Literature and Arts C-56: Putting Modernism Together
Final Study Guide, 2006
Index
Lectures…………………………………….……………….p. 3
Paintings………………………………….…………………p. 18
Musical Pieces……………………………………………..p. 38
Performances………………………………………………p. 48
Readings…………………………………………………….p. 52
Lectures
October 31st:
Cubism as anti-impressionism
-ocular anti-mental art v. ocular, extraordinarily mental art
- one is objects as they are seen, the other is objects as they are thought
- Picasso’s work breaks man, or objects down into components and reorganizes them in
new ways
- Cubism is a technique for giving maximal information—i.e. substituting a compound
eye for a monocular eye
- sought to eliminate subjectivity from art, as Bertrand Russell sought to do the same
from philosophy
- Braque’s “Nude” is a cubist painting with an additional structure, seeming to envelop
the naked woman
- Braque wanted to destroy the delineation between ground and object
- Picasso and Braque thought of themselves as the Wright brothers of painting (they had
learned how to fly)
- Dionysiac elements of cubism: emphasizes the primal oneness of experience; mutes the
visual and thus appeals to the depth of the human; (Braque’s Harbor)
- Picasso’s Nude, takes the indeterminancy of Dionysius and creates a complex visuotacile image, taken from Apollo
- Analytic cubism is the breaking down of objects into separate components, synthetic
cubism brings pieces of objects together, sometimes from separate materials, to create a
super-image, includes radical decontextualizing (Dionysian)
- Cubism hopes to give volume to flat canvas
Apollinaire’s poem “La mandoline, l’oeillet, et le bamboo” hopes to give volume
to words, a textual cubism
Nov 2nd:
IMAGISM
• Getting at what is actually there; a collection of impressions (Hume, Nietzche)
impressionism
• Reality as transcendental forms outside the realm of the material world (Plato)- cubism
• Reality as physical science--cubism
Cubism created multidimensional forms; sound, touch, sight
Imagism-- did not shape their text like Apoliinaire did; what happens if you strip language down;
use no superfluous words; arrive at some stark icon of the subject
Picasso and Braque suppress color in order to get at some jagged truth of form itself; imagists try
to get rid of extraneous words to get at some hard irreducible fact
What is the minimum unit of poetry, the equivalent to the atom? A symbol
Pound did not like the idea that symbols have traditional meanings; did want to leave us with
conventional representations but to de-familiarize; not interested in the anchor as an emblem of
hope, but in how the anchor feels when it is dropped into the ground; interested in the physical
presence like cubism
Poetry has to do with gravity, weight and heft; Pound dislikes impressionists for deconstructing
physical objects into a haze of sensory impressionism; he wanted a dense feeling of the presence
of the physical object; like Braque, who thought he could paint an absolute object, Pound
thought he could capture in writing a permanent image
An image does not stand for anything outside of itself, it is not symbolism or association
A slam at Yeats; a hawk is just a hawk; need to know little about hawks to read a poem about
them
A word is just a placeholder for something hard and heavy
Pound was interested in pictorial abstractions; an abstract movie; a limit in reduction, alleged
that avant-garde painting has shown him how to be a better poet; imagism is like an abstract,
non-representative painting
• "the apparition of these faces in the crowd peddles on a web black bough"; the apparition
is both faces on a subway platform and peddles on a bough; putting these two things
together to try to find the absolute thing underneath
• Armor and pine tree-- different planes lying on top of one another; names/nouns produce
the poem atom
• Pound's hero was Gauster-Brzesta; the sculpture is bi-representational; hovering over two
cylinders
Pound, who also worked as an artist to make money was interested by the triangle, which
replaces the face of Gaultier's sculpture, the triangle moves toward the organism, the geometry
gives a certain monumentality to the dancer, and the dancer gives a certain vitality to the
geometry; the top part bulges outwards, has spherical quality
The nouns of the poems are meant merely to move toward something, like the triangle in
Gautier's sculpture
Pound replaced the word imagism by the word Vorticism
Vortigraphs were made by looking through a vortiscope; they have certain vertigo, whirlwind,
vortex qualities that draw you in, more so than picasso or Braque's work do; spinning mirrors,
kaleidoscope
Hilda Doolittle;s poem "Oread" as the ideal vorticist poem; transition from ocean to mountain,
static things like lines of force or moving things like pines on a mountainside are vorticist poem
is about a vortex, an eddy
Energies concentrate on a point, the brain as a clod of semen, sculpture of Pound's head like a
penis (Dionysus) sexual energy as the ultimate creative impulse
The main effect is from putting two opposite objects next to each other, weird nouns, hard shapes
and distinct lines juxtaposed in eerie ways
Drawin quote "assumed punctuated equilibrium", not gradualism to support his ideas
A cubist painting, image of the guy at the metro is digital, poetry is the compromise of the
language of intuition, makes you continually see the physical thing and prevent you from gliding
through an abstract process; Hume emphasizes reason, as the whole point of art is to find the
physical
November 7th: Stravinsky, “Rite of Spring”
KEY IDEAS FROM THIS LECTURE:
..PRIMITIVISM IN VISUAL ART (ROUSSEAU) AND MUSIC
..“RITE OF SPRING”: SHOCKING CHOREOGRAPHY AND CUBIST ELEMENTS
• Primitivism: desire to capture the corporal; sexual desire; sexual anxiety
o In painting/writing, primitivism often has a scary undertone: Gaugin, Picasso,
D.H. Lawrence
o In music, primitivism is less dark, less terrifying. Applying research on primitive
folksongs to new use
• Bartok: Combines rhythmic elements of Russian folk music with savage, barbaric quality
not found in folk music. Combines the ultra-primitive with ultra-modern.
• The Law of Parity: Every value system presupposes a counter-value system exactly equal
Rite of Spring:
• 1913 Premiere in Paris, “gold standard of artistic scandal” (riot in the theatre!)
• Djagalev’s ballet company, starred Nijinsky
• Mme. Hugo’s sketches from the premiere are our only clues as to what it looked like
• The work opens with bassoon solo (Stravinsky quoting a folksong)
• Opening round dance: plodding, clumping, heavy choreography
• The ballet erases distinction between animate/inanimate, human/animal
• Lots of time dedicated to lethargy of winter, with short bursts of energy mixed in
• Dancing: hunched up, closed, land jumps flatfooted..conscious opposite of classical
ballet
• ..Riots during premiere were reaction to this unconventional choreography
• Cubist aspects of “Rite”: Finale (danse sacrale, dancer is dancing herself to death) is very
cubist (same tune in different keys, tempos layeredall at the same time... a controlled sort
of chaos), based on folk technique (“heterophony”)
• Difficult meters in “Rite of Spring”: Nijinsky essentially ignored the music and had
dancers listen to him counting back stage. But Nijinsky also paid too much attention to
the music by choreographying to each and every beat..awkward, unnatural effect. At
premiere, Nijinsky showed inability to adapt. Stravinsky later decided that he wanted
“Rite” to be just a concert hall performance and no longer a staged ballet.
Henri Rousseau
• Primitivist painter
• “Snake Charmer”
• the jungle: uses common house plants (philodendrons) to depict savage, primitive
landscapes in his art ..similar technique to Stravinsky
Lecture: November 14th : Mann and Nietzsche
KEY IDEAS: THE COMPLEX RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DEATH IN VENICE AND
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. SUMMARY OF DEATH IN VENICE.
Mann, Death in Venice:
• Nietzschian ideals present: Dionysus and Apollo are characters that propel the dialectic
• Novella is shaped by music (Wagner died in Venice 1883)
• Seems to be a critique of Wagner: something grotesque about modern people dressed up
in Wagnerian costume...protagonist, Auschenbach, seems to be anti-Wagner
• Book adapts fabled story of Pantheus to modern day (Euripedes).. many characters are
very similar to eachother (like a mad house)
• Homosexuality is “whispered” throughout the work
Structure:
1. Munich cemetery, Auschenbach decides to go East
2. Catalog of Auschenbach’s career
o Obsessively Apollonian body of work
o They are all things that Mann considered writing
o Homosexuality pervades (St. Sebastian, Frederik the Great)
3. Boat approaches Venie, thinks of Von Clotten (gay poet)
o A push toward boys; destruction of Auschenbach’s created persona
o ..Apollo is gay
o Lots of mirroring with Chapter 1 between pilgrim and elderly
o Eg Oarsman of the gondola is another Dionysian (similar to pilgrim)
o Second half of 3. is Auschenbach falling in love with a boy..but becomes less beautiful
(jagged teeth)
o Loosening of Kadzio, of Auschenbach’s resolve, of Auschenbach’s muscles (hands hang
limp, gesture of welcome)
4. Rhetorical flourish, last ditch effort to regain control
o Apollonian writing at end
o Auschenbach says “I love you”
o This section concerns literature/style, like Ch. 2 (lack of plot)
5. Like Ch. 3, more loosening, cholera arrives.
o Baritone is a composite of all previous Dionysian characters.
o Mann’s abyss seems superficial, shallow, a caricature (Apollonian world doesn’t fall
apart when a man falls in love with a boy)
..Albright suggests that Nietzsche would not have liked Death in Venice: Dionysus is
trivialized and Auschenbach rationalizes self-consciousness. Death in Venice is not a
triumph of the Dionysian art
o Ultimately, Auschenbach is punished for his sins by death. He judges himself all the way
up to his death.
• Venice as a threshold: water/land, real/unreal
• Threshold between male/female
• Music: lots of Italian pop music, but also lots of German (novella inspired Mahler’s
death)
• Mahler’s 3rd symphony is very Nietzschian (4th movement is based on Nietzschian
poem)
• As War approaches, we move towards more modest/objective art. More violent
branches of Modernism are muted.
November 16: Neoclassicism
Neoclassicism as the anti-expression:
- After WWI, expressionism lost momentum; the War was like the “expressionist spectacle
to end all expressionist spectacles” with its unprecedented violence and bloodiness, and
around 1919 resistance to expressionism was widespread, Stavinsky’s Pulcinella,
Cocteau’s Cock and Harlequin, Satie’s Parade.
- As a movement caught in one dialectical extreme, expressionism presupposed an antiexpressionism movement embracing the “modest, spare, simple, linear, sturdy, even
ordinary” as embodied by the music of Erik Satie
- Cocteau compared art to study things; art as a chair, not music one swims in, or music of
clouds and waves, or hammocks and gondolas, but music as a house that I can live in.
Neoclassicism crystallized: New Objectivity:
- Music as environment, wallpaper; Satie wanted audiences to talk amongst themselves
rather than listening to his “furniture” music
- Art considered as a physical object
- T.E. Hulme’s 1911 “Romanticism and Classicism” – outlines Romanticism as messy and
always reaching for the infinite, and instead advocates Classicism which is neat, hard,
and dry
- German’s dubbed this art movement as “New Objectivity” (neue Sachlichkeit), where art
was not a vessel of human feeling, inner psyche, and spirituality, but a self-stranding
object
- Highlights of Franz Roh’s 1925 comparison of Expressionism with successor:
Expressionism Post-Expressionism
ecstatic objects plain objects
dynamic static
loud quiet
monumental miniature
warm cool to cold
thick coloration thin layer of color
roughened smooth, dislodged
like uncut stone like polished metal
leaving traces pure objectification
expressive deformation of objects harmonic cleansing of objects
rich in diagonals rectangular to the frame
primitive civilized
- Albright highlights how New-Objective cancels out the creative process and just exists.
This makes New Objective works arbitrary and enigmatic; they are impervious to
interpretation
- Example: the spare, clean-lined architecture of Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus
- Boredom (with art) as theme of New Objectivity;
Defamiliarization of the World
- Embodied by Pound’s “make it new” challenge; try to restore novelty to art before it
became dated, familiar and boring; depict “ordinariness of things, and yet in such a way
that this matter-of-fact seemed detached, slightly marvelous”. They tried to breathe new
life into ordinary things; glorification of the ordinary.
- Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way (1913) – depicts habit as a villain that disenchants and
desensitizes us to our world; Proust is not a new objectivist, but vilification of habit is.
- Vladimir Nabokov, “A Guide to Berlin” (1925) – imagines a car as it will seem in 2120;
“every trifle will be valuable and meaningful” – outline attempt to portray ordinary
objects as they will be reflected in 2120, embodies neoclassicism. Perceive ordinary as
extraordinary, like an artifact in a glass case.
- Viktor Shklovsky, in Theory of Prose (1925) – argues that we live a shorthand,
abbreviated life; our brains “generalize” the world and reduce it into “prepackaged”
perceptions. The purpose of art is the “estranging” of the world, the defamiliarization of
ordinary things. Art should reintroduce complexity, tension, abrasiveness, and grit; it
should be hard to understand like a representation of a person as cubes.
Stravinsky as the Great Estranger of Music:
- Stravinsky abandoned his extravagant style of his ballets before the War: The Firebird
(1910), Petrushka (1911), The Rite of Spring (1913), and claimed to invent Musical
Neoclassicism.
- Writes that music is “powerless to express anything”
- Etude for Pianola – objectify music by eliminating the human performer (pianola – player
piano) who will naturally interpret music and add certain rhythmic and dynamic elements
- Pulcinella task was to defamiliarize, de-expressionize the familiar, expressive music of
Giambattista Pergolesi – aggressive assimilation of past, stealing old themes, like a game
to see how little he could change in Pergolesi and get away with it – expand
orchestration, yet keep harmony, melody, rhythm the same; remarkable how little
Stravinsky changes some parts, e.g. Vivo which was a cello sonata by Pergolesi, is played
by the trombones and double-basses. He makes it different by increasing the volume.
- Translates Pergolesi for the jazz age, a new, “hip spiffy” Pergolesi
- Primarily rely on “cool sonorities” of wind instruments
- Flatten past with its irony; Stravinsky incorporated Se tu m’ami a tune attributed to
Pergolesi, but in fact by Alessandro Parisotti in 1885 – lose authenticity of history
- Eliot – “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal” – Stravinsky – “Good composer
does not imitate he steals” – theft as connection between individual artists and the “mind
of Europe.” Eliot suggests that the poet who depersonalizes himself will be most able to
enhance the “mind of Europe”. Stravinsky agrees; he claims to “perceive the presence of
the past and the simultaneity of the entire universal intellectual inheritance” – he claims
the whole musical mind of Europe as his own; his power of control beneath the cold,
clear Pulcinella.
Eliot’s Withered Stump of Time:
- Where Stravinsky sees this “mind of Europe” to be exhilarating, dynamic body of
intellectualism and art, Eliot considers the 20th Century as “a withered stump of time”
- “Gerontion” – example of what it is to be the senescent mind of Europe, incorporate
European history, but depiction as sick, like Europe in a Tuberculosis war, Jewish usury
(Eliot was anti-Semitic),
- Gerontion is a negative inversion of a human, defined through absence not presence.
Europe as suffering from Alzheimer’s, Europe has deviated into perversion, impotence,
senile dementia .
November 21: DADA
Birth of Dada:
- Dada was born in Zurich cabaret in 1916, and was nearly finished by early 1920’s
- International European movement, extended to the US by Duchamp.
- Term “Dada” comes from Tristan Tzara, who claimed that he invented the term Dada, a
French word meaning hobby-horse found “by accident in the Larousse dictionary”
- Dada was anti-Expressionist, anti-logical, anti-everything – an “art” movement that
embodied nihilism, clear extensions of WWI and the meaningless world view that
stemmed from mass slaughter and flying viscera; thus it adopts a violent tone. Art is
dead, dying. Aggressiveness of Dada.
- Francis Picabia’s Manifesto Cannibal Dada, “Dada is nothing, nothing, nothing” –
Picabia would erase drawings on a blackboard
- Hugo Ball dressed up in “blue silly suit” reciting unintelligible, nonsense poems, full of
made-up words – he, like his friend Kandinsky, rejected all representation, yet claimed to
search for a kind of essence of things.
- This search for the essential evolves into the 1917 Dada exhibition “Negro Music and
Dances” – avant-garde circling back to pre-civilized Africa in a search for meaning?
Convergence of “hypermeaningful” and “unmeaningful”,
- Dada poetry caught in network of extremes
- Ball’s notion of Dionysian desires too intense for language, veer into the nonsensical
shows the presence of Nietzsche.
- Or is Dada poetry so absent of any meaning or effect that it is listless and dead; the
morbidity of language; the interchangeableness of any two nouns; the devaluation of
language – the deliberate pleasure of how capitalist society drains all meaning from
words – the rebuilding of the Tower of Babel and delight at the confusion of language
- Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument for the third international - an expression of the Tower of
Babel?
- Dada as anti-expressionism; a parody to everything that tries to be meaningful
- Tzara outlines Dada’s realism, in a world without meaning. He sees logic and science as
illusions, the foolish belief that humans understand the world around them. He sees art
that inspires beauty and clarity as a dishonest, offense to reality, which is all discord and
meaninglessness. Thus, Dadas are presenting a sincere image of what human beings are:
tin men and scarecrows.
