Contemporary Surrealism

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Comment by Zsi Chimera 10 hours ago

helen: The window is open. The flowers smell sweet. Today's champagne, a glass of which is bubbling in my ear, makes my head swim. The cruelty of the day molds my perfect forms.
satan: Can you see the Ile Saint-Louis above these Ladies and Gentlemen? That's where the poet's little room is.
helen: Really?
satan: Every day he was visited by waterfalls, the purple waterfall that would have liked to sleep and the white waterfall that came through the roof like a sleepwalker.
lucie: It was I who was the white waterfall.
marc: I recognize you in the strength of the pleasures here, although you are only the lace of yourself. You are the ultimate uselessness, the laundress of fish.
helen: She is the laundress of fish.
satan: Now the hostage of seasons whose name is man is leaning on the reed table, the gaming table. He is the guilty one with gloved hands.
helen: Begging your pardon, Sire, the hands were beautiful. If the mirror had been able to speak, if kisses had fallen silent...
lucie: The rocks are in the living room, the beautiful rocks in which water sleeps, beneath which men and women bed. The rocks are enormousluy high: white eagles leave their plumes there and in each plume there is a forest.
marc: Where am I? Worlds, the possible! How fast the locomotives went: one day the false, one day the true!
satan: Was it worth the trouble to leave the place, the trouble of losing one's footing running after corpses and spitting out lamp-bracket lightning? The poet was poor and slow in his dwelling; the poet did not even have a right to the punch that he was very fond of. The purple waterfall carried with it revolvers whose grips were made of little birds.

Comment by Deirdre A. Fox 11 hours ago

An interesting way of putting it ... the sound of necessarily rearranging your concepts a bit, taking stock after the
experience. Our first response is instantaneous, before we form words to describe it even to ourselves, and usually nondescript, isn't it? I like it, I hate it.... etc... It has more to do with how the work aligns or doesn't align with our world view. Then we find words and look again.

If I think about it further, my sense of visual and conceptual integration is a combination of mirroring, echoing, and resonating. A mirror is exacting in its reflection (though backward), an echo fades and resonating implies coalescing (whether of sound, thought, feeling...).

One takes stock after the experience, looks again, has another experience, this time reflecting their initial interaction in some measure, takes stock again, etc., so that there is a building or a growth. The process reoccurs and reoccurs, continuing to build some crux or center, losing outlying thoughts and responses, to the point where it seems indisputable in the moment. Until one looks from the side :)

Hearing the sound of thunder even after the thunder is gone?

Anyhow, you're right, the context of the gallery, etc., impacts the reception of the work.

Comment by Rob Van Beek 14 hours ago

I was interested in your use of the term 'resonate' earlier. I use a similar expression sometimes, but l wonder what is actually going on when the look or meaning of a work 'resonates'?

Perhaps it is the 'sound' made when your have to re-arrange your concepts a bit? A kind of stock taking after a significant experience?

Yes 'looseness', indeterminacy, has its problems too.

A lot of issues of meaning are determined by context.

A gallery or Fine Art context has powerful influence on work - at the same time galleries etc. bask in successes that are not of their own making.

There are power assymetries that part of the 'normal' context for viewing art and which influence both the meaning and the look of work.

Comment by Deirdre A. Fox 17 hours ago

Fair enough.

It's not impossible to make a successful piece where there's tightness between concept and visual, but it is difficult to avoid the literalism trap, thereby deadening the work, or the trap you noted early, merely mimicking the concept. Looseness has it's traps, too. Tension between tightness and looseness in the connections in a given piece is an interesting area to navigate.

Comment by Rob Van Beek 20 hours ago

Of course. It was just one kind of example that happened to come to mind in the current climate.

There are lots of other more positive examples and these tend to come up where the relationship between visual and conceptual features of the work is more open.

Paul Klee has a interesting openess about imagery emerging from materials and processes and titles and meanings emerging after the work is complete.

