Posts Tagged ‘Surrealism’
“Early modern society created – and we have inherited – that paradoxical thing: a tradition of radical innovation”*…
A University of Chicago economist with a specialty in the economics of creativity, David Galenson, with an argument that the Impressionists contributed more than their works to the story of art…
Since the 1960s the art world has become accustomed to the arrival of startling new works by contemporary artists, from Yves Klein’s anthropometries created by nude models covered with blue paint, Piero Manzoni’s canned feces, and Andy Warhol’s silkscreened portraits, through Andres Serrano’s crucifix in urine, Damien Hirst’s sectioned animals in formaldehyde, and Tracey Emin’s soiled bed, to Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana. Yet few art experts understand that these radical works are only the most recent consequences of a fundamental change in the structure of art markets that occurred more than a century ago. And the artists who initiated this change are today so venerated that few people realize how radical they were in their own time…
Art historians have long recognized that a radical change occurred in the appearance of fine art during the late 19th and early twentieth centuries, but they have failed to explain why this happened when it did. The answer lies in a change in the structure of the market for art, initiated by Claude Monet and a small group of his friends. The Impressionist group exhibitions of 1874–86 effectively ended the official Salon’s monopoly of the ability to certify artists as qualified professionals, and began a new regime in which small independent group exhibitions competed for attention. The result was a new era of artistic freedom, as painters no longer had to satisfy the conservative Salon jury, and new styles challenged for leadership of the art world. The heightened demand for originality favored conceptual artists, who could innovate conspicuously and decisively. So ironically, Monet and his fellow experimental Impressionists came under attack from the supporters of Seurat, van Gogh, Gauguin, and other young conceptual artists. The growing independence of private galleries, which further contributed to fostering competition, would allow Matisse, Picasso, and their peers to consolidate this revolution early in the next century. And the products of this perpetual revolution have included such later works as Warhol’s silkscreened portraits, Hirst’s sectioned animals, and Cattelan’s duct-taped banana. Art historians have described the transformation of modern art in great detail, but have failed to recognize the causal role of economic forces, as the shift from monopsony to a competitive market gave artists a new freedom to innovate, and made the modern era a time of continuing radical innovation…
Fascinating: “Marketing modern art: how the impressionists started a perpetual revolution,” from @jcultecon.bsky.social.
Bay Area readers can peek at the process in motion at The MFA’s Legion of Honor in the “Manet & Morisot” exhibition, up through March 1.
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As we divvy up the difference, we might send avant-garde birthday greetings to a beneficiary of this emergent cultural mechanism, Francis Picabia; he was born on this date in 1879. A French avant-garde painter, poet, and typographist, Picabia experimented with Impressionism and Pointillism before becoming a Cubist. He then became one of the early major figures of the Dada movement in the United States and in France, and was later briefly associated with Surrealism.
See his work at the record of a major retrospective hung at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2017 on their web site.
“Dada was a bomb… can you imagine anyone, around half a century after a bomb explodes, wanting to collect the pieces, sticking it together and displaying it?”*…
Marcel Duchamp was hugely influential in the revolutionary developments in the arts in the early 20th century. After helping establish Cubism, he turned to what he called “Readymades,” “found objects” which he selected and presented as art. By far the most famous of these was the piece he entitled “Fountain.” Damon Young and Graham Priest recount the stir that ensued… and unpack the work’s philosophical comment, making a case for why it resonates to this day…
In 1917 a pivotal event occurred for art and philosophy: Marcel Duchamp unveiled his artwork Fountain in Alfred Stieglitz’s New York studio. This was simply a porcelain urinal, signed ‘R. Mutt’.
Fountain was notorious, even for avant-garde artists. It has become one of the most discussed works of art of the 20th century. The Society of Independent Artists rejected it, though every artist who paid the exhibition fee was supposed to have their work shown. For almost a century, it has remained a difficult artwork. The philosopher John Passmore summed up Fountain as: ‘a piece of mischief at the expense of the art world’, though many have taken it very seriously.