Dada Painting
- Dada paintings incorporating everyday things – praise Picasso’s synthetic cubism, this is
an emancipation from “art’s” status as a copy, and makes Dada works have the same
“dignity” of actual objects
- Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes called Dada a cancer that causes cancer. Dada as the
uncontrollable proliferation of cells was good Dada because it accurately represents
human life: cancer.
- Frequent analogy in painting to cells. Reduction of life to unicellular level was theme of
Dada because it turns humanity and ennobled civilization into tiny dots and meaningless
subunits.
- Schwitters, Merzbild 133 - Here we have newsprint, a label for cough medicine, a tram
ticket, etc. all stuck together– “a collage of modern life’s dreck” – he understood that if
Dada stripped down art to nothingness, then everything became art. Art became diffused
with whole world environment. The boundary between art and life vanishes, e.g.
Schwitter’s Merzaule in the Merzbau, Hanover 1923
- Marcel Duchamp as forerunner of Dada with his “ready-mades” –toilet fountain;
Mustache on the Mona Lisa;
Dada Music
- Duchamp’s musical compositions composed of randomly generated musical fragments,
displayed without consideration of rhythm or instruction about whether parts should be
played together or independently.
- erratum musicale - asks the performer to compose his own music by running a toy train
with open boxcars directly beneath a funnel; various balls, with numbers representing
musical notes, are crammed into the funnel; the note-balls fall into the boxcars, and their
sequence, from engine to caboose, determines the music. It is an attack on everything
“musical”, a pure state of anomie and apathy.
- Schwitter’s Ursonate (Primal Sonata, 1921-32) – speech music, random words inserted
into strict form of a rondo. This highlights the contrast between disorderly phonemes and
symmetrical rigidity of rondo’s form; counterpoint between total destruction of some
rules and total submission to others – Ribble.
Nov. 28 Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex (1927)
Listen to Stravinsky / Cocteau: Oedipus Rex (1927).
Look at de Chirico, The Archeologists (1927), on the website.
Themes:
P Decadent Neoclassicims: decadence as the use of functional elements as non-functional
ornaments
P Nietzsche’s Dionysis gone gaga.
P The fracturing of the stage into mini-stages
P Greek Tragedy emasculated or turned into cabaret
P Leonard Bernstein on Oedipus Rex: Handel meets hoochie-koochie.
P Adaptation of the tragic ritornello from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (1762).
Main Points from Lecture:
P Nietzsche/Wagner’s concept of music
o beneath the mind’s categories of time and space, beneath all the precisions and
divisions that articulate our vision of reality, there lies a delirium, a vertigo, a
void, a plenum
P Stravinsky’s concept of music
o a kind of torture device, a machine for pounding, crushing, dismembering.
Attacked human subject through motor-driven devices, mechanical warfare
o Death all throughout his music
P Stravinskykills off the language, the music, even the concept of drama itself => Oedipus
Rex is indeed a post-mortem opera, a sort of autopsy of a Greek tragedy.
P the text is in Latin => The notion of detaching language from normal speech
o Strict language not to illuminate the strictness of his Christian beliefs but the
illuminate the strictness and dogmatism of Christianity
o he wanted a text that could be heard purely as phonetic, that is, musical, material;
by writing in a language that scarcely any listener could understand, he minimized
the troublesome and distracting semantic elements of language
P the progress from monstrum meaning wonder to monstrum meaning monster summarizes
the play’s whole development in a single pun, a pun possible only in Daniélou’s Latin
P Stravinsky uses extinct musical means
o Schoenberg’s twelve tone method (equality of every note; can’t hear A again until
all the other notes are sound)
o Stravinsky was from Russia and wanted to exhibit his estrangement from Western
music
o Stravinsky is making a merzbild of archetype, classical music => Dada!
o Stravinsky uses Dada to negate his material to “deal with Dionysis”
o The harmonic movement from a tonic minor chord to a tonic 7th-chord in the
major like in Handel
P The notion of a stage fractured into a number of private mini-stages, each inhabited by
one character, he happily dismembered the stage, just as his music sometimes seems to
tear the characters limb from limb. => suggests just how far Stravinsky was willing to go
toward a Cubist tessellation of the concept of drama: human lobster?
P His meters made allusions to classical poetry
P The sheer Surreal WRONGNESS of the music to the text is Stravinsky’s way of telling
us that Jocasta, like Oedipus, lives in an unreal world, a fool’s world.
Nov. 30 Surrealism
Look at Surrealist paintings on the website.
Read André Breton: “Discourse on the Paucity of Reality”–11 pages.
Themes:
P games with disorientation and false space--why Surrealist paintings,
P unlike Dada, have horizon lines
P Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto”: French psychic automatism
P Simulations of mental disease.
P Magritte’s The Conquerors (1925) and acephalism.
Main Points from Lecture
P Giorgio de Chirico: surrealist before surrealism existed
o The Archaeologists (1927) the knob-headed archaeologists have fragments of
classical antiquity tucked away inside their torsos.
P Surrealism = Neoclassicism: a way of re-using the past, not for the sake of glorifying the
achievement of the past, not for the sake of aligning the present with the high standards
of the past, but for the sake of flaunting in your face the degradation of the past, the
pastness of the past
P Surrealism, to Krenek, is simply entropy in visual plastic.
P Surrealism begins as an attempt to make art more real than reality, super-real, by means
of renouncing representation in favor of Cubist-like dissection, dislocation
o Apollinare calls “analysis-synthesis.”
P Writer André Breton, organized Surrealism
o preached complete artistic freedom, and yet he organized Surrealism with ruthless
totalitarian efficiency, expelling from the movement anyone who displeased him
P Most Surrealists were just old Dadaists (e.g. Max Ernst)
P Dalí, André Breton, The Great Anteater: Dalí and Breton didn’t get along so well towards
the end.
P Surrealism redefined chaos not as a procedure generated by and pertinent to the outer
world, but as a procedure generated by and pertinent to psychology
P Breton, a great definer of terms, published a definition of Surrealism in the Surrealist
Manifesto:
o SURREALISM, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express,
either verbally, or 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
P Breton attacked similarity and differences; Breton had special procedures for cultivating
irrational thought. One procedure was the calculated disabling of the mind’s ability to
make discriminations between similarities and differences
o this absence of rational insight is the whole point of the comparison.
P “the universe resembles nothing . . . the universe is something like a spider or a gob of
spit.” - Georges Bataille
P figures of speech can be generated simply by abutting any two nouns, without regard to
whether this abutting creates what is usually called insight.
P many experiments with involuntary composition, such as automatic drawing, in which
your hand moves across the page while you’re not looking at it, not thinking about what
you’re doing, preferably not even in a waking state.
P Surrealism differs from Expressionism, in that Expressionism measures its distortions
against a norm, bears witness to the power of the normal => Surrealism has no sense of
the virtue of waking
P The cultivation of mental disease is an explicit part of the Surrealist aesthetic.
P Each of the Surrealists had his own specialty among the various mental diseases. Dalí’s
was paranoia
P Dalí was an exhibitionist, and determinedly publicized his odd sex life: his hateful
obsession with his mother, his impotence, his fascination with masturbation. His
paintings look as if disturbing sexual thoughts had themselves deranged time and space:
o Dalí, Vertigo: Tower of Pleasure, 1930
o Dalí, Sometimes I Spit on the Portrait of My Mother for the Fun of It, 1929
o Dalí, Oedipus Complex, 1930 (Swiss Cheese)
o Dalí, The Enigma of Desire: My Mother, 1929: incestuous fantasies
o Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, 1931
o The last aspect of the paranoiac- the looming of hidden figures, sometimes
menacing. Dalí sometimes set himself the task of painting invisible images
o Dalí’s cult of sexual impotence led him to construct an impotent world where all
objects sag helplessly
o Dalí, The Invisible Man, 1929
o Part of Dalí’s concept of paranoia seems to be that the desirer is unable to avoid
fusing into the object of his desire
o Dalí, Study for Invisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion, 1930
P Belgian painter René Magritte was a specialist in prosopagnosia (Inability to recognize
faces)
o Magritte, The Key to Dreams, 1930
.. as if the right match of word and image were just as much a matter of
lunatic indifference as the wrong ones.
o Magritte, Lost Worlds, 1928
o Magritte, The Conqueror, 1925
December 5- Lady Chatterley’s Lover
-Lawrence had a dialectic in his novels of Socrates vs. Dionysus, with Clifford Chatterly as
Socrates, inwardly crippled, and Mellors as Dionysus, someone on the edge of civilization who
can vary his speech with different dialects. Mellors is a man who is everybody and nobody.
- Lawrence imagined himself as Dionysus. Lawrence was an extremely intelligent man.
- Lawrence disliked realistic fiction in which the outside appearance of a person said something
about their inside, but he also didn’t like James Joyce impressionistic fiction because it was an
assault of the mind against the body
-Lawrence wanted to be a realist of the body, not of the mind, and wanted to portray the body in
a beautiful way, and to portray the mind as the source of all corruption
- In his Fantasia of the Unconscious, Lawrence stated his opinions about the relation between
mind and body. He contradicted the writings of Freud, because Lawrence believed that the
unconscious was good and wholesome and that incest was not caused by the body but by mental
perversions. He believes that the mind continually tampers with man’s healthy sexual nature.
- In the Fantasia of the Unconscious, Lawrence equated the unconscious with the body. The body
has two wills- the sympathetic will that wishes to combine with another being, and the volitional
will, that wants to separate from other beings. Both of these impulses are good and need to be in
equilibrium according to Lawrence. Body parts can be interpreted to reveal something about
someone’s character.
- Clifford’s broad shoulders and stiff pose represent curiosity and objective control, his snapped
spine represents that he is cut off from his groin
- Clifford is like a crustacean, all outside and no inside, a hellish condition according to
Lawrence.
-Connie is all lower torso- her buttocks is her best feature, whereas Clifford is all upper torso.
-Connnie loses roundness because she is not getting loved, yet when she meets Mellors, her body
becomes full again because the body expresses the nerve centers of the body. Bumps on body
say everything about you.
-Lawrence hated art that portrayed objective reality, like photographs, he instead liked art that
showed the inside of things, that expressed energy. Therefore his novels don’t express objects,
but the loomings of force; his fiction is shapeless in some sense.
- Lawrence had to begin with depictions of the outer world, however, before he could move into
the energy.
-Lawrence presented a lot of objective physical detail, but only so he could eventually mock it.
-Lady Chatterley is a novel about sex, about the transfiguring power of the right type of orgasm
that effects not just the genitals, but the whole body
-As Connnie walks along, she feels like her outer consciousness is unfriendly and unreal,
Mellors makes her participate in a more real reality.
-Lawrence felt words were out-dated, he wanted to twist language into new shapes to
express the voice of the body.
-Lawrence used words connoting landscapes to explain nerves and organs, and oceanic
imagery to describe sex, and he ironically endorses Freud’s theory of evil clitoral
orgasms versus good vaginal orgasms
-The women in the novel sort themselves by erogenous zone- Bertha (Mellors wife)
clitoris, Mrs. Bolton breast, and Connie butt
-Lawrence thought his mission as an author was to show the parts of the human where
everyone is alike
-Sexual arousal that could resist conscious control is a form of speech from the body,
Lawrence believed.
-Connie and Mellors become unimportant, while their genitals take center stage
- Throughout the novel, Connie must redefine herself as the inside of her own body, her
vagina, urethra, and anus
7 Dec MECHANICAL MEN
-Lawrence described Clifford’s body by way of surrogacy, because various inorganic
things overcome Clifford’s body and soul, like his wheelchair which overtakes his lower
body.
-Clifford lives in an almost futurized, robotized world. He himself is part metal, instead
of a body he has a motorized chiar, and instead of a soul he has a radio.
-Clifford is a surrealist analogue of a human, all the work of his body is done by
machines
-Clifford and his friends want an annihilation of all organic aspects of humans (breeding
babies in bottles)
-Lawrence felt that insidious mental constructions had everywhere usurped the body’s
authority, had attacked the body’s physical integrity.
- Lawrence’s heroes always tried to restore their physicality amidst an inorganic human
race
-Lawrence was very interested in modernist artists, he thought that abstract art was like a
blueprint for a machine
- Lawrence wanted abstract art to start with a visual whole in the phenomenal world, and
then simplify that until it becomes independent of particular circumstances. He doesn’t
like abstraction of mere geometrical figures with no meaning.
-Grant (abstract artist) is the Clifford Chatterley of art and George Antheil is the Clifford
Chatterley of music
-Lawrence though Antheil’s Ballet Mecanique was a mechanical “time canvas”
-Antheil thought he was an arranger of tiny hard musical objects against long silences and
blank space. Antheil played with the two backgrounds of silence and noise. Much of the
noise in his Ballet Mecanique is created by airplane propellers, a rhythm so fast that it
becomes a blur.
- In the first roll of Ballet Mecanique, the figures created are dim against an oversaturated
background, while in the third roll, there is a trill against a nearly empty background,
making it very mechanical sounding.
-Antheil did not intend Ballet Mecanique to demonstrate the beauty of machines, he just
wanted to emphasize the importance of time rather than the tonal principle in music, but
he did declare that the ballet was composed out of and for machines.
-Ballet Mecanique is a study in the delight of feeling the mecahnicalness of one’s own
body
-Antheil considered the ballet to be an expression of the mental condition of the postwar
age, which is revealed by his original title for it “A Message from Mars”
12/12 Lecture
On this day and in the following lecture, the Dada and surrealist projects were presented.
There were 4 projects presented in total. Find a summary of each presentation below.
1. Rehearsing a Play – same events repeated 4 times in varying levels of insanity.
Actors speak as though they understand each other, despite the nonsense of their
speech and actions. In contrast to the increasingly nonsensical language used by
the actors, the director’s comments become more and more realistic, implying that
the more crazy art is, the more it makes sense and achieves it’s goals. Several
lines were taken from “Waiting for Godot” which is itself an absurdist play that
clowns around with existential questions.
2. Battle between Dada and Fine Art knight – murder of fine art artists, with a sword
held by the Dada knight inscribed with “LHOOQ” alluding to the Dada spoof of
the Mona Lisa. Dada called for us to join him: “join us and be free” was repeated.
Portraits of 2 different people looked the same, hastily created with mud, the artist
didn’t care about it .. it’s all trash. The dehumanization and devaluation of art
(things made out of wrong materials). The musical selection with fast rhyming
rap was quite surrealist .. get the impression the mind is turned off as tongue
seeks rhyme.
3. Large clock with sun and wind dancing and destroying. Elements of nature were
destroying time, removing multiple layers of clothing to discover. Surreal
induction into a trance opened the scene. Man sings, shoots himself, re-emerges
with a white face. Nothing is subject to time in the unconscious.
4. Four paintings created by student in class. Each was made of many many layers
which were influenced by the layer that came before them. A study in abstraction
away from original meaning. There is hidden meaning quite literally layers below
the outermost. How art works upon itself. Many elements of surrealism as the
intent of the artist was to allow her mind to work freely, freely associating with
each successive layer to create the next.
Paintings
Cubism
ANALYTIC CUBISM
Analytical Cubism is one of two major branches of the artistic movement of Cubism ( Synthetic
Cubism being the other) which was developed between 1909 and 1912. Analytic Cubists
"analyzed" natural forms and reduced the forms into basic geometric parts on the twodimensional picture plane. Color was almost non-existent (except for grey, blue and ochre ).
Instead they focused on forms like the cylinder, sphere and the cone to represent the natural
world. During this movement, Picasso's and Braque's paintings were very similar.
Leading cubists included Pablo Picasso and Braque.
Close studies:
Close analysis of "Les Demoiselles"
• the asymmetry of the profile was used to signify the demonic
• signs here operate as pairs, as carriers of opposed qualities in the same work
• contrast between Venus/Madonna/whore. Sex as good and sacred or evil and profane
• faces on the right of Picasso's painting may be pictorial signifiers for primitive masks or
the deformed faces of those ( especially prostitutes ), suffering from syphilis.
• on the left, a woman in profile lifts up a drape to show two "Venus poses". The skin tone
of the profile face is different, perhaps signifying ethnic origin or older age.
• paintings encode a gendered commercial exchange, between men and relative socioeconomic freedom to take pleasure where they wished, and women whose lack of
freedom is depicted in the sale of their bodies. Venus's pose is a token of that exchange.
• a set of supplementary messages comes from the interaction between viewers and
between object and viewer. Les Demoiselles capitalizes on this.
• Centralized figures are the idealized Venus, the two on the right are framed by blue
drapes and are heavily marked with textured paint, suggesting mask-like qualities
• There is no male character, only woman as erotic spectacle.
