Sunday, April 28, 2013

Questioning Possibilities

Here are some thoughts for final questions:


1. Is Dada dead?
In a review for the New York Times on an exhibit opening at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris in 2005, Alan Riding wrote, “Viewed from almost a century later, Dada can be easily recognized as a short-lived but influential movement that expressed its revolt against World War I by challenging artistic and intellectual conventions… Certainly, from its birth in a Zurich club called Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, the Dada movement appeared eager to avoid classification. Its impact was immediately felt in New York, Paris and the German cities of Berlin, Cologne and Hanover, but in each city it expressed itself differently. Then, like many revolutions, its ardor waned. By 1924, if not earlier, Dada was over.” The article continues: “‘Max Ernst said that Dada was a bomb and you can only pick up the bits,’ Le Bon [the Pompidou show’s curator] noted. “When you pick up the bits here, you can see all the elements of 20th century art. In 1921, Tzara, a Romanian-born poet and dad’s central figure, moved to Paris and a highly literate form of Dad flourished briefly around the likes of Andre Breton, Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard. But while Dada found space to breathe in other cities, Paris was an intellectual pressure-cooker and personality clashes soon erupted, with Breton often at their center. In fact, it was Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto in 1924 that announced the birth of a new movement and the demise of Dada. Open, nonconformist and spontaneous, Dada was not equipped to resist Surrealism, which was closed, disciplined and ritualistic. Over the next 15 years, Surrealism ruled the left bank.”

Is Dada dead? Or does it continue to inspire artists, like the “happenings” of the 1960’s, which echoed of Cabaret Voltaire, and are there aspects of modern art that are Dada? Riding states, “Dada is now part of an evolutionary process. The shock has largely disappeared. Dada’s aesthetic values may even have triumphed, but its political message has been forgotten. Today, many artists like to shock, not to overthrow the art establishment but to join it.”

Do you agree that the political message of Dada has been forgotten? Does it have any relevance today? Does Dada exist in any modern art forms, or did it die with its creators?

2. Women and Surrealism

Meret Oppenheim claimed, in a 1984 interview with Robert J. Belton, that Andre Breton had imposed a masculine interpretation on her famous work Dejeuner en Fourrure, and in fact had subverted the entire piece. Phyllis Evans writes, “Its very creation was something of a fluke, with the idea to line a teacup and saucer with fur arose from a bit of lighthearted banter with Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar about how anything could be covered in fur. While Oppenheim thought of it only in terms of the contrast of material textures, she made it according to Breton’s idea. When he renamed it Object, she felt that it was his title and creation, and stated that she saw herself only as the manufacturer. Breton saw the work as a sexualized object with its furry and concave cup acting as a female recipient to the phallic form of the spoon. This ‘resonated with sophomoric humor that male Surrealists found so endearing’ (Belton, 53).” Evans further explains the role of women: “Oppenheim, like other woman Surrealists, had to contend with a tendency within the movement to abuse women. Proto-Surrealist Isodore Dicasse’s statement ‘as beautiful as the chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissection table,’ with its Freudian, aggressive, and violently sexual insinuations set down a pattern of sexual objectification and violence which was thereafter followed by the male Surrealists. She also had to contend with Surrealism’s indifference to the work of its female members. For all its claims to be a movement of social revolution, Surrealist society paralleled the patriarchal attitudes of society during the day. Andre Breton ‘had a way of praising their work without granting them autonomous powers.’ Belton comments that ‘it is a sad fact that a great many of the women who participated in Surrealist exhibitions seem to have been allowed to do so precisely because they...were nicely packaged explosives’ [a reference to Frida Kahlo].”

Belton further states in his article “Speaking with Forked Tongues: ‘Male’ Discourse in ‘Female’ Surrealism’ that “In point of fact, the male Surrealists were almost totally indifferent to the work of women artists as art, even though they exhibited alongside them from time to time. Their writings on art typically ignored the contribution of female artists, and individual women were mentioned chiefly as the wife or companion of a respected male” (Belton, 52)

So the question becomes, did the female artists of the Surrealism movement participate as equals, with outlets and acceptance for their work, or is it only through contemporary lenses of gender equality that their work is validated?