No doubt there was some tomfoolery involved – Duchamp did not choose a urinal randomly. Yet there is more to Fountain than nose-thumbing. What makes this artwork so striking is its philosophical contribution.
Commentators often highlight the influence of Fountain on conceptual art, and this most ‘aggressive’ readymade, as Robert Hughes put it, has certainly had an enduring legacy. In 2004, it was voted the most important 20th-century work by hundreds of art experts. From Andy Warhol to Joseph Beuys to Tracey Emin, this urinal inspired artists to reconsider the traditional artwork. Instead of paintings and sculptures, art was suddenly Brillo boxes, an unmade bed, or a light-bulb plugged into a lemon: ordinary objects, some readymade, removed from their original contexts and placed on display in art galleries. The art critic Roberta Smith sums it up this way: ‘[Duchamp] reduced the creative act to a stunningly rudimentary level: to the single, intellectual, largely random decision to name this or that object or activity “art”.’ As we will see, Duchamp’s choice was not random at all, but Smith’s description points to the broader shock that Duchamp’s work prompted: if this can be art, then anything can.
Since then, scholars have discussed Fountain to demonstrate a shift away from aesthetics to thought. As the philosopher Noël Carroll notes, it’s possible to enjoy thinking about Duchamp’s work without actually looking at it, which cannot be said for Henri Matisse’s vivid paintings or Barbara Hepworth’s dignified stone sculptures.
These traditional ideas, as we will see, are all important to Fountain. But they do not go far enough. They treat Fountain as art, but of a mocking sort: a kind of intellectual heckling that nudged artists to taunt and scoff more academically at their own field. Our explanation of the artwork’s power is much more controversial: we believe that Fountain is art only insofar as it is not art. It is what it is not – and this is why it is what it is. In other words, the artwork delivers a true contradiction, what’s called a dialetheia. Fountain did not simply usher in conceptual art – it afforded us an unusual and intriguing concept to consider: a work of art that isn’t really a work of art, an everyday object that is not just an everyday object…
Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ is not just a radical kind of art; it’s a philosophical dialetheia: a contradiction that is true: “It is and it isn’t,” from @damonyoung.com.au and Graham Priest @aeon.co. Eminently worth reading in full.
We might note that it’s not altogether clear that the dialetheia which the authors celebrate was what Duchamp had in mind. In any case (in line with the quote at the top) Duchamp, a father of Dada, was not entirely pleased with the influence that his work had:
This Neo-Dada, which they call New Realism, Pop Art, Assemblage etc. [Duchamp is referring to Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein], is an easy way out and lives on what Dada did. When I discovered readymades I thought to discourage aesthetics. In Neo-Dada they have taken my readymades and found aesthetic beauty in them. I threw the bottle-rack [here] and the urinal in their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty…
– Duchamp in a 1962 letter to Hans Richter
And as this is the centenniel of Dada’s “child,” Surrealism, we might peruse “The Small Magazines That Birthed Surrealism.”
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As we ponder paradox, we might raise a glass in celebration of National Cartoonists Day, observed on this day each year. The date was chosen to recognize the first appearance (in color) of the mischievous cartoon character “The Yellow Kid” in the New York World newspaper (on May 5, 1895).
“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth”*…
Drawing on her recent book, Facing Crisis: Art as Politics in Fourteenth-Century Venice, Stefania Gerevini on a historical reminder of the crucial role that art can play in times like these…
In an increasingly polarised world, the arts and humanities play a key role in sustaining democracy. They foster critical thinking, open dialogue, emotional intelligence and understanding across different perspectives, all of which are essential for a healthy democratic society. Also, people who participate in cultural activities are much more likely to engage in civic and democratic life.
