"Surrealist Muse: Lee Miller, Roland Penrose, and Man Ray"

2003-02-25 until 2003-06-15
J. Paul Getty Center
Los Angeles, CA, USA

The many faces of Lee Miller—model, muse, and artist—are explored in Surrealist Muse: Lee Miller, Roland Penrose, and Man Ray at the Getty from February 25–June 15, 2003. The exhibition traces Miller’s colorful life and legacy from 1925 to 1945 through more than 100 photographs, and in selected paintings and mixed-media works. These objects document the impact of her talent and powerful personality on artists with whom she came into contact, and explore the influences of these collaborations on her creative life. The works on display are from the Getty’s permanent collection, the Lee Miller Archive, and the Roland Penrose Collection. They range from early pictures of Miller’s modeling career in New York, to Surrealist images showing her influence on Man Ray, Picasso, and Roland Penrose, to her astonishing World War II photographs documenting the demise of Hitler and the Third Reich.

Deborah Gribbon, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, commented, "It is difficult to think of another woman who has had such a far-reaching impact on a group of artists and their work. We see Miller’s image and influence as interpreted by others, and then see the source of that power in her own creative vision. Miller’s legacy is all the more compelling because she made her presence felt at a time when women were still struggling for equal rights. She helped pave the way, leaving her indelible mark on a world soon to be altered by war."

As muse, Miller was a rare inspiration, equally comfortable and forceful in front of and behind the camera and canvas. At the age of 19, she became a model in New York where her image, captured and composed by photographers Arnold Genthe, Edward Steichen, and George Hoyningen-Huene, made her a fashion icon. At 22, Miller began working as a studio apprentice to Man Ray in Paris. The relationship soon evolved with Miller becoming artistic collaborator and muse. Some of Man Ray’s most prominent images were created between 1929 and 1932 with Miller’s assistance. Through Man Ray, Miller was introduced to the writers and artists of the Surrealist movement. Miller’s membership in this vibrant community sparked a cross-pollination of influences that infused Surrealist traditions into her work. Her impact was also felt by other artists in the group, including Picasso, who painted his vision of Miller in five portraits, one of which is on display.

Miller’s influence is perhaps most keenly felt in the works of her two closest collaborators—Man Ray and Roland Penrose. Both interpreted and reinterpreted Miller’s image to reflect their relationships. Man Ray, enraged after a quarrel with his muse, depicted Miller with her neck slashed in his 1930–32 painting Le Logis de l’Artiste (The Artist’s House), using a previous photograph of Miller with her head thrown back and her neck extended as a model. Penrose envisions Miller, whom he married, as Night and Day in his painting portraying Miller in a costume half adorned with clouds floating in a blue sky, and half shaded in the gentle darkness that comes with night.

As an artist, Miller’s work moves from portraits taken in her New York studio, to documentary images recording her travels, to the stark faces of death and destruction captured on the fields of war as a correspondent for the U.S. Armed Forces. Across the maturing quality of her work, we see the different threads of her prior experiences united in her vision. In her photograph documenting the suicide of a German official and his family at the end of the war, Miller moves her lens close to the subjects, capturing the bodies as if they were in a state between dream and waking, life and death—at once beautiful, horrible, and surreal.

The above copied from:
http://www.absolutearts.com/artsnews/2003/02/26/30779.html

The Art of Lee Miller

Shehani Fernando
guardian.co.uk, Saturday September 15 2007

Tony Penrose, son of Lee Miller and Roland Penrose, introduces some of his mother's work and remembers life with her at Farley Farm, Sussex. The Art of Lee Miller exhibition is at the Victoria and Albert museum, London, until January 6 2008. View the video here: http://arts.guardian.co.uk/video/2007/sep/15/lee.miller

Surrealism and photography

It may at first seem odd that Surrealism, with its emphasis on the poetry of the unconscious, should have had any interest in the all too physical processes of photography. But the Surrealists were not interested in escaping from reality; rather they sought a deeper, more heightened form of it. If photography could be turned away from the mere depiction of surfaces, its apparent objectivity could be powerfully put to Surrealist ends, producing evidence of this ‘sur-reality’.

In fact, photography was found everywhere in Surrealist publications. Magazines such as La Révolution surréaliste (1924-9), Documents (1929-30), and Le Minotaure (1933-9) featured anonymous photographs, often with their meaning crucially changed in this new context, alongside images made by photographers such as Man Ray, Jacques-André Boiffard, and Brassaï. The leader of the Surrealist group, André Breton, used photographs by Boiffard and Brassaï to illustrate the places visited in his two books Nadja (1928) and L'Amour fou (1937).

Several Surrealist books juxtaposed poetry and photography. In Facile (1935), Paul Éluard's poems for his wife Nusch were interwoven with Man Ray's photographs of her nude body. Roland Penrose's The Road is Wider than Long (1938) was the product of a journey through the Balkans with Lee Miller, and brought together his photographs and poetry in a shifting page layout. On the Needles of These Days, published in Prague in 1942, juxtaposed photographs of found objects by Jindrich Styrsky (1899-1942) with unrelated fragments of text by Jindrich Heisler.

