surrealism - 2001 - Surrealism: Desire Unbound

Surrealism: Desire Unbound

Jennifer Mundy (ed.)

Princeton University Press

2001

349 pages

Surrealism: Desire Unbound is a collection of essays published to accompany an exhibition held at the Tate Modern London in Fall/Winter 2001 and in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in early 2002. The book and exhibition focuses on how love and the associated sense of desire (the sexual and the emotional) are, to the Surrealist artists and writers, liberatory forces unleashed through their poetry, image-making, and object-building practices.

This book contains twelve essays including some by major figures in the fields of art history and  art criticism such as Hal Foster and Dawn Ades (a major scholar of Surrealism) that focus on various aspects of desire in regard to the work of the Surrealist movement. Foster, just to note one example, discusses fetishism via Freudian theory as it may be read into Hans Bellmer’s bizarrely sexualized dolls.

Much of the book is made up of full-colour images of Surrealist works of art and accompanying straightforward expositions of how different Surrealists tackled this problem of desire.  Hence certain Surrealists are represented more than others, with their overlord, Andre Breton, as the most heavily represented of the group. One essay (Love of Books, Love Books by Vincent Gille), for example, noted how each of his major works of literature (L’Amour Fou, Nadja, Arcane 17) were inspired by a different love affair. Hans Bellmer’s doll sculptures are, of course, featured prominently in Desire Unbound, as are the gender play of Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp via the ‘Rose Selavy’ photographic persona (discussed, in particular, in Dawn Ades essay ‘Surrealism, Male-Female’. One section of the book titled Lives and Loves reads as celebrity gossip of the Surrealist avant-garde, detailing all of the love affairs and sexual relationships between different members of the group, and some of the art that came out of these pairings. The catalogue does highlight the contributions of women to the group although a LOT of the book is focused on men and their desires.

Sixties - 2012 - West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977

West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977

Elissa Auther & Adam Lerner (eds.)

Lucy Lippard (foreword)

University of Minnesota Press

2012

388 pages

Considering that Sixties America is supposed to have been a special time of swift and turbulent change, the canon of American art history of that period reflects very little of that milieu.  Where it does, for example, make a critical statement of the times: in Andy Warhol’s disaster series, for example, it says something that had already been stated more artfully by some media guru or another.  Editors Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner have compiled this volume of twenty chapters, each on a separate art movement or artist of the 1960s/70s counterculture, as a companion to an exhibition of the same title, shown from November 2011 - February 2012 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and from September 29, 2012 to January 6, 2013 at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.

Johnny, by Roger Anderson - 1972

The book is varied in its approach to its subject matter, with chapters on topics such as Drop City (and later, Libre) two dome-based communes that update some of the 19th century utopian society ethos, a-la Brook Farm, with modern technology and the creative ethos of the 1960s at its centre, and Crossroads Community, a farm set up on the land under a highway interchange in San Francisco (recalling a greened and livable version of JG Ballard’s Concrete Island). The book has a number of different sections but the art movements and practices discussed in West of Centre can be broken down into discussions of creative communities that, in a sense, lived their art, including discussions of the above communities, and also Drag Collectives and various art-making workshops and retreats.  

The second overarching type of art discussed in the chapters of West of Center are the more traditional graphic arts movements of the 1960s counterculture. These mostly focused on those artists who illustrated the radical publications of various liberation movements, most notably Emory Douglas, the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party and the premiere illustrator of that organization’s weekly newspaper. Another, lesser known, graphic artist for a radical cultural newspaper was Yolanda Lopez, who contributed drawings and collages to La Basta newspaper, a radical Spanish newspaper for California’s various Chicano communities. Additionally, this book includes chapters on feminist and Gay liberation artists as well as subversive ‘detourned’ advertisements that address political issues of the time.  In brief, psychedelia and the accompanying 60s tradition of rock posters are also investigated with some awesome reproductions of posters by the great psychedelic artist, Rick Griffith, featured in full colour.

