Karma

"This life is a stage - Each without exception plays his role - Life is a drama - Men pass from one role to another - The cause of the world-play is not outside - It is the latent powers that are slumbering in each human soul."

 - The Doctrine of Karma

Surrealism: The Poetry Of Dreams, Brisbane

SURREALISM AND CONTEMPORARY ART

23 JULY 2011

DR. MIRANDA WALLACE. (Curational manager of international art and exhibitions research)

I decided to visit Brisbane's recent major Surrealist exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art. I was lucky enough to also catch a lecture with Dr. Miranda Wallace, the curatorial manager of the exhibition, in discussion about the relationship between the Surrealist movement and contemporary art, which enhanced my visit to the exhibition.

When asked what she liked most about Surrealism, Wallace said she finds it first of all difficult to pin down what Surrealism is, but that largely her favourite aspect is the photography and the clear influence of cinema on many surrealist photographers, including contemporary artists. It is clear that Wallace wanted emphasise this link within the exhibition as film projections consistently appear alongside static works within the exhibition. There is also a surrealist cinema season devoted to moving image, (The Savage Eye; Surrealism and Cinema) which is running alongside the exhibit.

Wallace continues that one reason why it is so hard to define Surrealism is that many works are not linked by a visual style or approach but rather it is more a 'mode of enquiry.' Surrealism sets out to approach the more challenging aspects of life; the subconscious, The invisible realm and other 'hard to access' places, in fact Surrealists were obsessed by these themes. When we consider this, it makes sense and that there isn't one all encompassing style, as if there were, there would be some suggestion that each individual's subconscious is not unique. This is not to say that there are not common themes between artists and links between certain symbolic aspects of work as well and artistic approaches, however each outcome is essentially personal to artist.

In regards to contemporary art or in fact contemporary culture, Wallace explored the fact that Surrealism has also been one of the largest influences in commercial advertising; this bringing together of random things, is a technique, which at one stage became hugely useful within advertising.  

Wallace then began to talk us through a collection of slides' some from the exhibition and some contemporary examples.

SLIDES

Victor Bauner 1934 – artificial man,

This first slide displayed a hybrid creature, displaying this idea of part human part machine. Surrealists were consistently concerned with the line between the real and unreal to perhaps create a stronger more capable human being, forever trying to cross this boundary. In the example shown, the real and the unreal are merged. An idea, which became possible after WWI when the production of prosthetic limbs rose and these hybrids appeared, bringing us closer to this surrealist vision of the unreal becoming real. Wallace made the link to The Tales of Hoffman; where a man falls in love with a mannequin; falling in love with something unreal is perhaps the ultimate bringing together of real/unreal.

Wallace touched on a lot of important things and appeared to have absolutely vast knowledge, especially in terms of Surrealism's relevance to contemporary art, theatre, literature, culture, history etc. This fascination with the body perhaps stemmed from Breton and Ernst's medical background, both trained to be doctors, until they resigned to become poets, yet their fascination with the body continued as they searched to link artificial worlds.

Ron Mueck, mask 11, 2011

contemporary example of the real and the unreal joined together

-the fantastic world

Perhaps the difference between then and now is that contemporary surrealists there is an element of humour and a replication of the movements attitudes, whereas surrealists of the time were completing a genuine search for truth, a genuine way to tap into the subconscious and make the unreal, real.

Wallace showed a slide of Bretons 1960s studio/home, which was fascinating and of which a video appears in the exhibitions, the studio is permanently displayed at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Within the studio many esoteric objects appear. Breton had a strong belief in the power, status and mythology of objects, hence his vast an eclectic collection.

Often the question is asked 'When does the object become art? Is it when the artist pronounces it art, as if the artist somehow has a divine power. In the case of Surrealism the answer is no, an object must hold some magical power, or retain a sense of meaning or worth, never be a commodity or mass produced consumer item, perhaps found or manipulated in some way. The fall in popularity of Surrealism is largely to do with the rise of Pop Art, which was doing precisely this taking and everyday consumer object and displaying an oversized, over spruced, shiny version of it and calling it art, essentially going against everything that Surrealism was about. Refusing to commit to convention.

The exhibition itself was curated in chronological order, mapping the rise and 'fall' of Surrelaism.

“Transform the world' said Marx, 'Change Life' said Rimbaud. These two orders are for us one and the same” - Bréton 1955

"Every product of disgust is capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada: a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructive action dada: the knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the stonefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners, dada: absolution of logic: which is the dance of those impotent to create: dada of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets Dada absolution of memory: dada – abolition of archaology” Dad absolution of prophets Dada: absolution of the future absolute and unquestionable faith in every God that is faith in the immediate product of spontaneity."

Tristan Tszara -Dada Manifesto, 1918.

The fall of popularity in Surrealism due to the rise of Pop Art, which essentially went against everything that Surrealist was about, often the question is asked ' when does the object become art? Is it when the artist pronounces it art, as if the artist somehow has a divine power. In the Case of Surrealism the answer is no, an object must hold some magical power, or retain a sense of meaning or worth, never be a commodity or mass produced consumer item, perhaps found, but then manipulated in some way. Pop Art was doing precisely this taking and everyday consumer object and displaying an oversized over spruced shiny version of it and calling it art. 

On visiting the exhibition itself after the talk I found some very different works to what I have seen before – the surreal house was more specific, obviously centred around the house and themes of domesticity, of course this is a revisited theme from many surrealist, this show has a broader, general overview of surrealism, with a strong link to cinema in conjunction with the surreal film festival being held at the gallery, there is a clearer narrative, however when listening to the talk it seemed that Dr. Wallace's interviewer was perhaps speaking with little knowledge of Surrealism, which is perhaps effective as it is such a vast and complex subject that many of the audience may only have touched on parts of it. It was reassuring, however, that Wallace clearly had more to offer on the topic.