Surrealist photography itself took several forms. There was a great use of techniques of manipulation. Many artists used photomontage—the early work of Max Ernst stands out here—but equally it was pursued by Surrealist writers such as Breton and Éluard. The foremost inventor of Surrealist photography was Man Ray—born in America but living in Paris from 1921. He developed a poetic form of the photogram, which he called the ‘Rayograph’. Later, he explored the technique of solarization with great delicacy, especially in his portraits and nudes. In the 1930s, the Belgian Raoul Ubac mixed solarization with photomontage to make more multi-layered, ‘convulsive’ images.

Staged photography was also important for a number of Surrealist artists, often prefiguring its role in later art practice. On one level, this took the form of highly sophisticated snapshots, like the witty, ironic images made by René Magritte and the rest of the Belgian group. More serious and indeed controversial are the photographs that Hans Bellmer took of his ‘Poupée’—the female doll he made in the 1930s. Variously seen as liberatory or misogynistic, the images of the doll twisted this way and that remain deeply disturbing. Recently, the work of two lesser-known figures, Pierre Molinier (1900-76) and Claude Cahun, has been much discussed for the way they crossed gender boundaries, Molinier dressing in corset and black stockings while Cahun often rendered herself neuter, almost alien.

Finally, and in quite different ways, the conventions of documentary photography were exploited by Surrealism for its own ends. Among the images used anonymously in La Révolution surréaliste were four photographs by Eugène Atget, made for quite different ends but ‘discovered’ as examples of unconscious Surrealism by Atget's neighbour, Man Ray. Very soon, though, the Surrealists came more broadly to view Atget's deserted cityscapes as images of a haunted urban environment pregnant with possibilities. Brassaï's later photographs of Paris by night can be seen as a nocturnal parallel to Atget's work; he was one of a generation of photographers in Paris in the early 1930s who were influenced by Surrealism. Using the new 35mm camera, André Kertész and the young Henri Cartier-Bresson pictured a city full of coincidences and connections, caught in a fraction of a second before they disperse.

The influences of Surrealism within photography have been far reaching. Simply in this latter area of ‘surrealist documentary’, one would have to go on to consider the work of Bill Brandt and Lee Miller in Britain, Vilém Reichmann (1908-91) and Emila Medková in Czechoslovakia, Manuel Álvarez Bravo in Mexico, Frederick Sommer in the Arizona desert, and Clarence John Laughlin in New Orleans. All these photographers were interested in how the camera can simultaneously record everyday reality and probe beneath its surface to reveal new possibilities of meaning.

— Ian Walker

Bibliography

Krauss, R., and Livingston, J. (eds.), L'Amour fou: Photography and Surrealism (1985).
Walker, I., City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar Paris (2002).
Bate, D., Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent (2003)

The above copied from:
http://www.answers.com/topic/surrealism-and-photography

Walter Benjamin, Surrealism and Photography

Rajeev S. Patke

National University of Singapore

[Paper presented at Workshop on ‘Literature as Revolt in Twentieth Century Europe’, 17 August 1998, The University of Haifa, Israel (6th ISSEI Conference)]

Benjamin wrote his essay on Surrealism during 1928, when the Surrealist movement was still in what André Breton called its transition from an "intuitive" to a "reasoning" phase.1 Benjamin's recent work, the city-montage of One-Way Street (1928), had taken on the challenges presented to the writer by the natural history of the modern, post-Baudelairean, urban landscape of Europe. It had given him a presentiment of what was to become the Arcades project, the main preoccupation of his last decade. These developments were accompanied by the onset of a highly personal commitment to Marxism. In this context, his relation to the Surrealists was adventitious and fortuitous. He was neither part of the movement, nor close to its members, though he looked on, first with a keen—and then with a disappointed—eye on their activities in Paris.

In 1926, he had found Louis Aragon's Le paysan de Paris exciting, like "the shock of a violent crisis". Aragon's focus on the Opera Arcade in Paris as "one of those absurd and legendary manifestations that made its greatness and its rot",2 anticipated Benjamin's increasing conviction that a new way had to be found for treating the images of everyday bourgeois reality. In July 1925 he wrote to Rilke: "The way language enters the realm of dreams by conquest, authoritatively and normatively, is what particularly moved me about surrealism".3 In "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" (1935), Benjamin credited Surrealism with having exposed to view "the ruins of the bourgeoisie".4 Art and its institutions had to be pulled down. But the attack on art launched by Surrealism lost its momentum in solipsistic esotericism. So did the political activism. Though Breton maintained a firm polemical grasp of the revolutionary intentions of the Surrealist movement, the political affiliations of the various Surrealists kept changing. Unlike Paul Claudel or Aragon, or Breton, all of whom joined the Communist party at some point, Benjamin kept himself clear of Party affiliation, even though he had written to Scholem in 1924 of generating "a `politics' from within myself".5 The freeplay of associations that was characteristic of Surrealism, and its Dada legacy, did not prepare its anarchist methods for a focussed political praxis. Benjamin's temperament could only politicize itself through the mediation of writing. Surrealism's forte remained shock tactics; Benjamin's meditation. Their means forestalled their intended political ends.

But Benjamin was alert to how developments in the technological means of production affected the nature of art. The Surrealists were indifferent to this issue, given their preoccupation with the subliminal, and their active opposition to technique as a resource for the conscious manipulation of materials. The creative powers of the unconscious were celebrated by the Surrealists. Benjamin too approved of the element of chance in creativity, and the relief offered by the subliminal to consciousness. He also welcomed the Surrealist desire to disorder the senses. But he was never insistent on automatism in art as both means and ends. He was not primarily interested in objects created or discovered by the unconsciousness. His objective was to uncover the objects of external, socio-historical reality, as these might be redeemed by the "profane illumination" of the artist. Benjamin development took a divergent path from that of Surrealism, but he never lost touch with his original sympathy for the shared impulses behind their ideas.