It should be noted, even though it may be obvious from the title, that West of Centre only focuses on countercultural art and communities from the Western United States. Nothing from the eastern hippie Mecca of New York City that provided the setting, for example, for the great Hippie musical and film, Hair, is included. Nothing focusing on the imagery produced on the periphery of the many hardcore radical movements like The White Panthers or The Motherfuckers that operated out of eastern or midwestern northern cities like Detroit or Chicago. Then again, the San Francisco Diggers weren’t mentioned either.... Anyways, the book offers plenty of information and full colour images of countercultural creative groups that have held little presence in the numerous texts of 60s nostalgia, and helps to broaden the retrospective image of 1960s art beyond the set boundaries of tie-dye clothing, Abbie Hoffman’s TV antics, and the San Francisco Oracle.

by Emory Douglas

avant-garde, Lettrisme - book - 1985 - Letterism and Hypergraphics: The Unknown Avant Garde 1945-1985

Letterism and Hypergraphics: The Unknown Avant-Garde 1945-1985
Jean-Paul Curtay
Franklin Furnace
1985
78 pages

Letterism (in French, Lettrisme) is one of the forgotten avant-gardes of the 20th century, having been overshadowed by its predecessors, Dada and Surrealism, and its successor, the Situationist International led by Letterist defector, Guy Debord.  The Letterists were originally formed in 1942 with the writing of the Letterist Manifesto by Isidore Isou, a young Romanian poet who, like Tristan Tzara and Constantin Brancusi before him, left his home to make a name for himself in western Europe. Isou was originally focused on creating letter poetry in the tradition of the Dadaist, Raoul Hausmann, who wrote fsmbw (a title which also makes up the bulk of the poem’s content) in 1920. Isou, in his manifesto, put things under headings such as “The destruction of words for letters” and “the order of letters” revealing an interest in reducing language to its basic form, and creating a poetry that is necessarily typographical.  

The original Letterist movement did produce letterist poetry (were they mentioned in a novel I’ve read? I have a vague memory of them being referenced in a scene of a Canadian novelist, either by Mordecai Richler or Robertson Davies). They also became an anarchistic movement that pulled off pranks such as the Easter morning address at Notre Dame in Paris in 1950 where it was declared by Lettrist Michael Mourre that God is dead.  And they produced abstract films.  They were, in essence, a belated Dadaist unit operating during wartime and then the post-war period.  In addition to these films and letter poems produced by Isou, he also developed what he called ‘hypergraphics’, a mode of writing that freely mixes words with images, or even small symbols or signs set into a sequence to convey some kind of meaning. Letterism and Hypergraphics is a kind of small catalog to an exhibition, currated by Jean-Paul Curtay (who wrote the bulk of the text for this small volume), held in 1985, that features a number of hypergraphic works by Isou and his Letterist allies.

This catalog is significant for being one of the few (very few) English texts to discuss the Letterist movement in a sustained fashion.  Elsewhere, the Letterists are referenced largely as a lead-in to a more deeply focused discussion on Guy Debord and the Situationists.  Debord is certainly mentioned in Curtay’s catalog, but only as part of the timeline of Letterist activity, as much of the text focuses on Isou, his work AFTER the split with Debord, and the influence Isou has had elsewhere (one of the pieces in this book is called Hypergraphics and America). In addition to Curtay’s writing about the Letterist’s, their history and their work, the book contains numerous reproductions of hypergraphic drawings as well as still-shots from some of the experimental films produced by these artists. The text and all the images are printed in some kind of violet.  Because this is an exhibition catalog, it focuses pretty closely on the art of the movement, and it does not actually discuss things like the above mentioned Notre Dame fiasco.  

street art, Keith Haring - book - 2008 - Against All Odds: Keith Haring In The Rubell Family Collection

Against All Odds: Keith Haring in the Rubell Family Collection
Mark Coetzee (ed)
2008
287 pages

Keith Haring was one of the major artstars of the downtown NYC art scene of the 1980s.  









He achieved renown when he was quite young for his cartoony drawings and paintings which featured an idiosyncratic set of symbols such as the barking dog:

and his best known symbol, the radiating baby:

Haring’s work was the point of convergence for a number of clear influences, including Andy Warhol’s pop, NYC graffiti, abstract expressionism, and semiotic theory.  Although Haring was not really a part of the NYC graffiti subculture, he is known as one of a small number of artists who emerged out of graffiti practice, as he drew his forms over sheets of black construction paper that were placed by the transit people in blank subway-station advertising space.

Against All Odds is a catalog for an exhibition of works of art by NYC 1980s artstar Keith Haring.  All of the works featured in the exhibition were from the Rubell family, Don and Mara Rubell, who were great collectors of recent American art.  The exhibition was held at the Palm Springs Art Museum, in Palm Springs California, from November 8, 2008 to january 19, 2009 (click here to see some of the images shown), and was curated by Mark Coetzee, then the head curator for that gallery.  This catalog shows how closely Coetzee worked with the Rubell family as it includes a detailed interview between the curator and his benefactors, and it also demonstrates how close the Rubell’s were with Haring, as they express an intimate knowledge of the artist that includes many personal anecdotes.  They also describe owning a scroll that features all of the different symbols Haring uses in his art.  Coetzee also includes Jason Rubell’s (Don and Mara’s son) interview with Haring, recorded a few weeks before Haring died of complications from AIDS in early 1990 where the artist described his philosophies towards his art.

