Australian Surrealism

The Agapitos/Wilson collection

15 February – 11 May 2008

The story of Surrealism in Australia has until recently remained largely unknown. It was only in 1993 with the National Gallery of Australia’s exhibition Surrealism: revolution by night that the extent of Surrealist practice in this country was revealed. That seminal exhibition led the Sydney collectors James Agapitos, OAM, and Ray Wilson, OAM, to focus their energies towards collecting Australian Surrealist art.¹ Assembled with intellect and passion, their collection became the largest and most important repository of Australian Surrealist art in private hands.

The National Gallery of Australia has recently acquired the Agapitos/Wilson collection through a combination of gift and purchase. Covering the period 1925 to 1955, the Agapitos/Wilson collection includes 285 paintings, prints, collages, drawings, photographs and sculptures by the foremost artists associated with Surrealist art practice in Australia.

While there was no organised Surrealist movement in Australia, its importance lies in the fact that some of Australia’s leading artists were influenced by Surrealism at a formative period of their careers. James Gleeson, Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Arthur Boyd, Robert Klippel and Max Dupain all experimented with Surrealist ideas and methods, and the impact it had on their art at that time and on their future development was decisive. Other artists, such as Ivor Francis, produced their best works under its influence. The story of Surrealism in Australia is of artists responding in individualistic ways to the possibilities it offered. With the exception of Gleeson, Australian artists did not become committed Surrealists; rather, they dipped in and out of Surrealism, selectively taking what they wanted for the enrichment of their art.

While Surrealism was not conceived as an artistic movement, its influence was to be felt most strongly in the visual arts, including painting, sculpture, photography and film. Surrealism was officially born in Paris in 1924 with the publication of French poet and intellectual André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism. For the Surrealists, the exploration of the unconscious mind, pioneered by Sigmund Freud, was a way to liberate the imagination from the dominance of reason. This would lead to the breaking of restrictive social conventions, bring to light previously repressed feelings and result in the greater happiness of mankind. The Surrealists’ aim was to revolutionise society at all levels, and Breton argued that the way forward was ‘the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality,
a surreality’.²

Surrealism’s fascination with dreams and the unconscious led the way to a new kind of imagery: the precise portrayal of dream-like scenes and disassociated narratives of Salvador Dalí and René Magritte. Just as influential was Breton’s definition of Surrealism as ‘pure psychic automatism’, which opened the door to new creative processes such as exquisite corpse, decalcomania and frottage, all means of liberating the subconscious mind through the relaxation of conscious control.

While it is not possible to speak of a Surrealist style, at the heart of the Surrealist aesthetic was the illogical, unexpected juxtapositions of disparate elements, conveyed by the nineteenth-century writer Lautréamont’s phrase ‘beautiful as the chance encounter on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella’ from his 1869 novel Les chants du Maldoror. This idea of the junction of disjunctive elements also informed the practice of collage – the quintessential Surrealist medium.

While the 1920s are considered the high point of Surrealism in France, the 1930s saw a resurgence of interest in Surrealism in England and America. The highly successful International Surrealist exhibition held at the New Burlington Galleries in London in 1936 included almost 400 works. The same year in New York, the Museum of Modern Art staged Fantastic art, Dada and Surrealism and Julien Levy held an exhibition of Surrealism at his gallery. ‘These three major exhibitions in 1936 … together with their various publications, related lectures and newspaper and radio reports firmly cemented the place of Surrealism within the English-speaking world.’³

Australian artist Peter Purves Smith, then living in London, is known to have visited the International Surrealist exhibition and his subsequent works show the stylistic influence of Surrealism in their strange figurative distortion and mood of disquiet. Fellow Australian expatriates James Cant, Clifford Bayliss, Geoffrey Graham and Roy de Maistre all experimented with Surrealism. Of these, Cant was the most strongly influenced and painted in a Surrealist style influenced by Giorgio de Chirico and Magritte. Cant had arrived in London in 1935 and through de Maistre was introduced to the Mayor Gallery, which had held solo exhibitions of the Surrealists Max Ernst and Joan Miró. Almost immediately Cant was invited to become a member of the British Surrealist Group and his work was regularly exhibited in Surrealist exhibitions to critical acclaim. In 1940 at the outbreak of the Second World War, Cant returned to Sydney. Joining the Communist party, Cant repudiated Surrealism in favour of social realism.

In the 1930s in Australia, Surrealism was often more visible in the realm of popular culture than in the fine arts.⁴ In 1938 the fashionable The Home magazine commissioned Max Dupain to take a series of Surrealist inspired portraits of socialites.⁵ Dupain was the only Australian photographer of his generation who felt the lure of Surrealism. In 1935 he had enthusiastically reviewed JT Scoby’s book on Man Ray for The Home, and he experimented with the techniques of solarisation, double exposure and photomontage, also producing his own ‘Rayographs’.⁶ His Doll’s head & goat’s skull c. 1935 uses the Surrealist strategy of juxtaposition: ‘In a bed of straw coiffed into pubic tufts, two unlikely lovers prepare to conjugate … the mannequin’s lips promise pleasure, and the animal’s maw presages death’.⁷ In the implicit erotic content of this, and other of his Surrealist photographs, Dupain was one of the few Australian artists who responded (albeit in a restrained manner) to Surrealism’s espousal of the liberation of sexual desire.