An enthusiasm for spontaneous images remained one of the strongest links between the Surrealist and Benjamin. Benjamin experimented with drugs from 1927 to 1934, and chronicled his surreal experiences in eight "Protocols".6 The fifth, dated March 1930, speaks of the "tumultuous production of images" made possible by hashish with "images like those familiar to us from surrealist paintings". While the fortuity of imagery was a means towards an integrated imagination for Benjamin, the Surrealists treated the found image as a cherished end in itself. The connection between creativity, the unconscious, and states of trance induced by drugs interested Benjamin. Unlike the Surrealists, he was also preoccupied with the connection between the trance of hallucination and that of mysticism. "Hashish in Marseilles" identifies several features of the drug-trance. One is an expanded sense of inner space and time;7 another is the fascinated gaze with which Benjamin contemplates "the faces I had around me, which were, in part, of remarkable coarseness and ugliness". The transmutation of such ordinariness was the burden of the secular mystery that Benjamin undertook as one of his tasks.

Benjamin's hashish trances made a connection between the sacred and the profane when mediated by his notion of the aura. "Protocol 5" posits three aspects of the aura:

First of all, the genuine aura appears in all things, not just specific ones as people imagine. Secondly, the aura changes completely and fundamentally with each movement made by the object whose aura it is. Thirdly, the genuine aura can in no way be thought of as the immaculate, spiritualistic magic ray as depicted and described in vulgar, mystical books. On the contrary, the distinguishing feature of the genuine aura is the ornament, an ornamental periphery in which the thing or being lies fixed, as if confined in a sheath.8

Nothing in Surrealism corresponded to Benjamin's preoccupation with the aura. Aragon celebrated the fortuity with which the Surrealist found his images: "in this enviable peace, how easy is daydreaming. Let dream carry itself forward.... Images come down, like confetti. Images, images, everywhere images".9 Benjamin shared this pleasure. But the images of his own writing were self-conscious rather than accidental. The notion of a dream from which the age has to be awakened served Benjamin as a metaphor for the revolutionary function of art. The idea and image were derived from Marx: `The reformation of consciousness lies solely in the awakening of the world... from its dream about itself".10 Benjamin applied this image to "dialectical thinking" as "the organ of historical awakening".11 Breton takes the opposite stance in "What is Surrealism?" (1934): "for us... at the point where we found it, the dialectical method in its Hegelian form was inapplicable".12

Benjamin's association of dream and dialectic with image was a curious one:

... image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of the Then to the Now is dialectical—not development but image leaping forth.13

He speculated further:

Can it be that awakening is the synthesis whose thesis is dream consciousness and whose antithesis is consciousness? Then the moment of awakening would be identical with the "Now of recognizability", in which things put on their true—surrealistic—face.14

Adorno took Benjamin to task for what he believed was a confused utopianism:

... the dialectical image should not be transferred into consciousness as a dream, but in its dialectical construction the dream should be externalized and the immanence of consciousness itself be understood as a constellation of reality.15

Subsequent readers of the Benjamin-Adorno debate have generally conceded that Adorno may have been the more correct—but less intuitive—Marxist. We meet the dialectical image in a more viable way, in Benjamin's account of photography.

"A Small History of Photography" appeared in 1931.16 Photography exemplifies his belief that developments in the technology of production alter the scope of what an artist or author can do as producer in relation to materials, vocation, and their impact on society. In 1934, "The Author as Producer" makes the political relevance explicit: "technical progress is for the author as producer the foundation of his political progress".17 The photograph is celebrated for the capacity it shares with the Dada image, to transmute "the tiniest authentic fragment of daily life". The technique of montage is singled out because "Much of this revolutionary content has gone into photomontage". The modernity of the photograph resides in its power to transmute: "it can no longer depict a tenement block or a refuse heap without transfiguring it". The photograph becomes a metaphor for art as a form of revolutionary action.

"Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" continues this train of thought. Photography is treated as an instance of the development of technical means against which, from the middle of the nineteenth century, painting has been forced into a series of rear-guard actions. The same position can be discovered in Breton. His essay "Surrealist Situation of the Object" (1935) remarks on how, "Unable to engage in the seemingly futile struggle with photography, painting was forced to retreat and reorganize its ranks in an invulnerable position, under the necessity of visually expressing internal perception".18

Benjamin takes the history of photography to embody the political potential of surrealism in at least four ways. Photography renovates representation by emancipating it from degenerate conventions and debased social functions. Benjamin replaces the notion of "photography as an art' with the idea of `art as photography".19 The reorientation foregrounds the social relevance of art. Photography practises what Benjamin calls "a salutary estrangement between man and his surroundings".20 Breton described what Surrealism hoped to accomplish along identical lines in "The Automatic Message" (1933): "The `disordering' of the senses, of all the senses, remains to be achieved or, what comes to the same thing, the education (practically speaking, the dis-education) of all the senses remains to be done".21 Photography offers to consciousness modes of reality that would remain in the unconscious without its action: "It is through photography that we discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis".22 The analogy is striking and apt. The photograph preserves in space that which is transient in time. The rapidity of movement with which mutability exercises its fugitive effect on human perception, the complexity of detail at the micrological level that slips through the wide net of the human visual apparatus, all these the photograph redeems by preserving.

