reading looking smelling thinking

Currently reading or recently have read:

Sunny Wednesday by Noelle Kocot
Helsinki by Peter Richards
Livingdying by Cid Corman
Poem Stripped of Artifice by Mark Lamoureux
My Body and I by René Crevel

And very much feeling
the vibe of Ursula von Rydingsvard's exhibit at the DeCordova, which I've visited twice to see (each time with toddler in tow, so I need to go again I think).

Ursula von Rydingsvard, Bowl with Fingers, 2007–2008
cedar

These sculptures are intoxicating -- the smell of the cedar and the organic forms initially remind me a bit of Bataille's idea of the informe*, which he used to describe the way ideas in the abstract escape formal limits (though it has obvious material & formal reference points). I think in a way scent actually touches the idea of the informe more than the forms of the sculptures themselves, which oddly, through repetition, become rather formal. But the scent of the cedar puts these pieces in a more primitive realm, non-visual, formless, airy, so that I feel myself at an intersection of form and formlessness. They evoke "a life of sensations," formless in that the experience of sensation escapes the rigorous limits of categories.

*". . . un terme servant à déclasser, exigeant généralement que chaque chose ait sa forme. Ce qu'il désigne n'a ses droits dans aucun (sic) sens et se fait écraser partout comme une araignée ou un ver de terre. Il faudrait en effet, pour que les hommes académiques soient contents, que l'univers prenne forme. La philosophie entière n'a pas d'autre but: il s'agit de donner un redingote à ce qui est, une redingote mathématique. Par contre affirmer que l' univers ne ressemble à rien et n'est qu' informe revient à dire que l'univers est quelque chose comme une araignée ou un crachat." Georges Bataille: "Informe." Documents 7 (December 1929), p. 382. (Radical Art)

Bashing Surrealism

I'm cross-posting this comment here. It's in response to a post Josef Horáček’s made on Montevidayo, probably the most consistently provocative, weird, hilarious, frustrating, interesting poetry-culture-critique blogs I know of.

Here's the original post.

Here's my response:

I’m three days late to the party and now the discussion seems almost over, but I was really irked by the original post and have to chime in. As I see it, the problem with Josef’s post is that he’s only talking about one strand of surrealism, that of the 1924 manifesto (where Breton defines the movement primarily as psychic automatism). Not only do Breton’s definitions of surrealism mutate with each of his polemics, but the practice itself mutates with each offshoot group that wiggles away from Parisian surrealism. Surrealism is this every evolving freak show that’s hardly limited to automatic writing—by the 1930s Breton even admitted automatic writing was a failure (see his essay “The Automatic Message”). Then, to condemn surrealism as a sexist cult of feminine beauty is simplistic—there is certainly a pervasive hetro-normatively glorification of the female body, but this is only a fraction of the surrealist pursuit (probably the most well known because, well, boobs get publicity). But what about these touch points: collage, juxtapositional imagery, the absurd, black humor, paranoiac critical / frottage imagery, dream narrative, objective chance, convulsive beauty, etc.? All of these practices, along with automatism and the simultaneous valorization and interrogation of love & desire, flow in and out of the ever-mutating nexus of activity called “surrealism.” You’re condemning one rivulet of an unwieldy river.

Or consider this passage from Arcane 17, which, in 1945, seems utterly prophetic: “The time has come to valorize woman’s ideas at the expense of those of man, whose failure has come to a rather stormy consummation in our time. In particular, it is the artist’s task… to give the greatest priority to everything that comes from the feminine system of the world, as opposed to the masculine, and, even better, to appropriate to his own jealousy defended use everything which distinguishes woman from man with respect to appreciation and volition.” Okay, we can condemn Breton for operating on a simple masculine-feminine duality, but at least he’s tipping the scale in another direction.

Josef also calls Surrealism’s relationship to Marxism arbitrary. I’d say it was ambivalent, but Breton was attracted to Marxism because of the dialectic. One of the most consistent aims of Breton’s notion of surrealism was to overcome the constraints of binary thinking. “Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.” (2nd manifesto) It’s Marx through the Hegelian dialectic that interested Breton – not to mention an utter scorn for the social order of his day (thus the flirtation with communism & anarchy). This “opposition to opposites” fits very well with Johannes emphasis on the kitsch problem—surrealism constantly and emphatically overwhelms the tidy distinctions between high and low art (not to mention genres, etc).

As for Perloff’s new book, I haven’t read it yet. But I think that if she really does expel surrealism from venerable canon of the historical avant-garde, a surrealist would say “splendid–get us out of here, away from these stinking artists!”– the last thing surrealism wanted (and this is sad in the end) was to be academically historicized and locked up in museums and libraries along with all the other literary and art movements. Art was only a means to an end for surrealism.

Sorry to be all long-winded and quote-happy, but I think there’s been too much thoughtless (or at least groundless) bashing here.