In the realm of painting, the influence of Surrealism had been seen in the works of Melbourne artists Sam Atyeo and Eric Thake in the early 1930s. However, these remained relatively isolated incidents, and as late as 1938 Basil Burdett begun his review of modern art in Melbourne with the observation that ‘surrealism is practically non existent’.⁸

The year 1939 can be seen as the watershed in Australian art when the tide finally turned in favour of Modernism. That year saw the first exhibition of the Contemporary Art Society, a group whose aim was to promote new ideas in art. This exhibition, held at the National Gallery of Victoria in June 1939, was an important showcase for modern art and attracted widespread attention. The exhibition included the Surrealist paintings Happy landing (The happy father) c.1939, The philosopher 1939 and The attitude of lightning towards a lady-mountain 1939 by Thake, Tucker and Gleeson respectively. With the publicity received by these works – The attitude of lightning towards a lady-mountain was reproduced both in the popular press and Art in Australia – Surrealism announced its arrival on the Australian scene.⁹

The ensuing uptake of Surrealism by artists from 1939 must be considered in the light of several factors. The revitalisation of Surrealism in England in the 1930s and 1940s and the increasing availability of publications in English had a decisive impact. Of these, Herbert Read’s Art now, which included a discussion on Surrealism, was the most widely read book on contemporary art of the period.¹⁰ The year 1939 was also the first time that works of European Surrealism were seen in Australia. The hugely successful Herald exhibition of French and British contemporary art of over 200 modernist paintings and sculpture toured Australia in 1939, and included paintings by Ernst, de Chirico and Dalí. Dalí’s L’homme fleur 1932 (now titled Memory of the child-woman) was ‘the prime target for abuse and admiration’.¹¹ In response to the interest generated by these works, Art in Australia asked Gleeson to write an article on Surrealism. ‘What is Surrealism?’ was published in 1940 and includes the first discussion of Australian Surrealist artists.¹² The following year Breton, the ‘pope of Surrealism’, also contributed an article to Art in Australia.¹³ Surrealism was now firmly established as one of the most visible of the modern movements.

The adoption of Surrealism by (almost exclusively) younger artists from 1939 onwards was also related to the widespread anxiety and increasing politicisation of society as Australia entered the Second World War. Richard Haese considers that, ‘To advocate Surrealism (good or bad Surrealism, nobody knew the difference) was to lay claim to being on the side of a radical and anarchic future’.¹⁴ Surrealism, born in Europe in the aftermath of the First World War, found a receptive home in Australia at the outbreak of the second. For many artists the war and Surrealism were inextricably linked and Gleeson recalled:

For a while, especially during the war years, I did think of Surrealism as a revolutionary weapon. I accepted Breton’s contention that by utilising the subconscious one could arrive at a condition that held the rational mind in balance and perhaps prevent such disasters as war, indifference or fanaticism.¹⁵

Gleeson, born in 1915, is the Australian artist who has been most closely connected with Surrealism, its longest practitioner and most prominent spokesman. Indeed, he considers that, ‘I was born a Surrealist’.¹⁶ Gleeson studied at the East Sydney Technical College and the Sydney Teachers College where he had access to a large library of art books and journals. As early as 1938 Gleeson was painting Surrealist inspired images and producing poem – drawings which sought to integrate text and image.

Gleeson’s first exhibited Surrealist painting was The attitude of lightning towards a lady-mountain. Dalí’s influence is strongly evident in the deep space and dream-like qualities of the scene and the precise realism with which it is painted. A towering feminine biomorphic rock formation, its eroded surface recalling the drapery of classical statuary, stands in front of a smaller form. Both anthropomorphic shapes are repeated in a silhouette cut-out on the horizon. The fluid forms of the lightning are juxtaposed with the rigid architectural forms in the foreground. Renée Free has argued that the theory of opposites and metamorphosis are at the core of Gleeson’s art and philosophy. In this work, lightning is the agent of change and of metamorphosis.¹⁷ The attitude of lightning towards a lady-mountain was the first Surrealist work acquired by James Agapitos and Ray Wilson and a key factor in their decision to devote themselves to collecting Australian Surrealism.

In 1947 Gleeson left Australia for England. After a short stay in London he took up residence at ‘The Abbey’, art dealer William Ohly’s property in Hertfordshire, which had been set up as artist studios. There, Gleeson met fellow expatriate Robert Klippel who was to become a lifelong friend.

Klippel had arrived in England earlier in the year on a three-year stipend from his father. His friendship with Gleeson was to have a significant influence on his work and their collaboration on Madame Sophie Sesostoris (a pre-raphaelite satire) 1947–48 (in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales) marks the beginning of a period of Surrealist explorations. In December 1948 Klippel moved to Paris. Together with Gleeson he visited Breton (although Gleeson recalled that the meeting was not fruitful as Breton spoke no English and Gleeson’s French was poor) and soon became part of the Surrealist group centred around Breton at La Dragonne Gallery. In Paris, Klippel turned his energies to drawing, creating an extraordinary series of drawings of sinister biomorphic forms, including Drawing P19 c. 1949. Full of menace, three spiky plant-machines face towards a floating form. We sense that any change to the equilibrium will result in the immediate demise of this unfortunate creature. Gleeson considered that ‘it is with this sequence of drawings that he [Klippel] makes his closest approach to Surrealism, and through them we are drawn into the darkest chambers of his imagination’.¹⁸

Sidney Nolan, born in 1917, was Australia’s most original artist of the late 1930s, exploring Abstraction and Surrealism and experimenting with a wide range of unconventional techniques. Enrolled as a student at the National Gallery School in Melbourne from 1936–37 Nolan attended classes sporadically, preferring to spend his time in the reading room of the state library. There, he encountered the works of the poets Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire and William Blake, and writers James Joyce and DH Lawrence, among others. According to Haese, as late as 1939, Nolan was undecided as to whether to be a painter or a poet, and while he chose the former Nolan maintained a lifelong interest in literature, collaborating with writers and poets, and publishing his own poetry.¹⁹ Arthur Rimbaud, the nineteenth-century poet beloved by the Surrealists, was Nolan’s anti-hero – his poetry and unconventional life a guide in charting his own artistic journey.

During 1939–40 Nolan undertook an ambitious series of collages in homage to Rimbaud. As Bruce James points out, these works are in no way illustrations of Rimbaud’s poems; rather, their blend of ethnographic and geographic source material, ‘white imperialist themes’ and exoticism resonates with the poet’s biography and ‘succeed in emulating the poet’s signature fracturing of mood and sense’.²⁰ Surrealistic in intent, mood and method, these collages are amongst the earliest forays into the quintessential Surrealist medium of collage by an Australian artist.

Constructed of cut-up and re-arranged squares of nineteenth-century black-and-white engravings, which are glued onto another engraving, the result is an unstable, constantly shifting image, a jumbled ‘nonsense’ image, defying visual or narrative interpretation. While Ernst had earlier used steel engraving for his collages, their aims were dissimilar. Ernst used the collage process to create new fantastical imagery whereas Nolan’s collages destroy the conventions of representation and linear narrative. In several of Nolan’s collages, this idea is carried further with the inclusion of completely abstract elements – coloured squares – arranged in a checkerboard pattern over the engravings.