That is how Benjamin again comes up with the idea of the dialectical image. Evanescence—the decay of material reality as it is lived in time—is accurately transfixed; and yet, in being so held back from time, it is sublated. The swell of nostalgia that Benjamin both succumbs to, and resists, is thus aroused and allayed by photography. The force with which this happens in Benjamin separates his concerns from Surrealism. Photography helps him recover the hope that the very idea of redemption may be redeemed. Finally, photography is magical in a special way. The Surrealists had aimed at restoring the phantasmagoric quality to everyday objects. In "What is the Mechanism of Collage?", Max Ernst described one technique for achieving this: by "The pairing of two apparently unpairable realities on a plane apparently unsuitable to them".23 For Breton, conscious of modernity as the epoch of "a fundamental crisis of the object",24 the technique was not collage or montage but frottage: "intensifying the irritability of the mind's faculties".25

Benjamin saw his own work on European cities as a linguistic extension of photomontage. He was the revolutionary disguised as a cultural historian strolling amidst the ruins of the museum that was the nineteenth century. In this crisis, photography looked at persons as inscrutably as it looked at objects. The photograph was the image of that looking. Thus we arrive at Benjamin's notion of the gaze: "I find among my notes the surprised comment `How things withstand the gaze'".26

In 1931, Benjamin compared an image of modernity—a photograph of Kafka aged six, staring out with "immensely sad eyes"—with the earliest photographs. In them, "people did not yet look out at the world in so excluded and god-forsaken a manner as this boy. There was an aura about them, an atmospheric medium, that lent fullness and security to their gaze even as it penetrated that medium".27 Thus Benjamin constructs a myth of dispossession, in which photography is the medium which preserves utopia: the one-that-never-was for the sake of the-one-that-might-be. Through the course of the nineteenth century, "the aura" was "banished from the picture' because of `the deepening degeneration of the imperialist bourgeoisie".28

Yet the essay goes on to applaud "Atget's Paris photos" as "the forerunners of surrealist photography", because "he initiates the emancipation of object from aura which is the most signal achievement of the latest school of photography".29 The ambivalence about the aura deepens:

He looked for what was unremarked, forgotten, cast adrift, and thus such pictures too work against the exotic, romantically sonorous names of the cities; they pump the aura out of reality like water from a sinking ship. What is aura actually? A strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close the object may be.30

The ambivalence has to do with the attitude he takes towards the aura in different frames of mind. When charged with revolutionary materialist fervor, the aura looks like the torn pellicle of the epoch of idealist metaphysics. But when his Lukácian zeal is less strident, the aura can again become the sheath through which the translucence of Messianism again reveals itself as the redemptive force that shall transmute natural history. In 1931, Materialist hopes prevailed over metaphysical memories, and in the spirit of the Surrealists, Benjamin celebrated the augury of universal utopia:

The stripping bare of the object, the destruction of aura, is the mark of a perception whose sense of the sameness of things has grown to the point where even the singular, the unique is divested of its uniqueness—by means of its reproduction.31

The same somewhat strained hope that reproducibility matters more than uniqueness is renewed in "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935).

From the middle 1920s to the middle 1930s the conjunction between Surrealism and Benjamin would sustain a commonalty which may be summed up in terms of two descriptions he provided Scholem. In both, he was thinking of his project on the Paris Arcades. In the first, from 1928, he described himself as a philosophical Fortinbras who "will take possession of the inheritance of surrealism in purely temporal terms".32 In the other, dating from 1935, he wrote of his project as representing "both the philosophical application of surrealism—and thereby its sublation".33 Those are the most accurate descriptions we have of the relationship between Benjamin and Surrealism.

What then was the Hamletian legacy? And what the sublation? To be surreal was to sustain actively a sense of acute historical crisis about consciousness, society, art, and culture. The unconscious had to be let in. The human urge to shape had to be unmade, and then remade, in acts of finding. Layers of convention and complacency had to be ripped away. The cleansing quality of violence had to be savored without distraction. Familiar modes had to be abandoned, their names erased, and new ones with no names discovered. The object had to be dismantled and reconstituted. Its patina of the familiar had to be wiped. Startling juxtapositions and wrenched transpositions had to convert surprise to shock. A state of perpetual shock had to be cultivated. Strangeness had to be returned to the familiar; the phantasmal had to become as commonplace as the ordinary. All this Benjamin shared with the Surrealists. But other compulsions had to be answered too, and about these, the Surrealists were like a Horatio to Benjamin's Hamlet pretending he was Fortinbras. The timeless was to be discovered in the mutable. Eternity was lost or found only in fragments of the Now. The fragments had to come from the unconscious, but the unconscious of the collectivity, not the individual. Adorno criticized Benjamin for this Jungian swerve, but the move had a simple logic. To valorize the individual unconscious was to slip into the narcissism of a Dali or the solipsism of an Eluard or the vocational transgressiveness of a Bataille. Another fate was reserved for Benjamin. Means were vacuous if pursued as ends. The debris of a degenerate reified culture had to be retrieved and reviewed. He took that to be his task. Like Browning's Grammarian, he studied to be worthy of the responsibility all his life. He had the temperament to follow a vision; while always being prepared to fall back upon the bank of nostalgia, shored with ruins in what Wallace Stevens would have called "the stale grandeur of annihilation".