3. Back to the Future: Fluxus and Surrealism

Fluxus continues to thrive in modern society, including at a Fluxfest in Chicago in February of this year.  On the Flux Blog http://www.fluxusfreezone.com/ there are opportunities for on-sendings, zines, received art and many other aspects of Fluxus that anyone can do. Flux games abound on the Internet and in personal gatherings. Why does Fluxus thrive while its predecessors have been relegated to relative obscurity? Are there continuing connections to Surrealism? Recently at the MoMA there was an exhibition of Surrealist games, including one called “The Exquisite Corpse,” which can be played either verbally or artistically. The MoMA exhibit included a drawing from the game called "Landscape" (1933), done in colored pencil on black paper with elements composed by Valentine Hugo, Andre Breton, Tristan Tzara and Greta Knutson. The game is essentially on-sending, originating in Surrealism. The exhibit included works by modern artists created through the same “game.” Dick Higgins said, “Long, long ago, back when the world was young ... Fluxus was like a baby whose mother and father couldn't agree on what to call it ... Fluxus has a life of its own ... When you grow up, do you want to be a part of Fluxus? I do.” (Dick Higgins, "A Child's History of Fluxus," New York, 1979). Is Fluxus a “movement” like Dada and Surrealism, or is it something else? Why does it endure?

Female and Surreal

http://flux-boston.com/the-women-of-the-surrealist-art-movement/

Saturday, April 20, 2013

Torched


Guilty. I confess. I am a moth to the status of celebrity, unable to resist the siren song of an artistic icon, and so I succumbed. Despite the newly acquired knowledge that I should resist, The Lennon Diary 1969 sucked me in. And just as I already knew, it was an amusing bunch of pages with the same message scrawled in increasingly incoherent scribbling. Is it a mere recording of the inanity of daily life? Or does the increasing scrawl indicate growing frustration as the box? And if so, why buy another diary? Scholarly analysis is beyond me, really, I just enjoyed the ride, and therein lies, I suspect, a great part of the raison d’etre of fluxus and received art. It’s just fun to play.


The psyche of fans like me played an important role in the intricacies of intimate bureaucracies. Ray Johnson was the master of playing off the dynamics of celebrity status and the role of fans. His on-sending philosophies dared both unheralded participant and towering celebrity to defy their social status and participate as equals. No one in the transactional processes of networked art had any superiority or even ownership in the interactions; it was merely a conveyance of art to art. But the presence of celebrities in any environment is a powerful lure. Craig J. Saper writes that “one cannot avoid the urge” and that is certainly true in my case. I played right into the game, and wanted to read Lennon's diary even though I knew that there was no great literary payoff – just a joke on me, on my “narcissistic identification with a star” (Saper). John Lennon, and through him Yoko Ono, are icons of my past, and so their art appeals to me not because of any aesthetic merit, but just because it is theirs. This is in direct opposition to the goals of intimate bureaucracies, but I could not resist the psychological call to investigate further.

In some ways I am guilty of sticking my finger in an Ay-O fluxus finger box, knowing full well that it contains objects that could pierce my skin, but nonetheless unable to resist my curiosity.  Fluxus, including Lennon’s diary, continues the perplexing dilemma I have encountered throughout this semester’s study of the avant-garde – is it art, is it anti-art (and is there really a difference?), or is it avantgarbage? I find it increasingly difficult as we travel from Dada through Surrealism to Oulipo and Fluxus to peruse all of it through a scholarly lens. I just want to toss off my academic robes and romp on the playground. There is so much potential (how Oulipean) to have creative fun, even when creativity is allegedly the antithesis of the form. It’s irresistible. To write, to draw, to paint, to sculpt, to perform in an outrageous costume and shout silly nonsensical syllables – to play! I realize that it all had profound significance in the world of art and even politics, but every aspect of it cries for creativity. From calligrams to fluxus kits – who can keep their fingers out of it? Certainly not me.