In 1948 Nolan was asked to design the stage set for Jean Cocteau’s Orphée 1926 to be performed by the Sydney University Dramatic Society. Orphée was a modernisation of the Orpheus myth, and Cocteau introduced the device of the mirror as the passageway from the world of the living to the world of the dead. Nolan recalled: ‘I followed all of Cocteau’s instructions quite literally. I had mirrors all over the place made of silver paper … the mirrors blinded the audience at rehearsals’.²¹ Nolan’s painting Orphée, as self-consciously stylish as Cocteau himself, is based on Nolan’s collaged design for the play’s drop curtain. In the painting Nolan uses the silver foil wrapping of a Cadbury chocolate bar to indicate the mirror – appropriately, the embossed ‘Cadbury’ is reversed, as in mirror writing.²²

In Adelaide, Surrealism crystallised around the precocious poet and intellectual Max Harris. In 1940, while still a student at the University of Adelaide, Harris had established the literary journal Angry Penguins. Harris declared himself an anarchist and a Surrealist, and the second issue of Angry Penguins featured a reproduction of Gleeson’s Surrealist painting Images of spring. Ivor Francis was Adelaide’s most prominent Surrealist painter. Around 1940, he met Max Harris and began his own investigations into Surrealism. Francis was also greatly inspired by Harris’s writing, particularly his Surrealist novel The vegetative eye of 1943. Investigation, scientific or otherwise, of matter without form 1943 employs a nightmarish dream-imagery to suggest the fate of man at the mercy of psychic forces.

While Francis’s painting activities declined in the late 1940s after his appointment to the Education Board of the then Australian Broadcast Commission, Adelaide soon received another adherent of Surrealism. Dusan Marek arrived in Adelaide in 1948 after fleeing the communist regime in Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic). Marek had studied at the Institute of Fine Arts in Prague where his teachers included Frantisek Tichy, a supporter of Surrealism. Gravitation – the return of Christ 1949 is one of Marek’s masterworks. In this meticulously painted work, Marek creates a mood of menace with a canon dominating the left side of the composition. Adding to the sense of unease, a convex mirror on a boat floating on the rolling ocean gives a distorted view back onto the viewer, and acts as an opening onto another reality. The boat and the ocean are suggestive of journeys and transformations, as is the evolutionary appearance of the man–ape who holds aloft another figure.

A Surrealist undercurrent runs through Arthur Boyd’s darkly expressionistic paintings of wartime Melbourne. Franz Philipp considers that ‘[m]etamorphosis – or rather its literal visualization – is a fundamental feature of Boyd’s iconography, and is more closely related to surrealist than to expressionist notions’.²³ Boyd’s remarkable ceramic sculpture The bride 1953/54 is explicitly concerned with this concept. The bride is composed of multiple fleshy protuberances of breasts and buttocks juxtaposed against a beak-like nose. An image of a butterfly, a recurring motif in Boyd’s art symbolic of metamorphosis, is emblazoned across her breasts. Philipp notes that in Graeco-Roman art the butterfly is a symbol of the soul, while in Christian iconography it stands as a symbol of the resurrection of Christ.²⁴ This symbolism is in stark contrast with the earthy fecundity of the bride, and a reminder of the presence of death in the midst of life.

In February 2008, the National Gallery of Australia will mount a special exhibition devoted to the Agapitos/Wilson collection of Australian Surrealist art, which will include The bride and other key works from the collection. Sadly, James Agapitos passed away early this year. The acquisition of the collection by the National Gallery of Australia is the fulfilment of his and Ray Wilson’s long-held dream to make their collection available to the nation for the enjoyment of visitors for generations to come. It constitutes a remarkable act of generosity and will forever remain testimony to the insight, vision and commitment of James Agapitos and Ray Wilson to Australian art.

Elena Taylor
Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture

¹ As they wrote in the foreword to the publication documenting their collection: ‘The exhibition catalogue became a bible to us, a valued guide that led us to a number of our later acquisitions. Our original enthusiasm for Australian art returned with a vengeance. We searched through books and catalogues and enjoyed the chase and each new discovery. We contacted many artists, their families and friends of deceased artists’. Bruce James, Australian Surrealism: the Agapitos/Wilson collection, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2003, p. 14.

² André Breton, ‘The Surrealist manifesto’ (1924), in Lucy Lippard (ed.), Surrealists on art, Prentice-Hall, New Jersey, 1970, p.15.

³ Ken Wach, ‘James Gleeson and Surrealism: the inexhaustible murmur’, in Lou Klepac, James Gleeson: beyond the screen of sight, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2004, p.41.

⁴ Man Ray’s photograph Glass tears c. 1930 was reproduced in The Home magazine in February 1934 accompanying salad recipes. For a discussion of Surrealism and popular culture in Australia, see Christopher Chapman, ‘Surrealism in Australia’, in Surrealism: revolution by night, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1993, pp. 268–75.

⁵ ‘A gallery of Surrealist portraits’, The Home, vol. 19 no. 6, June 1938, pp. 39–46.

⁶ Gael Newton, Max Dupain, David Ell Press, Sydney, 1980, p. 25.

⁷ James, p.56.

⁸ Basil Burdett, ‘Modern art in Melbourne’, Art in Australia, no. 73, 15 November 1938, pp. 12–23.

⁹ With the National Gallery of Australia’s acquisition of Happy landing (The happy father) and The attitude of lightning towards a lady-mountain from the Agapitos/Wilson collection, all three works are now reunited in the Gallery’s collection.

¹⁰ For a comprehensive listing of books and reproductions of Surrealism available in Australia see Christopher Chapman, ‘A bibliographic chronology of Surrealism in Australia 1923–49’, in Surrealism: revolution by night, pp. 310–15.

¹¹ Mary Eagle, Australian modern painting between the wars 1914–1939, Bay Books, Sydney, 1989, p. 201. Mary Eagle also notes that the Empire Loans collection of twentieth-century British art, held at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1939, also included a Surrealist section. p. 198.

¹² James Gleeson, ‘What is Surrealism?’, Art in Australia, no. 81, 25 November 1940, pp. 27–30.

