The Surreal Object: Sketched thoughts on Poetry, Duchamp, and Things
I've always felt that Surrealism was at its best when experimenting with objects.
In searching for a 'physics of poetry' (Breton's words) it exposed and reconfigured the 'everyday' in ways that, for me, are even more radical than the film experiments of Un Chien Andalou or Dali's photo-real dreamscapes.
Man Ray
...Or if not more radical, then at least more immediate somehow, more unsettling. They insist on a new way of looking at very ordinary 'things'.
I'm not sure how true this is, but I read an essay recently on the relationship between the work of Marcel Duchamp and American poet William Carlos Williams which seemed to suggest that the path to American Modernism could perhaps be mapped in the following way:
European Realist Painting/Sculpture > European Abstract painting/Sculpture > American Abstract painting/Sculpture > American Modernism (Which crystallises the abstract and draws out a more definite focus.)
American Modernism then insists upon a distilled 'Abstraction' that brings 'the thing itself' to the foreground.
Dada/Surrealist experiments with the snow shovel or urinal for example.
Marcel Duchamp
But I'm jumping ahead of myself really... What I wanted to say was that I was surprised during a recent visit to the 'le Surrealisme et l'objet' exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris that my first thought was of Carlos Williams' Poem 'The Red Wheelbarrow':
Again, there is the intense focus on the object itself.
Then later, trawling through the Internet for information, I discovered a concrete connection between Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and William Carlos Williams.
My initial thoughts are that the object intersects with the poetic at two key points:
1) Object as the fulcrum for a wider narrative
2) The 'uncanny object': A moment of very ordinary disquiet
The first seems to share more with Carlos Williams' wheelbarrow - The theatre stage prop, or gun glimpsed on the wall in the first act of a play by Chekhov. The second functions as a tripwire, a perfectly structured metaphor.
I like both.
Salvador Dali / Alberto Giocometti
I've always felt that Surrealism was at its best when experimenting with objects.
In searching for a 'physics of poetry' (Breton's words) it exposed and reconfigured the 'everyday' in ways that, for me, are even more radical than the film experiments of Un Chien Andalou or Dali's photo-real dreamscapes.
...Or if not more radical, then at least more immediate somehow, more unsettling. They insist on a new way of looking at very ordinary 'things'.
I'm not sure how true this is, but I read an essay recently on the relationship between the work of Marcel Duchamp and American poet William Carlos Williams which seemed to suggest that the path to American Modernism could perhaps be mapped in the following way:
European Realist Painting/Sculpture > European Abstract painting/Sculpture > American Abstract painting/Sculpture > American Modernism (Which crystallises the abstract and draws out a more definite focus.)
American Modernism then insists upon a distilled 'Abstraction' that brings 'the thing itself' to the foreground.
Dada/Surrealist experiments with the snow shovel or urinal for example.
But I'm jumping ahead of myself really... What I wanted to say was that I was surprised during a recent visit to the 'le Surrealisme et l'objet' exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris that my first thought was of Carlos Williams' Poem 'The Red Wheelbarrow':
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
Again, there is the intense focus on the object itself.
Then later, trawling through the Internet for information, I discovered a concrete connection between Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and William Carlos Williams.
My initial thoughts are that the object intersects with the poetic at two key points:
1) Object as the fulcrum for a wider narrative
2) The 'uncanny object': A moment of very ordinary disquiet
The first seems to share more with Carlos Williams' wheelbarrow - The theatre stage prop, or gun glimpsed on the wall in the first act of a play by Chekhov. The second functions as a tripwire, a perfectly structured metaphor.
I like both.
