The lecture today was immensely fascinating. Paula is a fantastic lecturer with always the right amount of context and detail to support individual points and examples. I’m now equipped with a much clearer picture of how to make sense of nonsense and the relationship between DADAism and Surrealism. She was the tutor for my first study group and that was very enjoyable as well, as I always feel I take away a lot when she speaks on a subject matter. So, I took a lot from the 2-hr lecture this morning. Almost too much to summarize. I’ll definitely look back on the written notes I’ve taken and reference to the works / artists explored.
I’ve always had an interest in DADA and Surrealism, but never realized how closely interlinked they were. Paula made it clear how, although there are great visual aesthetic similarities between the two movements, the values / beliefs were slightly different. DADA is referred to as ’anti-art’ ‘anti-beautiful’ ‘anti-meaningful’ and generally rejecting all beliefs and values (nihilism). It rejected the idea of the mainstream - born around the time of WW1, it held the belief: if society is supposed to be this civilized ideal then why is the world war happening? and so the irrational way of working - chance, accident, nonsensical pathways came to life. On the other hand, Surrealists seem to believe in some things, usually optimistic perspectives - surrealism had begun around 1923-4 in Paris, and supposedly ended around 1938 in the Surrealist exhibition in the same city. But - nevertheless, it definitely still exists ‘here, there, everywhere,’ I can definitely see how the line between DADA and Surrealism can be blurred - many of the works born from these eras seem to disorientate, shock, confuse the audience with irrational imagery. Breton talks a lot about ‘convulsive beauty’ - “The greatest kind of beauty would not come to us along ordinary logical paths, but will come about ‘convulsively’” He points to the pleasures of automatic writing: “what is delightful here is the dissimilarity itself which exists between the object wished for and the object found,” ** That beauty came in forms such as the stationary and the moving together in one image, involuntary body movements (Freud and his colleague studied women of hysteria with those movements), the female body and machinery, inanimate objects coming to life, exaggerated perspective/shadow/scale etc, paranoic imagery/objects of one thing looking like something else (Dali’s The Enigma of Hitler 1937: the fish/lake).
One of the most iconic works of DADAism was Duchamp’s Readymade urinal, Fountain 1917. I saw it in the Dali/Duchamp exhibition in RA a few months before, it was the only work I really studied before. It was indeed, not beautiful, not handmade, was an offense to the public, and there was no real meaning except to reject everything that was considered art at the time. It was a genius move, really, to submit and challenge the members of the jury and see if it would get accepted, which of course it did not.
What stuck to me was how both DADA and Surrealism were literary movements - as poets/writers were as involved as artists were. Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Comte de Lautremont were just some of them. This excites me as I feel a connection to poetic ways into thinking, making, painting, writing. Baudelaire wrote poems on Paris, and unexpected subject matter.Modernity was hitting society (which can also be seen as disorientating - much of these symbols of modernity are also seen in surrealist paintings such as Giorgio de Chirico’s The Uncertainty of the Poet 1913- the train in the background. also Ernst’s The Elephant Celebes 1921 - the elephant looking metallic.) and Paris was changing - the centre of it being rebuilt. He wrote pieces on gas lighting, women’s cosmetics, the enchantment of the everyday things. The ‘Marvelous in the Everyday’. Isadore Ducsse (Lautremont) used the metaphor ‘Beautiful as the accidental encounter, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella,’ Breton’s Poem-Object 1941 also emphases the beauty of random objects as an accidental collective (with poetic text supporting each item). I definitely felt moved when I heard of these concepts as I can see that beauty as well. Is this the convulsive beauty Breton speaks of? It feels like a quiet beauty. a collision of objects. not as a violent accident but a silent agreement. I’ve had the urge of putting random objects together before, but would that be an experiment of chance? does it matter? I really would like to try the ‘poem-object’ idea as well. Perhaps I could collect random objects and write nonsensical poems on them.
The concept of free association / automatic writing / automatic drawing also fascinated me. I understand why Dali and other artists decided to abandon it after experimenting with it though - is it really possible to create something without preconceived ideas? and if it is, what will that indicate? It also forces the artist to be the audience/reader as well - interpreters of your own work. The Methodology (method of approach to looking at/ writing about, in this case, nonsensical art - art that appears to resist any interpretation) here could be shifting from ‘what does it mean?’ to ‘how can it be meaningful?’ - an interpretation instead of digging for the true meaning. also to think about ‘what might this art tell us about society and the time in which it was made?’ Another way of approaching it is through Breton’s free association concept - what immediately comes up in the mind as you view it? “You don’t judge our art, our art judges you!” this quote from Jake Chapman of the Chapman Brothers switches the role of the critic around. Yes, their work, Chapmanworld etc. was full of controversial ideas, (child-sized mannequins, mutations, nakedness, pedophillic/phallic/sexual imagery) sparking media outrage, but their argument was reasonable: the art they create is nothing more horrific than what already exists in society and media (hollywood films, pornographic films). and it’s true - art is created from what we conceive in the world around us, no? weren’t we born as a blank canvas, gradually or rapidly tainted by the twisted society? if the world is so civilized and perfect, why did it lead to world wars? Is there any scope for shocking art nowadays? has everything been done? Paula also pointed out that artists like the Chapman Brothers - who usually create shocking artworks, don’t just do it for the shock, of course. There are many inspirations and interests that feed into their work - for example, the mannequins, naked except for a pair of nike trainers, could be taken from American Psycho. They were also interested in surrealism / DADAism as well as genetic technology and what it would look like if it went wrong, the mutated forms. This definitely opened my eyes to art like this - visually impactful, immediately controversial. I’ve never thought about this type of art as much - but after this lecture I see clearly that they don’t just trigger shock - they also raise questions about human nature etc, and provoke thought perhaps through free association again.