Yet the way the arts are funded differs widely from country to country, especially in times of economic hardship or significant change. During and after the pandemic, for instance, some EU countries increased public spending on culture, while others made significant cuts.
The reasons for these contrasting attitudes are many, from local cultural values, to shifting economic priorities and politics. But at their core, different funding strategies express different attitudes towards two questions: what contribution does art make in times of crisis? And how do communities express their experiences of uncertainty?…
… the medieval city of Venice provides a remarkable historical example for addressing these questions.
Between the sixth and 12th centuries, Venice grew into an independent city-state ruled by an elected council and an elected head of state, called the doge.
Set on an island, the city lacked some of the resources necessary to its survival, so it quickly established strong maritime trade networks across the Mediterranean. It gradually developed into an international merchant empire, acquiring strategic territories along the eastern Adriatic Coast, Greece and the Aegean Sea.
By the mid-14th century, Venice was a leading global power. Yet, between 1340 and 1355, the city also faced famine, plague, a violent earthquake and fierce military conflicts with Genoa and the Ottomans.
Internally, Venice tackled dramatic political tensions (including a coup and the public execution of a doge in 1355), as non-noble citizens were gradually excluded from public office. Strikingly, it was during this period of acute crisis that the government initiated a series of ambitious artistic projects in the state church of San Marco.
A new baptistery and a chapel dedicated to Saint Isidore of Chios were lavishly decorated with mosaics. In addition, the high altar, which provided religious focus for the faithful, was revamped. This included turning its uniquely precious golden altarpiece into spectacular moving machinery that would open and close to reveal different images daily, and on feast days.
These projects, which required substantial public spending at a time of financial strain, hardly represented business as usual for Venetian policymakers. Instead, they were a central part of the government’s wider response to crisis.
On one level, these new projects revealed the range of pressing concerns that engulfed the Venetian government and people at the time. The painted altarpiece displayed on the altar of San Marco on non-festive days exhibits an emphasis on human suffering, miracles and saintly interventions that may relate the need for reassurance in uncertain times.
The bloody conflict against Genoa likely influenced the dedication of a chapel to St Isidore. The saint’s body was transported to Venice from the Greek island of Chios, a vital Genoese stronghold in the 14th century. To the people of Venice, the physical presence of St Isidore’s relics in San Marco provided reassurance and the promise of protection and victory as their state engaged in a risky conflict.
Finally, uncertainty about the nature and boundaries of citizenship and political authority – which the expansion of Venice’s overseas territories transformed into an ever more urgent problem – offer a valuable way to interpret the imagery in the baptistery. Here the apostles are rendered in mosaic as they baptise the “nations of the earth”, offering an idealised image of union in diversity.
Yet, on another level, the projects sponsored by the Venetian government during this period represented the active exercising of the political imagination. In ways that some of us may find alarmingly familiar, Venice’s ongoing instability made traditional approaches to decision-making, communication and control ineffective in dealing with the challenges it faced.
Venice’s governors responded to the crisis which threatened the very survival and stability of the city and its political foundations with a wide-ranging strategy of legal, institutional and historical revision, aimed at clarifying the nature and functions of the Venetian state.
The government reaffirmed Venice’s civic laws and reorganised its international treaties. The authority of the doge was progressively restricted, and over time, the government clarified the rules for holding public office. The first official history of Venice was completed in 1352.
In this context, the San Marco projects did not merely express the anxiety of the Venetian people, or their hopes for renewed stability. They represented the establishing of a new political landscape, which was envisioned most clearly on the east wall of the baptistery.
Three secular figures – a doge and two officers – are depicted as kneeling supplicants within a monumental mosaic of the crucifixion (see the main headline image above). Blending the sacred with the secular, this image offered an abstract “state portrait” that simultaneously expressed a political reality and suggested a new political ideal.