• red and blues - blue had been used to show melancholia and socially marginalized. Color
had been regarded as "feminine", as the antithesis of intellectual control. Perhaps also
references the Tuareg, whose skin was often tinged blue from the heavy use of indigo
dye in their clothes. Red shows an unusual urgency and anger...puts a certain ferocity in
the painting, accented by the angular contours of the women. Perhaps a reverberation of
German Expressionism here.
• The gazes of the women can be similar to the gaze of the Dionysiac "abyss"
Analysis of Picasso's "L'aficionado"
• The meticulous arrangement of details - the breaking up of objects and the proliferation of
minute volumes - is typical of this style of Cubism.
• The starting point for this painting is the actual or remembered image of a human figure
which can be perceived with some difficulty if one assumes that the edges of the planes
denote the outer extension of volumes in space.
• Since the volumes are suggested rather than described, they must be "thought" by the
spectator as well as "seen." Picasso later remarked, "I paint forms as I think them, not as
I see them."
• In L'Aficionado the position of the objects in space is indicated by several realistic details,
such as the moustache, the mouth, the bow-tie and the stiff front of the dress shirt. In the
lower left, part of a woman's torso can be seen, dressed in evening clothes. Near this are
the letters, "Le Torero."
• The letters are forms that cannot be distorted since they are already flat; they do not exist
in space, and thus contrast with objects that do. The word "Nimes" relates in the same
way to the picture surface. The palette has been reduced to a sober, almost
monochromatic colour scheme of grey and brown accented with ochre, black, a touch of
green and the red of the man's cheek. This reduction of the palette was part of the
Cubist's search for the reality of the object, its real rather than apparent existence in
space.
Analysis of Braque's "Harbor" 1909
• a research into space ( a manual space )
• the landscape is portrayed as if Braque had painted it on a canvas, crumpled it, and then
smoothed it back out
• the "raised" qualities of the picture near the edges ( adding to the crumpling effect )
makes the painting almost as if it has a 3-D dimension, coming out of the picture, in
addition to all the angles it portrays in the canvas. Professor Albright says it has a Braillelike aspect. I think that's going a little too far, but if you want to put it, I'm guessing the
man won't disagree with you.
• Dionysiac aspect of cubism with its "mind-sensation", dissolving background/foreground
distinction. You really can't tell here what you should be concentrating more on. The
painting is just an overwhelming sense of angles and colors, perhaps a visual sense of
what the Dionysiac chorus might be like.
• appeals to the sense of touch, though the impression is totally ocular. In this sense,
"Harbor" has a synesthetic appeal, something that doesn't show up prominently until
Surrealism. We find the first beginnings of it here.
Analysis of Braque's "Nude"
• Before this painting, Braque had done a study "Three Nudes", in which he drew a woman
in three different poses: front, back, and side. He was interested in portraying a person
from all angles, and seeing how the body changed with each perspective.
• He later compiled each of the three poses from "Three Nudes" into "Nude", where the
model is in a paradoxical, contorted pose.
• The woman seems like a paper-cut doll, which can then be folded up to create a woman
in a cylinder-form. The dynamic shading in her body, tension of her pose, and round
edges also suggest a sense of folding, as if prompted, the woman could turn a little more
and create a 3-d representation of herself out of the page.
• The deep brown coloring suggests a thick husk or cocoon, further suggesting the
"potential" and power of the woman to transform.
• Interestingly, Braque analytic studies of nudes create not a static sense, but a sense of
transformation and ephemerality. His attention to the dimensions and angles of his nudes
also emphasizes the ability for these angles to change easily.
Analysis of Picasso's "Nude"
• Following the technique from "L'Aficionado", the labyrinthine lines suggest a grid, in which
a woman's body is barely decipherable.
• The colors are muted browns and greys, following the style of analytic cubism
• The projection of the grid onto the woman's body suggests a static sense, very unlike
Braque's sense of potential and transformation in his analytic nudes.
Synthetic Cubism Paintings
Overview of synthetic cubism:
• Synthetic cubism was developed by Picasso and Braque in 1912 and represents
the second stage of cubism after analytic.
• Unlike analytic cubism, where an object is analyzed and brought to reality by
breaking up all of its parts and views from different angles and then reassembling
them, synthetic cubism is where the artists takes pieces of reality (cardboard,
newspaper clippings, ads) and juxtaposes them to create a new form.
• Since works of synthetic cubism use scrap materials like newspapers, cardboard
and labels they could not be categorized as conventional art objects. A new
category was named for them: papier colles, or collages. With the addition of
foreign materials on the canvas, the artists were questioning the accepted criteria
for artistic media in “high art.”
• Apollinaire describes synthetic (or orphic) cubism as intuitive, “art of painting
new structures out of elements which have not been borrowed from visual but
entirely created by the artist and endowed by him with powerful reality”
Fruit Dish, Ace of Clubs, Braque (early 1913):
* This includes elements of analytic cubism. The 3-d shapes in the background are
reminiscent of the analytic style, but this work is synthetic because it encompasses pieces
of reality which is not characteristic of analytic works. You can see grapes, another type
of fruit, playing cards, and pieces of wood which might represent parts of the table,
whose form is suggested by the dark brown circle in the background.
Au Bon Marche, Picasso (1913):
• This work contains materials including wallpaper, news clippings,
advertisements, labels, and scraps of paper. The scene appears as a café table,
represented by the Au Bon Marche label, with a bottle and glass sitting on top and
a woman sitting on the other side of the table. This work can be read in different
ways.
• There is a sexual reference made with the woman who seems to be sitting at the
other side of a table and the reading in combination the label of the table and the
heading of the newspaper clipping that serves as the table’s leg. In combination
they say “ Au Bon March Lun B Trou Ici,” which can be translated as “one may
make a hole here inexpensively.”
Guitar, Sheet Music and Glass, Picasso (1912):
• The objects listed in the title can be found on the canvas and each object is
represented in a different way, which seems to challenge the relationship of
representation and reality. The form of a guitar is created by some scraps of wood
and cardboard that outline a rough form. A glass is sketched in the style of
analytic cubism on a piece of paper that is mounted next to the guitar form.
Meanwhile, the sheet music, is simply presented by attaching a real piece of sheet
music on the canvas. Picasso demonstrates representation in three ways: collage,
drawing, and simply pasting the thing to the canvas.
La Mandoline, l’oeillet, et le bamboo, Apollinaire:
• Apollinaire decided that a poem could become a cubist painting as well and he
wrote a book that was first called “Me, I’m a painter too”
• He writes a poem in the shape of a mandolin, a flower, and a stick of bamboo
Surrealist
Surrealist Style
• Artists employed the imaginative "unconscious mind": paintings can be described as
dream-like, mystical, fantastical, etc.
o “imposed conscious arrangement and high artistic finish on the material fished
up from the unconscious”
o Embraced irrationality; Stripped ordinary objects of their normal significance
o Surrealist Manifesto: “absence of all control exercised by reason”
• Similar to Cubism, often utilized dissection /dislocation and played with perspective and
space
Surrealist Paintings
1. Chirico, The Disturbing Muses, 1925
• “Surrealism as eroded classicism”- statue on eroded pillar (classic) has a punching bag
for a head (surrealist)
• Competing “mini stages”; many opposing perspectives
2. Chirico, The Archaeologists, 1927
• Painted the same year that Oedipus Rex appeared.
• Landscape of ruins
Composer Ernst Krener compared to Neoclassic art b/c both use “destructive energy” to
take “the classicism of antiquity” into something new
3. Magritte, The Key to Dreams, 1930
• Pictures of objects with mislabeled words; words do not connect to picture
• Because both the objects and the words are familiar, mismatch suggests a
malfunction in thought process.
4. Magritte, the Key to Dreams, English version
• Similar to original, with pictures of objects paired with words that do not connect to
picture
• Interestingly, last box has a matching picture/word pair
5. Magritte, Lost Worlds, 1928
• Map for an unpainted picture
• field is captioned country; white lobes are labeled Person losing his memory and
Body of a woman, the word horse appears in the lower right corner
• Exemplifies artistic irrationality; no rational thought seems to have been put into this
painting (missing figures, missing background, almost absurd captions, etc.)
6. Magritte, The Conqueror, 1925
• Man in tuxedo (classic) with head replaced by wood plank (surrealist)
• Opposite of classic artists, who retain head and transform the body
7. Dalì, André Breton: The Great Anteater
• Reflects Dali’s love of chaos
• Consciously arranged chaos (see above)
8. Dalì, Automatic Drawing
o Example of “automatic composition”: the unconscious brain moving the pen in
the hand to draw an image of itself
o Exemplary surrealist art; Highlights the artistic embrace of the unconscious mind
Surrealist Paintings (part two) – consisting of the following paintings by Salvador Dalí:
Tower of Pleasure (1930); Sometimes I Spit on the Portrait of My Mother for the Fun of
It (1929); Oedipus Complex (1930); The Enigma of Desire: My Mother (1929); The
Persistence of Memory (1931); The Invisible Man (1929); Study for Invisible Sleeping
Woman, Horse, Lion (1930); Invisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion (1930).
The cultivation of hysteria that was a key part of the Surrealist movement is
evident in Dalí’s paintings. Dalí’s specialty within the various mental diseases was
paranoia. He defined the “paranoiac-critical” as “a spontaneous method of irrational
knowledge based on the systematic objectification of associations and delirious
interpretations. In general terms, it's the most rigorous systematization of the most
delirious phenomena and materials, with the intention of making my most obsessively
dangerous ideas more tangibly creative.” Dalí used conscious artistic methods to
illustrate what he found in his unconscious. Some other characteristics of Dalí’s works
include: his hateful obsession with his mother, his impotence, and his fascination with
masturbation. He also depicted this paranoia by illustrating invisible objects found
within other objects, thus imitating how a paranoiac would find multiple realities in every
figure.
Tower of Pleasure (1930)
QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressorare needed to see this picture.
Notice: “The spectral fellators, the lion’s head, the shadow of the man in bondage,
themselves seem to tilt the plane of the feasible to sickening angles; that shiny ball in the
center of the painting seems about ready to roll down fast.”
Sometimes I Spit on the Portrait of My Mother for the Fun of It (1929)
QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressorare needed to see this picture.
The message here, the title of the painting, is printed within the silhouette of the Virgin
Mary, which makes the incestuous fantasy even more repulsive.
Oedipus Complex (1930)
QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressorare needed to see this picture.
“The large object in the foreground that looks like a piece of swiss cheese swarming with
ants is repeatedly labelled ma mère, and indeed seems a somewhat unflattering image of
mother. The man’s head is nothing but a hole framed by a loop, and a hole is the most
conspicuous part of the mother-cheese. Oedipus, as Dalí sees him, appears to a hole
fascinated with his mother’s hole. If the abyss speaks here, it seems to be saying all sorts
of queasy things.” Incestuous fantasies again.
The Enigma of Desire: My Mother (1929)
QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressorare needed to see this picture.
“In this painting the slice of maternal cheese is thinner, more full of holes and dents, and
seems to be part of a snail. Notice the soft little terminus of what might be the snail’s
head: it might be a bird’s head, or the head of a big-nosed man–Dalí himself had a
prominent nose–with shut eyes, and with ears that look like more shut eyes. This sort of
figure appeared compulsively in Dalí’s paintings.”
The Persistence of Memory (1931)
QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressorare needed to see this picture.
“It’s like a dreaming head liquefied into some flaccid shapeless organ: the fringe of hair
could represent either eyelashes or the hair around a woman’s labia. The Dalí of The
Enigma of Desire seems to bear his mother on his back, in his face, as if he were some
hideous composite of man and mother, in danger of getting himself unborn.” The limp or
“soft” watches are an illustration of Dalí’s sexual impotence. They also represent to Dalí,
an “image of the loose bulging space-time that Einstein developed in the General Theory
of Relativity.” This is Dalí’s most famous painting.
The Invisible Man (1929)
QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressorare needed to see this picture.
“Perhaps here the first thing that you notice is the way the forms keep twisting into
allusions to fallopian tubes, ovaries, pelves. But in the upper background you can see the
invisible man: . . . his right shoulder and arm consists of a statue of a naked woman; his
hair is rendered by a streak of cloud. The paranoid imagines personal presences manifest
in animate objects–the eggbeater that sends murderous messages, and so forth; Dalí
found a way of making secret urgencies of form visible in the painted canvas–forms that
lie behind, within, or beyond the ostensible images, by means of a sort of pictorial
transubstantiation.”
Study for Invisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion (1930)
QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressorare needed to see this picture.
“I think that the first thing you see is the horse, but quickly thereafter you notice the
lion’s mane in the horse’s tail, and the fact that the back half of the horse is made up of a
human figure crawling on its knees, and the front half of the horse is made up of a
woman’s supine torso, with one dangling arm representing the horse’s head, and another
dangling arm representing one of the horse’s legs, and maybe a third dangling arm
representing the horse’s other leg–it’s hard to tell where the horse’s left front leg comes
from.”
Invisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion (1930)
QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressorare needed to see this picture.
“The legs seem muscular, perhaps male, as if the picture showed a monstrous hybrid of a
woman being fellated and a man fellating her. But the horse’s rear legs are also a statue
of nude woman, as the isolate of this figure, repeated just under the horse, makes explicit.
Male, female, human, equine, all merge together, as the painting violates the mind’s
categories of experience. This Dionysiac teeming of forms losing all individuation can
be seen in Dalí’s own description of this painting
The double image (the example of which may be that of the image of the
horse alone which is at the same time the image of a woman) can be
prolonged, continuing the paranoiac process, the existence of another
obsessive idea being then sufficient to make a third image appear (the
image of a lion, for example) and so forth, until the concurrence of a
number of images, limited only by the degree of the capacity for paranoiac
thought. . . . <They are always boats which seem to be drawn by
exhausted fishermen, by fossil fishermen.>
Deep in the abyss it seems that all forms rhyme with one another.”
Note: All quotes from Surrealism Lecture Notes, December 7, 2006.
Dada
1. Hugo Ball reading- Ball was a friend of Kadinsky and also rejected all representation
as pure and wanted to return to the true form to represent the sound of things, their
essence, their intrinsic being. Ball looked for basic vocables perhaps from the prehistory
of the human race. This photo of Ball dressed up in his blue silly-suit, reciting poems,
once was so overcome with emotion that he felt he was performing a sacred rite, so much
so that he experienced a conversion and rejoined the Catholic church. His poems seemed
like nonsense syllables it was a converging of the hypermeaningful and the
unmeaningful. The hypermeaningful in the sense that it is the soul's cry that is not
capable of being expressed by normal language and the unmeaningful in the sense that it
is not understandable by others and seems like nonsense syllables. The costumes have a
similar message-they call attention to the fact that all Europeans wear clown suits, though
they don't know. These clown suits represent articles of faith, tastes in the arts, and
religions. And by wearing these costumes, Dada artists, like Ball, are expressing
meaningful poetry because it exposes the meaninglessness of normal discourse and what
we see as "normal."
2. Tatlin, Monument for the third international- Vladimir Tatlin, a visionary Russian
architect, was a hero of many Dadas. This monument for the third international alludes
to Johannes Baader's proposal to rebuild the tower of Babel, to represent the confusion of
the world's languages, in babble itself. This is a theme that carries through the
movement. This is a 400m high framed structure in spiral form housing 3 units of
accomodation one above the other, which revolves at different speeds: a cube-shaped
turning at the rate of 1 revolution a year and houses conferences, a pyramid revolving
once a month and containing administration offices, and a cylinder completing 1 rev/24
hrs and acting as an information center.
3. Arp, Anthologie Dada- Many of Arp's images of amoeboid shapes seem to suggest
some primal fertility in the universe.
4. Portrait of Arp, Almanac- Another theme through dadaism is an absence- copulation
in the absence of copulating creatures, animality without any animals. This picture is a
picture of Arp's head in the abscence of a human head.
5. Diamonides, St. Gonorroheicus- Daimonides (Dr. Karl Döhmann) was a physician
specializing in venereal disease. And Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes proclaimed on stage
that “Dada is a cancer which also causes cancer. It destroys the functioning of specialist
cells and makes the others multiply with frightening rapidity. . . . Quaking in your bed
you know you have . . . an enormous cancer of the heart which, spongy through and
through, has ceased beating and simply squelches your hideous stagnant blood like an
industrially-reared pig in a manure pit.” The notion of an uncontrolled profileration of
unstructured tissue seemed good Dada, because it was a good image of life on planet
earth, cancerous or otherwise.
6. Ernst, Stratified Rocks, Nature’s gift of Gneiss- The reduction of human life to the
unicellular level was one central metaphor of Dada; another was garbage. This collage
evokes the natural world in unnatural disorder. Thus, Ernst's extravagant title reads:
"Stratified rocks, nature’s gift of gneiss lava Icelandic moss 2 kinds of lungwort 2 kinds
of ruptures of the perinaeum growths of the heart b) the same thing in a well-polished
little box somewhat more expensive." In contrast to Schwitters, found images appealed to
Ernst far more than than stray bits of printed matter and colored paper.
