fly. Car interior. Window. Fly. Front legs. Barrier. Panic. Fly. Window. Fly. Window. Fly. Window. Panic.

Father. Head. Fly. Irritation. Hand. Dodge. Wind. Kansas. Summer. Plains. Clouds. Boredom.

The Surrealist Erotic: Mutilation and Intimacy in Unica Zuern's "Dark Spring"

In reading Dark Spring one feels the nameless young girl acting as the main character is much more psychologically complex than what is originally presented in the text. For one example of how her character acts contrary to someone her age, one only has to go as far as the incident wherein, after learning of her parents' failing relationship and their polyamorous ways, one of her father's "friends" presents the girl with a "big, expensive" doll (40). The young girl's reaction to this doll says a substantial amount about the idea of eroticism within a violent action; in its entirety, the novella says this about the fate of the doll:

Angry and desperate about the unhappy conditions inside her home, she takes a knife and cuts out the doll's eyes. She slices open the belly of the doll and tears her expensive clothes to shreds. None of the adults utter a single word about this destruction. (40)

This passage is dripping with Freudian imagery and archetypal symbolism, both of which played arguably large roles in the development of the Surrealist oeuvre. The simple act of destruction clearly communicates a desire to dramatically alter the living conditions the young girl is in; one can interpret the gouging out of the doll's eyes in one of two ways: either she is jealous of the doll's ability to gaze upon the home life of the girl as an impassive observer and wants to rob her of that ability, or she is gouging out the eyes because she is ashamed and wants to hide the quickly-dissolving home she thought she was in from this doll and blinds it out of mercy. The slicing of the belly hearkens to the idea of the womb, and of either Cesarean delivery of a child (birth) or demolition of the womb/abortion (death). The ripping of the doll's clothes is a way of demoting the doll's status from that of an elegant creature from an elegant woman (her father's cohort) to that of a pile of rags and mutilated plastic.

A Surrealist would be quick to point out, however, that this destruction is also very intimate. It is, in fact, one of the more intimate passages in the book, though "intimacy" may be the wrong word. The young girl essentially rapes the doll, which provides another interpretation of ripping the clothing (as an act of power over a weaker individual), the gouging of the eyes (so that the victim cannot identify the attacker) and the slicing of the stomach (to negate any chance of propagation of evidence in the form of a child).

This event takes place shortly after the girl experiences her "sexual awakening" in that she becomes aware of sexual organs and begins to understand that sexuality plays a very large but almost unmentioned role in her family. The rape of her doll is her first sexual act, and while it is repulsive in its rapaciousness, it is also disarming in its eroticism and intimacy. Instead of being acted upon, as is the case when the girl is raped by her brother or when she goes to the basement to be with the dog, the girl is taking the active role here, controlling her own sexual explorations and empowering herself as she is unable to do in the rest of the novella.

A very brief, but very powerful scene.

Dali and the Divine Comedy

As Salvador Dali is one of my favorite artists--Surrealist or otherwise--it seemed fitting to study his work for this blog post. I was surprised, in the course of my studying, to find that Dali had in the course of his life created 101 watercolor paintings representing the 101 cantos of Dante's Divine Comedy. For this blog post I will be discussing the aspects of his Inferno paintings that are distinctly Surrealist or characteristically "Dali."

Dali is known in his work for representing people or objects in ways that are slightly off; in particular, he often toys with perspective and dimension, as he does with legs in paintings like The Temptation of St. Anthony or his sculpture Elephant With Long Legs. This extends to humans and humanoids in his watercolor paintings for Inferno, particularly with creatures like Minos, whose exaggerated shoulder blades, buttocks, and right leg all suggest a representation of something realistic (the human form) but at the same time defies reality in its dimensions. This continues in his Inferno paintings with images like the near-comically stretched skull used to depict The Blasphemers of Canto XIV and The Sodomites of Canto XIX. Both show the human body (or parts thereof) recast in ways that make them appear inhuman, alien. The Sodomites, for example, shows the human body in relatively realistic poses, but the dimensions of the bones themselves (such as the impossibly thin right calf of the man in the foreground) give this away as a Surrealist piece, and particularly one of Dali's.

The choice of color is important in discerning these watercolors as Surrealist pieces as well; every individual, human or humanoid, depicted in the 34 paintings of Inferno has a skin tone which is a different shade of olive or tan. However, these skin tones run the gamut from orange (In the Hands of Antaeus [Canto XVI]) to purple (The Furies [Canto IX]). Obviously, these skin tones can only exist in the world of a Surrealist artist, though it is particularly important to understand that Surrealist art did not try to be realistic, but rather tried to connect the subconscious to the conscious, and the use of color by Dali is almost certainly done to convey a specific emotion that he is trying to inspire in the audience (sorrow or fear in The Furies, agitation or excitement in In the Hands of Antaeus, etc).

All of the Divine Comedy paintings were taken from the Lockport Street Gallery website (http://www.lockportstreetgallery.com).