Comment by Deirdre A. Fox 1 day ago

Rob, don’t you think you may have given short shrift to 'visual and conceptual integration' by using an example of “integration” that is purely illustrative/descriptive, one producing a sum that is perhaps ostensibly “incontrovertible” in meaning but won’t resonate long if at all. The idea of visual and conceptual integration, at least in my mind, is more than combining visuals elements (and text) to illustrate a point; it’s an interplay where visual and conceptual approaches to and dimensions of the work mirror and resonate with and against each other. When the work succeeds, the synthesis has greater power than would the precipitating/developing concept(s) or the manifested visuals alone: the integral ought to be more than a sum of parts.

Comment by Rob Van Beek 1 day ago

I get ladies calling from the Jehovah's telling me what a fallen world we live in and, if I haven't been listening to the radio, or watching the T.V., I just don't believe them.

I know you live in London and therefore your quality of life is not all that it might be, but life, if not Edenic, is pretty astonishing.

I find making stuff, particularly in a playful way, refreshes my sense of .....wonder? - particularly in the range of properties stuff has and in the sheer persistence of people.

I can not only be ironic, I can be malign.

But if I had to live my whole life in the spirit of one day I wouldn't choose an ironic or intellectual day but an expansive one. I think we should live with as much boldness and freedom as we can muster.

Having said that I do suffer from quite severe moods swings and today is probably a good day...

More to the point, I think you'll agree, that people are motivated to make pictures etc. for very different reasons. Some need to work, some to play, some need to show off, some need to amuse. I wouldn't bother questioning people's motives because making pictures etc. is at least a fairly harmless thing to do.

I think this exchange about wit and incongruity is important in its own small way. I think it would be good if we looked at what might be going on in some specific works.

All activities have their conceptual side (even having a 'good' shit).Therefore there is always scope for conceptual play.

But that is not all there is.

For the first months of our lives we have no concepts. Our aesthetic interest in the sensuous properties of the world is in the driving seat then.

This is a subordinated part of us now but it is still part of us.

As you say, visual and conceptual integration - what would that be like?

Well one form of it is: 'visual' works whose parts combine (often via their title) to make some point, or, which point towards some narrative or conceptual meaning.

This is a strategy of 'closure', you get the point. The material object serves as the bearer or vehicle of intellectual sense. Materials etc. are put in the role of dumbo, meaning the role of smart-arse. Curators love this stuff - they can tell people what is about even though its obvious to all. 'This work has meaning its incontrovertible...'

That is not a form or integration or co-operation that motivates or inspires me.

I'm more into messing about with stuff, seeing what I can do with stuff (and that includes representational and conceptual properties.)

I can think about this process in an analytical way, and I often do, because his makes me bolder and freer than I would be otherwise. But not all intelligent activity is conceptual.

One of the things that seems a bit sad about surrealism are their stabs at 'automatic' drawing, which are so patently driven by a concept of the unconscious rather than by the poor old subconscious itself.

I think this is one of things you get used to, this cat and mouse relationship between performing an activity and forming a concept of the activity one is performing.

I think when you can decide not to think about something reflectively whilst you are doing it, you are putting yourself in a kind of trance.

The Surrealists would have approved, but of course you have to be careful that you don't find yourself merely doing the trance concept.

Comment by mike hinc on 15 May 2008 at 9:13am

Rob - me chiding you for rhetoric! – now that would be rich, if not ironic. It was not your rhetoric that spurred me to comment – but that it disguised a leap in logic - from an uncontroversial “'Wit' is the intellects' answer to humour” to ‘The Declaration of Wit’s Appropriate Genres’ in a trice! When you say “’Wit' is the facility most associated with devising effective incongruities.” I don’t think you are entirely wrong but IMHO you make it sound like an add-on or an optional extra.

