A brief exposition on the nature of art

Inadequate, but not inane; that is the best way to describe art. It describes, or tries to recreate, an instance of phenomenological being, or witnessing; to describe an experiencing. Even Surrealism is the recreation of an initial evocation of a feeling or an emotion. Art is merely a striving to produce, in an objective existence, what one feels in the sub...jective. Thus, art is the trying to posit something lasting, from something essentially transitory; it is an objectively perceivable memory. It is the artist's, albeit crudely, objectifying of his most inner being; "I am here; I am alive, and I am experiencing". It is understandable then, the frustration most of us feel when the image envisaged in our minds does not correspond to that created upon canvass; it does not provide an adequate copy of this rememberance or feeling, and even more so, for us who are unskilled at such things. If anything, art is demonstrative of an artist's narcissism to be remembered, to have one's meaning validated by a sense of futurity and permanence, when otherwise, there would be none. Thus, it is harrowing for the artist, to try and recreate an instance of being over a period of time; it ends as a conglomeration of instances, of merely a trying to remember that one, initial, instigating one. Thus it becomes distorted and unrecognisable from the original, though this, I'd hasten to add, is too remembered in mind, and not felt. Thus, we create a copy, of a copy, of a copy. Therefore, one cannot pre-ordain the form and content of art, it simply is. One may have an idea of what one wishes to paint on canvass, or strike into marble, but the finished piece is truly original; it sprouts only into existence once the tired artist's hands are finished. It is only definable afterwards, the same as in life. We, and art, are merely consecutive instances, but that is going more into the nature of our own phenomenology, than into the nature of art itself.

Perry Smith

Surrealism and Philosophy - Part II

In part I of these articles I suggested that there were several problems in understanding the links between surrealism and philosophy, certainly one problem is that of terminology. I made the claim that to an extent surrealism’s philosophical basis was Hegelian; this seems to need to be clarified, but also modified. Many surrealists, and especially André Breton, were interested in the notion of dialectics. Here is another of those problems as dialectics seems to be either widely misunderstood or very differently understood by different people. Hegel does not help as his writing style is often fantastically obscure, sometimes to the point where one could doubt if the text one is reading had actually been translated into English!

The process of dialectics is often explained rather diagrammatically thus: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Basically this means that every idea, proposition or thesis contained within it a contradiction, the antithesis. One worked at resolving this contradiction until a synthesis was achieved. However, this is not as Hegel himself explained it, and indeed he condemned this sort of formula. For him the dialectic had to move from abstraction towards becoming concrete. He certainly did think that arguments tended to contain a contradiction and unless this was resolved they would be one-sided and false. However, they would not necessarily be entirely false, the lie would contain a moment of truth, and hence it was necessary to look at the precise terms in which the argument was couched. Hegel is somewhat out of favour at present, his ideas are disputed by most postmodernists, not surprisingly in some ways, he saw a logic of history in which fundamental ideas would reach a point of synthesis at which history would end. All of human existence after that point would no longer be “history”! Clearly this is a very specific notion of what constitutes history that many would disagree with.

So, getting back to surrealism and the idea of convulsive beauty, the images of convulsive beauty (exploding-fixed, erotic-veiled, magic-circumstantial) are effectively those of a deliberately posed contradiction that cannot be resolved logically. There are many sources for this, but one immediate predecessor needs to be mentioned, Lautréamont. Lautréamont was the author of the phrase “as beautiful as the chance meeting upon an operating table between a sewing machine and an umbrella”. For Breton this was effectively the first real example of “convulsive beauty”, two objects that have no apparent relationship upon a surface that is foreign to both of them. This is difficult, if not impossible to describe entirely rationally, but clearly the idea is that there is a level of shock at seeing this juxtaposition, a sort of estrangement of sensibility. I would suggest that, rather than there being a simple lack of relationship between such objects there is something like an unfinished dialectic going on in which the different terms/objects/etc, in this case the umbrella and sewing machine will neither cancel each other out nor resolve themselves into a logical system, they create a sort of mental friction that refuses to be resolved.

Let’s go back to the passage from the Second Manifesto of Surrealism I quoted in the first part of this series: “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. Now, search as one may one will never find any other motivating force in the activities of the Surrealists than the hope of finding and fixing this point.”