I absolutely qualify as an outsider in every sense of the term, and thus I am drawn to receivable art, fanzines, and on-sendings as connectional tools to others who are playing the game. I’m not too keen on the poking, scissors games, but many others seem like great fun, from literary craftings to fluxus kits. And the spin that much of the work contains, promoting pacifism, unconventiality and cooperation, is highly appealing. If there are no divisions of win and lose on Yoko's white chessboard, the only choice is to play consensually. Perhaps that is why Western society struggles so much with these art forms, they offer community rather than exclusivity, the Yoko Ono-Lennon merge that made so many traditionalists crazy. 

The interconnections of assemblings, received art, fluxus and all of the democratically-functioning art forms open up new possibilities in interpretations - both scholarly and ludic, and therein lies their authenticity. While there is a huge enclave of dark, transgressive work, there is also just plain fun, from Ubu to George Maciunus's snake in "New Flux Year." The art is the process, and occasionally the product, but mostly it is fun to play.






Saper, Craig J. Networked Art. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 2001. Print.

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Word Puzzles and Palindromes – Ludic Linguistics



Not really. Just playing.
“The dream which occupies the tortuous mind of every palindromist is that somewhere within the confines of the language lurks the Great Palindrome, a nutshell which not only fulfills the intricate demands of the art, flowing sweetly in both directions, but which also contains the Final Truth of Things.”
Alistair Reid

Anyone who has ever tinkered with a word search or an anagram has played with palindromes. The ability to see words backwards and forwards (or upside down, inside out or diagonally) predisposes one to the Oulipean constraint of the palindrome.  George Perec, never one to shy away from lexographic challenges, penned his “Le Grand Palindrome” using more than 1000 words.  Even readers proficient in French find it challenging, despite Perec’s noble effort at including some sense of a story intertwined with the word games.  The first and final paragraphs are about as deep into the text as most people manage. Fellow Oulipean Harry Matthews and Perec friend translated them as follows (from Cornell University professor Stephen Saperstein Frug’s blog):

Trace the unequal palindrome. Snow. A trifle, Hercules would say. Rough penitence, this writing born as Perec. The read arch is too heavy: read vice-versa....

Reading it backwards, to complete the palindrome, it is translated by Matthews as:

Desire this dreamed-of decease: Here goes! If he carries, entombed, this penitence, this writing will disturb no lucre: Old witch, your treachery will bite into neither the shore nor the space between,

Frug included, on his palindromic blog post of 11-02-2011, an interesting perspective on the massive palindrome from Perec’s biographer. It points out what many encounter with some of the more obtuse Oulipean constraints:

...it is undeniably difficult to read. Knowledge of the constraint disarms critical faculties; when you know that it is a monster palindrome, you tend to see nothing but its palindromic design. At Manchester, in 1989, doctored photocopies and unsigned handwritten versions were given to students and teachers of French who were asked, respectively, to use it for the exercise of explication de texte and to mark it as an essay. Perec's palindrome barely made sense to the readers. Some teachers took it for the work of an incompetent student, while others suspected that they had been treated to a surrealist text produced by "automatic writing". Those with psychiatric interests identified the author as an adolescent in a dangerously paranoid state; those who had not forgotten the swinging sixties wondered whether it was LSD or marijuana that had generated the disconnected images of the text. Readers seem to project their won positive and negative fantasies onto Perec's palindrome, as they do onto other difficult, obscure and unattributed works.


The fact that Perec himself called the work penitence casts an uneasy eye on the literary merits of the exercise. Does the use of a constraint enhance or inhibit both the writer and the reader? One could certainly argue both points, but the unreadable realities of Perec’s text points to the latter.