7. Schwitters, Merzaule in the Merzbau, Hanover (1923)- The great garbage man of
Dada was Kurt Schwitters. Here we have newsprint, a label for cough medicine, a tram
ticket, etc. all stuck together–a collage of modern life’s dreck. At the beginning of
Modernism, in 1864, Baudelaire hoped for an art of modern city life, in which the
ephemeral, fleeting elements were somehow made permanent; Schwitters gives you all
the urban junk you can handle, and more–you feel that sawdust and puke are never far
from his artistic horizon. If he arranges the stuff in a manner reminiscent of Cubist
collage, Albright argues that the material is being transfigured by its formal
arrangement.
8. Schwitters, Merzbild 133 (1921)- ere, the boundary between art and everyday life is
vanished almost completely. Schwitters' collages, of which he produced more than 2,000,
and his large-scale reliefs known as Merzbilder are kaleidoscopic, sometimes whimsical
compliations of humble material such as tram tickets, ration coupons, postage stamps,
beer labels, candy wrappers, newspaper clippings, fabric swatches, rusty nails, and the
like—that illustrate the flux of contemporary society.
Possible prompts (From '04 Final Exam)
Francis Picabia: "America is Dada." Demonstrate Picabia's claim with reference to
elements in at least two of the studetn performances and two examples from your
experience as a resident of America (events documented in the news media, advertising
campagns, the Merzbild of everyday life, etc.). Then, prove that America is not Dada.
- Francis Picabia’s Manifeso Cannibal Dada: “Dada . . . smells of nothing, it is nothing,
nothing, nothing, / It is like your hopes: nothing. / like your heaven: nothing . . . like your
artists: nothing.”
Conclusions:
From performances:
• Nonsense syllables infecting scene with disorder
• Voice inflection same but carries very different meaning
• Babble sounded as if it should be important
• Relativization = refusing to draw distinctions
• Must be seen as performances, cannot separate the verbal performance from the
physical
• the outfit of the performer often had meaning as well
• portrays idea that current language and communication is incomprehensible
• therefore the babble that is performed has just as much meaning as normal
language if not more
• dualism between hypermeaning and no meaning.
From paintings:
• regarded itself as realistic in some sense
• praises the incorporation of "alien materials" - newspapers, hairs, cloths, etc.
• painting should "seek to imitate not the outer shapes of nature, but the processes
of nature: to illustrate not a stone but an act of fracturing; not a flower, but a
dehiscence, an opening out of insides; not an animal, but the way an animal
perpetuates itself, that is, coitus"
Dada's relationship to Nietzsche: art-efaction of everyday life; anti-art (cf. Nietzsche the
anti-philosopher)
Erasure games with word-meanings
Exposes the un-meaning of normal discourse
Absence of affect, frenetic listlessness
Deliberate pleasure in the way capitalist society drains meaning from words
Convergences and extremes
Enjoyed ridiculing the 'isms'
In other words, if nothing is art, then everything is art.
The boundary between art and life is vanished completely
Created art that had meaning of itself only to show that what we thought had meaning is
actually meaningless
Wallows in irony of its realization
Pushes audiences limits in every way
Leaves no scrap for previous definitions and assumption of art and life to exist
Walter Serner, in his Dadaist Manifesto (1919) observed, "Dada was creation from the of
indifference of nothingness.”
Lawrence’s paintings and Mark Gertler’s The Merry-Go-Round
Merry-Go-Around (Gertler)
• Background: Gertler, a Polish-Jewish, was a painter who belonged to the Bloomsbury
set. Poor and often ill, Gertler has also had turbulent relations with his patrons,
colleagues and friends. A conscientious objector during the Great War, he was
deeply traumatized by the experience and expressed such in his art—in a way to
“justify his own existence’ in a “critical age” (letter to Lady Morrell.) Afraid of a
second world war, he committed suicide in 1939.
• His major painting, The Merry-Go-Round, was created in the midst of the war years
and was described by Lawrence as "the best modern picture I have seen" (Letters, 9th
October 1916). There is some influence of Cezanne that has lessened after his postwar visits to France.
• A composite of impressions: Whitechapel slum, young artist’s Bohemia, fashionable
society, the Garsington intelligentsia,” (William Rothenstein); symbolism of the
Great War and the Western front that have caught mechanical men in a vicious cycle.
o The mechanical aspect: wooden figures with ambiguous expressions (is it
a scream or a laugh); homogenized men neatly lined up like objects;
geometrical shapes with metallic sheen;
• Ironic title: is there anything merry to the usual ride? Gertler is showing a tinge of
sarcasm at contemporary self-delusion.
• Lawrence wrote: “Your terrible and beautiful picture is great and true, but horrible
and terrifying. I’m not sure I wouldn’t be too frightened to come and look at the
original.” One could glimpse a Clifford Chatterly among the hectic yet soulless
riders.
• Abstraction: why doesn’t this kind of abstraction bother Lawrence? Is it the
coherence between the form and the subject matter of the reduction of men to
machines? Or is it Lawrence’s type of abstraction from a physical detail?
-a bit abstraction ehre: why Lawrence still praises it
Lawrence (I will describe the paintings briefly and then analyze them together in a
thematic summary, for coherence’s sake)
• Red Willow Trees (1927)
o Foreground: three nude figures, two squatting and one sitting on the
branch of a willow tree
o In the center: a road curving down towards the background, lined first
with fire-red willow trees and then dotted with teal ones
• Red Willow Trees (1927):
o allusion Rome’s founding myth about Sabine women seized at Roman
festivals to be Roman wives. Here, more like liberation of sexual
energies
o many buttocks, legs and few faces jumbled together
• Dance sketch: (1928)
o Two reedy figures, one pale and one dark, whose lean silhouettes blend in
with those of the trees
o Possible Diaonysian allusion: the goat—may be a symbol for the faun or
sartyr
• Leda (1928):
o Another allusion to classical mythology: Zeus, in love with Leda, changed
into a swan and copulated with her by feigning escape from an eagle.
From this Leda has begotten Helen, and the twins Castor and Pollux.
o Leda = breast + thigh; swan’s neck is erotically nestled between her
cleavage.
• Flight back to paradise (1928):
o Figures: seem to be Adam, Eve and God
o Background to the left: smoke stacks, industrial-looking towns, angles,
lines and stark planes; in the foreground: curves and rounded surfaces;
fleshiness.
Themes:
o Abstraction: Lawrence’s simple figures seem to be a reaction against the
geometrical abstractions of Duncan Grant. As he writes to Ottoline Morrell, “One
cannot build a complete abstraction, or absolute, out of a number of small
abstractions, or absolutes. Therefore one cannot make a picture out of geometric
figures. One can only build a great abstraction out of concrete units…The way to
express the abstract-whole is to reduce the object to a unit, a term, and then out of
these units and terms to make a whole statement.” Grant’s Bathers, for example,
is formed from lines and curves—a synthetic type of abstraction—whereas
Lawrence’s figures tend to be a simplified form of a concrete human being (an
oval suggesting tummy)
o Philosophy of the body: Lawrence is pitting his solar plexi and lumbar ganglia
against the mind, a la Nietzsche (Socrates v. Dionysus). The body has its own
logic and forces that the mind covers up, and every figure in these paintings is an
anti-Clifford Chatterly. Whereas Grant portrays Vanessa Bell with her head
prominently leaned against her hand, not to say Eve with just her head and neck,
Lawrence paints faceless figures with enormous buttocks and thighs—the
meaning of which I do not need to spell out—which suggests his definition of
humanity. The nudes exude more unabashed energy than tantalizing eroticism,
and sex is celebrated more as a creative force than a private pleasure. The
primitivist style and bold colors suggest something analogous to Nietzsche’s
rehabilitation of instinctive wisdom, and the topsy-turvy views turn traditional
wisdom on its head,, if not its butt.
o Anti-modern science: Lawrence’s paintings often are set in wilderness. By
omission he shows his aversion to the degradation wrought by modern science.
The philosophy that he attributes to one’s deep body could also be read as a
reaction against the intellectualism and abstractions of modern science, or at least
a Cartesian science epitomized by geometry. There are more curves than
straightlines, and more shaded ovals than precise angles and clear planes. Not
only does the return to nature symbolize a liberation from the stifling products of
science, but even the style tries to undo some scientific thinking that Duncan
Grant tries to convey in his carpet design.
Musical Pieces
Duchamp's Erratum Musical
Marcel Duchamp was one of the first artists to bring Dada to musical composition in his
1913 work Erratum Musical. Duchamp's original proposed system for a musical
composition suggested the use of a funnel, a toy train with open trucks, and balls to be
placed in the funnel. The balls would be numbered and represent separate notes. Chance
decides the order in which the balls land in the trucks: this in turn decides the tonal
sequence of the composition, which is thus made random and variable. In reality for
Erratum Musical, it is believed he chose notes written on notecards out of a hat, and
wrote them into the score in the order they were drawn. In the piece we discussed in
class, Erratum Sisters, this was repeated for all three parts…giving rise to three random
parts being sung at the same time. This created throughout the piece anything from
dissonant chords without any musical basis to pleasant fifths.
Perhaps more important to discuss is how this type of composition fit into the
Dada movement. First, it is specifically focusing on the theme of art as a process.
Duchamp does not truly seem to care how the finished product sounds as it comes out;
instead, he is focused on the random creation of notes through this random number
generation. It is the process of composition that is important. Second, we can see a
theme of machinery. This type of composition is something any simple machine could
do, as it is based off random number generation. The mathematics and order behind it
bring to mind something a computer would create. The only input required from the
“artist” was the number and length of notes, which in theory could also be determined
randomly. Finally, it also shows a degree of rebelliousness towards established music, by
not following any rules of musical key, tonality, or even bothering to require music that
sounds pleasant to the ear.
Ballet Mechanique-Antheil
• George Antheil
o Originally born in New Jersey but then moved to Europe in 1922
o Become good friends with Ezra Pound, who hailed Antheil as the greatest
composer of the century
o Regarded himself as an abstract painter, who painted not on canvas but on
the blank surface of time
o Was fascinated by the player piano
o Antheil blurred the distinction between figure and ground (melody and
harmony)
o Thought of music as a binary: silence and noise
• Ballet Mechaniqueo Written for player piano in 3 rolls
o Incorporated strange instruments: several pianos, xylophones, bass drums,
tam-tam, siren, electric bell, and airplane propellers
o Painting sound on a background of noise
o Noise is created by sounds imitating airplane propellers
o Pounding chords that are difficult to determine if they are even harmonic
o Steady rhythms are juxtaposed against syncopated rhythms
• Significanceo Antheil didn’t like it when people interpreted his piece as representing
modern industry or the factory.
o People thought of Antheil’s piece as “industrial” because of the mindset of
the time (The Great War).
o Antheil refered to his piece as, “it was an experiment with and thus, to
demonstrate a new principle in music construction, that of “Time-Space,”
or in which the time principle, rather than the tonal principle, is held to be
of main importance.”
o Although, Antheil did contradict himself by saying that his piece was
composed by machines and for machines
.. Something being for machines would drive Lawrence nuts
o Originally, the ballet was supposed to be called Message to Mars
Stravinsky
PULCINELLA
A little Background on Stranvisky’s composition eras
1st Phase
• Firebird (what first made him famous)
• Petruchka and The Rite of Spring
• Became established as prince of the avant garde
2nd Phase
• Moved to paris (1818)
• Diaghilev commissioned Pulcinella (1819)
• Used past conventions as a nehicle for moden ideas
• Emphasis on classical elegance and clairty
• Objectified music with cool sonorities of wind instruments or eliminated human
performer
3rd Phase
• Moved to holleywood (1940)
• Turned to 12-tone technique with characteristic inventiveness
Background on Pulcinella
• ballet by Igor Stravinsky based on an 18th-century play
• premiered in Paris on 15 May 1920 under the baton of Ernest Ansermet
• dancer Leonid Myasin (Léonide Massine) created both the libretto and
choreography
• Pablo Picasso designed the original costumes and sets
• commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev
A little plagerism…
• Stravinsky based most of the composition on existing Baroque scores he found in
libraries in Naples and London
• He rewrote this older music in a more contemporary way by borrowing specific
themes and textures, but interjecting modern rhythms, cadences and harmonies.
• Pulcinella is scored for a modern chamber orchestra with soprano, tenor, and
baritone soloists, and is often considered to be the first piece of Stravinsky's
neo-classical period.
• Exs from lecture: Stravinsky, Pulcinella, opening from Domenico Gallo, trio
sonata and Stravinsky, Pulcinella, Vivo from Pergolesi, Cello sonata
Consists of eight movements:
1. Sinfonia
2. Serenata
3. a: Scherzino b: Allegretto c: Andantino
4. Tarantella
5. Toccata
6. Gavotta (con due variazioni)
7. Vivo
8. a: Minuetto b: Finale
Analysis of Sinfonia
Features from pre-Classical style
Modern Features
• chamber orchestra- small
• regular time signatures
• obvious melody
• clear texture
• ornamented instrumental parts
• ritonello structure
• use of oboes, bassoons, and strings
• solo strings contrast with full bodylike soloists and tutt in a concerto
grosso
• instrumental combinationsprominent winds
• unresolved dissonances
• extra notes in chords- A added to G
major (3rd measure)
• rhythmin modifications
• abrupt changes of tempo
• displacement of accents
• accented synopations (10th measure)
• bassoon used high up in range
• use of horns
Other features: imitation, sequences, tune passed around intruments
Rite of Spring (Stravinsky,1913 )
• Background
o Third and final of a series of collaboration with choreographer
Diaghelev, commissioned by the dancer: the first two were Firebird
Suite and Petrushka
o After this, he returned from attempts to stretch the boundaries of
music
o Arguably the most significant AND most controversial musical work
of the 20th century
o At the performance, the audience was so startled that they
actually started a riot. Stravinsky was forced to flee out the window
of the Parisian theatre
• Plot
o A pagan spring ritual
o Two parts: “adoration of the earth” and “the sacrifice”
o Focuses on primitive/raw acts with violent dance steps
• Musical Characteristics
o Rhythmic complexity
.. Most rhythmically complex work to date. This is arguably the
most significant aspect of the work
.. Harsh, pounding rhythms in many of the movements, varying
time meters, etc
.. Established by simply adding an extra beat to certain
phrases
o Orchestration: truly the most unusual to date
.. Unusually large instrumentation: huge orchestra with huge
timbres
.. Most powerful use of orchestra so far, very bold in
combinations of instruments.
o Emphasis on harmonic complexity/dissonance
.. Expanded the use of the tritone from petrushka, layered
harmonies, etc
.. Largely atonal, following in the steps of Debussy and
Schoenberg
o Based on Russian folklore tunes, like petrushka and firebird
.. Yet these tunes were twisted and reharmonized.
• Significance
o After writing the Rite of Spring, Stravinsky completed his Russian
period and continued on to more “traditional” musical explorations
in neoclassicism, etc
o Continues to be considered one of the most remarkable works of
music for an orchestra, in terms of rhythmic, orchestrative, and
harmonic complexity
o Influenced modern composers to this day
Stravinsky/Cocteau 'Oedipus Rex'
Oedipus Rex was written at Nice between 1926 and 1927, with the music
following by a few months, just days before the premiere. At first it was just
performed as a concert performance in Paris in May 1927. Though Strav
conducted it himself, Oedipus Rex was not impressive. Still, it was his first neoClassical masterpiece.
Strav had always wanted to create a big dramatic work like Oedipus Rex.
However, having grown up in Russia but now living abroad, it became a great
question which language he might create his work in. In fact, it is he chose the
language before even he picked a subject. He wanted an antique; something no
longer in use but that commanded respect and moved the heart, something that
would complement his powerful music. Latin was the obvious and best choice. He
liked Latin because it could not be corrupted and was immortal.
Strav had always been in awe and appreciation of Ancient Greece and it can be
seen in others of his best works, including Op. 2, Faune et Bergère and
Persephone. In particular, he especially loved Sophocles's Oedipus Rex since he
was a teen and so chose it. It was an ideal pick because it was well known and
well liked, which would give him the opportunity to anneal his music perfectly to
it.
This is where he recruits Jean Cocteau, an old Parisian buddy. Strav had enjoyed
an adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone that Cocteau made, and therefore asked him
to write the libretto (‘little book,’ text of an opera) for Oedipus Rex. After a lot of
work and revision, Cocteau's French product was translated into Latin, allowing
Strav to get pumping on the music.
Wanted very little action to be happening on stage, Strav wanted the chorus to sit
in a single row, reading with their heads buried in scrolls while soloists would
stand on differently elevated platforms. He pretty much wanted the characters to
look like living statues. Oedipus would be seen the whole time, while Jocasta and
Creon would be illuminated only during their arias (they would just be spotlighted
on and off instead of ever entering or exiting). Similarly, when Oedipus goes
blind, he just puts on a different mask.