So this seems to indicate that Breton wants surrealism to, not abandon logic, but to surpass it in some way so that the rational and irrational can be seen as two elements in a kind of “surrationalism” and even if, as some people claim, he did not properly understand Hegel, he made a very creative use of his dialectics, possibly undoing the process that Hegel envisaged! This overcoming of contradictions is to be in every part of our experience, not just within logic. The convulsive image is an embodiment of the overcoming of contradiction in one sense, but at the same time embodies the contradiction itself.

If we look at Victor Brauner’s Wolf-Table for instance, Brauner has created something that is both wolf and table, but is neither. It partakes of both natures, but they are locked into an endlessly antagonistic relationship. One aspect seems about to cancel the other out, they confront each other, struggle, but neither can win. This leads to the question: how can there possibly be a resolution to this battle? The answer is in human consciousness, in the realm of imagination. But it is important to understand that by imagination the surrealists do not mean unreality, for as Breton wrote, the imagination is that which tends to become real.

The next part will start to examine the surrealist imagination in more detail, just as soon as I write it!

Stuart Inman

Surrealism and Philosophy - Part I

I was asked to write a brief piece on the relationship of surrealism to philosophy. For anybody trying to understand these links, the most immediate problem is that the only book in English suitably titled “Surrealism and Philosophy”, has not been in print for many years. Once, however, you acquire a copy there is another problem, the author, Ferdinand Alquie, ignores the actual theoretical preoccupations of the surrealists and constructs a platonic model of surrealist theory instead! Admittedly it is difficult to avoid Plato and his influence once one starts to deal with philosophy in any way, but I have to suggest that in order to understand what the early surrealists were thinking, and how this affects the movement today, it is necessary to come to terms with what the surrealists actually thought and read rather than to project upon them whatever fantasies or ideological preconceptions one might have. I have decided, given the constraints of the newsletter, to break down my account into 3 parts. The first of which will deal briefly with the manifestos of Surrealism which must be the starting point for any decent account of the subject.

The Manifestos are certainly a product of their time, but nevertheless they do manage to articulate the principles of surrealism as it emerges, grows and develops. So, in the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), André Breton defines surrealism as: “Dictionary: Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.” (Breton, André: Manifestoes of Surrealism)

This early preoccupation with automatism was indeed the focus of surrealism in the early days, but its value has often been doubted and questioned by some surrealists. It was partly inspired by Freudian free-association, but should not be confused with it. This kind of automatism emerged from experiments made by Breton and Phillipe Soupault when they created a collaborative text which became the first surrealist book Le Champs Magnetique, or Magnetic Fields (1919).

Over the next few years the surrealist vision developed rapidly, even as the movement spread to several other countries, Belgium, Yugoslavia and Romania among others. By 1929, during a major crisis in the movement, and with a number of people leaving the movement and joining the circle around Georges Bataille, Breton felt the necessity to restate the position of surrealism in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1929): “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. Now, search as one may one will never find any other motivating force in the activities of the Surrealists than the hope of finding and fixing this point. From this it becomes obvious how absurd it would be to define Surrealism solely as constructive or destructive: the point to which we are referring is a fortiori that point where construction and destruction can no longer be brandished one against the other. It is also clear that Surrealism is not interested in giving very serious consideration to anything that happens outside of itself, under the guise of art, or even anti-art, of philosophy or anti-philosophy — in short, at anything not aimed at the annihilation of the being into a diamond, all blind and interior, which is no more the soul of ice than that of fire.”

This text shows Breton’s interest in the dialectics of Hegel. There has been some argument as to how much he understood Hegel, at least at this time, but I don’t think Breton is simply trying to reproduce Hegel’s ideas, but use the notion of a dialectical overcoming in order to arrive at this state beyond contradictions. Breton had already stated that “beauty shall be convulsive or it shall not exist” and was later to develop this poetically as “Beauty shall be convulsive-fixed, magic-circumstantial, erotic-veiled”. Each phrase locks together antithetical and antagonistic images that become something greater than the parts. The poetic and intellectual origin of this is Lautréamont’s Le Chants de Maldoror, and the famous phrase “as beautiful as the chance meeting upon an operating table between an umbrella and a sewing machine”. Effectively, these “convulsive-fixed” images undo binary logic and allow the mind access to new ways of thought. It is almost incidental that they should be expressed as a painting, drawing or poem. It could equally be expressed by action in the street.

In the next part want to go a bit further into the notion of convulsive beauty and also the surrealist engagement with politics. In the third part I shall focus on the principle of poetic analogy. Apologies for dodgy citations, but this was written off the top of my head, without my usual books to hand!

  
By Stuart Inman

Click here to read Surrealism and Philosophy Part II