¹³ André Breton, ‘Originality and liberty’, Art in Australia, no. 4, 1 December 1941, pp. 11–17.

¹⁴ Richard Haese, Rebels and precursors: the revolutionary years of Australian art, 2nd edn, Penguin, Melbourne, p.105.

¹⁵ James Gleeson, interview with Lou Klepac, in James Gleeson: landscape out of nature, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 1987, p. 14.

¹⁶ Lou Klepac, James Gleeson: landscape out of nature, p. 12.

¹⁷ Renee Free, ‘James Gleeson: ideas from the shadows’, in James Gleeson: beyond the screen of sight, p. 56.

¹⁸ James Gleeson, Robert Klippel, Bay Books, Sydney, 1983, p. 119.

¹⁹ Haese, p. 90.

²⁰ James, p. 119.

²¹ Sidney Nolan, ‘Painting and the stage’, lecture presented to the Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1988, quoted in TG Rosenthal, Sidney Nolan, Thames and Hudson, London, 2002, p. 255.

²² Nolan’s Orphée is one of the earliest Australian paintings to incorporate collaged elements. The Agapitos/Wilson collection contains an earlier painting by Herbert McClintock (aka Max Ebert), Approximate portrait in a drawing room 1938, incorporating collage. Nolan himself used collage in the Kelly subject K & Sergeant Kennedy 1945. See James, p. 50.

²³ Franz Philipp, Arthur Boyd, Thames and Hudson, London, 1967, p. 32.

²⁴ Philipp, p. 173.

Saville Park Suites is a proud supporter of the Australian Surrealism: the Agapitos/Wilson collection Exhibition

The above copied from:
http://www.nga.gov.au/AustralianSurrealism/

Conversations with Dali, Alain Bosquest

Salvador Dali, Spain | 1904-1989
Conversations with Dali, Alain Bosquet

Translated from the French by Joachim Neugroschel.
(Editions Pierre Belfond, 1966; E.P. Dutton & Co., 1969)

ubuclassics
2003

from the dust jacket:

The antic genius of "the divine Dali" has never been better displayed than in these sprightly conversations with his old friend, Alain Bosquet, a novelist, poet, and critic. The setting for all ten conversations is Dali's luxurious Paris apartment. "From time to time a charming and formidable ocelot wearing a muzzle came strolling in from the next room, making the intruders tremble." But there are no muzzles on Dali and Bosquet.

Everything is grist for the talk, and the subjects change rapidly as the obiter dicta fall: politics and painting, France and the U.S.A., Luis Buñel, Popes John and Paul, Sophia Loren. Alain Bosquet is no mere "straight man" and has strong views of his own that he does not hesitate to oppose to Dali's. Bosquet especially pursues Dali's relationship to Spain and France, to Catholicism, and to the history of Surrealism.

There are hilarities here and opinions quotable by the page. However, running throughout this dazzling talk are the expectably shrewd and knowing observations on the history and craft of painting, both Dali's and that of past and present masters. Rounding out the ten conversations is a new translation of Dali's complete essay "The Conquest of the Irrational," a tour de force on the place of Surrealism in twentieth century culture. This is a primary document of the movement, in which Dali analyzes the significance of the unconscious forces of modern art over against modern science and technology.


FIRST CONVERSATION
[The First of Ten Conversations]

A luxury apartment in the Hotel Meurice on Rue de Rivoli above the Tuileries. Salvador Dali, wearing a navy-blue suit with broad stripes, his moustache glossy, with neither part longer than an inch and a half. The furniture is of the neutral and comfortable sort found in sumptuous international hotels. A copper mask on the mantel bears the profiles of the last sovereigns of Spain: Alphonse XIII appears amazingly young; below the effigies, the dates of their visits in the hotel. Elsewhere, the skeleton of a spoonbill together with a realistic drawing of Dali’s near a mirror. The skeleton of a rattlesnake on the other side of the same mirror. Scattered about on the furniture are pieces of plastic material reflecting the superimposed shapes obtained by electronic machines, forms producing unusual optical illusions: thus, one has the impression of standing before a very deep mirror with faraway circles and oval forms. Further along, there are egg-like shapes which are projected in front, and at first sight, seem to be almost in the center of the room, whereas in both cases we actually have surface planes. Dali is signing engravings handed to him by Peter Moore, a young man, thirtyish, whose exact title is Attaché Militaire. From time to time a charming and formidable ocelot wearing a muzzle comes strolling in from the next room, making the intruders tremble. One enters Dali’s home as one engages a windmill in Cervantes. Before the interview, Dali prefers to have a few semi-public conversations, hoping that the hubbub will provide him with material for verbal explosions. He adds that he is expecting “atomic scientists, physicists, ballerinas, and, some high-quality bores.”

ALAIN BOSQUET: Dali, we’ve known each other for twenty-three years. You’re a holy terror, a monstre sacré.1 You’re probably a monster. And yet you call yourself “the divine Dali.”

SALVADOR DALI: I was dubbed that by one of the greatest writers in modern Spain. He said that Dali would have to be compared to Raymond Lull,2 and he added that I was the incarnation of Lull. Now Lull was known as Doctor Illuminatus and as the archangelical scholar. But since the latter epithet is too complicated, they finally settled on calling me le Divin.

A. B.: Who did?

S. D.: The Daliists.

A. B.: Who are they?

S. D.: The people who latch on to me, ostensibly because I can get them married to princes, or star them in a movie, or simply have my picture taken with them. They’re climbers; what the French call arrivistes.

A. B.: Arrivistes who exploit your divinity? How can you consent so readily to other people’s granting you this would-be divinity?

S. D.: I am a supreme swine. The symbol of perfection is a pig. Charles V himself adopted it to replace all other symbols of perfection. The pig makes his way with Jesuit cunning, but he never balks in the middle of the crap in our era. I feed my crap to the Daliists. Everybody’s satisfied. And everything’s just hunky-dory. Actually, those climbers are the finest imaginable.

A. B.: You’re willing to be an arriviste yourself, aren’t you?

S. D.: An arriviste with a vengeance.

A. B.: What about your parasites?

S. D.: I’m horribly stingy, and I get more out of them than they get out of me. They give and they give. And I profit immensely. So that the satisfaction is mutual.