Notes

1 André Breton, What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. Franklin Rosemont (London: Pluto Press, 1978), 116.

2 The Autobiography of Surrealism, ed. Marcel Jean (New York: The Viking Press, 1980), 73.

3 Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910-1940, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994) 274.

4 Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 161.

5 Benjamin, Correspondence, 258.

6 S. Thompson, "On Hashish" (Unpublished translation of "Protokolle zu Drogenversuchen", from Benjamin's Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Herman Schweppenhäuser and Rolf Tiedemann. Franfurt a.M., 1974-89, vol. VI: 558-603, 607-18), 1996. All quotations from the Protocols are from this source.

7 Benjamin, Reflections, 138.

8 Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: The Free Press, London: Collier Macmillan, 1977), 275.

9 The Surrealists Look at Art, ed. Robert Shapazian (Venice, CA: The Lapis Press, 1992), 145.

10 Walter Benjamin, `N', in Gary Smith (ed.) Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), 43.

11 Benjamin, Reflections, 162.

12 Breton, Selected Writings, 130.

13 Benjamin, `N', 49.

14 Ibid., 52.

15 Adorno, in Ernest Bloch, et al., Aesthetics and Politics, trans. Ronald Taylor (London and New York: Verso, 1977), 111-12.

16 Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London and New York: Verso, 1979), 240-57.

17 Benjamin, Reflection, 230.

18 Shapazian, The Surrealists Look at Art, 179.

19 Bloch, Aesthetics and Politics, 116.

20 Benjamin, One-Way Street, 253.

21 Ibid., 251.

22 Shapazian, The Surrealists Look at Art, 183.

23 Benjamin, One-Way Street, 243.

24 Shapazian, The Surrealists Look at Art, 183.

25 Ibid., 161.

26 Ibid., 183.

27 Benjamin, Reflections, 144.

28 Benjamin, One-Way Street, 247.

29 Ibid., 248.

30 Ibid., 249-50.

31 Ibid., 250.

32 Benjamin, Correspondence, 342.

33 Ibid., 505.

The above copied from:
http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/ellpatke/Benjamin/benjamin_surrealism.htm

The Author as Traitor, Gerald Raunig

"It is hard to be a traitor, it is a creative act. It requires relinquishing one's identity, losing face. One must vanish from the picture, remain unrecognized."
(Gilles Deleuze/Claire Parnet)[1]

Walter Benjamin's essay "The Author as Producer" is an attack on the "leftist bourgeois intelligentsia" in Germany of the 1920s and early 1930s. Its primary targets were the Neue Sachlichkeit[2] and a movement from the 1910s that has been largely forgotten in German-speaking countries, but whose name sounds surprisingly up-to-date today: the name "Activism" was applied to a discourse in the shadow of Expressionism[3] marked by literature and literary criticism and the loose association of mostly men of letters affiliated with it. This included, for certain periods of their work, such diverse authors as Heinrich Mann, Gustav Landauer, Max Brod and Ernst Bloch. The circle affiliated with the publicist Kurt Hiller had been developing since 1910, specifically under the label "Activism" after 1914. Although Hiller and his circle are hardly remembered today, in 1934 Benjamin could be certain that the figure of Hiller and the associated positions would still be familiar to his recipients. Especially the abusive diatribes and mockery on the part of the Berliner Dadaists against the "Activists" were characterized by a remarkable vehemence around 1920 and probably still remembered in the mid-1930s due to their verbal brutality.[4]

In "Author as Producer" Benjamin presents Hiller, as the "theoretician of activism", as a classic example of a purportedly leftist intellectual tendency that was actually counter-revolutionary. According to Benjamin, it was revolutionary only in its mentality, but not in its production.[5] This difference between tendency and technique and the neglect of the latter was only one of the problems of "Activism", the misleading self-definition another. What was peddled during the First World War and the years following it as "Activism" was, according to Hiller's self-definition, "religious socialism"[6] or - in my interpretation - vitalist spiritism[7]. In addition to eloquent appeals to and invocations of the "young breed" ("das junge Geschlecht", Heinrich Mann), of the "New Demotic" ("Neue Volkstümlichkeit", Kurt Hiller), or the people as "sacred mass" ("heiliger Masse", Ludwig Rubiner), the "Activists" focused primarily on the hypostasization of the spirit and the "spiritual" (Geistige). The term "spiritual", initially a tactical substitute for "intellectual", was gradually substantiated by Hiller and others and eventually understood as a "characterological type"[8]. From Heinrich Mann's seminal text "Geist und Tat" ("Intellect and Action") to Hiller's manifesto-like "Philosophie des Ziels" ("Philosophy of the Goal") to Ludwig Rubiner's "Der Dichter greift in die Politik" ("The Poet Intervenes in Politics"), the Activism texts[9] wrestle conspicuously often with themes of religion, mysticism and the church. It seems that the spirit that haunts the spiritual here is more of a holy one than Hegel's Weltgeist. Hiller himself tends to posit paradise more than revolution and socialism as a utopian goal. "Consecrate yourselves, you spiritual ones, finally - to the service of the spirit; the holy spirit, the active spirit."[10]