 Belle Du Jour, 1967

 Commercial Surrealist Film

 Early Hans Richter

Mannequin Love

Mad To Live

Here is a coverless mock up of the publication I have been creating, based around The Beat Generation. The book contains extracts from Allen Ginsberg's Poem, Howl, William. S. Burroughs novel, Naked Lunch and Jack Kerouac's novel, On The Road. I wanted to create imagery, which provoked my interpretation of the mood and attitude around the Beats, without being obvious or cliched. This may stay as a 9" x 6" landscape book, perfect bound, but i am also going to explore larger formats, edited formats alterntive directions for the material...(to be continued)

Open publication - Free publishing - More burroughs

Howl

I am currently involved in a project based around the Beat generation, I am specifically researching the works of William. S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. I have been creating imagery combining it with typography to eventually create a publication, which is a mixture between horror and paradise. I recently went to see the film Howl, which portrays the culture and obscenity trial surrounding one of Ginsbergs most famous poems of the same name. James Franco leads as Allen Ginsberg, and he is fantastic. Man of the moment Franco, really captures subtle mannerisms and idiosyncracies of Ginsberg and his recital of the poem is a really enjoyable and mesmerising aspect of the film. The portrayal of the obscenity trial was impressive and felt well directed. The poem Howl is split up into 4 parts including a footnote at the end, a series of animation sequences run alongside the poem. Although the animation was very well produced, I felt that in some ways it was far too literal in its portrayal of the poem and there seemed to be a few too many animation styles going on at once. It detracted from Franco's precise engaging recital of the poem in that the poem was portrayed almost word for word, far too many things going on and I didn't think it captured the essence of the poem. Franco was so convincing that the simple reading of the poem was enough, that doesn't mean to say that the animation was completely pointless, there were some very beautiful moments within the animation and perhaps if these were celebrated and given time to breathe and stand in their own right, this could have worked. I did still very much enjoy the film, and it definitely helped with my project to see the poem performed. Especially touching was the slideshow of real photographs alongside descriptions of what the beats went on to do; shown whilst Ginsberg himself spoke and then appeared at the end. Directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman

I Never Called You Darling

Female Erotic Fragments

I have been exploring erotic fiction and feminist writings as part of my university course. I have been writing my own story-poems from written fragments by Anaïs Nin, Sylvia Plath, Angela Carter, Pauline Réage (Anne Desclos) etc. As I was using fragments of text I felt it appropriate to use fragments of imagery to illustrate this text. I created a series of Montages, which I then collected within a small book along with the story-poems.

I also made some limited edition cards and envelopes to accompany the book or to stand alone.

The Dusty Bullet Issue, Sue Platt

I got given this mini-zine, whichwas created by my tutoe, Sue Platt. It definitely deserves to be blogged as there are some lovely sensitive, witty and well thought out aspects, which should be celebrated. My dissertation focuses upon photo-montage, therefore it is not only useful to look at Sue for my research, but also for my personal projects.

Howl, Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)

Howl

For Carl Solomon

I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,

incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping towards poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,

Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,

who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,

who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,

who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,

a lost batallion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,

who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,

suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,

who wandered around and around at midnight in the railway yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,

who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,

who studied Plotinus Poe St John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the universe instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,

who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,

who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,

who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,

who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,

who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving nothing behind but the shadow of dungarees and the larva and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,

who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,

who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,

who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,

who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,

who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom,

who copulated ecstatic and insatiate and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but were prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,

who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,

who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,

who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open full of steamheat and opium,

who created great suicidal dramas on the appartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,

who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of the Bowery,

who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,

who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,

who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,

who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,

who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,

who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,

who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,

who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,

who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,

who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,

who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch Birmingham jazz incarnation,

who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,

who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,

who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,

who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,

who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,

who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,

who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturerson Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with the shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,

and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,

who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,

returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,

Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,

with mother finally *****, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger on the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—

ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time—

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soulbetween 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,

and rose incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

II What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas! Moloch whose factories dream and choke in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisable suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstacies! gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

III Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland

where you're madder than I am

I'm with you in Rockland

where you must feel strange

I'm with you in Rockland

where you imitate the shade of my mother

I'm with you in Rockland

where you've murdered your twelve secretaries

I'm with you in Rockland

where you laugh at this invisible humour

I'm with you in Rockland

where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

I'm with you in Rockland

where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio

I'm with you in Rockland

where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses

I'm with you in Rockland

where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica

I'm with you in Rockland

where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx

I'm with you in Rockland

where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of actual pingpong of the abyss

I'm with you in Rockland

where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse

I'm with you in Rockland

where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void

I'm with you in Rockland

where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha

I'm with you in Rockland

where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb

I'm with you in Rockland

where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale

I'm with you in Rockland

where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep

I'm with you in Rockland

where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're free

I'm with you in Rockland

in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

A new film is scheduled for release in autumn named, Howl. It a representation of the controversy caused by the poem , see trailer here. For my current project I have also been researching the writings of "Penny Rimbaud," co-founder of the anarchist-punk band CRASS, Penny Rimbaud is actually the pseudonym of Jeremy John Ratter so named as a tribute to poet Arthur Rimbaud, the 'Penny' being a pun on the phrase "arfer (half a) penny", referring to the long discontinued British Ha'penny coin.for my current project and he has created a tribute to Ginsberg with her poem entitled How? I researched Rimbaud's writings for a while before realising she was actually he, I wonder if this will change my perspective on the writings.