A. B.: Let me be brutally honest with you, Salvador, and tell you what you represent to certain intellectuals in my generation. For us, you’re the man who invented critical paranoia at a time when Surrealism was skidding toward academicism. You invented the metamorphosis: the erotic metamorphosis of an object gradually changing into another object and of a person turning into another person.

S. D.: Go on.

A. B.: And then came Dali’s fall (as far as we were concerned). During the war, for example, you were accused of having Francoist leanings. I think it’s essential that I tell you. Later on, right after the war, you had a huge number of enemies in Paris. Today, we are witnessing a return to most of the Surrealists, especially Tanguy and yourself. Youth is shifting from gestural painting toward a new order. Young people of twenty or twenty-two are going back to you with friendlier feelings—and sometimes in terror as well.

S. D.: You’re right; but in the most recent outbreaks of the avant-garde, painters have come close to me ideologically, whereas Paul Cézanne’s mountains and apples no longer interest them. Even during the Surrealist era, I felt that the great painter was Meissonier and not Cézanne .... I’ve always been impressed by what Auguste Comte wrote when he founded his positivist religion. He felt that we cannot build the world without bankers. I myself decided that for my personal and absolute power, the essential thing was to have lots of money. And I hold on to this money because I shall probably have to spend it to make the swine that I am hibernate. I am a swine par excellence: General Franco bestowed on me the highest honor that can be given to a living artist: the Cross of Isabella the Catholic.

A. B.: And you accepted it with no reservations?

S. D.: I would have taken two of them!

A. B.: You love your faults.

S. D.: In my case, they’re not faults. Let’s clarify our political positions. I’ve always been against any sort of affiliation. You know very well that I’m the only Surrealist who ever refused to belong to any organization whatsoever. I was never a Stalinist or a cat’s-paw of any association. Illustrious members of the Falanga tried to get me interested; but I’ve never committed myself.

A. B.: Wasn’t the Spanish order an act of defiance, and didn’t it embarrass you terribly?

S. D.: On the contrary! Its smallest benefit was the trouble it created for me. Only people with a servant’s mentality commit themselves. I prefer being a nobleman, and so I couldn’t ask for anything better than being covered with all kinds of medals.

A. B.: Including two-bit hardware from a general who won a civil war against certain Spanish intellectuals such as your friend Federico Garcia Lorca .... Isn’t that an act of treason toward Lorca? ubuclassics ubu.com

S. D.: Excuse me, but I’ve got to let you in on a congenital trait of mine. As the bourgeois son of an attorney in Figueras, I began life with a spectacular betrayal of the class I come from, the bourgeoisie; and ever since, I’ve always touted the virtues of aristocracy and monarchy. I’m a monarchist in the most absolute sense of the word. At the same time, I’m an anarchist; anarchy and monarchy are poles apart and yet they’re two of a kind, for both aim at absolute power. I accepted the Cross of Isabella the Catholic from Franco’s hands, simply because Soviet Russia never offered me the Lenin Prize. I would have accepted it. I’d even consent to a badge of honor from Mao Tse-tung.

A. B.: Does your glory lack Mao Tse-tung?

S. D.: Especially Mao Tse-tung.

A. B.: You study certain writings of his?

S. D.: At the moment, I am meditating upon one of his poems that is going to permit the
introduction of a new dance for young people of today. What’s most important now is this rising-generation, and a new style ... Just look at Mademoiselle Onda on the couch over there, she represents the younger generation. I hope that by the end of the week she’ll be hung up like a sublime swine on a ceiling where she’ll perform super-exhibitionist contortions during a new dance accompanied by poems of Mao Tse-tung’s.

A. B.: Shall we totally exhaust our political conversation?

S. D.: Fine.

A. B.: You feel perfectly at ease in the role of a traitor. What is your goal?

S. D.: The very opposite of Picasso’s. For Dali, politics, like everything else, has to be resolved by a visceral image. If you look at the eyes of people on the Left, especially the Far Left, you’ll notice a kind of white blur on the edges, the so-called rheum. People on the Right, monarchists, and cruel men like Phillip II, stand up straight instead of crawling about and have no physical sign of human sympathy—a totally useless trait. Radical Socialists, Communists, and all Left-Wingers have a continuous secretion that forms in the eye and comes from their love of humanity. Oh, how they love humanity! They harp on it and dwell on it constantly. I do respect them because in a monarch’s court there have to be a lot of Sartre’s. And an occasional bomb thrown at the king is desirable from time to time as a stimulus for him.

A. B: Assuming that you are a Rightist and a partisan of monarchy, I find it contradictory of you to spend half the year in a democracy like the United States—whether or not it’s a failure. I knew you there at the very beginning, and you’re still at the same address, a posh hotel on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street.

S. D.: My exceptional ethic is unerring. I always live where the most money is.

A. B.: But is that reason enough to live in America? You wound up there almost by chance, didn’t you?

S. D.: That was thirty-five years ago. I live there now because I’m always in the middle of a cascade of checks that keep pouring in like diarrhea. In addition, America is the only country in the world making enormous advances in the technology of science. Cybernetics is close by. And at this very moment in New York, people are working on my earthly immortality. Hibernation specialists are preparing complicated cylinders to lengthen my life expectancy greatly. I’m only human.

A. B.: To what extent are you really involved in life in New York?

S. D.: I see a large number of bankers, interesting homosexuals that I’ve never come across in other countries, and enthusiastic Daliists.

A. B.: Do you ever do any paintings on commission there?

S. D.: Never.

A. B.: But you have in the past.

S. D.: Perhaps.

A. B.: Are you proud that you did?

S. D.: Not at all.

A. B.: You do admit that those paintings are inferior to the others.

S. D.: All I’m interested in is the money I get for them.

A. B.: Well, then why does the “Divine Dali” agree to put his name on things that are less than divine? I have a specific painting in mind, one I personally don’t care for: your Last Supper at the National Gallery in Washington, D. C.

S. D.: According to statistics, that painting you personally don’t care for is the best seller of all modern paintings. There are more post-card reproductions of it than any da Vinci or Raphael. My strategy worked: At a certain point I decided to do paintings that would be more popular than anything else in the world. My performance was marvelous. I would even go so far as to say that that painting is a thousand times better than all of Picasso’s works put together. That one single painting!