The two main aspects of Benjamin's question about the "place of the intellectual" are its position with respect to the proletariat on the one hand and the manner of organization on the other. Benjamin's criticism of "Activism" thus consists primarily in its self-positioning "between the classes". This position beside the proletariat, the position of benefactors, ideological patrons, is an impossible one.[11] The principle of the formation of this kind of collective, which assembles men of letters around the concept of "the spiritual" beyond any incipient organizing, is a wholly reactionary one, not only for Benjamin.[12] This criticism is even more evident, if we include not only Benjamin's technical, formal insistence on changing the apparatus of production, but also the attitude of the "Activists" that was not at all revolutionary: sometimes their texts are marked by nationalism, are often even anti-democratic, and in Hiller's circle anti-democratic tendencies cannot be interpreted as radically democratic or radically leftist. "Activism does not want a -cracy of the demos, in other words of the masses and mediocrity, but rather a -cracy of the spirit, in other words of the best."[13] Hiller's principle of spirit-aristocracy propagates a dominion of the spirit, meaning a dominion of that which is of the spirit, of the best, finally even of the "new German master house"[14].

Such an unequivocal "mentality" inevitably leads to the question of why Benjamin was even willing and able to sell the authors of "Activism" as left-wing bourgeoisie at all. I suspect that has to do not only with Benjamin's text-immanent intention, which I will come back to later, but also and especially with the broader activities of a second branch of "Activism". Although this branch rarely referred to itself as "Activism", its organ, the weekly paper the "Aktion", substantially influenced leftist intellectual and radical leftist movements in the German-speaking region in the 1910s.[15] Although the "Aktion" and its protagonists were not activists in today's sense either, they were certainly more politically and pointedly active than Kurt Hiller's circle. In its early years until the start of the war, the "Aktion", alongside the "Sturm", was the leading Expressionist periodical with a clearly anti-militarist tendency. During the war it was the only oppositional literature and art periodical, avoiding censorship with astonishing mastery using veiled writing and other means, and after the end of the war it increasingly became an organ of the radical leftist opposition with a close relationship to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Its publisher and editor-in-chief, Franz Pfemfert, radicalized himself and the paper in several surges from its founding in 1911 into the revolutionary war and post-war period, through the Spartacist uprising and the soviet republic.

Whereas the literary activism associated with Hiller was otherwise marked by a relatively diffuse will to change, from the beginning Pfemfert linked Expressionist literature and contemporary cultural politics in the "Aktion" with (historical) social-revolutionary texts to form a singular combination. The focal point of the paper was its anti-militarist critique, which particularly examined the war-mongering function of the liberal press and the Social Democrats and the affirmative stance of writer-colleagues within the framework of events leading up to the war. It also published early social-revolutionary texts, anarchist texts from Russia, essays by Lassalle and Reclus. Texts by the later Dadaists Hugo Ball, Hans Richter and Raoul Hausmann were also published in the "Aktion".

As people involved in earlier associations (the newspaper "Demokrat" and the Democratic Association) gradually left for ideological reasons, in the early years the "Aktion" drew more and more authors and subscribers. At least until Pfemfert distanced himself from Hiller in 1913[16], the "Aktion" was something of a gathering point for the men of letters who were later to assemble under the label Activism with Hiller. Hiller's spiritist ideas were reason enough for Pfemfert to put an end to the cooperation in the paper's third year. Contrary to Hiller's reactionary rejection of democracy, Pfemfert's anti-authoritarianism saw itself as propagating soviet democracy; the absolute pacifism of Hiller's logocracy (the revolution of words) was countered by Pfemfert with an anti-militarism that became increasingly revolutionary and concretely soviet-communistic during the course of the war; contrary to Hiller's German nationalism, Pfemfert's position was anti-national and anti-antisemitic.

In the first months of its publication, specifically from No. 3 to No. 16, the "Action" was published with the programmatic subtitle "Publication Organ for the Intelligence of Germany". Even though this subtitle quickly disappeared again, the paper increasingly assumed organizing functions for a mixed association of artists and intellectuals throughout the decade. Whereas the literary-activist circle around Hiller comprised - as Benjamin correctly describes it - an "arbitrary number of private existences without offering the least grounds for organizing"[17], Franz Pfemfert was the pivotal point not only for the "Aktion", but also for a number of other attempts at an "organization of the intelligence". Following the start of the "Aktion" as a weekly paper on 20 February 1911, the publishing company was founded in 1912. To begin with, Pfemfert published Expressionist literature; this was expanded beginning in 1916 with the "Political Action Library", including revolution texts by Lenin, Marx, Liebknecht and others. Finally, Pfemfert also recognized the necessity of a concrete location, a public sphere outside printed material, and opened the Berliner "Action Book Shop" in 1917 together with his wife Alexandra Pfemfert and her sister [hat die Schwester auch einen Namen?], which was open for exhibitions and events.

One of the anti-militarist agitation actions against conscription in 1913[18] even turned into an early instance of communication guerrilla: to create a broader base for protests against an extension of the powers of the Wehrmacht in Berlin, Pfemfert faked the declaration of a bourgeois anti-national association, "To the German Reichstag", against the new military laws. This declaration was propagated not only through the "Aktion", but also with flyers, which ultimately led to an actual demonstration through the aspect of media counter-information. Since conscription was being debated in France at the same time, the action was extended there to a parallel French declaration under the direction of the later Nobel Prize winner for literature, Anatole France.[19] This may be regarded as an attempt to internationalize anti-militarist resistance, which also used media guerrilla means to fight for an expansion and international organization of anti-national structures; with little success, however, as history shows.

