Jodorowsky’s Dune

Was Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune, “the greatest movie never made?” The South African director Richard Stanley makes that claim in Frank Pavich’s documentary about the ill fated project, currently playing at Film Forum. Writers, filmmakers and artists often fear they are putting a curse on an idea by talking about it before actually undertaking the work. One wonders if the same thing can be said about talking too much about postmortems, in which an unsuccessful attempt has resulted in a stillbirth. In the case of Pavich's Jodorowsky's Dune, one wonders if it might have been better to let sleeping dogs lie. The documentary brings to light the  deficiencies of a millenarian project that might better have lived on a as a great mystery and question mark. Jodorowsky if you remember had achieved notoriety with El Topo which played midnights at Chelsea’s famed Elgin theater and other art house venues during the 70’s. Jodorowsky had come to film through the avant-garde directing productions of Beckett, Ionesco and others in Mexico before producing early films like The Holy Mountain, whose mixture of provocation and hallucinogenic spirituality appears, from the clips show in the documentary, to have combined the kitsch of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theater Company with the high strung camp of Warhol’s Factory. Jodorowsky shared Warhol’s infatuation with celebrity and had enlisted  Pink Floyd, who'd just recorded “The Dark Side of the Moon” album to do a sound track. Salvador Dali agreed to work only if he received the highest salary in Hollywood at $100,000 an hour and Orson Welles was cajoled with the promise hiring the chef from his most favorite restaurant in Paris to cook his meals. Dali asks Jodorowsky “did you ever feel like you lost a clock in the sand?” and Jodorowsky proudly recounts how he won Dali over by answering “I never found a clock, but I lost a lot." In Jodorowsky’s recounting Mick Jagger, at the height of his fame, walked towards him at a Paris social function and agreed to participate. An enormous storyboard was created with the help of Dan O’Bannon, a Hollywood special effects expert who’d worked on John Carpenter’s Dark Star and would later co-write the screenplay for Total Recall, Jean Giraud, the comic book artist known as Moebius, Chris Foss, a designer of science fiction book covers and H. R. Giger, the Swiss painter. Everything about Dune was larger than life (in his failed pitch to Hollywood Jodorowsky talked about a movie that might be 20 hours long) and hearing  Jodorowsky’s claim that he would start the movie with a panning shot of the universe that would outdo the opening sequence of Touch of Evil, you get the feeling that this is one case where Hollywood was right. David Lynch’s Dune was a failure, but who knows if Jodorosky’s Dune might not have been the science fiction version of Heaven’s Gate. At the end of the documentary, Jodorowsky’s says “I was raping Frank Herbert, but with love.” That’s no guarantee Frank Herbert would have liked it.

Venice Journal I: Roberto Matta and Sons

“Spitting” (1974) by Gordon Matta-Clark

The Fondazione Querini Stampalia is an inauspicious structure that houses great beauty inside, both architecturally (due to the contributions of the Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa) and in the works it displays. Now it’s exhibiting a show devoted to the Chilian artist Roberto Sebastian Matta and his two sons,  Gordon Matta-Clark and Pablo Echaurren. Roberto Matta was befriended by Dali and Breton and he brought the surrealist impulse to South America—something which uniquely complements, the literary work of Marquez and the magical realists. His son, Gordon Matta-Clark was associated with a whole new generation of avant-gardists amongst them the performance artist Joan Jonas and choreographer and dancer Trisha Brown, but when you see the photograph of his famed work “Splitting,” a conceptual piece in which a house is literally cut in two from l974 or his “Conical Intersect” (1975), a huge hole in a wall, you realize that the Matta-Clark the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. In this case a surrealist gave birth to a conceptualist. Echaurren is the only member of the family who is still alive and his “Wall of Fame and Shame” (2012), displayed in the current show, is a monumental panel that seems to create its own language out of language. Echaurren is now the sword bearer of the family. Is it oxymoronic to discuss a tradition of avant-gardism?

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.