Coetzee’s catalogue also includes an essay about Haring by Robert Hobbs, a visiting professor of art history at Yale University.  Hobbs essay compares Haring to the French artist Fernand Leger in their aesthetics and their populist approaches to art.  Hobbs makes some, to me, uncomfortable observations regarding Haring’s subway drawings that sets it as street art that transcends graffiti, because it compels the viewer to contemplate its meaning... unlike street art which is, according to Hobbs, intended for the admiration of other graffiti artists.  Of course, all graffiti/street art has the potential to provide a viewer with things to think about, so do television commercials or the architecture of public housing or highway interchanges or anything else “cultural”. This kind of observation which reserves for “high art” the capability of setting the viewer into a contemplative state is a pitfall of art-world people who are already committed to the eternal contemplation of high-status objects themselves.  Ignoring Hobbs remarks about graffiti, however, is not difficult, and his main points about Haring, Leger and semiotic theory are quite interesting.


Coetzee's catalog contains full page colour images of all the works featured in the exhibition. Many of the works are self-referential and include photographs of the infant or child Haring. This book also includes images by those artists most closely associated with Haring, including works by Warhol and Haring's fellow 1980s NYC art-star graffiti transcendentalist, Jean-Michel Basquait. The English text in this book is accompanied by a parallel Spanish translation, and the book ends thorough bibliography of written works about Haring as well as an exhibition history of the artist.

avant-garde - book - 1985 - The Dada & Surrealist Word Image

The Dada & Surrealist Word Image
Judi Freedman & John C. Welchman
The MIT Press
1989
141 pages

The Dada & Surrealist Word Image is a hardcover catalogue for a travelling exhibition of Dada and Surrealist works of art.  The exhibition’s first location was the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where it was shown from June 15-August 27, 1989 before being transported to other locations around the United States and Europe.  

I think that the title of the catalogue makes its content, and the theme of the exhibition, quite clear.  Play with language featured prominently in the programs of the Dada and Surrealist movements who sought to unlock the liberatory potential of nonsense and incongruity in written and visual creative work.  The Dadaists focus on language is driven by a desire for nonsense and a will to break down the structures of control that edify culture.  The ‘word salad’, jumbles of words juxtaposed with jumbles of images, often in the photomontage, became the primary Dadaist mode of representing language in visual art.  Raoul Hausmann was a particularly strong proponent of this kind of work.

Raoul Hausmann - Elasticum (1920) 

More specific to this catalogue however, are detailed analyses of two of the most famous word/image works of these two movements.  Marcel Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q., from 1919:

Marcel Duchamp - L.H.O.O.Q. (1919)

a postcard reproduction of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa featuring a hand-drawn moustache and goatee over the famous portrait, and the letters LHOOQ written at the bottom, which, when pronounced out loud in French, are meant to sound as: "Elle a chaud au cul" which translates to English as, "She has a hot ass."  Duchamp was intentionally bringing bathroom stall humour to the eminent High Renaissance portrait.  

The other work of great importance to this exhibition was The Treachery of Images, the famous “this is not a pipe” painting of 1928 by the Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte (side note: Magritte is heavily represented in this text!).  This is the work that inspired Michel Foucault to investigate relationships between written language and its visual referrents, and is perennially used as a background or an introductory image to semiotic lectures and academic discussions on representation and reality.

Rene Magritte - The Treachery of Images (1928)

While the written component of this catalogue focuses on these particular works of art, or on the overarching concepts and strategies that these movements were working with, the actual catalogue component shows a variety of images from a wide swath of the Dada/Surrealism ranks.  Max Ernst, Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, Raoul Hausmann, Jean Crotti, Francis Picabia, and many more are represented.  There are also a number of works by figures such as Jean Cocteau, who were only tangentially connected to Surrealism, but whose visual works bear the influence of that movement’s ideas.  All of the images are in black and white, which isn’t so bad, since many of the works are drawings.  Also, the catalogue includes an interesting essay about Joan Miro and Magritte and critical theory (mostly Julia Kristeva’s) by University of California, San Diego professor John C. Welchman.