Whereas Hiller's "Activists" increasingly invoked the party of the spirit[20], the German spirit[21] or the spiritual[22], Pfemfert founded the Anti-National Socialist Party Group of Germany (ASP) as early as 1915. The tiny anti-capitalist, anti-national, socialist party was "covertly active" until the end of the war, entering the public sphere on 16 November with a manifesto in the "Aktion". The party never grew beyond the status of a special interest group of a few dedicated artists, yet the reversal of the conventional relationship between party and newspaper appears to be an interesting constellation: instead of a party founding its publicizing organ, the newspaper founded the organization of a party in an ongoing process. Although the collectivity and the quantity of the distribution of endeavors revolving around the "Aktion" may be debated, Benjamin's question about organizing must certainly be answered positively in Pfemfert's case as the process of organizing leftist intellectuals in the second half of the 1910s, especially because of the aforementioned attempts to work on organizational linking and articulation in association with the "Aktion" and going beyond the paper.

The whole spectrum of German "Activism" appears to be quite a disparate arrangement that is fed - roughly outlined - from a right-wing activism of the spirit, which sometimes slipped into the margins of antisemitism[23], racism and proto-fascism[24], as well as from a left-wing activism of the "Aktion", which from its basis as a literature magazine became increasingly radicalized and turned into an agitation platform for radical leftist politics. Especially in the first half of the 1910s the actors frequently alternated between the unraveling camps, and naturally there were "activisms" of all kinds to the right of Hiller as well. Returning now to Benjamin's essay, which was based on the draft for a lecture in Paris from April 1934, the answers to the question of why this late attention is devoted to Hiller in particular may be found in the context of this lecture.

Benjamin uses the foil of "Activism" mainly to criticize recognized leftist, but purely content-focused, agitational strategies, in other words primarily socialist realism, in a communist context. At the Paris Institute for the Study of Fascism, a sham organization that was controlled by the Comintern, he would have found himself on thin ice with this, as he was well aware[25]. Even before Stalin's cultural politics, such diverse positions as Lenin's, Bogdanov's and Lunacharsky's were all, despite their very different ideas of proletarian culture, oriented to the production and presentation of proletarian contents. Even in Germany, in the socialist circles of the 1920s and the 1930s, there was a line of giving precedence to revolutionary contents over form. Benjamin's attitude, which focused primarily on the technique and organizing function of art practice, was the exception. Particularly before an audience that was skeptical about formal considerations, Hiller's partly reactionary position was excellently suited as a negative point of approach. Even though he represented something completely different from the content-fixed position of socialist realism, in Benjamin's lecture Hiller represents the position of being fixed on content, writing sentences such as these: "But in truth, all truly great art works [...] were great not because of the perfection of what was specifically artistic about them, but rather [...] because of the sublimeness of their What, their Idea, their Goal, their Ethos. [...] If one takes away from one of them its content, its idea, its morality, so that only what is 'designed' remains, what remains is worthless!"[26] Hiller's attitude is just as clearly idealist as it is anti-formalist: "Form, though, as such, is empty"[27], "what remains essential is what is designed"[28]. In the position of the German "Activists" there were echoes of a debate that was also familiar from Soviet cultural politics, yet because of its idealistic orientation, it was impossible to link this position with materialist cultural politics. In this way, the discourse associated with Hiller also became a suitable foil in terms of content, which Benjamin could use to highlight the practices of Bert Brecht and Sergei Tretyakov as positive counter-examples of changing the production apparatus.

Let's stay with this negative foil for a few more sentences and examine the question that was central for Benjamin, the position of the "author as producer" or, more broadly, the position of intellectuals and artists: in the distinction between "universal" and "specific intellectuals"[29] developed by Foucault, Hiller's position would be that of a representative of the universal. The spiritual thus corresponds to a universal truth, the carriers of which, the spiritualists, represent a universality denoting the conscious and developed form of the unconscious universality of the proletariat. Here the spiritualists would be the widely visible role models, exemplary and illuminating, rising out of the dark form of the proletariat. Foucault describes the universal intellectual - this also corresponds to the example of Hiller's literary "Activism" - using the example of the writer and the threshold of writing as the sacralizing feature of the intellectual.

This figure, which implies speakers articulating the mute truth of others, must necessarily come under fire in emancipatory, egalitarian contexts. The contents, according to Benjamin, and the political tendency have a counter-revolutionary function, as long as the instruments, forms and apparatuses of production, in other words the relationship of the "spiritual" as universal intellectual to the proletariat remains unchanged. Benjamin uses not only the example of "Activism", but also that of Neue Sachlichkeit to describe how even photographs of misery become an object of enjoyment, how the artistic processing of a political situation is able "to achieve ever new effects for entertaining the audience"; in other words, how the bourgeois apparatus of production and publication is able to assimilate and even propagate revolutionary themes with the help of the figure of the artist/intellectual next to/over the proletariat.[30]