During the entire piece, a narrator would explain what was going on of the
tragedy to the audience and in the audience’s language. This was Cocteau's idea
which Strav thought was idiotic since everyone pretty much knew Oedipus Rex.
But this wasn’t the worst idea, actually, because no one then (or now for that
matter) really knew Latin. Additionally, the narration is like a welcome break
from the super intense heartbreak of the work. Furthermore, the narration allows
the audience to focus in on the music instead of on the plot, since they already
know what is going on.
For instance, Strav’s really tried to combine the simplicity of harmony with
rigidity of rhythm. Harmonically, as well, Strav utilized simple constructions (like
a C major triad played by a solo trumpet in the accompaniment to Creon's aria,
"Respondit deus"). However, he added his own personal flair by discarding the
classical tonal framework for atonal progressions, often dominated by minor
chords and contrapuntal accompaniments.
So while Strav adapted the conventions of the heroic opera, he Stravinskyzed it
with a focus on humanisms unusual interface with ritualistism. Oedipus Rex is a
dreadfully magnificent display of human misfortune charged by antiquity,
reflective of primitivism, and embedded in modernism.
Second view on Stravinsky
Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring
When we studied Stravinsky, we took particular note of his contradictions. Albright
argued that The Rite of Spring is particularly significant for the way it seems
simultaneously abstract and concrete, primitivist and futuristic. He maintains that
Stravinsky unites The Flintstones with The Jetsons, offering a further example of the
Modernism’s fascination with the “convergence of extremes.”
Important People
• Serge Diaghilev
o A visionary in the world of ballet
o Before Diaghilev, ballet had been a sort of seedy side-genre where men
could hope to find mistresses
o Diaghilev made ballet masculine (albeit sometimes homoerotic) when he
chose Vaslav Nijinsky to be his star
• Vaslav Nijinsky
o Eccentric choreographer of The Rite of Spring (more to follow)
Stravinsky as a Preliminary Primitivist
• Primitivism has as one of its central themes an interest in sexual desire and sexual
anxiety
o Primitivists seemed to be both fascinated and disgusted by a world that
they rendered sometimes as pure, positive, and uncorrupted, and other
times as “intimate with dung and pus”
o Before Stravinsky, Primitivism in music had downplayed the darker side
o Bartok, for example, had adapted folk music into catchy tunes
• The Rite of Spring centers around the execution of a virgin
o Sacrifice to the pagan sun god Yarilo
o Controversial subject matter, combined with revolutionary music and
choreography, led the audience to riot at the premier
• Stravinsky draws from anthologies of folk music in his score
o Melody at the very beginning of the prelude is a bassoon played in high
register – taken almost exactly from an anthology
• Important Aesthetics
o See Roerich’s final design online to see one of the sets for the ballet
.. Burial mound that, according to Albright, seems to belong in
prehistoric Russia
o As the dancers move in a kind of synchronized heaviness, they seem to be
evoking a kind of “archaic prepersonal state of being” (Albright)
.. Albright connects these undifferentiated selves with Nietzsche’s
notion of primal unity
o Dancers wear bear skins, and critics have understood the costumes as an
attempt to blur the boundaries between humanity and bestiality; there’s
some kind of aesthetic truth beneath the veneer of civilization
.. Almost “subhuman”
o Loss of Category
.. Old woman from scene one seems to be both a human and an
animal
.. Albright argues that the youths who appear throughout the ballet
seem to be “hermaphrodites” whose sex is “single and double”
.. This is an interesting contention, given Albright’s claims in his
lecture on Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex that Stravinsky is a composer
who loves “rigidity and dogma”
o Heaviness
.. Heaviness-in-music
• If one of Stravinsky’s themes is the blurred boundary
between humans and animals, then Albright argues that his
alternately heavy and frenzied music seems to mimic the
“bouts of lethargy” and “spasms of grotesque excitement”
that characterize animals’ hibernations and their hunts
o Especially in (Rite, Round Dance), online
.. Heaviness in choreography
• Dancers’ movements are huddled, hunched, knee-buckled
• Dancers would often complain about how Nijinsky, their
choreographer, ordered them to land heavily on flat feet
• Subtract the manufactured grace out of life and see what’s
left over
o Heterophony
.. A melody sung by several singers at the same time, but only
approximately at the same time – some too fast, some too high
.. Albright argues that Stravinsky and Nijinsky were striving toward
this kind of controlled loss of control
• A kind of clock-like tick-tock plays throughout the ballet,
offering to Albright another example of Stravinsky’s
contradictions: a dance that seemingly lacks form is
performed according to a strict count
Important Moments in the Ballet
• Scene One
o Adolescent boys imitate an old woman as she contorts herself (“halfwoman, half-beast,” according to Albright”)
• Final Dance (Danse sacrale, penultimate section), online
o Albright identifies this musical selection as “cubist” because its five-note
pattern is “endlessly out of sync with itself”
Bottom Line: Locating aesthetic value in a primitivist, clunky, deliberate dance of
humans who aren’t quite humans
Stravinsky/Cocteau: Oedipus Rex
Albright describes Oedipus Rex as an anachronistic piece—one composed of segments of
a kind of music that Modernism typically scorned. But even as it relies on techniques that
displeased his contemporaries, Stravinsky’s piece—and Cocteau’s staging of it—include
a number of distinctly Modernist themes.
Estrangement – Stravinsky’s tendency to use his foreignness (Russian heritage, unique
artistic values, etc) to his own advantage. Albright comments that Stravinsky “spoke
mainstream Western music…with a funny accent”
Dead Music
• According to Albright, Oedipus Rex is a “post-mortem opera, a sort of autopsy of
Greek tragedy”
o Reviving dead trends
.. Tonal Music
• Schoenberg had invented the notion of the twelve-tone
scale, but Stravinsky created an opera out of pieces of
Verdi and Tarantellas
• Stravinsky, himself, refers to the music as a Merzbild of
historical music
• Text is written in Latin
o Significant firstly in the context of the necromantic qualities of the piece
.. Reviving dead musical qualities via dead words
o Stravinsky was interested in the separation of meaningful sound from
everyday speech
.. Wanted to work in a “sacred language” that could me “writing for
the ear”
.. Wanted a “purely phonetic” kind of narrativ—focused on the
rhythm, not the content, of the words
.. It’s interesting to think about this idea in the context of some of the
earlier artistic movements we’ve studied; Pater and the
Impressionists, for example, supported this kind of subtraction of
irrelevant information from art. A unity of form and meaning is
more likely when words and dialogue melt into the background
noise
• Albright indicates that Stravinsky understood music as a kind of “torture device”
for “pounding crushing, and dismembering” the “human subject”
o This assertion hearkens back to a number of previous moments in the
course
o The Expressionists (and Kafka) were intrigued by the idea of using art as a
medium to depict and inflict physical pain
.. Remember Grosz, Kokoschka, etc
o And Modernism since Nietzsche has been at least partially about hostility
toward the proud and differentiated human subject
The Drama
• Albright mentioned that Oedipus Rex works to “kill off the notion of drama”
• We have already seen the outlandish story that was The Rite of Spring, and when
Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex was brought to the stage by Cocteau (in 1952,
technically beyond the range of this course), more strangeness followed
• Stravinsky had originally wanted to revamp the play by revealing speakers from
behind individual curtains only when they sang, but then decided to accomplish a
similar goal with lighting
o Singers were illuminated when they sung their arias – “vocally, though not
physically, animated statues”
• Cocteau adapted Stravinsky’s original vision by hiding the actors behind masks
that resemble crustaceans or insects
o Even as Stravinsky resurrected historical music in the retelling of a
traditional tale, he hoped for a kind of parody of it
.. Jocasta is portrayed as a kind of giggly, promiscuous girl
Truth Music
• Simple, traditional, tonal music conveys truth
o When gods speak, they do so in C-major triads
.. An “ultra-simple figure representing authority”
.. Listen to Respondit dues online
o Tiresias, the blind seer, sings in a similar style
o When Oedipus learns the truth about its parentage, that truth reveals itself
in a falling major scale of triads
.. “the ultra-simple things that support tonal music”
o When Oedipus faces his fate, he does so to a descending b minor triad that
builds to a D major resolution
.. Oedipus, Cecidi
False Music
• If truth-tellers sing in simple melodies, liars sing in “shifty, flowery music”
o Listen to Oedipus, Liberi, vos online
.. Stravinsky referred to this as Oedipus’s spreading “the tail feathers
of his pride,”
o Jocasta appears in a “hoochy-koochy dance”
.. The wrongness of the music in the context of tonality tells us that
Jocasta lives in a “fool’s world”
Bottom Line: Merger of form and meaning, revival but subtle parody of classic form
(tonal music, Greek tragedy)
Performances
Dada/Surrealist Performance #1
*This was the one where they spoofed the play “Waiting for Godot” and had the weird
classical/Eastern music playing
Why was it Dada?
-Got more and more nonsense; the scene got gradually more and more infected
-Same scene repeated 3 times, over 3 scenes of the rehearsal, the words changed.
“Adieu” .. “Flush” .. “Carnage” (voice inflections were similar regardless of the words
said – they spoke as if they were saying meaningful things)
-Set as a rehearsal (imitating the stage experience) – Dada as an artistic process
-Chose the play “Waiting for Godot” as opposed to, say, Shakespeare because
Shakespearean language can be obscure anyway and they thought it was better to destroy
modern, clear language.
-As things became more nonsensical to us, it made more and more sense to the director
who became increasingly less outraged
-Used words from the Dadaist manifesto
-Used a random word generator! (like Duchamps)
-Had many other completely random moments, like the word “Botch” which was meant
to disrupt the pattern for no particular reason.
What about it was not Dada?
-There was order and Dada is supposed to be disorder (they were using order to show
disorder)
Dada Presentation #2:
The first act was destruction of other “fine” art. A battle ensued between
LHOOQ and the Mona Lisa swards. The Dada Mona Lisa sward, in addition to winning
the fight, also cut down non-Dada artists (Picasso, Schoenberg, Munch).
This act portrayed Dada’s rejection and mockery of traditional art. Perhaps the
deliberate attacks were not so Dada though.
“Join us and keep your freedom” was yelled constantly, a quote directly from the
Dada Manifesto.
The second act incorporated a dada as anti-art theme. This element was explored
through a déjà vu scene of painting with mud. “Portraiture is my specialty” declared on
one of artists. The pointlessness of high art was driven home by the repetition. The artist
created the same unartistic mud painting while looking at two different models. Dada
artists followed the ‘Dada Crusaders’ around in this act (Ball, Schwitters)
The third and final scene looked at Dada as the disintegration of language, shown
by the vocal piece (composed of random rhyming words and poems by Schwitters) and
further by the chaotic elements of all the artists (dada and non) coming back on to stage.
Overall themes: Destruction of traditional/conventional Art. Creation of Dada Anti-Art.
Dada is nothing (and everything). Destruction of boundaries. The titles were written on
the chalkboard before the corresponding act, this order might not have been very Dada in
nature. An attempt to incorporate as much of the audience as possible was made. They
even went so far as to recruit them in their crusade, almost threateningly. While the
incorporation of the audience highlights the elimination of boundaries, the physical
attacks were not all that Dada.
Dada/Surrealist Performance #3
*This was the one where the guy was standing there with a big clock and they all
attacked him and removed his clothes
-Big clock (told the right time)
-Performers played the roles of nature and destroyed the clock ..nature destroying time
-Peeling off Time’s clothes (perhaps in order to peel off layers of mystery and discover
what time actually is?) Also, this was repetitive which is very dada
-Guy singing to the background music, white faced makeup (which, as we discussed, has
many symbolic possibilities – a statue? Clown? Mime? Death? In any case, this guy shot
himself. Perhaps he is a statue representing all humans, wants to kill time, but can’t, so
kills himself.)
-The guy’s death and the overall violence represents overall destructiveness, again very
dada
-However, this play was not supposed to be dada at all – it was supposed to be surreal
-Surreal aspects include the clock (like Dalí’s obsession with clocks), wind, sun, music
(Pink Floyd-ish psychedelic rock), are all allusions to Dalí and other surrealists
-Focus on how time places restraint on man (the clock hypnotizes the human)
What follows is the TF's review, critique and grading of this third presentation. Read for
the key concepts, which are highlighted.
“Deceit of Time”
w/ Alison Baum, Kieran Burke, Magnus Grimeland, Mato Lagator, Miran
Pavic
Congratulations on staging a well-planned, entertaining Surrealist
allegory. The human struggle against Time is a major Modernist
preoccupation indeed, and your approach to the clock here seems to
advance a witty alternative to Dali's: if you can't melt it, strip
it. Or perhaps you wish to imply that Emperor Time has no
clothes?) Hypnotizing the audience was a compelling opener,
especially when Time itself stars as hypnotist / yogi. Perhaps
appropriately, your musical choice of epic metal -- the opening song
(and subsequent incidental music?) by Dream Theater -- lent your
production the hilarious aspect of some Scandinavian rock opera. The
backdrop agreed with this ambience: that lush, improbably verdant
landscape (courtesy of PowerPoint) looked like a taiga out of Middle
Earth.
The most intriguing aspect of the play may have been the mutual
teases and taunts between Wind and Sun, drifting back and forth
across the stage like a psychedelic tango or flirty danse macabre.
The pacing of this segment was particularly interesting. Sustained
longer than the audience might expect, the to-and-fro, ebb-and-flow,
created a lull not unlike that of a dream sequence.
In spite of somewhat heavy-handed symbolism overall, some elements
remained suitably cryptic. Wind's gymnastic prancings, tinseled
streamer a-swirl, looked curiously taut-postured and dignified
throughout, e.g., while Sun's billowy swayings appeared inebriated.
An array of smaller touches could be appreciated as well: e.g., the
undulating sunrise (as if buoyed by a rocking ocean), the Janusian
Sun (self-eclipsing midway, morphed into 'Scorched Sun'), the Deathlike figure (clad not in his usual robe-with-cowl but urbanite's
hoodie).
Judged along the Surrealist spectrum, this play does run some risk of
spelling out its intentions a bit too clearly (ie. heavy handed symbolism as mentioned
before). The labeling of
events throughout (e.g., 'Imposing the Time onto Nature') may have
gained more mileage had the associations between labels and events
been less explicit, less reasonable. That is, while you're quite
right in recognizing that the Surrealists were smitten with big,
bright symbols, they liked to mix and mismatch -- sometimes offering
suggestive connections but rarely conclusive ones. Precisely in its
fullness of intent, then, this project may have answered a few too
many of its own questions.
--- --- --- --A few other key concepts and/or observations:
-Big clock (told the right time)
-Performers played the roles of nature and destroyed the clock ..nature destroying time
-Peeling off Time’s clothes (perhaps in order to peel off layers of mystery and discover
what time actually is?) Also, this was repetitive which is very dada
-Guy singing to the background music, white faced makeup (which, as we discussed, has
many symbolic possibilities – a statue? Clown? Mime? Death? In any case, this guy shot
himself. Perhaps he is a statue representing all humans, wants to kill time, but can’t, so
kills himself.)
-The guy’s death and the overall violence represents overall destructiveness, again very
dada
-However, this play was not supposed to be dada at all – it was supposed to be surreal
-Surreal aspects include the clock (like Dalí’s obsession with clocks), wind, sun, music
(Pink Floyd-ish psychedelic rock), are all allusions to Dalí and other surrealists
-Focus on how time places restraint on man (the clock hypnotizes the human)
Readings
Harrison, Frascina, and Perry: Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction,
Chapter 2
pp. 135-183
-Picasso and Braque began producing work side by side
• post 1909- saw each other every day
• vowed commitment to ‘art for art’s sake’
• emphasis on two major types of works: portraits and still life
• later works grow further away from iconic dependence
• in other words, figures become indistinguishable
• still maintain a ‘language system’
• included connections between paintings via use of words and
certain images that were both well-known/obvious and
private, more personal references
• use of visual, aural, verbal puns
• used to place paintings/objects in a social context
• aimed to get a message to the Bohemian subculture, not
necessary the masses
Influences
• Notions of ‘reality’ and ‘realism’
• Philosophy of Henry Bergson as highly influential
o Anti-materialism and idealism
o Reality is only that which we ‘seize from within’
o Reality is the individual’s experience
o Intuition is key to understanding reality
o Reality is constantly changing
o Time as an intuitive experience
o
Picasso, ‘Ma Jolie”: Woman with Zither or Guitar
• Use of abstraction and also words: “ma jolie” at the bottom
o Seem to act as title for the painting, almost cheesy
o Words to a popular song at the time
o Used to evoke the sensation of sound, along with vision
of the musical istrument
• Seen as a precursor to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles
• Has ‘significations’ of head, breast, neck, hands, etc.
