International Exhibiton of Surrealists.
Sixty artists from fourteen countries presented their work in Galerie des Beaux-Arts in 1938. This is a photo compilation from the event as it was published in the Greek free-press Lifo.
This is a compilation of pictures taken during the filming of Circe in AA 001 in Brunel University on February 2013. The video was made by Alexandra Gorbunova.
Circe
Circe is a surrealistic short film with elements taken from the Theatre of the absurd. It is a modern allegory of the myth of witch Circe, from Homer’s Odyssey. In that myth Odysseus’ comrades, as they reached Circe’s palace, started drinking and eating lavishly and fooling around with the witch’s servant, until they suddenly got transformed into pigs. In the film, Odysseus’ comrades are described as some bourgeois and Circe’s palace as a surrealistic whorehouse. The bourgeois enter this whorehouse and as they start flirting with the girls, drinking and taking drugs, their animal instincts coming over them and they get transformed into animal. However, none of the characters, neither men nor women, seem to have realised the fact of the transformation. None of them is reacting to the fact that men’s heads have been replaced with animal heads until a point where gradually every man who is in the whorehouse starts fainting. The moment they have all fainted, two “face-less” bouncers enters the scene and take throw them outside. All men seem to be dead, or at least unconscious, until morning comes and they wake up. Then they remove their masks, like they were aware of the fact that they were wearing masks and they had not been actually transformed, and leave that strange whorehouse like nothing had happened the previous night.
The reason for the ancient myth to be put in a whorehouse was the enlightenment of its core. What Homer is trying to say in this Rhapsody of The Odyssey is that extravagant pleasure leads to dehumanization, the ignorance of basic moral codes leads to destruction. This dehumanization in modern times could be well put in a whorehouse which by many is considered to be a “fleshpot”, a place of filthiness and lust. Additionally, the film’s whorehouse is not a regular whorehouse. There is something absurd about it; women before being touched stand completely still, the source of music is a headless man, men are being transformed to animals the exact moment when they seem to have yield to the pleasure. The whole film looks like a nightmare sequence where everything is symbolic. Even the song that has been chosen as a soundtrack talks about a “dark, secluded place” where no-one knows the other’s face and people can secretly yield to their own desires. Circe is a film which through surrealism tries to explore the subconscious of the Homeric myth and also satirize the “double” life of today’s bourgeois.
A tree is burning in the middle of a square
Among its leaves
Scattered white pages
All the poems
We once wrote
Black burnt out branches
Their ashes suspend
And dance with the ashes
Of dead sailors
The sea graves opened
The oar and the blood
The fire and the snow
The marble fingers on the rudder
Silence
The ship that was carrying
The last hope
Shipwrecked
Its name was “Krostandt”.
Dada was a literary and artistic movement born in Europe at a time when the horror of World War I was being played out in what amounted to citizens’ front yards. Due to the war, a number of intellectuals filled with anger and despair decided to protest against the insanity of war by making art. Since the war was in some way sense-less their art which had as a route the war became sense-less as well. One was the rule for Dada, there are no rules. (Unknown, 1) Even the name of this movement means nothing. It aims to mean nothing, and was adopted precisely because of its absence of meaning. “I found the word Dada in the Larousse dictionary, we all liked it…” Tristan Tzara, the artist and founder of the movement has said in an interview he had given in Nouvelles Litteraires. (Motherwell, 102)
Part of the Dada movement was Calligram. Calligrams are poems in which the look of the poem supports its meaning. (Medwell, 1) A clear example is the one that has been created for this blog. The poem which is written above in a first glance may have no meaning at all as Dada works of art seem at first. However, it talks about the unsuccessful uprising of the Soviet sailors, also known as “Sailors of Krostandt”, against the almost totalitarian regime of Lenin and the Bolsheviks; an uprising which began as a protest against the Communist policy which has lead the Soviet Union in a total economical, and not only, sordidness and ended as a merciless civil massacre. (Unknown, 1) Therefore, since the story that lies beneath the words of the poem is connected to Communism, the shape of the poem is a depiction of the communist hammer and sickle, although in the poem’s shape the hammer has been replaced by an oar, symbol of the Krostandt Sailors.
Bibliography
1) Medweel, A Jane, Primary English: Knowledge and Understanding, as seen as in the Google Books webpage: http://books.google.gr/books?id=fEhgI8RaG-UC&pg=PT297&dq=calligrams&hl=el&sa=X&ei=RsB9UZPBAYjBswbB44HYDg&ved=0CFMQ6AEwBw
2) Motherwell, Robert, The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, Wittenborn, Schultz Inc: United Sates of America, 1951
3) Unknown, Dada – Art History 101 Basics, Article on the About. Art History website: http://arthistory.about.com/cs/arthistory10one/a/dada.htm
4) Unknown, The Uprising of Krostandt, Article on the SanSimera website: http://www.sansimera.gr/articles/225
“It would seem that mythological worlds have been build-up, only to be shattered again, and that new worlds were built from the fragments” the famous Claude Levi-Strauss, “father of modern anthropology”, will say in 1962 in an effort to define the art of Bricolage. (Iam, Deutch , 338) Bricolage comes from the French word “bricole” which means “tinker” (Unknown, 1) and it is used to describe “the making of something new out of something old” (Hoesterey, 10). In that spirit, we had been requested to create our own bricolage out of some BBC footage.