A. B.: Do you really feel that surpassing Picasso is a distinction?

S. D.: Scarcely, scarcely. I consider myself a very mediocre painter. I have always affirmed that I’m a very mediocre painter. I simply believe that I’m a better painter than my contemporaries. If you prefer, they’re much worse than I am.

A. B.: Let’s get back to politics .... Your policy on the American check doesn’t quite satisfy me.

S. D.: There are two things: the check, and the technology leading to hibernation.

A. B.: What are you like when you find yourself face to face with Dali in a moment of solitude?

S. D.: Let me take advantage of what you’re saying and do a bit of PR work for another book that will make cuckolds of you all. Albin Michel has just commissioned me to do a book entitled: A Letter from Salvador Dali to Salvador Dali. There won’t be any Alain Bosquet monopolizing me; the book will be much more intimate, and I’ll say what I have to say to Dali himself.

A. B.: What does the France of the Fifth Republic represent to you? Does it seem viable? Do you regard Moscow as an example of total wisdom, prudence, and flexibility? Does China impress you as being a dangerous and exciting state? Is America merely a commercial undertaking that succeeds without an ideology? I’m asking all these questions in bulk. What is your situation in the modern-day world?

S. D.: I expressed my opinion in a confidential meeting at the École Polytechnique before the students, who wore white gloves and uniform. At this point in our world, Dali is becoming more and more of a Stalinist. And this happens to be an automatic reaction on my part; as soon as some one is insulted and trampled upon, I raise him up again. Stalin is my present passion, and I consider him the most important personality of our era. Stalin and perhaps Mao Tse-tung . . . but especially Stalin, for he is the truly great cuckold of modern times.

A. B.: Could you explain that?

S. D.: Stalin forged the Red Army and military power in Russia. He’s a blacksmith. Blacksmiths have always formed fraternities and sects. The moment a blacksmith of this kind comes to power, he creates male and female symbols: the hammer and sickle as emblems of an ideology. That’s what Vulcan did in ancient Greece. It was Vulcan who forged Achilles’ shield while his wife, Aphrodite, was being seduced by Apollo.

A. B.: What becomes of Stalin in this flood of inextricable explanations?

S. D.: He thought he was forging the shield of socialism and Communism, ideologies that no longer exist. Stalin furnished us with the best weapon to defend the European monarchies which are going to be restored in four or five years. He’ll do what Kaiser Wilhelm II thought he was doing against what he labeled the Yellow Peril. Personally, I’m extremely fond of the Yellow Peril. It’s going to be the stake in a war, and I just love wars.

A. B.: Then you believe there’ll be a sort of unification of the entire white race?

S. D.: Naturally. Karl Marx suffered from the same kind of illusions as poor Le Corbusier, whose recent death filled me with an immense joy. Both of them were architects. Le Corbusier was a pitiable creature working in reinforced concrete. Mankind will soon be landing on the moon, and just imagine: that buffoon claimed we’d be taking along sacks of reinforced concrete. His heaviness and the heaviness of the concrete deserve one another. Thanks to IBM machines, social classes are going to disappear, and the whole universe will be cuckolded. We are advancing far more heroically to a struggle of the races.

A. B.: You still haven’t told me what you think of present-day France. To what extent do you find the Fifth Republic rotten, slightly rotten, over-intellectual, etc. Whatever you do, don’t be too nice!

S. D.: The government doesn’t strike me as sufficiently rotten. I like a regime that’s so corrupt as to be ready for the reestablishment of a traditional monarchy. France has to be more rotten, much more rotten!

A. B.: Then you find France acceptable?

S. D.: General de Gaulle’s administration is a transitory regime on the way to monarchy. Monarchy will be restored first in Spain, the day that General Franco decides.

A. B.: Decides or deceases?

S. D.: Decides. You know it’s very difficult to decease.

A. B.: You’re evading my questions about France. You lived here before the war. Does anything seem different to you, or less free? France has become a second-class country. How does her art, her intellectual life, strike you? Hasn’t something fundamentally given way?

S. D.: No doubt about it: the avant-garde’s no longer in Paris, now it’s in New York. Of all the new painters doing Pop or Op Art, the furthest-out, the most unusual are in New York. A few months ago, I went to the annual exhibition at the Salon de Mai in Paris, and I couldn’t find a single Op artist. At that very moment in New York, there were ten shows of Op Art, and the Museum of Modern Art is filled with it.

A. B.: All the same, the idea originated in Paris. After all, Vasarely lives here.

S. D.: The New Yorkers’ approach to the problem was totally paranoid and absurd. Here, as you know, whatever a person may do, he is always under the sway of Monsieur Descartes’ intelligence. Everything instantly withers and grows dusty. What France really needs is a good kick in the ass from America. I’m obviously talking about art and painting. . . .

1 Monstre sacré, taken from the title of a play of Cocteau’s, is applied to any great actor.

2 Raymond Lull or Lully (Spanish: Ramon Liul, c. 1234-1316), Catelan author and lay missionary, was theh first great mystic of the Iberian peninusul. Revered by Franciscans as Doctor Illuminatus.

The above copied from:
http://www.ubu.com/historical/dali/index.html

http://www.ubu.com/historical/dali/dali_conversations.pdf

Joseph Cornell, Filmmaker of "Rose Hobart"

Joseph Cornell (1913-1984)
Rose Hobart (1936 USA, 17 mins)

The first and greatest American Surrealist, Joseph Cornell is best known for his boxes. The best of his mysterious assemblages of dime-store tchochkes and paper ephemera in little hand-made cabinets perfectly realize the elusive sublime at the heart of Surrealism, while avoiding the juvenile theatrics of his European colleagues.

However, Cornell was also one of the most original and accomplished filmmakers to emerge from the Surrealist movement, and one of the most peculiar. Just as the ascetic and introverted Cornell himself held Surrealism at arms length, borrowing only those elements that suited his interests and temperament, his films superficially resemble those made by other Surrealists, they are in truth sui generis. Only a handful of his contemporaries understood the genius of films like his Rose Hobart — an unfortunate situation exacerbated by Cornell's own obstinate resistance to public screenings. No one made films even remotely similar to Cornell's for almost thirty years, and even now the perfect opacity of his montage remains unrivalled.