• Symbol for arm of a chair with decorative tassles
• Viewer must construct these parts
• Composition/Technique
o Every element of the scene is treated equally
o Creates illusion of shallow interlocking planes
o Emphasis on short brush strokes
o Limited use of color
o Both the painting itself and the figure with in as objects
of the painting
o
George Braque, Le Portugais
• parallel work to that of Picasso
• same cubist abstraction techniques, almost like fragments of
a mirror
• seen as a pivotal work of Braque’s
• no words included here
•
Picasso, Femme a la mandoline
• Figure is more distinguishable here
• No ture facial features, only a block for a head
• Cubes seem to fade into background towards edges
Picasso, Portrait de Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler
• Smaller cubes
• Face is distinguishable, nose and eyes
• Stronger sense of shading, with highlights on the face
Picasso, Nature morte ‘Au Bon Marche’
• Still-life, scrap newspaper clippings, muted brown
• Box in the center with Au Bon Marche label- lingerie box
• Samar writing in background- sexual pun pertaining to label of
bourgeois female.
Picasso, L’Accordeoniste (The Accordion Player)
• Swirl on bottom left
• Highly abstracted, general shape of a right triangle
•
Braque, Homme a la Mandoline
• Almost identical to Picasso’s Accordion Player
• Same swoosh but darker portion at bottom right
•
Braque, Femme Lisante
• Arm of a chair in the left
• Lighter shading where woman’s body is
•
Braque, Violon et Palette
• More distinguishable violin
• Strings and end, all parts but easier to put together
Braque, Composition au Violon
• Violin is less distinguishable except for pieces of the end
• More flecks of light towards outer portions of painting
Picasso, La Suze (Glass and Bottle of Suze)
• Constructed of yellowed newspapers
• White ‘bottle’ surrounded by circle of blue
• Labed bottle with real Suze label
Picasso, Bouteille, verre et journal sur une table ‘Un coup de the’
• Innovative use of collage or ‘papiers colles’
• Use of previously created objects = “antithesis of pure art”
• Based on the traditional still life
• Comparable to Braque’s ‘Verres et Bouteille fourrues’
• Double meaning of words plays into use of the social pun
• Way of questioning high art and its meaning/significance
Chardin, The Rayfish
• Finished look, hanging rayfish in center, hissing cat on the left,
pots on the right.
• Centralized perspectival viewpoint signified academic approach
• Paradoxes of viewpoint and pictorial scale
Conclusion
• “Cubism as a system of signs which engaged the spectator in
a social dialogue about the nature of representation itself”
• dangerous to look for fixed meanings
• legacy of the ‘photomontage’
• legacy of the development of abstraction
• art as a conversation, as an activity, and not merely a
regurgitation of the artist’s view of the world
Reading for Lecture 14, Nov. 2
Ezra Pound, “A Few Don’ts”
Pound, unlike Yeats, disapproves of symbols as most people used them. He feels they
have lost their significance and have been abused. In his list of “Don’ts,” he sets
guidelines on the proper use of symbols:
- Symbols should symbolize their own physical properties
- They should invoke the essence of an object in a non-abstract manner
- Pound believed he could capture an object’s weight and texture through writing
o Rhythm and rhyme:
.. should correspond “directly to the emotion of shades of emotion to
be expressed”
.. “should not destroy the shape of your words, or their natural
sound, or their meaning”
o The meaning of the poem should come from the reader’s own
interpretation, thereby respecting the reader and not limiting the poem’s
significance to a specific analysis
- Technique indicates a writer’s skill: “Don’t mess up the perception of one sense
by trying to define it in terms of another”
- Don’t use abstractions
o Pound likes good prose and hates wordiness
- “Use no superfluous word”
- “the natural object is always the adequate symbol”
- “What the expert is tired of today the public will be tired of tomorrow”
o If a poem relies on music through rhythm and rhyme, the music should
appeal to an expert
- Don’t be pretentious
o Don’t expect to get recognition for baby steps…you have to work at it
- Be influenced by as many great artists as possible, but be smart enough to hide or
acknowledge it
- “Don’t put in what you want to say and then fill up the remaining vacuums with
slush”
***“I believe that the proper and perfect symbol is the natural object, that if a man use
'symbols’ he must so use them that their symbolic function does not obtrude; so that a
sense, and the poetic quality of the passage, is not lost to those who do not understand the
symbol as such, to whom, for instance, a hawk is a hawk.”
Ezra Pound Vorticism
Definitional quote:
“The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must
perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, idea are
constantly rushing. In decency one can only call it a VORTEX. And from this necessity
came the name ‘vorticism.’ Nomina sunt consequentia rerum, and never was that
statement of Aquinas more true than in the case of the vorticist movement.” (207)
Imagisme and its aims:
1. Vorticists wanted to use art to capture the dynamism of the modern world.
2. Defamiliarization
3. Imagisme was Pound’s form of Vorticism.
4. Images, understood as “direct treatments of the ‘thing,’” were preferred to static
symbols, or associations. (201)
5. Unlike symbols, which “have a fixed value, like numbers in arithmetic, like 1, 2,
and 7,” images “have a variable significance, like the signs a, b, and x in algebra.”
(201)
6. Imagisme v. rhetoric: “the ‘image’ is the furthest possible remove from rhetoric;”
in other words, unlike rhetoric, which is concerned only with appearance, or
persuasion, the image is connected to what really is. (200)
Things to notice in Vorticist art:
rhythmic use of color/line/word/form; dynamism; lack of ornamentation; simultaneous
emphasis on movement and solidity/concreteness
Hierarchy of the arts:
Unlike Pater, for example, there is no fixed hierarchy, or no highest art. Some arts are
more suited to express “certain emotions or subjects.” Pound explains that the best art to
express a particular subject is the one which can most efficiently communicate it: “the
work of art which is most ‘worth while’ is the work which would need a hundred works
of any other kind of art to explain it.” (201)
Helpful things Albright said:
“Just as Picasso and Braque suppressed color in order to arrive at jagged truths of form,
so the Imagists tried to suppress extraneous description in order to arrive at some hard
irreducible fact.”
“Pound wanted symbols that, so to speak, symbolize their own physical properties, and
nothing but their own physical properties; they are surrogates, not for some abstract
meaning, but for the sensuous immediacy of the object to which the word refers
[…]Pound gathers, clenches his symbol–what he calls the image–into a state of dense
thingliness”
Pound - Lustra
Lustra is a collection of poems written by Pound during 1915-6. They are hard to
describe, and an easy read, so I'd recommend quickly glancing through them yourself.
One thing I was surprised at after reading them was that they were more story-like than
what Prof Albright's lectures suggested. His example of the poem "The apparition of
these faces in the
crowd: Petals, on a wet, black bough" embodies much more of the Imagism ideals than
the Lustra poems. They are more like scenes from a story, still minimalistic, yet not so
abstract. The meaning behind them is more obvious. Again, I'd suggest reading the
poems because they're quick and enjoyable!
T. E. Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism”
Jean Yang
Main points: Hulme says that there will be a revival of classicism, which is grounded in
the real rather than the impractical “infinite.” Beauty is in “small, dry things,” but society
has become so “debauched” that most would not even recognize classical verse as poetry.
Hulme says he objects to both the classical fancy and the romantic imagination; wonder
cannot last.
Romanticism
Classicism
Man is oppressed by laws, “instrinsically
good, spoilt by circumstance”
organization brings out the best in man, that man
is “intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order
and tradition to get something fairly decent”
Man’s nature is like a well
Man’s nature is like a bucket
The root of Romanticism is Rousseau’s belief
that man is by nature good and only
suppressed by bad laws, “that man, the
individual, is an infinite reservoir of
possibilities; and if you can so rearrange
society by the destruction of oppressive order
then these possibilities will have a chance and
you will get Progress” (116).
H. writes of classicism, “One can define the
classical quite clearly as the exact opposite to
this. Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited
animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is
only by tradition and organization that anything
decent can be got out of him” (116).
Supported by Darwin’s theory of evolution as
small variations
De Vries’s mutation theory which says that
things happen by leaps, and once in existence
something stays absolutely fixed
Romanticism is the inversion of classicism,
“spilt religion,” the result of a society in which
religious instincts have been suppressed and
so “bursts out in some abnormal direction.”
Hulme writes, “By the perverted rhetoric of
Rationalism, your natural instincts are
suppressed and you are converted into an
agnostic… The instincts that find their right
and proper outlet in religion must come out in
some other way. You don’t believe in believe
in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a
god. You don’t believe in Heaven, so you
begin to believe in a heaven on earth. In other
words, you get romanticism” (118).
Church has always taken a classical view
(dogma, original sin); classical view is different
from view of materialism but identical to
“normal religious attitude;” belief in the Deity is
part of the fixed nature of man. Belief in the
Deity is parallel to appetite, though it is
sometimes suppressed.
The romantic tends to the gloomy because he
thinks about man as infinite and must
therefore always be talking about the infinite.
The classical poet does not forget man’s limit,
the finiteness of man. Even in the most
imaginative classical verse there is a sense of
reservation. H. writes, “In the classical attitude
you never seem to swing right along to the
infinite nothing… You never go blindly into an
atmosphere more than the truth, an atmosphere
too rarefied for man to breathe for too long”
(120)
• Hulme points out how strongly people become attached to either the “classic” or
“romantic.” He tells of a time a fight broke out when a man made some
disparaging remarks about Racine, a classical ideal.
• H. analyzes romanticism in art and says that it requires something new—blank
verse, landscape painting. He says that romanticism is dead, writing, “This period
of exhaustion seems to me to have been reached in romanticism. We shall not get
any new efflorescence of verse until we get a new technique…” (122).
• H. addresses the counterargument that he is not treating people as individuals,
saying that everyone’s opinion is “almost entirely of the literary history” of the
individual. He writes, “Language here acted after the manner of a reflex. So that
certain extremely complex mechanisms, subtle enough to imitate beauty, can
work by themselves—I certainly think that this is the case with judgments about
beauty” (124).
• H. welcomes the revival of classicism, saying that it may even come in an
unrecognizable form.
• Romanticism is not completely dead as the “critical attitude of mind, which
demands romantic qualities from verse, still survives.” H. writes, “The thing has
got so bad now that a poem which is all dry and hard, a properly classical poem,
would not be considered poetry at all” (126).
• H. says that the essence of poetry is that it leads people to a kind of a beyond.
Verse confined to the earth is not poetry. H. writes, “So much has romanticism
debauched us, that, without some form of vagueness, we deny the highest. In the
classic it is always the light of the ordinary day.... It is always perfectly human
and never exaggerated: man is always man and never a god” (127).
Unfortunately, however, romanticism is like a drug: once accustomed, you cannot
live without it. H. is disappointed that people cannot understand the concept of
verse without sentiment and the inability to admit the existence of beauty without
somehow implicating the infinite.
• H. discusses romantic attitudes and why he does not agree with them. H.’s big
point: “It is essential to prove that beauty may be in small, dry things.” The
goal of life is to capture things with “accurate, precise and definite description.”
This is incredibly difficult and to be admired, given the properties of language.
o H. has similar view to Nietzsche about the manipulation of language,
except H. is more optimistic that language can be manipulated. He writes,
“Language has its own special nature, it’s own conventions and communal
ideas. It is only by a concentrated effort of the mind that you can hold it
fixed to your own purpose” (132).
• Good classical art is not bound by conventions. H. uses metaphor of architect
bending a piece of wood to get the exact curve to describe the artist capturing the
essence of the thing. It is important not to just use the “curves of others.” (Like
Nietzsche!) H. writes, “To prevent one falling into the conventional curves of
ingrained technique, to hold on through infinite detail and trouble to the exact
curve you want. Wherever you get this sincerity, you get the fundamental quality
of good art without dragging in infinite or serious” (133)
• H. discusses how real communication is rare, as words already have so much
meaning associated with them. H. writes, “Real communication is so very rare,
for plain speech is unconvincing. It is in this rare fact of communication that you
get the root of aesthetic pleasure” (136). When someone has intense interest in
something, however, he will try to raise it above just an “accurate description.”
H. writes, “It isn’t the scale or kind of emotion produced that decides, but this one
fact: Is there any real zest in it? Did the poet have an actually realized visual
object before him in which he delighted?” (127). This is Nietzschean and also
expresses views of Ezra Pound.
• H. says that his objection to the “bad romantic aesthetic” in verse is imagination
when it deals with emotions (romantic) and fancy when it deals with finite things
(classical). (Note that both are bad!)
o Fancy is excessive decoration on plain speech, which is already
inaccurate. However, “If it is sincere in the accurate sense, when the
whole of the analogy is necessary to get out the exact curve of the feeling
or thing you want to express—there you seem to me to have the highest
verse…” (138).
• A romantic movement must end because it is wonder, and “wonder must cease to
be wonder” because something is no longer strange if you live it. H. writes,
“Wonder can only be the attitude of a man passing from one stage to another; it
can never be a permanently fixed thing” (140).
Death in Venice: First half
Chapter 1
Gustav von Aschenbach is an aging, nationally renowned writer living alone in Munich.
One morning, after a particularly demanding session of writing, Aschenbach goes on a
walk to clear his mind. He passes a graveyard-like place where he meets a strangelooking man with red hair, dressed as a tourist. After their meeting, Aschenbach
suddenly has an urge to travel abroad. Aschenbach believes perfectionism to be the
essence of artistic talent and that excessive passion impedes a writer's pursuit of
excellence. However, thinking that his work might benefit from an element of inspired
improvisation, he finally decides that a short vacation might improve his productivity.
From the beginning, Death in Venice establishes an ominous tone. The descriptions of
the dire political situation, the storm, and the menacing-looking stranger foretell
impending dangers. The gravestones and mortuary represent thoughts of death.
Chapter 2
In this chapter, we learn that Aschenbach is the son of a high-ranking legal official
descended from a family with a long tradition of austere and disciplined service to the
Prussian state. The narrator explains that it was this marriage between disciplined
conscientiousness and darker, more passionate inclinations that made Aschenbach the
artist he is. We are told that Aschenbach achieved fame at an early age, and the pressure
to produce, which he always felt, prevented him from ever knowing the carefree idleness
of youth. Aschenbach's dutiful devotion to work, however, wreaks havoc on his naturally
fragile health, and he is constantly battling illness. For him, art is the triumph over these
torments. While Aschenbach was headstrong and intellectually radical as a youth, he
now considers his greatest achievement to be his attainment of dignity. The fact that
Aschenbach has lived his entire life without really acknowledging his more impulsive
side indicates potential future problems.
Chapter 3
Aschenbach embarks on his journey where he first travels to an Adriatic island but finds
that its rainy climate and provincial flavor do not satisfy his longing for a “fantastic
mutation of normal reality”; ten days after his arrival, he then leaves for Venice.
While on the boat, Aschenbach examines a group of young men, and Aschenbach
realizes to his horror that this particular "young man" is in fact quite old and wrinkled:
His rosy cheeks are painted on, his hair is a wig, his moustache dyed, his teeth false.
Aschenbach finds the sky over Venice to be heavy with clouds, making it appear to him a
"different Venice” than before. Aschenbach steps into the gondola that resembles “a
coffin and linked with death, "the last journey." However, he notices that the gondola is
headed out to sea rather than to the vaporetto stop where he had intended to take the
smaller boat that would bring him to his hotel. He argues with the gondolier, but the man
refuses to turn the boat around or to inform his passenger of how much the ride will cost,
saying simply, "You will pay.” They reach the shore and Aschenbach goes to get change
to pay the gondolier, but upon returning, he finds the man has vanished. An old man tells
him that the gondolier owns no license, is a known criminal, and left to avoid the police.
Chapter 4
Once at the hotel, Aschenbach settles into his room and then goes down to wait in the
parlor until dinner. At a nearby table, Aschenbach notices three adolescent girls and a
boy, all speaking Polish and accompanied by a governess. The boy appears to be around
fourteen, and Aschenbach finds him "entirely beautiful" with his golden ringlets, a divine
serenity, a countenance suggestive of Greek sculpture, and dressed in a child's blue
sailor-suit. The children's mother appears to lead them into the dining room; as the boy
exits behind her, his eyes meet Aschenbach's.
The next morning, Aschenbach finds the weather still overcast and the air heavy; he
recalls a previous visit to Venice during which similar weather had caused him to fall ill
and forced him to return home. He wonders whether this trip will end the same way. At
breakfast, Aschenbach sees the Polish boy arriving late to his family's table; he is again
startled by the boy's "godlike" beauty. Aschenbach mentally compares the boy to Eros,
the Greek god of love, and finds in his complexion the sheen of Parian marble.
Aschenbach spends the morning on the hotel's beach, delighting in the spectacle of
carefree and playful vacationers. He again sights the Polish boy, whose scowl of disdain
seems to prove that he is, in fact, human, capable of feeling, and earns the boy
Aschenbach's further respect. Aschenbach watches the boy play with the other children,
one of whom, "Jashu," seems his closest companion, his "vassal and friend." Listening
for what the boy's name might be, Aschenbach finally decides the name must be "Tadzio"
or "Tadziu," a nickname for the Polish "Tadeusz."
