paula di bello - la disparition
Fish in Pocket: David Bate on Photography and Surrealism
Are you, or have you ever been, a card carrying Surrealist? No Ditto Lacanian? No Why do you carry a fish in your breast pocket? Ah, the fish! Well, it was made of plastic! The fish was used at the book launch as a form of 'memory object'. It is a bit like the idea of the surrealist 'dream-object' where an object operates as a 'likeness' for a mental image or dream. This is also an ancient Greek idea in teaching the art of memory. Esssentially this is the rhetorical strategy of using am image-object and to locate within that object certain points to remembered for a speech [very useful if you worked in the ancient Senate and had to give long speeches!] So, for example the mouth of the fish, used to remind me that it is the organ for speech, as a way to remind me to thank the people who enabled me to speak by publishing the book, etc. So you see, in this sense, the fish was not a fish.
Are you the Anti-Krauss? What a great question! No, she is! Rosalind Krauss totally re-orientated the study of surrealism in the 1980s. Her idea was that you could understand all surrealism, or at least its visual works, by thinking them through the logic of photography. In some sense this is true. The surrealists are certainly hostile to the idea of mimetic representation. So if photography was the dominant form of mimetic representation, that might be an interesting way to examine surrealism. My problem with this is that surrealism used photography in different ways, as mimetic and as, in various ways, anti-mimetic. This is where my book starts out. It considers the fact that the surrealist use of photography, as a media, cannot be reduced to an aesthetic definition, which is what I think she tries to do: looking for the ‘essence’ of a surrealist photographic image. The other point to make about Krauss’s writings on surrealism is that this whole argument she makes about re-centring the study an ‘art’ like surrealism through photography can be read allegorically as a symptomatic argument about the contemporary art of the day. It is obvious to me that her argument is being made a t precisely the same time that photography – in the form of ‘post-modern’ New York artists using photography, like Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger, et al – was talking centre stage in contemporary art. In this respect, Krauss’s turn away from painting to photography represents the rejection of her own Greenbergian modernism. But what she takes to the debate on photography and surrealism is precisely the emphasis on formalist argumentation. This brings some interesting points out, but what IS lost in it is any sense of the historical location of the images and ideas that she discusses. Consequently, there are people who think that George Bataille was a key figure of surrealism, when, in fact, he was never actually a member of the surrealists. I do not wish to be pedantic, or even really criticize Krauss for all this, after her work brought about a renewed interest in surrealism. But surely, the difference between history and formalist criticism needs to be articulated somehow.
INTERVIEW
Fish in Pocket: David Bate on Photography and Surrealism Are you, or have you ever been, a card carrying Surrealist? No Ditto Lacanian? No Why do you carry a fish in your breast pocket? Ah, the fish! Well, it was made of plastic! The fish was used at the book launch as a form of 'memory object'. It is a bit like the idea of the surrealist 'dream- object' where an object operates as a 'likeness' for a mental image or dream. This is also an ancient Greek idea in teaching the art of memory. Esssentially this is the rhetorical strategy of using am image-object and to locate within that object certain points to remembered for a speech [very useful if you worked in the ancient Senate and had to give long speeches!] So, for example the mouth of the fish, used to remind me that it is the organ for speech, as a way to remind me to thank the people who enabled me to speak by publishing the book, etc. So you see, in this sense, the fish was not a fish.
CONTINIUE
Are you the Anti-Krauss? What a great question! No, she is! Rosalind Krauss totally re-orientated the study of surrealism in the 1980s. Her idea was that you could understand all surrealism, or at least its visual works, by thinking them through the logic of photography. In some sense this is true. The surrealists are certainly hostile to the idea of mimetic representation. So if photography was the dominant form of mimetic representation, that might be an interesting way to examine surrealism. My problem with this is that surrealism used photography in different ways, as mimetic and as, in various ways, anti-mimetic. This is where my book starts out. It considers the fact that the surrealist use of photography, as a media, cannot be reduced to an aesthetic definition, which is what I think she tries to do: looking for the ‘essence’ of a surrealist photographic image. The other point to make about Krauss’s writings on surrealism is that this whole argument she makes about re-centring the study an ‘art’ like surrealism through photography can be read allegorically as a symptomatic argument about the contemporary art of the day. It is obvious to me that her argument is being made a t precisely the same time that photography – in the form of ‘post-modern’ New York artists using photography, like Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger, et al – was talking centre stage in contemporary art. In this respect, Krauss’s turn away from painting to photography represents the rejection of her own Greenbergian modernism. But what she takes to the debate on photography and surrealism is precisely the emphasis on formalist argumentation. This brings some interesting points out, but what IS lost in it is any sense of the historical location of the images and ideas that she discusses. Consequently, there are people who think that George Bataille was a key figure of surrealism, when, in fact, he was never actually a member of the surrealists. I do not wish to be pedantic, or even really criticize Krauss for all this, after her work brought about a renewed interest in surrealism. But surely, the difference between history and formalist criticism needs to be articulated somehow.