Rose Hobart consists almost entirely of footage taken from East of Borneo, a 1931 jungle B-film starring the nearly forgotten actress Rose Hobart. Cornell condensed the 77-minute feature into a 20-minute short, removing virtually every shot that didn't feature Hobart, as well as all of the action sequences. In so doing, he utterly transforms the images, stripping away the awkward construction and stilted drama of the original to reveal the wonderful sense of mystery that saturates the greatest early genre films.

While East of Borneo is a sound film, Rose Hobart must be projected at silent speed, accompanied by a tape of "Forte Allegre" and "Belem Bayonne" from Nestor Amaral's Holiday in Brazil, a kitschy record Cornell found in a Manhattan junk store. As a result, the characters move with a peculiar, lugubrious lassitude, as if mired deep in a dream. In addition, the film should be projected through a deep blue filter, unless the print is already tinted blue. The rich blue tint it imparts is the same hue universally used in the silent era to signify night.

Rose Hobart was only one of several mythologized actresses who populated Cornell's hermetic world. Many of his boxes were homages to the actresses that formed his pantheon: Lauren Bacall, Hedy Lamarr, Greta Garbo and Deanna Durbin, among others. In Rose Hobart, Cornell holds Hobart in a state of semi-suspension, turning the film itself into a sort of box. She moves her hands, shifts her gaze, gestures briefly, smiles enigmatically, perhaps steps slightly to the side, and little more. The world appears as a sort of strange theatre, staged for her alone.

But the root of Cornell's genius as a filmmaker is his singular version of montage. Cornell's version of continuity is the continuity of the dream. He does not juxtapose images so much as suggest unlikely — but still vaguely plausible — connections between them. Hobart's clothing may change suddenly between shots, but her gesture is continued or she remains at a similar point in the frame. Unlike most collage filmmakers, Cornell does not rely on cheap irony or non sequitur. His films are unsettling because their inexplicable strings of images are like reflections from the deep well of the subconscious. In fact, one of the most arresting images in Rose Hobart comes when a solar or lunar eclipse is paired with the image of an object falling into a circular pool of water. Hobart simply gazes bemusedly at this spectacle, as if it were little more than a parlour trick.

Rose Hobart premiered in December, 1936 at the Julian Levy Gallery. Cornell included it in a matinee program of short films from his collection, which Levy titled “Goofy Newsreels.” The first Surrealist exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art was about to open, and many of the artists were in town, including Salvador Dali, who attended Cornell's film program. During the screening of Rose Hobart, Dali became extremely agitated. Halfway through the film he began shouting "Salaud!" — bastard — and overturned the projector. Reportedly, Dali ruefully explained his actions to Levy, "My idea for a film is exactly that, and I was going to propose it to someone who would pay to have it made…. I never wrote it or told anyone, but it is as if he had stolen it (Solomon 89).” Some prefer an apocryphal — but far more poetic — explanation also attributed to Dali: “He stole it from my subconscious.”

© Brian Frye, November 2001
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/01/17/hobart.html
Senses of Cinema

The above copied from:
http://www.ubu.com/film/cornell.html

A Biography Of The Surrealist Artist, Salvador Dali (1904-1989)

The Spanish artist, Salvador Dali, is considered one of the most impressive artists of the 20th century, not only because of his paintings but also because of his eccentric character. Dali was born in 1904 in Figures, Spain, and nine months after the death of his older brother, who was also named Salvador. At the young age of 10, Dali first began painting. It was at the age of 12 that he vacationed with an artistic family, the Pichots. Ramon Pichots was probably Dali's first role model as a painter and influenced much of his early development and interest in art. He later attended Municipal Drawing School, where he first received formal art training, learned draftsmanship, painting, and engraving from Senor Nunez. In 1917, Dali's father organized an exhibition of his charcoal drawings in their family home. A year later, in 1918, one of his drawings was published in a Catalan magazine, Patufet. Dali was also recognized in local newspapers and the magazine Stadium. In 1921, Dali's mother passed away. Quickly after her death, his father married her sister.

Having been already exposed to the artist movement and styles of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Futurism, he was accepted to the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid, only to be expelled in 1926 for refusing to take the examination in "Fine Art Theory." He stated that the faculty was not competent enough to examine him. During this time he explored Cubism, Neo-Classicism, and Realism in his paintings. The year 1929 proved to be an important year for Dali: he made his first Surrealist Film, Un Chien Andalou (An Adualusian Dog) with former classmate Luis Bunuel, joined the Surrealist group, and in June, he met Gala Eluard, the wife of Paul Eluard, a Surrealist poet. She eventually became hi wife, his muse, and influence behind many of his paintings. Other inspirational people for Dali were Picasso, Miro, the architect Guadi, and especially the landscape of Catalonia.

The Surrealist's ideology was based on Freudian psychology, which systematized the analysis of dreams as revealed in images from the subconscious. Many of Dali's work during the 1930's were intaglio prints that accompanied Surrealist books and periodicals; these prints included "L' Immaculee Conception," and "La Femme Visible."

The works leaned toward provocative, and the "paranoiac-critical method," which Dali' defined as a spontaneous mode of irrational understanding based on interpretative critical association of delirious phenomena. The Oxford Companion to Art refers to it as "an attempt to make systemic use of the organizational force of hallucinatory and obsessive experience with special emphasis on multiple figuration." Even the Surrealist group thought of these works as risque and controversial. Eventually, in 1934 Dali separated from the Surrealist group, because of his conflicting view toward their commitment to Marxist politics and development of rituals, and dogmas. He demanded absolute freedom, and he felt their censorship and political motivations were constricting his ingenuity.

Dali and Gala fled the German invasion of France in 1940 and headed toward the United States, where they stayed until 1948. During much of this time Dali gained international fame by capitalizing on self-advertisement through television, advertisements, and publications. As one of the most diverse artists of the twentieth century, Dali worked in many mediums, designing state settings, jewelry, clothing, and perfume; he also worked on animation for Walt Disney movies, which were never finished. He refers to this period as the time he desired to become "classic."

The bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima made quite an impression on Dali, he entered what is called his Nuclear and Atomic period. By the 1950's he had begun to focus on religious themes and in the 1960's Dali experimented with Pop and Op Art, as well as Abstract Expressionism, which eventually culminated in the stereoscopic paintings and holographs of the 1970's. The early 1950's he developed his principals of Nuclear Mysticism, in which he concluded "the very basis of life would prove to be spiral."

In 1970, Dali and Gala parted ways and he gave her the Castle at Pubol and only visited her with written invitation. In 1982, Gala died at the Castle Pubol. With his muse gone, he no longer had the desire to create and only did a handful of paintings and prints. Before dying of heart failure in 1989, he lived as a recluse in a room adjacent to his Teatro-Museum. He is now interred in his museum, surrounded by his art, which was his life.

(Source: dali.com)

The above copied from:
http://www.ubu.com/historical/dali/index.html

What does an artificial design agent mean by being "situated"?

Gregory J Smith and John S Gero

Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition, University of Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia

Abstract

Schön described designing as a "conversation with materials conducted in the medium of drawing". Both the problem and solution of many designing tasks emerge through this "conversation" between a situated designer and the medium of the design. Unfortunately, describing agents as "situated" means different things to researchers from different fields. In this paper we review work from different fields so as to describe what "situated" means for a design agent.

Introduction

Designing is the conscious effort to impose meaningful order (Margolin, 1986, quoting Victor Papenek). Conceptual designing is an early phase of design which is characterised by abstractness and an incomplete understanding of the problem and/or solution (Gero, 1998). Designers cope with this by exploring the space of design requirements at the same time as they begin to try and understand the space of conceptual designs. This is achieved by interacting with the media of the conceptual designs as exemplified by Schön's (Schön and Wiggins, 1992) "conversation with the medium". Designers, human and artificial, have therefore been described as situated agents. But what is meant by "situated" varies across disciplines. What Suchman (Suchman, 1987) understands by the term "situated" has a cognitive and sociogical character that is distinctly different from a common AI understanding that equates it with "embodied". So, when talking of design agents, what does "situated" mean?

The traditional computational approach presumes that designing is search and planning; achieving design goals through internal reasoning with inference rules over models in a suitable logic or language. These methods search an encoded space for a goal state, and require good heuristics to be effective. There is no notion of interaction revealing alternatives not encoded in the space. It is an approach characterised by (Coyne et al., 1990).

A logical proposition, however, is not necessarily the same as a design proposal as design problems often cannot be comprehensively stated (Lawson, 1997). Some aspects of a particular design problem do not emerge until an attempt has been made to solve it. So how does search or planning in a solution or plan space account for designing if knowledge of the design environment or design goals are incomplete or in error, or if design knowledge itself contain errors/omissions, or is incomplete, or if the design task can be formally stated but planning is exponentially complex and over a large solution space?

The heuristics that are required of any search are a part of the domain and common-sense knowledge available to a designer. Expert systems programmers have been trying to program disembodied common-sense knowledge for decades (Horgan, 2004). One reason suggested by Brooks (Brooks, 1995), Clancey (Clancey, 1997) and others for why this has been a struggle is precisely because their systems are not situated and embodied. By contrast with conventional planning, in a situated view plans are constructed as an artifact of "reasoning about action, not the generative mechanism of action" (Suchman, 1987, emphasis is Suchman's).

Fig. 1. Man standing on window ledge, from (Milligan and Shand, 1996).

An example is of a designer and sketches made during the early conceptual phases of a design task. There is a difference between this viewed as an interaction with a drawing and, say, viewing it as searching of encoded model of a drawing. One difference is that expectations of what is in a drawing influence how it is perceived it, and this influence feeds back into ongoing perceptions of that drawing. Consider the scene shown in Figure 1. We naturally believe that the man is contemplating jumping from the ledge. Now look at Figure 2, which is the same scene a few seconds later. The reason that this is funny is that it contradicts our expectations.

Consider now Figure 3(a). We do not simply look at Figure 3(a) and parse what is sensed into objects; we interact with the figure. Biasing our perception are expectations of what will be perceived. The concepts that Dali had in mind when he produced Figure 3(a) most likely include concepts of a greyhound, the mythological beast and so on as well as others that associate in his mind with those.

What we conceive of while interacting with this figure, as a viewer and independent agent, is not necessarily as Dali intended. Indeed it is not assured that what the painter conceives of afterward is only that originally intended. Many people viewing Figure 3(a) for the first time will not find all of the interpretations intended by Dali without the assistance of the Figure 3(b) sketches. Equally, just because Dali produced the image does not mean that those six interpretations are exhaustive or even necessarily correct. How we interpret the figure depends on our expectations, the current situation, and we construct the memories, beliefs and expectations that bias our perception.

Our work has therefore been motivated by a desire for a model of designing that is based on interaction; of a situated agent that can interact with an external representation of a developing design. It is the intention of this paper to describe situated design agency in the abstract, not applied necessarily to human designers or artificial agents, so as to inform the future development of artificial agents. Descriptions inspired by human behaviour are therefore intended only to that end. We do not intend these descriptions to be taken as a cognitive model of human behaviour. Computational details in this paper apply to artificial agents but will be informal (in a computational sense); a forthcoming paper will introduce formalism to this discussion. In this paper we consider research that at first blush may seem disparate. The research reviewed in this light comes from AI, computer science, cognitive science and philosophy. The common theme is a situated, interactive approach to intelligence and problem solving. We consider these ideas in the light of the actions of human and artificial agents so as to determine what it means to say that a design agent is situated.

(a) "The Endless Enigma", Salidor Dali, 1938, reproduced from (Descharnes 1985)

(b) Sketches by Dali of the images overlayed in "The Endless Enigma". They are (i) Face of the Cyclopean, Cretin (ii) Greyhound (iii) Mythological beast (iv) Philosopher reclining (v) Mandolin, compotier, figs on a table (vi) Woman seen from the back mending sail sail (Descharnes, 1985).

Fig. 3. Dali's "The Endless Enigma"

The above copied from: http://people.arch.usyd.edu.au/~john/publications/2005/05SmithGeroDS.pdf