Aschenbach returns to his room at midday and gazes in the mirror at his aging features.
He is joined in the elevator by a group of boys, including Tadzio. Up close, Aschenbach
notices the boy looks pale and sickly. The thought that Tadzio might not live to grow old
gives Aschenbach an inexplicable sense of relief.
Aschenbach decides to leave Venice for a resort near Trieste, and he notifies the hotel of
his plans. The next morning at breakfast the porter comes to tell Aschenbach that the
hotel's private transportation is leaving soon for the station; Aschenbach, having spotted
Tadzio's sisters but not the boy himself, feels the porter is rushing him. Finally, he tells
the porter that the coach may leave without him and take his trunk; he will take the public
steamboat when he is ready. As he rises to leave, Tadzio enters, and Aschenbach feels
acute regret as he crosses the lagoon to the station. He arrives still undecided whether to
take the train or not, but he soon learns that his luggage was mistakenly checked for
Como, forcing him to remain in Venice until he can regain the luggage. Relaxing in his
room that afternoon, Aschenbach sights Tadzio through the window and realizes that the
boy has been the reason for his reluctance to leave Venice.
Aschenbach's initial interest in the boy Tadzio is something he himself does not
understand. From the very beginning, Tadzio represents pure artistic beauty. At first,
Aschenbach believes that he can admire this beauty dispassionately, from a purely
intellectual, aesthetic standpoint. Later, he will try to convince himself that he desires the
boy only as an inspiration for more of his principled, dignified writing.
Death in Venice Notes Part II (beginning on pg 40)
Aschenbach Stays in Venice
Previously, Aschenbach was supposed to leave Venice, but his luggage was not
available, so he decides to stay and realizes more and more that he is doing it for Tadzio.
So when his luggage returns, he stays in Venice. He keeps looking at and “admiring”
Tadzio—in the hotel, on the beach, and even stalking him during trips into the city. He
becomes enamored with Tadzio’s physique and movements and thinks he sees the human
version of Beauty in front of him. This is when he gets the vision of Socrates wooing
Phaedrus, one of Socrates’ male students—this is to personify Aschenbach and Tadzio’s
relationship, and how Aschenbach feels about the boy’s beauty. There are also subtle
hints that point to the fact that such an action is littered with vice, and that there is some
aspect of immorality to all this. Aschenbach decides he wants to write a treatise, but he
also decides that he needs the inspiration of Tadzio’s presence, more importantly his
body and form. While he works, he experiences intense joy, but once he is done, he feels
guilty as though of some crime or transgression.
There is an episode where Aschenbach thinks of actually meeting and becoming
acquainted with Tadzio and he almost carries his idea through, but just when he is about
to lay his hand on Tadzio’s shoulder on the beach, he turns away. Aschenbach feels
embarrassed and it seems that he also does not want to break whatever illusion he has
constructed of Tadzio in his mind because he gets so much pleasure from it. The narrator
also begins to question Aschenbach at this point and any description of virtue or values
that he held earlier begins to be eroded. He talks about how Aschenbach is losing his
conscious and is succumbing to weakness. The narrator’s comments begin to have actual
proof when we see Aschenbach no longer keeping track of the hours he spends idling and
puts less energy into work. He seems a man consumed by passion and feverish, unhealthy
emotion, as he has very restless sleep and dreams of Greek mythological figures, which
add to feelings of decadence.
There is a bit of a turnaround when Aschenbach begins to realize that Tadzio is
catching on to his admiration. This makes him feel better and at one point Aschenbach
bumps into Tadzio in his family on the pier and Aschenbach is unable to veil his emotion.
Tadzio responds by giving him a smile, like that of Narcissus, inquisitive and troubled.
After this, encounter, Aschenbach silently declares his love for Tadzio.
Sickness in Venice
Aschenbach begins to notice that there are fewer guests staying in the hotel. He
hears rumors of there being a sickness in the city. Aschenbach realizes that if a quarantine
is imposed on the city, Tadzio and his family will have to stay, which alleviates the
horror Aschenbach had of losing Tadzio. At this point, Aschenbach becomes increasingly
more obsessed with Tadzio and stalks him throughout the city. The reader gets a more
Dionysian feeling from the descriptions—Venice is shown as a labyrinth and Aschenbach
becomes further consumed by decadence, as he slips into the depravity of the Venetian
atmosphere.
Although Aschenbach does question the transformation occurring with him, as he
shamefully thinks of how he would be compared with his dignified and virtuous
ancestors, he tries to assert himself by explaining that an artist’s life is also respectable
and worth pursuing—also, the enslavement to passion that he has been experiencing with
regard to Tadzio is part of being an artist. There is another episode where Tadzio and
Aschenbach interact: it is during a show and the two exchange glances and Aschenbach
tries his hardest to guard his emotion since he does not want people, especially Tadzio’s
family, to know, which would result in Tadzio being taken away from him. There is more
on the spreading of the sickness in Venice, which is, in turn, symbolic of more and more
of Aschenbach’s body falling victim to emotion and passion. As one would lose his
health, Aschenbach is losing his virtue—a process that is surely bound to get the better of
him.
The Advance of Cholera
Aschenbach finds out from a British travel agency that cholera from India is
advancing onto the city. The text talks about the corruption of the authorities in Venice
and how it is related to the abandonment of morals by the lower social classes. The city
becomes consumed with vice—drunkenness, crime, and brothels—representative of
Aschenbach’s own consummation with Dionysian vice. Aschenbach is urged to leave,
but feeling repunged by his previous life, he realizes there is no option besides staying. In
fact, he decides not even to tell Tadzio’s family of the impending danger and quarantine,
as he is consumed by visions of his and Tadzio’s potential adventures in a city full of
chaos. Aschenbach chooses his own selfish motives at the expense of hurting others—an
action that the reader himself cannot but see as immoral. Thus, Aschenbach’s downfall
continues. Symbolizing his tumble into vice, Aschenbach has a dream that takes place in
his own soul. There is a phallic symbol around which many worshippers are whirling in
some sort of orgy. Aschenbach realizes that he is in fact like the worshippers and has
become enslaved to a Dionysian demon-god—a devastation that Aschenbach has been
coming to throughout the entire novel. Tadzio’s image shifts from being Apollonian to
Dionysian, as the statuesque and beautiful Tadzio now becomes worshipped like a god. It
is an uncontrollable and lewd worship that Aschenbach engages in, and this is what
makes Tadzio’s image Dionysian in Aschenbach’s mind.
The Final Descent
There are no tourists left in the city, but Aschenbach and Tadzio’s family remain.
Aschenbach is more and more infatuated with the thought of being left alone with the
boy. Since people are in panic and paying less attention to other things, Aschenbach
makes his advances toward the boy more apparent—he begins dressing up and goes to
the barber to get his hair dyed and put on make up (because Aschenbach is ashamed of
his old body). Aschenbach also begins to experience fever, and there is a scene where he
gets lost in the streets of Venice and buys overripe strawberries to quench his thirst, and
the reader understands that Aschenbach is in the same location of the city when he made
his unfulfilled decision to leave it. Aschenbach is not supposed to eat produce, but
indulges in this “forbidden fruit” anyway.
Thus, the narrator begins to further mock Aschenbach, showing the reader how far
he has gone from his previous honor and dignity to his current utter debasement. There is
a passage where Socrates addresses Phaedrus and implies thoughts about the eroticism of
beauty. He says that writers cannot always be prudent and somber, and that they
eventually fall into the abyss (think Dionysus). He claims that knowledge and beauty
always lead to the Dionysian abyss. It is after this that Aschenbach receives word that
Tadzio’s family is leaving the city. He begins to follow and watch Tadzio even more than
before, and there is an episode where Tadzio’s eyes meet Aschenbach’s on the beach. At
this point, Aschenbach succumbs to his fever, but in his mind imagines Tadzio beckoning
out to him. In a few moments, Aschenbach is found dead in his chair. The last image of
Tadzio is like a messenger of death, who ushers Aschenbach into the afterlife. It
concludes the novel with Aschenbach’s complete downfall to Dionysus.
T. S. Eliot “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
Eliot begins his essay discussing the concept of criticism, stating that “criticism is as
inevitable as breathing,” but it is important that we criticize the right things. Speaking of
tradition, we tend to appreciate artists who are new and original. “Tradition” in the sense
of emulating the past should actually be discouraged as it limits progress. However, true
tradition for Eliot is possible only understanding one’s place in time and is attainable only
through great labor. Knowing one’s significance in a historical sense is what actually
makes a writer traditional. Writers are significant and appreciated only in their
relationship to those of the past, however both past and present must grow together. That
is to say, a poet can not be great by being entirely new, however it can’t be a direct
replica of the past. The difference between past and present is that writers of the present
have the advantage of the knowledge of the past. The two exist simultaneously, as the
current poet continues the development of those of the past.
Poets do not differentiate themselves based on personality, but by medium of expression.
What separates writers is not what they know, but how they express it. Because writers
write primarily based on emotions and feelings, no two writers can ever be identical.
Problems tend to arise when poets search to express unknown feelings. Good poetry
must be written with a solid balance of the conscious and unconscious. To Eliot,
however, “the emotion of art is impersonal,” and it is important to not associate the poem
too directly with the poet.
T.S. Eliot “Gerontion”
Poem written in 1919. Could maybe be an ID, would just suggest reading the poem, you
can find it easily online. Professor Albright discussed this poem in his lecture on
Neoclassicism: “the senescence of the present, the enfeebling of the past.”
Basic Info on Eliot
T. S. Eliot thought that it was the duty of modern poetry to be difficult, operating under
the principle of defamiliarization that states that we live in a shorthand, abbreviated
perceptual world, and it is the purpose of art to fill the act of recognizing things with a
kind of friction: to restore a sort of abrasiveness and grit to the objects around us. One of
Eliot’s most often-quoted maxims is “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal” (SE,
p.182) Eliot’s sense that the poet isn’t working solo, but is instead a sort of vehicle
through which the impersonal mind of Europe is finding expression, think of a catalyst
(platinum). The only major Western poet who was fully trained in academic philosophy.
As a philosopher, Eliot espoused a complicated form of Idealism, strongly insistent on
the complete oneness of body and mind
Passages Quoted in Lecture
1) Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.
My house is a decayed house,
And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.
The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,
Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.
I am an old man,
A dull head among windy spaces.
2) I that was near your heart was removed therefrom
To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
3) I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
How should I use them for your closer contact?
4) Tyger tyger burning bright
In the forest of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry
Key Points from Lecture
.. “Gerontion” is a fine example of what it feels like to be the mind of Europe in full
senescence.
.. Throughout the poem Eliot seeks ways of identifying Gerontion with European
history. If he lives in a world that looks like a tuberculosis ward (coughing goats,
sneezing housekeepers), it is because Europe is itself sick; if the Jew squats at his
windowsill, it is because the usury of bankers has ruined civilization (Eliot’s antiSemitism will always remain an embarrassment to readers of his poetry).
.. Gerontion is a sort of negative inversion of a human being, and defines himself
through absence, not presence: he was NOT at the battles that are so sharply
evoked in the text. The mind of Europe seems to suffer from some sort of
Alzheimer’s disease.
.. As the poem continues it becomes clear that in modern Europe religion has
dwindled, deviated into perversion: the perversion of worshiping art (“Hakagawa
among the Titians”), the perversion of occult spiritualism (Madame de Tornquist,
shifting her candles, seems to be a medium), and various sexual perversions (in
the context of “depraved May,” Mr. Silvero’s “caressing hands” seem quite
sinister). History is as useless as religion in trying to make sense of things.
.. Many of those who disliked Neoclassicism thought it a sterile sort of art: why do
what Bach or Ben Jonson did when Bach or Ben Jonson could do it better? This
threatening sterility finds its expression in “Gerontion”: a mind that loses itself in
vast intellectual constructs from the past may lose everything. If you can swallow
the whale, well and good; but there’s always a danger that the artist may bite off
more than he or she can chew. “Gerontion” serves as a kind of warning.
Tristan Tzara (*1896 in Romania, †1963 in Paris)
Tzara was:
- one of the co-founders of Dada (first in Zurich, then in Paris)
- one of the driving forces behind the movement: very prolific writer of letters,
manifestos, propaganda pieces
Works we read for class:
Zurich Chronicle (15): About Dada happenings, publications, and exhibitions in Zurich.
Answers questions about what Dada was like in Zurich.
1) There is some explicit emphasis on the anti-conventional aspect of Dada:
conventional art is to be mocked joyfully by the “summersaults” of the New Art (15); authority of
police officers is disregarded.
2) Yet the spirit is for the most part affirmative. One could even say Dada’s anti-movement
status is the flip-side of its total affirmation of absolutely everything—sense and non-sense, order and
chaos; in other words: if all things have equal value, none have any value. Part of the problem with
“good sense” (28) is that it is not affirmative of all forms of expression. Part of what makes this
understanding of the movement (as an attempt at fusion of all modern trends rather than an attempt
to demolish them all) plausible is that the early exhibitions were not all non-sensible; they featured
artists of all kinds, and all art forms, orderly or not: Kandinsky, Klee, Kokoschka, Feininger, for
example, exhibited in the early Dada shows.
3) Art as happening: Tzara shows that Dada art is (a) always a performance, a Gesamtkustwerk; (b)
so spontaneous and situational that it makes less sense to speak of an artist than of a situation that
creates art (and is art, its own product): “relinquished the stage direction to the subtle intervention of
the explosive wind” (24).
4) Emphasis on the primitive: negro dances and sculptures and poems, children’s drawings
5) Not focused entirely on non-sense: many formal lectures on artists and art are delivered.
6) Quotations:
“Dada has succeeded in establishing the circuit of the absolute unconsciousness in the
auditorium which has forgotten the frontiers of education of prejudices, experienced the
commotion of the NEW” (33).
We demand the right to piss in different colors.
Dada Manifesto 1918 (121)
If I shout;
Ideal, Ideal, Ideal
Knowledge, Knowledge, Knowledge,
Boomboom, boomboom, boomboom
I have recorded fairly accurately the Progress, Law, Morals and all the other magnificent qualities that
various very intelligent people have discussed in so many books in order, finally, to say that even so
everyone has danced according to his own personal booboom, and that he’s right about his
boomboom… (127)
Order=disorder; ego=non-ego: affirmation=negation (see Point 2 above)
There is no ultimate Truth. Dialectics is an amusing machine that leads us (in banal fashion) to the
opinions we have already held in any case (127). (see “a few ideas…” below)
But suppleness, enthusiasm and even the joy of injustice, that little truth that we practice as innocents
and that makes us beautiful. (130)
Morals have given rise to charity and pity, two dumplings that have grown like elephants, planets,
which people call good. There is nothing good about them. (131)
Liberty: DADA DADA DADA (132)
Negro Songs (185)
A Few Ideas, in Note Form, About Dada:
- Dada turned against the humanistic tradition that exalted man as the measure of all
things but then destroyed him: see Tzara’s poem: Ideals Ideals Ideals / Knowledge
Knowledge Knowledge / Boomboom Boomboom Boomboom.
- Hence, its “anti-ness” need not be seen as a form of nihilism: it can indeed be seen as an
attempt to destroy the cobwebby constructs of old, which have led to such things as the
world wars, but this destruction might be followed by a rediscovery of what is truly
generative. Dada’s second aspect is then a “fusion of all generative ideas” (Hugo Ball).
Or as Tzara writes: “Dada was the most formidable protest, the most intense armed
affirmation of salvation liberty blasphemy mass combat speed prayer tranquility private
guerilla negation and chocolate of the desperate” (33).
- What could be generative? The non-conceptual, non-rational. Pure form, pure sound—
as opposed to the full objects constructed by conceptual thought. Hence Dada’s
repugnance at representational art and the possibility of calling Dada an “essentialism” or
a “realism.” Dada as a return to the essential reality which is defined as the pre-rational,
or sub-rational. This is what’s real, and its ebullient power ought to be emancipated from
the yoke of reason.
- Dada’s destruction of language can thus be seen as part of a large distrust of the rational
or conceptual faculties: these have lead us to mass-slaughter, so clearly they are not the
“generative elements.” Perhaps this is why Ball proposes to “dissolve language to the
core of the creative process” (Ball). It also explains the emphasis on primitivism (the
primitive is the non-cultured, non-conventional, non-rational), and on chance (chance as
the least “human” way of making decisions, hence the least “meaningful” or “rational”
way).