The mosaic now rendered Venice’s doge as a humble ruler, and it represented the business of government as a collective enterprise. In so doing, this image articulated a new vision of government as public service and shared responsibility. This idea, which developed through political reforms in Venice and from broader debates in other medieval Italian city states, has went on to influence western approaches to government and public life to this day.
Venice’s state-sponsored artistic commissions were not propaganda in the modern sense. Instead, they offered a compelling visual reflection on the nature of leadership and the necessary limits of authority. They kindled a new vision of government that enabled Venice to navigate one of the most turbulent phases of its history – reminding us, too, of the power of the arts to inspire and imagine new futures in difficult times…
Learning from history: “Medieval Venice shows us the good art can do in times of crisis,” from @theconversation.com.
* Pablo Picasso
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As we appreciate art, we might send imaginative birthday greetings to Odilon Redon; he was born on this date in 1840. A lithographer, etcher, and painter, he was influential in the development of modern French art in two different ways. His prints explore haunted, fantastic, often macabre themes, earning him a leading place among emerging French Symbolists and foreshadowing the Surrealist and Dadaist movements. His oils and pastels, chiefly still lifes with flowers, won him the admiration of Henri Matisse and other painters as an important colorist.
“The imaginary is what tends to become real”*…
Editorial note: your correspondent will be off the grid tomorrow, so (Roughly) Daily will be in “roughly” mode; “daily” service should begin again on Monday.
Surrealism took a hit in the later 20th century. For instance, Susan Sontag suggested that “surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip.” The great designer Milton Glaser averred that “in an age of computer manipulation, surrealism has become banal, a shadow of its former self.”
But (in an excerpt from his fascinating new book, Why Surrealism Matters) Mark Polizzotti argues that it’s relevant still…
Does Surrealism still matter? Has it ever mattered? The question is hardly new, and has been debated practically since the movement was launched. Already in 1930, a mere six years after its brash inauguration, the twenty-something poet René Daumal was cautioning André Breton, Surrealism’s founder, primary theorist, and author of the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), against the threat of irrelevance through popular acceptance: “Beware, André Breton, of one day figuring in study guides to literary history; whereas if we aspire to an honor, it is to be inscribed for posterity in the history of cataclysms.” (An apt warning, as Breton and many other Surrealists have since figured in quite a few study guides.)
A dozen years later, Breton himself, in exile in the United States during World War II, fulminated to students at Yale University against the “impatient gravediggers” who declared Surrealism over and done. Given that many of the young men in the audience were thinking about their looming draft notices, we can imagine that they, too, were wondering how relevant Surrealism was to their lives at that moment. And today, as Surrealism marks its centennial, and as its fortunes over the past fifty years have risen, fallen, and risen again, it’s a question worth pondering once more.
Indeed, much like the students at Yale, young people of the twenty-first century could hardly be faulted for wondering what a bunch of eccentric writers and artists showing off their dream states could have to do with such pressing concerns as social and racial injustice, a faltering job market, gross economic inequities, the decimation of our civil liberties, questions of gender identity and equality, environmental devastation, education reform, or, once again as I write this, the specter of world war. All the more so in that the word “surreal” has come to stand, in the popular imagination, for a vague cluster of things, a catchall term that runs the gamut from the unnerving to the merely kooky.
The answer is that Surrealism engaged with all of these crises. To cite several examples: The Surrealists’ outspoken critiques of French colonialism and racism share many points in common with current debates about racial equality and social justice. Their opposition to war and the military, dating as far back as World War I, was echoed in protests against France’s involvement in Algeria and America’s war in Vietnam, among others. The frankness with which they addressed sexuality, though this does not airbrush the more than equivocal position of women in the movement, was audacious for its time, and has had lasting echoes in contemporary attitudes. Their skepticism about work is almost a direct pre-echo of today’s Great Resignation…
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… To my mind, Surrealism’s true legacy is less as a forerunner than as a disruptor, something that perpetually challenges the existing paradigms and seeks new forms to maintain its emotional intensity. Or again, as a code-mixer, which takes in elements of its past, present, and projected future and recombines them, reworks them, reimagines them into something new, and then something newer…
One of Surrealism’s main drivers was a refusal of the values that European society tried to force on them. As political beings, they abhorred the bellicose jingoism that came screeching to the forefront during the War of 1914-18, and they felt revulsion not only toward the war itself but also toward the societal status quo that had fostered it, as well as the economic disparities, blatant racism, and intellectual blandness that went with it.