I think we look at Wit differently. Wit is the mouthpiece and mode of expression of a point of view – an ironic point of view and perhaps the only tenable point of view in an ambivalent and dissonant world structured by contradictions and forged on incongruity. As such, rather than “devise” incongruity, Wit can “describe” incongruity - as Art describes the world it is in. I agree that “Wit can have a moral side”. To my mind, its virtue is that “it can prick pomposity”. When it becomes “smart-arsed, exclusive and victimizing” I suspect you will find the irony it carries has turned sour in the mouth, has turned into satire and is no longer witty. I think I understand what you mean by “synaptic” but if wit is perception so quickfire that “You get it in an instant”, then “leaden” wit is oxymoronic. It has failed as Wit and become something else – something “witless”.

I think you right to notice “how much contemporary art uses one or another form of incongruity, including wit”. What else can it do in a dissonant world? In my limited experience, only those drunk on religion or sated by drugs find the world anything other than dissonant and incongruous. Am I wrong? Wit is no optional extra – but both a strategy for survival in the world at large and a way of containing and communicating small truths from that world. What other tools are at the artist’s disposal? What other world can he describe?

My mock ironic clarion call “Beauty will be conceptual or it will not be at all” was meant as a manifesto for an art visually and conceptually integrated and as rebuttal of those “art for art’s sake” yantras where “beauty” is the objective and endgame of art. Which to my mind are just so much Bad Faith. To clarify my thought, I believe that wit, irony and incongruity are part and parcel of that necessary conceptual underpinning. Schopenhauer and Kant apart – given the irony of your situation and the wit of your virologist, your mouth ulcers could – in my opinion – qualify as “Conceptual Beauty”, if not Art.

What really worries me is that you intimate an art and a world without incongruity. I’d call that world Eden and were it real it would turn my world upside down. Can such a world exist? Where is it then? Show it me!

Comment by Rob Van Beek on 13 May 2008 at 9:24pm

Thanks for your encouraging remarks, Mike, and for pulling me up in my rhetorical moments...

I don't claim any authority, I am merely offering an observation in a discussion.

I am curious that wit seems enlivening in certain contexts and leaden in others. I suggested that this might have something to do with its transitory 'synaptic' character. You get it in an instant.

This is perhaps at variance with the duration of sculpture or architecture. (I can think of counter-examples: Claus Oldenburg's Bat seems to work).

I hope I'm not anti-wit, immune to wit or witless.

However I often point out to people how much contemporary art uses one or another form of incongruity, including wit.

I'm not saying it has no place in art but I do think that it works in a psychological way rather in than an artistic or aesthetic way.

It works because we all have similar psychologies. Aesthetics works because we also experience the world as individuals.

In English we have 'wit' and 'humour' - wit is associated with intellectual sharpness and humour is more corporeal (originally from the Theory of Humours...) , more about lightheatedness, being in a joking mood.

I think wit does have a moral side. It can prick pomposity but it can also be smart-arsed, exclusive and victimising.

I think some of the witty incongruities of modern art can be little more than social snobbery - they are about keeping up a divide between those that get it and those that don't or won't or can't.


Incongruity throws up lots of issues to do with how seeing things is tied up with our concepts (Schopenhauer had an interesting theory of humour based on incongruity).

I seem to remember that Kant also had theory of beauty that distinguished concept free or concept dependent varieties.

I remember this because I once had to go to a virologist about some disguising mouth ulcers I had. He was really, really excited by them and said they were a the most beautiful set of mouth ulcers he had ever seen.

This is an example of Kant's concept dependent use of beauty. They were a beautiful instance of the concept ' Mouth Ulcers'.

Rather than dissonance or incongruity this is an example of concept congruence. "Conceptual Beauty"?

Comment by mike hinc on 13 May 2008 at 9:18am

Rob. I really like your writing. It’s cogent, well argued and informative. I’ve read your entries to this debate a dozen times. Although I’m not sure what point it is I made about “conceptual beauty. Perhaps I expressed myself badly. No matter.

The problem I have with your argument is where you leave logic to lurch into generalization: “ Wit is great in conversation, tolerable in writing, a bad idea in painting” Yes, it trips off the tongue well enough but who said so? Why is it so? Why should I believe you? This is unsubstantiated assertion and for me it spoils your argument. Sorry but whilst we agree on so much, I think that you do wit an injustice.

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