- Dada is the most skeptical of the modernist movements: not only can we know nothing
relevant), but knowledge is also destructive, is contrary to the “generative forces” that
exist in the irrational (ideals and knowledge just lead to boomboom)
The Dada Almanac
“Zurich Chronicle” by Tristan Tzara
• Tristan Tzara (Romania, 1896-1963)—co-founder and international promoter of
Dada; his idea of Dada was “complete negativity, an unlimited cultural clean
sweep”
• Dada-Soiree (July 14, 1916)—Tzara explains the new aesthetic: “gymnastic
poem, concert of vowels, bruitist poem, static poem chemical arrangement of
ideas…the subjective folly of the arteries the dance of the heart on burning
buildings and acrobatics in the audience”
• Strum Evening (April 14, 1917)—decided the role of the Dadaist theater, “which
relinquished the stage direction to the subtle invention of the explosive wind, the
scenario to the audience, visible direction, and grotesque props”
• New Art Night (April 28, 1917)—the audience withdraws its personal inclinations
and makes itself comfortable with Dada
• Dada 3 (December 1918)—“Let us destroy let us be good let us create a new
force of gravity NO = YES Dada means nothing life Who?”
• Dada 9 (April 1919)—Tzara performs “Fever of the Male,” and Walter Serner
presents his Dadaist Manifesto; both cause an uproar even though the Dadaist
Manifesto had previously been received well by the Zurich public; “Dada has
succeeded in establishing the circuit of absolute unconsciousness in the
auditorium which has forgotten the frontiers of education of prejudices,
experienced the common of the NEW. Final victory of Dada.”
• Johannes Baader (Germany, 1875-1955)—considered by many to be the most
extraordinary personality associated with the German Dada movement
“What Did Expressionism Want?” by Richard Huelsenbeck
• Expressionism was a reaction against the times, while Dada was an expression of
the times
• Expressionism turned its backs on nature and dared not look the cruelty of the
time in the face; it had forgotten how to be daring; Dadaism, on the other hand,
exposed itself to the risk of its own death; it put itself at the heart of things
• Expressionism wanted to forget itself, while Dada wanted to affirm itself
• “The execution and direction of art depends on the times in which it lives, and
artists are creatures of their epoch. The highest art will be that whose mental
content represents the thousandfold problems of the day, which has manifestly
allowed itself to be torn apart by the explosions of last week, and which is forever
trying to gather up its limbs after the impact of yesterday. The best and most
unprecedented artists will be those who continuously snatch the tatters of their
bodies out of the chaos of life’s cataracts, clutching the intellectual zeitgeist and
bleeding from hands and hearts.”
• Expressionism did not fulfill these expectations; its hatred of the press,
advertising, and sensationalism suggested that artists found their armchairs more
important than the noise of the streets
• Dada was created to realize these ideals
• The word Dada symbolized reality: “the confusion of noises, colors, and spiritual
rhythms”….“the sensational screams and feverish excitements of its audacious
everyday psyche and the entirety of its brutal reality”; this divided it from all
previous art movements, particularly futurism
• The Bruitist, Simultaneist, and Static poems—the Static poem “transforms words
into individuals”; it was perhaps the most radical experiment, having no
connection with Futurism; the words were split up into letters or syllables and
displayed on large cards, whereupon the stage curtain dropped and juggled their
order, demonstrating the arbitrariness of the word or letter as signifier
• “Dada leads to incredible new possibilities and forms of expression in all of the
arts. It turned Cubism into a dance on the stage, it has disseminated the Bruitist
music of the Futurists…The word Dada itself points to the internationalism of the
movement, which is not tied to borders, religions, or professions. Dada is the
international expression of our times, the great malcontent among artistic
movements, the artistic reflection of all these offensives, peace conferences…”
• “Against the anaemic abstraction of Expressionism! Against the world-reforming
theories of literary blockheads! And for Dadaism in word and image, for the
spreading of a Dadaist course of events throughout the world. If you are against
this manifest you are a Dadaist!”
“Dada Art” by Alexander Partens, p. 94-99 of the coursepack.
“Alexander Partens” was a pseudonym for Tzara, Serner, and Arp.
Describes Expressionism as “poster art”
“All art…already contains elements of abstraction….all imitative work consists in
transposing external relationships into a complex unity which is by its nature different”
(94)
Cubists wanted to show objects’ inner nature by constructing images of their fragments.
Futurism specialized in the relationship between movements and their synchronicity, but
it was still illusionistic. Expressionists coined “psychological art,” but it was just
symbolism.
“The goal of every art work is emotion, whose strength is greater in proportion to the
immediacy of the reality represented in the work…[A] direct work free of problems will
be more perfect and its emotion stronger and more direct” (95).
Cites Braque and Picasso as early examples of this. Incorporating materials (newspaper,
cloth, etc.) into artwork. Picasso’s intention was “to prise open directly the contrast
between that which was apprehended and that which one provided from one’s self” (96).
Hans Arp saw the métier itself as the problem; “He wanted a direct form of
production…He wanted abstraction” (96).
Dada “detested objects, landscapes, anecdotes and allegories, demanding instead the use
of simple means and a primitive approach to elementary things” (97). Dada has
individualism. “But more important than this was its dislike of handicraft, its disdain for
schools and its ridicule of doctrines. In principle no difference was made between
painting and ironing handkerchiefs…One created from one’s own world, creating a mix
that was strange, glorious, wild: and then signing it” (95).
Andre Breton’s Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality (sourcebook
p.57)
This is a surrealist piece in and of itself, so it is difficult to summarize the style. I’ll point
out certain passages that possibly illustrate some of the themes professor highlighted with
this essay. These themes, moreover, and other writings by Breton has influenced
numerous Surrealists artists and have laid much of the theoretical/aesthetic foundation for
the movement.
1. Attacking the past and its rigid standards by presenting the high standards of the
past and flaunting its degradation
2. Artists listened to their unconscious, preconscious, transconsious promptings from
within:
a. Surrealism as defined by Breton:
i. SURREALISM, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which one
proposes to express, either verbally, or 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.
3. Nietzsche’s notion of staring at the abyss and have the abyss stare right back at
you—this time presenting the chaos generated by and pertinent to human
psyche..Obsession with mental illness
4. Attacking the notion of similarity and differences (questioning established
categorization of things in this world)
a. Ex: “two leaves of the same tree are exactly alike: it's even the same leaf. I
have only one word. I insist that if two drops of water resemble each other,
it is because there is only one drop of water. One thread, repeating itself
and crossing over itself, makes silk. The staircase up which I walk has
only one step. There is only one color: white. The Great Wheel, in
revolving, has only one spoke. From this to the sun’s first way is but a
step” (sourcebook 60)
b. There exists only one leaf on the planet earth–but still leaves us all
deprived of any useful concept of leaf.
5. To evade reason, one should instead, “listen to one’s dreaming thoughts when
asleep; or, better yet, cultivate a state of trance, so that one is just awake enough
to write down where thoughts go of their own volition”. “Let the unconscious
brain moving the pen in the hand to draw an image of itself.”
Examples of passages that illustrate these themes include:
• The Succession of Wonders, which Breton describes as a passage in which his
conscious through is absent (the entire text is on 59 of sourcebook—very short)
o “Our ship carried everything you might think of as being most essential and
most precious to us. There was a plaster Virgin, whose halo had been made
of cobwebs so that it lighted up with dew, in order to complete the
resemblance. There was an artificial fly, all white, which I had stolen from a
dead fisherman in a dream, yes, in a dream, and which I had watched for
hours floating on the water I had placed in a blue bowl. That was the bait I
had set for the unknown. Something might rise from the depths of the earth,
something might fall from the sky. Healing shrubs great to the edge of the
deck, and the fragrance of hyacinths, indifferent to climate, was diffused…The
necklace of mercy had only two pearls, called breasts; genius was not only an
ornament but also a dazzling promise. A pair of birds, most rare, that
changed form with the wind, surpassed all musical instruments.”
o Breton also highlights the uselessness of figures of speech by using
comparisons of things/concepts that do not really relate to one another in order
to show that figures of speech does not lead to any further illumination of the
two things being compared. We learn nothing more about reality through
figures of speech.
• “That makes me think of poetry, too, which is a hoax of another kind, and perhaps the
gravest. Poetry evidences in our days such peculiar requirements. See what
importance it attaches to the possible, and its love of the improbable. What is, or
what might be – how insufficient that appears to be. Nature, it denies your rule.
Objects, what does it care about your properties? It cannot rest until it has placed its
negativist hand on the entire universe. This is the eternal challenge of Gerard of
Nerval leading a lobster on a leash to the Palais-Royal. And poetic abuse is not
nearly finished. The doe with feet of brass and horns of gold which I carry wounded
on my shoulders or to Paris or to Mycene, transfigures the world along my path.
Changes operate so fast I no longer can keep track of them.”
• “In its most sterile seasons, poetry has often furnished proof of this; what debauches
of starry skies, precious stones, dead leaves…I believe it is not too late to recoil from
this deception, inherent in the words we have thus far used so badly…Language can
and should be torn from this servitude. No more descriptions from nature, no more
sociological studies. Silence, so that I may pass where no one has ever passed.
Silence! After you, my beautiful language!...The object of language is to be
understood…but understood how? Understood no doubt by me, when I listen like a
child asking for the continuation of a fairy tale…A rather dishonest person one day,
in a note contained in an anthology, made a list of osme of the images presented to us
in the work of one of our greatest living poets. It read: ‘the next day of the
caterpillar dressed for the ball’…meaning ‘butterfly’. “Breast of crystal…meaning
carafe’. No, indeed, sir. It means nothing of the kind. Put your butterfly back I your
carafe. You may be sure Saint-Pol-Roux said exactly what he meant.”
DH Lawrence - Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Lady Chatterley’s Lover is revolutionary in its honest and extensive consideration of sex
and society. Lawrence considered personal qualities to reside in different parts of the
body and created his characters accordingly. Clifford, who is paralyzed from the waist
down serves as a perfect example of this “body-realism”: he is completely devoid of the
power in the lower torso, representing his lack of lower-nerve centers and his
overwhelming sympathetic dependence.
Basic Plot summary chapters 1-8:
Takes place in the early 20C. Clifford Chatterley is upper-class, the woman he marries,
Connie, is not. Clifford becomes paralyzed from the waist down during the war. He
comes home and marries Connie. After Clifford’s father dies he and Connie move into
his family home in Wragby. Thanks to the coal and iron industries, Wragby is really
dreary and depressing.
Clifford is entirely dependent upon Connie. He spends most of his time writing and is
becoming somewhat well-known and respected as an intellectual. Connie is growing
tired of her role in his life – she is restless. She spends her time entertaining Clifford's
scholarly guests and taking care of her lame husband.
Connie has an affair with Michaelis, one of Clifford's guests. This affair provides brief
refreshment for Connie's unhappiness, but is far from the solution. After this happens,
Clifford suggests to Connie one day that he wants her to have a child by another man so
he can raise an heir. She agrees, but no plan of action is created.
Michaelis returns and sleeps with Connie again, but this time Michaelis makes her really
upset (he complains to her about the amount of time it takes her to orgasm when they
have sex) and her feelings for him dissolve. She feels really empty inside again.
Connie meets Mellors, the game-keeper Clifford had hired, and grows fond of him. After
an encounter with him one day, she comes home and examines her naked body carefully
in the mirror (Professor Albright talked about this in his lecture). Her body is
deteriorating. She is getting thin and unhealthy. She writes to her Sister and tells her that
she is not well and needs help.
Connie's sister comes and forces her to hire a live-in nurse - Mrs. Bolton - to take care of
Clifford so she can get her health back. Clifford resents this at first. In time he becomes
dependent upon Mrs. Bolton in the same way he had been with Connie. He teaches Mrs.
Bolton sophisticated games and pass-times of the upper class, and he really enjoys this.
Connie's role in his life is becoming less critical.
Mrs. Bolton gives Clifford insight into the working class. He becomes interested in the
coal industry and started researching the industry to find a way to pull his town out of the
hole. This makes his feel powerful, useful.
Plot Summary Chapters 9-14:
Mrs. Bolton and Clifford Chatterley spend more time together as Connie
slowly pulls away from her husband. They discuss the mines, and Clifford
becomes interested in finding a new way to burn coal. He seems alive on
the outside, content with his power, money and intellect, but inside he
is weak. Inside this tough shell is a man who worships Connie and fears
her love for him is not as eternal as their marriage should suggest.
Connie wants to have a child. Clifford reasons that it would be nice to
have an heir to his estate and makes Connie assure him that no sexual
encounter could change her opinion of him. Connie consents, but is quite
misleading as she has already begun her affair with Mellors. Mrs. Bolton
picks up on Connie’s activities, and Connie plans a trip with her
sister, Hilda.
Clifford and Connie get into a debate about the people of Tevershall and
the bleak conditions that they live in. Clifford essentially argued that
the masses were doomed to their current lifestyle and it was impossible
to raise the condition of their living. It was quite the arrogant,
aristocratic view towards lower class people.
There was an incident with Clifford’s motorized wheel chair while he and
Connie were taking a stroll to appreciate the gorgeous outdoors. His
wheel chair couldn’t make it up the hill, but his delicate pride refused
to let anybody push him home. Clifford summoned for Mellors, but he was
unable to fix the chair. Eventually Clifford was pushed home by Mellors
and Connie as they shared a few affectionate moments behind the
nobleman’s back.
During a reunion between Connie and Mellors, he describes his previous
experiences with women and his marriage that ended up being a disaster.
Connie learns about Mellors' wife and his opinion of women.
Plot Summary Chapters 15-19:
As Connie’s trip abroad to London, Paris, and Venice with her father and sister
approaches, she begins to feel conflicted about whether or not she should go and has
several lengthy conversations with both Clifford and Mellors about the issue. Her
hesitation stems from a fear that Mellors’ feelings for her will deteriorate in her absence.
However, she sees this as a necessary opportunity to explain her potential pregnancy
from her affair with the gamekeeper. Clifford is very upset that she is leaving him alone
for such a long period of time.
Connie’s is found out in her affair with the gamekeeper by Ms. Bolton one afternoon
when Connie goes out in the rain to meet Mellors at the hut in the woods and is absent for
many hours. Ms. Bolton and Connie have an unstated understanding that she will not
betray Connie by telling anyone about the affair. During the course of this stormy tryst,
Connie and Mellors have a naked romp in the rain and then decorate each other’s bodies
with wildflowers. Connie asks Mellors how he would feel if she had a baby with him.
He reveals his aversion to children that is connected to his dread of the future of the
human race.
Before she leaves for Venice, Connie tells her sister Hilda that she is in love with Mellors
and begs Hilda to help her spend the night with him one last time before leaving. Hilda
disapproves of Connie’s love affair with a member of a lower class, but agrees to help her
sister. Mellors and Hilda meet and butt heads. Hilda feels that he is uncultured and
Mellors feels that she is too headstrong and egotistical. Connie and Mellors have a wild
night of love-making and Connie leaves the next morning, leaving behind a bottle of
perfume in the cottage (later be found by Mellors’ estranged wife Bertha Coutts when she
returns.)
Connie enjoys being apart from Clifford and Wragby, but finds the life of the vacationing
set to be unfulfilling. She sees all of the fancy meals, dancing, and sunbathing to be an
elaborate drug which the upper classes use to escape their own lives. Connie craves for
news from Mellors, but receives none, as they had previously agreed not to correspond
while she was away. An old artist friend of the family, Duncan Forbes, meets the family
in Venice and finds his attraction to Connie renewed. She, however, rebuffs his advances
beyond friendship.
Connie receives news from Clifford that there has been a scandal in Tevershall involving
Mellors. Bertha Coutts apparently returned to reclaim him as her husband. After Mellors
drove her away from his home, she broke in and waited for him in the nude in his bed in
an attempt to convince him to take her back. Mellors spends some time living with his
mother to avoid Bertha and eventually manages to drive her out of the cottage by
removing all of the furniture from the house. Bertha is angered and spreads bitter rumors
about Mellors around town, talking openly and explicitly about their sexual relationship.
Bertha also accuses him of “keeping women” in the cottage in her absence, naming
several prominent women, including Constance. Clifford confronts Mellors about these
rumors, they have an argument, and Clifford asks him to leave.
Upon hearing this news, Connie is frantic and arranges to meet Mellors in London on her
way home to Wragby. Connie reaffirms her desire to leave Clifford and go away with
Mellors, but Mellors is hesitant. He is worried that if their affair is discovered, his
divorce will not go through. He expresses the need for them to spend time apart until
March, after the divorce is finalized. In the meantime, Connie writes to Clifford to tell
him that she is not coming back. He insists that she return to Wragby to discuss it in
person. Upon her return, she reveals that she tries to claim Duncan Wells as the father of
her child, but Clifford does not believe that she is actually in love with him, so she tells
him the truth about Mellors. Clifford is furious and refuses to ever divorce her. Connie
nonetheless leaves Wragby and returns to Scotland with her family while Mellors works
on a farm until March. The novel ends with a letter from Mellors to Connie, describing
his work and his hopes about their future together and his fears about the fate of a
rapidly-deteriorating society.
Good luck on the exam, Magnus