In this sample, there were selected all the scenes from the BBC footage which included shots of traffic lights and city streets. Along with the use of some editing effects from Final Cut Pro, such as colour correction, change of speed and video transitions, there was created a small bricolage which shows the traffic lights of a city during a daytime. The video begins with shots of random traffic lights in many different places in the morning, it carries on as the sun goes down showing busy streets full of cars and people and ends with some shots of empty streets with traffic lights blinking into the night. The purpose of this project was for the students to prove that that they can work with what they have on their hands and produce something considerable (Hoestrey, 10). In this specific video, there was created a “collage” of shots of traffic lights out of a footage which included interviews and various shots of many different places. For this “collage” or better for this bricolage, all of the interviews and all of the shots which were showing landscapes, as well as dialogues and music, have been ignored when there were only used footage of urban scenes.
Bibliography
1) Hoesterey, Ingeborg, Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature, Indiana University Press: United States of America, 2001
2) Iam, Jack, Donald, Deutch, Miriam, Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art: A Documentary History, University of California Press: United States of America, 2003
3) Unknown, as seen in the Free Dictionary website: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/bricolage
Appropriation art borrows images from popular culture, advertising, the mass media and other artists and incorporates them into new works of art. Often the artist’s technical skills are far less important than his conceptual ability to place images in different settings and thereby alter their meaning. Appropriation art has been described “as getting the hand out of art and putting the brain in”. (Throsby, 217) A great example of Appropriation is Marchel Duchamps’s La Gioconda. There Duchamp created his own work of art by adding a moustache on the woman’s face of Leonardo Da Vinci’s masterpiece. In the same spirit, here a moustache has been added on Frida Khalo’s self-portrait, which has the title “The Broken Column”. In this painting, Frida stands all alone crying on a vast baron plain beneath a stormy sky. The straps of the corset seem to be all that is holding her broken body together and upright. The Ionic column, broken in several places, symbolises her damaged spine and the nails piercing her face and body become one more powerful symbol of her pain. (Unknown, 1)
Through the humoristic addition of the moustache on the face of the portrait’s woman, which in a first glance is only way of satirizing Frida’s thick eyebrows, there is signified the double sexual identity. In other words, through the addition of the moustache, Frida becomes a symbol of all the homosexual men and women, all the people who have two natures. Suddenly, the personal pain of Frida becomes the pain of a whole range of people who suffer from fear, guilt and racism all over the world. Her tears become their tears, her wounds their wounds and somehow like that through appropriation and the use of a well-known work of art emerges something new which alters the meaning of the initial work.
Bibliography
1) Throsby, David C, Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture, Library of Congress: Netherlands, 2006
2) Unknown, The Broken Column, Article on the Frida Kahlo’s Fans website: http://www.fridakahlofans.com/c0480.html
Rene Magritte – Son of Man
‘’At least it hides the face partly. Well, so you have the apparent face, the apple, hiding the visible but hidden, the face of the person. It’s something that happens constantly. Everything we see hides some other thing yet we still want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is always some sort of interest in what is hidden and what the visible does not show us.’’ (Shelley, 1) Those are the words Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte chose to say, in a 1965 radio interview, in an effort to analyse his painting ‘’Son of Man’’. ‘’Son of Man’’, like the most of Magritte’s works of art, looks like a game between reality and illusion; it depicts a bowler-hatted man, dressed in a suit with his face obscured by a suspended green apple. There are many theories that have been developed around the interpretation of the painting. A very popular one was written by Alain Robbe-Grillet, an important French writer and filmmaker. According to Grillet, ‘’Magritte’s distrust of the bourgeoisie, even though he himself lived and dressed like a bowler-hatted man, has always been pronounced. This explains why he paints a man’s face -The face is every man’s identity- obscured by an apple. Magritte has painted man’s anonymity, his void, his emptiness, because, in essence, every bourgeois has the same face. (Robbe –Grill, 201) Another approach that has been made, this time not with socio-political, but with psychological, criteria requires a small retrospect in the painter’s childhood.
When Magritte was 13 years old, his mother committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Sambre. This was not her first attempt; she had made many over a number of years, driving her husband Leopold to lock her into her bedroom. One day she escaped, and was missing for days. She was later discovered a mile or so down the nearby river, dead. According to a legend, Magritte was present when her body was retrieved from the water. Supposedly, when his mother was found, her dress was covering her face. That image, according to the other theory, could have been the source of inspiration for many paintings, Magritte painted, of people with faces obscured by various objects, like ‘’Son of Man’’. (Unknown, 1)
Magritte’s obsession of hiding people’s expression in his paintings could have been caused by this fact or it could not. Magritte’s works, as it happens in the world of surrealism, are covered by a wide mystery; a mystery that if gets solved, his paintings may lose their beauty. After all, he him-self has said that his paintings are visible images which conceal nothing; he said that ‘’they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, “What does that mean?” It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable. (Shelley, 1)
Bibliography
1) Magritte, Rene, Robbe –Grillet, Alain, La Belle Captive: A Novel, University of California Press: California, 1995
2) Shelley, Esaak, Artists’ Quotes: Rene Magritte, page in about website: http://arthistory.about.com/od/famous_names/a/Artists-Quotes-Ren-E-Magritte.htm
3) Unknown, Rene Magritte and his Painting, article on rene-magritte.org: http://www.rene-magritte.org/
vasiliskekatos 