Drawing Surrealism

Dali’s “Study for ‘The Image Disappears,'” Museum Associates/LACMA by Michael Tropea

The writer of a paper entitled “Catricide, Matricide and Magic” (Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Volume 44, Number 2) makes the following comment, “For me, writing is a kind of rite where I strive for a high level of unknowingness. I imitate tribal rituals, building myself up into a state of delirium, burning fires late into the night, exorcising demons, and drawing energy from a war dance of my own creation. Magical thinking is one of the things an analyst might try to disabuse his patient of in the course of the work, but magic, to may mind, is at the heart of artistic production.” Put another way rationality is nice, but it leads to inhibition and artists and writers alike partake of a paradoxical process by which they attempt to produce thoughtful work in a state that avoids the pitfalls of thought. Drawing Surrealism, currently on exhibit at the Morgan Library demonstrates the numerous techniques that artists of the surrealist school used to disinhibit their imaginations. Apollinaire’s calligraphy “La mandolin, l’oillet and le bamboo,” (1915-17) shows how words can be constructed in an image while Dali’s “Study for ‘The Image Disappears'" (1938) uses an image, Vermeer’s “Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window,”to turn the head of a woman into the eye of a bearded man in profile. Dali produced many of the dream sequences in Hitchcock’s Spellbound and this early drawing can still produce a nightmare like shock in the viewer. About automatic drawing, another in the pantheon of techniques employed by surrealist artists, including decalcomania (applying paper to another wet surface), frottage (rubbing), exquisite corpse (chance associating by a group) and collage, the curators quote Andre Masson as saying “the hand must be fast enough so that conscious though cannot intervene." As the current exhibition illustrates abstract expressionists like Rothko, Pollock and Kelly would be influenced by the liberties surrealists took with the pencil and pen as well as the brush. Lautreamont's famous description of a boy as “ beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella” has often been used to define surrealism, though no such aggregation of images is evidenced in the current show.

Social Notworking

In the current issue of Publishers Weekly, Andrei Codrescu, poet, NPR commentator, editor of Exquisite Corpse, learned gadfly and now Luddite, urges his readers, in the style of a biblical jeremiad, to “Leave cyberspace. Go back to Ohio!” (“Promote This! Forget Facebook,” PW, 1/31/11). “Oh, but woe is unto us!” he exclaims. “The social networks aren’t selling books! They are giving away stupid prose for free!” Being friendly is not the way to sell books, Codrescu argues. “Not only do you not sell books by being friendly, you won’t sell any because everyone in your ‘social network’ thinks they know you. Why buy your books, since you’ll tell them everything they want to know for free.” For Codrescu, Facebook is not even a good place for writers to search for material. “Even if a novelist, let’s say, mined a social network for stories, he’d find nothing but lies and fake grins. There would be no smells and no skin.” Codrescu’s point about the one-dimensional view of human personality perpetuated in the pages of Facebook and other social networks is something that is also discussed by Zadie Smith in her recent essay/review in The New York Review of Books of the film The Social Network and of Jaron Lanier’s book You Are Not a Gadget (“Generation Why,” NYRB, 11/25/10). Smith, who foreswore Facebook after just two months of status updates, writes, “When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Sensibility.” Bravo Andrei and Zadie! Let’s have a Fahrenheit 451 moment in which all the iPads and Kindles are burned, in which hedge funders short Facebook and in which friends parse each others’ essence through the complex characters in the novels they browse in their local independent bookstores.