As writers and artists, they repudiated—at least in theory—the careerism and complacency that underscored so much literature and art, and that led to creative stagnation, not to say to a tacit or overt endorsement of the crumbling social contract. By nature, Surrealist works are animated by an emphatic dissociation from the reigning orthodoxy, whether political, societal, or aesthetic…
… the aspect of Surrealism that to me epitomizes why it continues to resonate through changing trends and urgencies is its unwavering belief that the marvels it sought were a force for universal emancipation, within everyone’s reach. The aim was to tap into previously unsuspected resources and unleash the potential we all possess for wonder, invention, and salutary rage.
Otherwise put, Surrealism’s importance lies not so much in the works it produced as in the attitudes underlying them. Those who equate the movement with names such as Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy, Paul Eluard, and Robert Desnos might find this surprising. But though Surrealism is now generally considered a movement in literature and the arts, and while its principal members indeed used artistic means, their initial impulses were mainly philosophical, political, and experimental.
Breton, a former medical student who had studied neurology and psychiatry, defined it with scientific tonalities as “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express… the actual functioning of thought.” Surrealism in its essence tends not toward aesthetics but toward a radical new means of seeing the world, even a set of ethical guideposts…
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More than any other intellectual current of modern times, Surrealism posited a world that could embrace, equally and indivisibly, the violence of rebellion and the passion of creation. This book aims to parse out what is living and what is dead in Surrealist ideas, what is vibrant and what stale; to evaluate why, and whether, the revolution that Surrealism sought to foment can still claim the qualifier, as one of its tracts put it nearly a century ago, of “first and always.”
The legacy of one of the 20th century’s most innovative artistic movements: “Permanent Newness: Surrealism at 100,” in @lithub.
* André Breton
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As we wrestle with reality, we might send dream-like birthday greetings to David Lynch; he was born on this date in 1946. A filmmaker, painter, visual artist, musician, and actor, he is best known for his films– Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), Dune (1984), Blue Velvet (1986), Wild at Heart (1990), Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Inland Empire (2006)– and for the series Twin Peaks (co-created and co-written with Mark Frost).
Critic Pauline Kael labeled him “the first populist surrealist.”
Bonus: “I Found David Lynch’s Lost Dune II Script.”
“The Surrealist tradition in all these arts is united by the idea of destroying conventional meanings, and creating new meanings or counter-meanings through radical juxtaposition (the ‘collage principle’)”*…
California-based artist Bill Domonkos takes old photos and footage and turns them into surreal, witty GIF mash-ups. Flashbak reports…
As he says of his multimedia collages:
I experiment by combining, altering, editing and reassembling using digital technology, special effects and animation to create a new kind of experience. I am interested in the poetics of time and space—to renew and transform materials, experiences and ideas. The extraordinary thing about cinema is its ability to suggest the ineffable—it is this elusive, dreamlike quality that informs my work…
I think a lot of my work comes into being by chance. It’s all about making visual associations between things I’ve seen in the public domain. The back and forth experimentation of combining different elements usually leads somewhere unexpected…
More– and more wonderful examples: “Artist Creates Brilliant Surreal Animations from Archival Photos and Film,” from @billdomonkos in @aflashbak.
* Susan Sontag, “Happenings: an art of radical juxtaposition“
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As we muse on montage, we might send squawky birthday greetings to Donald Duck; “born” (in that he made his first screen appearance) on this date in 1934 in “The Wise Little Hen.”
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