In the Spanish Manner

The Spanish Manner: Drawings From Ribera to Goya at the Frick is like precognition. If one had been alive to see these works in the 16th or 17th Century, one would have been able to travel through a wormhole to the future. The prescient character of art and the way it reflects both the strivings and turbulence of the mind never ceases to amaze. Here we see the seeds of the Spanish temperament that produced Dalì’s “The Persistence of Memory” and Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou. All the ingredients of the surrealist nightmare are represented: sex, extreme aggression (the auto da fé), and the dichotomy between the sacred and the profane. “Studies of  Two Ears and a Bat”  by Jusepe de Ribera, with its inscription, “FULGET SEMPER VIRTUS” (Virtue Shines Forever), is hung next to a depiction of an enormous head covered with Lilliputian figurines. In Goya’s albums, which the curators describe as “a form of talking to himself,” there are drawings of women fighting, of a defrocked nun. “Beggar Holding a Stick” is a picture of poverty that foreshadows social satirists like Daumier. Like a graphic artist, Goya uses captions like “you are having a bad time” and “don’t fill the basket so full.” There is the torture of a man by Strappado, in which the shoulders are dislocated, and even the memory of horrible torture and mutilation in a drawing subtitled, “He Appeared Like This, Mutilated, in Zaragoza, Early in 1700.” “Tuti li Mundi” (Peepshow) is a garish drawing of a woman leering at the ass of a man looking into what is obviously a peep device. The Frick show is small in scale, but haunted by the future it augurs.

Perfect Nonsense

Mark Mitton is a meta-magician, a sorcerer’s apprentice. He is interested in how the mind makes patterns in a pre-conscious way. Magic is like mimesis—a revolution in the history of thinking. The magician, Mitton points out, must always understand what his subject is thinking. In this sense, his theme is epistemology. He teaches cause and effect to scientists and artists alike, and he is a figure in Manhattan’s nightlife, being a regular at Serge Becker’s exclusive club, The Box. Mitton wears a bow tie and suit and slicks his hair across his forehead like an English don. He’s a Haverford graduate who was born in Canada.

In one trick, he convinces the spectator a wine glass is falling through another, when it’s just a matter of timing and lowering. But is this a theory of mind, or a theory of the autonomic central nervous system? Consider the hypno-disk. During a recent performance at a Soho loft, he asked everyone to stare at an object that looks like one of the dream sequences designed by Salavador Dali for Spellbound, the classic Hitchcock film that also deals with illusion and reality. After staring into the twirling disc for thirty seconds, the audience was asked to turn their attention to Stuart Firestein, a biologist from Columbia who specializes in olfaction and has worked with Mitton in other performances that combine science and prestidigitation. Those in the audience who had never taken mushrooms or LSD experienced what seemed like a hallucination out of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, as their contracted eye muscles unwound and Firestein’s head appeared to explode—an unforgettable moment that would inevitably make its way into dreams.

There was another trick.  Mitton is very democratic and freely gives away selected secrets. Everyone got a bag. The sound of an imaginary ball falling, he revealed, can be created snapping fingers against the side of the bag. Mitton does for magic what Derrida did for literature. He deconstructs while remaining one step ahead of his patient, so that despite all reason, a large element of irrationality, and hence awe, still prevail. “It’s got to make perfect nonsense,” he said, invoking the famous quote about the structure of comedy. 

Emmanuel Radnitzky (1890-1976)

“The Destruction of the Object” (l923) is the show-stopper in the current Man Ray show at The Jewish Museum. The artist—born Emmanuel Radnitzky—had been jilted by his lover of three years, the legendary Lee Miller, and the resulting work, fired in the crucible of his heartbreak, made art-textbook history, a little like the image of the eye ball slit by a razor in Buñuel and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou (l929).  Radnitzky photographed Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Proust (on his deathbed), and Joyce. But it is the image of André Breton in front of De Chirico’s “L’Enigme d’une journée” that is the show’s second most stunning piece. Blend Surrealism with Futurism and what do you get? Something curiously naturalistic, like the metronome in “The Destruction of the Object”—a time capsule sending a nostalgic message back from the past, beyond love and loss.

Radnitzky was bar mitzvahed in Brooklyn, but eventually ended up in Paris in time for Dada and Surrealism, with its infatuation with the spontaneity of the photographic image. He moved to Hollywood, and then returned to Paris at a time when New York had emerged as the center of the art world. “All NewYork is Dada and will not tolerate a rival,” he said. The current exhibit, which includes Radnitzky's first film, Le Retour à la Raison (film stock, successions of geometric images, and a nude that all defy reason), is like a message in a bottle, washed up on some silent shore after bobbing solitudinously at sea.