Another extreme Oulipo creator of palindromes was Luc Etienne Perin. He loved ludic linguistics, including Spoonerisms and the poetic game of Bouts-Rimés (rhyming ends). He particularly loved puns, publishing his own patapèteries (patapuns) in the notebooks for the “College de Pataphysique.” He defined some parameters for the Oulipian palindrome, and created further variations in the genre, including the phonetic palindrome and the Moebius strip palindrome. The first half of the poem is written on one side of a narrow strip of paper, the second half is written on the backside upside down, and then the paper is twisted, the ends joined, and one continuous poem is created.

Here is one of Luc Etienne’s Moebius Strip poems:

Trimer, trimer sans cesse                                             L'amour toujours l'amour,
Pour moi c'est la sagesse                                             est d'un faible secours.
Je ne puis flemmarder                                                 La pire absurdité :
Car j'aime mon métier                                                 chercher la volupté.
Il faut faire ici-bas                                                       c'est vraiment éreintant
le devoir, sans faux-pas,                                              de gaspiller son temps,
subsister sans folie                                                      et grande est ma souffrance,
est le but de ma vie.                                                    quand je suis en vacances.

(my bad-French translation is:)
To slave away, slave away unceasingly                      The love always the love,
For me it is wiser                                                         is one feeble help.
I then loaf about                                                          The worst nonsense
Because I like my trade                                               to seek pleasure:
It is necessary to work while here below                     it is always exhausting
An obligation, without falsity,                                     and a waste of my time,
To remain without madness                                         and large is my suffering,
Is the goal of my life.                                                   when I am on holiday.

I tried to generate this on a Moebius strip without much success. I did have a lot of fun playing, and ended up making some lovely cat toys for my writing companions. Quite the ludic experience both poetically and physically, but in the end I was much like the students in the Manchester experiment – unsure of what I was reading. I ended up reading the two verses of the poem across the lines, so that it now reads like this:

To slave away, slave away unceasingly – the love, always the love,
For me it is wiser, is one feeble help,
I then loaf about - the worst nonsense -
because I like my trade.  To seek pleasure,
it is necessary to work while here below - it is always exhausting,
an obligation, without falsity, and a waste of my time,
To remain without madness, and large is my suffering,
Is the goal of my life when I am on holiday.

Not bad, I guess, but as to its literary merit, I remain somewhat unconvinced. The Oulipo constraints range/d from mildly amusing to mathematically exotic, and writing within them was/is both challenging and cathartic. Released from the obligation of unbound, kismet-ic inspiration, creativity becomes a matter of coloring within the lines. It is both a release and an imprisonment, finding words and stories to fit within the blocks of the crossword puzzle while still creating works with something to say beyond “oh, look, it fits!”

There is certainly merit in word games and cranial challenges. At the very least it is fun to play. Luc Etienne’s take on Adam and Eve is entertaining:

extrait d'Adam et Eve en palindromes


Un nu né de l'Eden

Noble bel, bon ...
...
Eve rêve

Rose verte et rêves or

Eté ta lèvre serpent ne préserve la tête

Ni l'âme le malin

Emu serpent ne presume

Eve
 Tate l'état

Si ne plieras pareil pénis ...
...
sexe vêtu tu te vexes

Born of a naked Eden
Noble nice, good ...
Eve dreams
Pink, green and golden dreams
In summer her head is not protected from the lipped snake
Or from the evil soul
The emoting snake cannot presume that
Eve Feels the state
If no equally plying penis ...
Sex dressed in you is highly vexing.

But does it add to the canon of creation stories? One could certainly argue against it. Does Italo Calvino’s “If on a winter’s night a traveller” have literary merit? One could certainly argue for it. I would.

Perhaps the answer lies beyond the constraints just as the readers in “traveller” lie together reading outside the stories. It is not so much a matter of “do the constraints make good literature;” it is instead a matter of “is it good literature” – with or without awareness of the constraints. The literary merit stands on its on (or doesn’t), and the constraints are puzzles one can choose to play with (or not). And the authors can come just to play or leave a lasting impression.

We all get to play the way we want to, and make up our own rules of the game.