Éliane: A Situationist Emblem
David Evans
Guy Debord's Panégyrique 2 (Paris,1997) is mainly a book of photographs, selected and captioned by the author. Published posthumously, it is a visual complement to Panégyrique 1 (Paris, 1989), an autobiographical celebration of Debord's loves, including people, places and alcohol. (Verso brought out an English language edition of the first volume in 1991, and combined the two in a new edition, published in 2004.) The second volume begins: The reigning deceptions of the time are on the point of causing us to forget that truth may also be displayed by means of images. An image that has not been deliberately separated from its meaning can add great precision and certainty to knowledge. Nobody has ever cast doubt on this until these last few years.
An Evening in the Mau Mau
Freddy was improvising percussion on a chair with a box of matches, singing plaintive songs Le ‘rymt’ me dechire he sang. They were good evenings. Marianne was dead drunk. Her lover had been unfaithful to her again. Barratin, once a sailor, was telling enormous lies to Pierre and Gerda. Jean Michel drifted from woman to woman. He said it avoided jealousy. (Ed Van der Elsken, Love on the Left Bank, London, 1956)
This doesn't sound like the Debord of legend who supposedly dismisses all images as liars, disingenuous accomplices of spectacular power. Yet the message is clear, unambiguous: he rejects the pervasive contemporary scepticism about the possibility of photographic truth. One of Debord's favourite forms of picture editing involves the combination of modern photographs and pre-modern quotations to create something like a baroque emblem. The latter was a scripto-visual form of allegory, widespread in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The image was usually composite, containing various elements with allegorical meaning; the text tended to be divided into a title (generally a motto) and a moral comment. Often the individual designs were presented in emblem books whose specific nature is conveyed well in the German word Lesebilder (images to be read). Debord, too, chooses photographs that have allegorical potential, and he matches them with quotations that are intended to be instructive, though without the Christian moralizing associated with the baroque precedent.
A private person
"A private person that those who write history will never know, or will never find worthy of mention. Yet it is this private person which makes it known whether we deserve honour or blame." François de Motteville, Mémoires. (Guy Debord, Panegyric, London 2004)
The above remarks help clarify Debord's use of Ed Van der Elsken's photograph in Panégyrique 2. The photographer is never credited. Neither is Love on the Left Bank (Amsterdam and London, 1956), the photo-novel in which the image originally appeared. And no mention of Éliane Papaï, the 'extra' in Love on the Left Bank who was also Debord's lover. In other words, information is deliberately withheld, preventing a conventional contextualization of the image. Moreover, Debord radically crops the image, removing the background detail of a night at the Mau Mau Club. Cumulatively, these tactics facilitate the reduction of the photograph into an emblematic image: The Scowl, perhaps, or Liberty misguiding the People. Yet the overall meaning of the emblem depends on the addition of a quotation from the 18th Century memoirist François de Motteville: A private person that those who write history will never know, or will never find worthy of mention. Yet it is this private person which makes it known whether we deserve honour or blame. Debord's fascination with the baroque goes beyond an interest in emblems, it must be stressed. Rather, he sees the baroque as an alternative to the 'false eternal present of the spectacle', argues Anselm Jappe. Jappe continues:
One of the spurs to the baroque sensibility was an acute awareness of human fragility with respect to time. Debord for his part gave the Situationist project a kind of existential underpinning: the acceptance of the passage of time as opposed to traditional art's reassuring fixation of time and embrace of the eternal. An acceptance of history, then, combined with a rejection of conventional approaches to historical understanding, like the focus on great men or the deployment of simplistic teleologies. There is no forward march of History in the name of Liberty, Proletarian Emancipation or anything else. Rather, there are merely exemplary moments, necessarily transient, when the presumptions of the ruling order are challenged. For Debord, such a moment occurs in Paris in the early fifties, when he and his companions start to cause trouble. That moment is the theme of this photo emblem. The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn, an Event. But the face of Éliane Papaï is a Situation.
Rut Blees Luxemburg - Liebeslied / My Suicides
Liebeslied / My Suicides is a ground-breaking collaboration between the artist Rut Blees Luxemburg, the philosopher Alexander Garcia Düttmann, the composer Paul Clark and the choreographer Tom Sapsford It is an experimental opera, which investigates the relationship between an artist, a writer and a lover. The Writer explores her complex intimacy with the Lover by absorbing and articulating the images of the Artist, but as the opera develops the identities, conspiracies and desires of the protagonists become increasingly entangled. The very process of creation, of seduction and self-destruction, is at the heart of the opera. world premiere at the ICA 21st, 22nd and 23rd October 2004