Writing work in the position of a bearer of the law and fighter for justice, for the proletariat, is a presumption; the place of the universal intellectual is an impossible one. If the intellectual's solidarity with the proletariat can always only be a mediated solidarity, then the intellectual, who has become a bourgeois intellectual due to social and educational privilege, must become, according to Benjamin, a "traitor to his original class"[31]. This necessary betrayal consists in the transformation of his position, from someone who supplies the production apparatus with contents, as revolutionary as they may be, to an engineer who changes the production apparatus, who, as Benjamin formulates it, "sees his task in adapting it to the purposes of the proletarian revolution".[32]

For a renewal of this demand that Benjamin poses, that of changing the production apparatus rather than supplying it, it seems to me that both aspects are equally important: the first part of the demand, not to supply the production apparatus, could be updated with the help of Deleuze's criticism of representation, especially the criticism of the framework of media representation and the function that intellectuals and artists carry out within this framework. The second part of the demand, namely that of changing the production apparatus, is found in an expanded form in Foucault's exhortation to specific intellectuals to constitute a new politics of truth. There are echoes of Benjamin's figures and terminology in both Deleuze and Foucault: with Deleuze it is the topos of betrayal, with which the intelligentsia leave their class[33]; with Foucault it is the "specialist", which Benjamin in turn took over from the terminological toolbox of the Russian productivists.

Contrary to Foucault's assumption of the disappearance of the great writer, the universal intellectual, ever new metamorphoses of this type have emerged in recent decades, still in the pose of the autonomous artist and thinker, but in fact in heteronomous subordination to structures, in which their figures fulfill certain functions.[34] Contrary to this pseudo-revival of the classical bourgeois, the universal intellectual, who is questioned about everything and also has something to say about everything, especially on the surface of the media and instrumental think-tanks, the point is not to continue supplying these media and politics with ever new contents, but rather to refuse to supply, to vanish from the machinery of the spectacle, to betray the spectacle.

To a certain degree, to the extent that intellectuals are involved in this spectacle, this also implies a betrayal of oneself. Going beyond Benjamin's classical Marxist formulation, the movement of the "betrayal of the bourgeois class" could generally be described in the words of Deleuze/Parnet as the position of a "traitor to one's own empire, one's gender, one's class, one's majority"[35]. Betraying one's original bourgeois class and adapting the production apparatus to the proletarian revolution today would primarily mean dropping out of the framework of representation. What can be aligned to the grid of possible images and statements is only that which is a priori acceptable , and what is acceptable is susceptible to recuperation a priori. To counter the mechanism of the media spotlight, which is capable of assimilating contents today much more radically than the reportage of the Neue Sachlichkeit was able to do, it is necessary to vanish from the picture, remain unrecognized, hide the traces of prominence. The key to change is not found in the battle of intellectuals for hegemony in the mainstream media, but rather in refusing to take part in this show battle, rejecting the role of commentators and suppliers of keywords in the framework of the media spectacle. Disrupting this relationship, preferably developing a form of disturbance through these kinds of disruptions, this is Deleuze's adaption of the demand to not supply the production apparatus: "Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control."[36]

Translation by Aileen Derieg
Pre-Release from Gerald Raunig, Art and Revolution, to be published in 2005

[1] Deleuze/Parnet, Dialoge, 53

[2] In a segment of an older text from 1931, which Benjamin himself cryptically cites as a quotation from an "understanding critic" in the "Author as Producer", the target for his attacks on "the proletarian mimicry of the decaying bourgeoisie" is the poetry of Kästner, Tucholsky and Mehring. Cf. Benjamin, Gesammelte Werke, III, 280f.

[3] Ursula Baumeister (Die Aktion 1911-1932, 43) defines Activism as an aesthetic program and radical cultural wing of Expressionism.

[4] Raoul Hausmann reviled the "Activists" roughly as "henchmen of the moral idiocy of the constitutional state" and suggested drowning "these snotty-nosed drips" in the "filth of their so horribly serious six-volume works" (quoted from Scholz, Pinsel und Dolch, 345).

[5] Walter Benjamin, Der Autor als Produzent, 689

[6] Rothe, Aktivismus, 18

[7]Translator's note: The word Geist in German, which is the focal point of Hiller's ideas here, can mean spirit, mind, intellect, ghost. In this translation preference is given to the word spirit, although intellect is more frequently used in older, related translations. In this case, spiritism has nothing to do with the esoteric movement of the late 19th century.

[8] Walter Benjamin, Der Autor als Produzent, 690

[9] Cf., for instance, the informative text collection "Der Aktivismus 1915-1920", whose publisher Wolfgang Rothe called "Activism" an "expression of the German spirit that calls for respect" (21) in his introduction in 1969 in comparison with the 1968 movement.

[10] Hiller, Philosophie des Ziels, 42

[11] Walter Benjamin, Der Autor als Produzent, 691

[12] Walter Benjamin, Der Autor als Produzent, 690

[13] Hiller, Verwirklichung des Geistes im Staat, quoted from Rolf von Bockel, Kurt Hiller und die Gruppe Revolutionärer Pazifisten (1926-1933), 25

[14] Hiller, Philosophie des Ziels, 53

[15] Benjamin was certainly familiar with the "Aktion", since he also published articles there. In addition, the publisher of the "Aktion", Pfemfert, had already bin the publisher of the "Anfang", the newspaper of the youth movement that Benjamin had been involved with in the early part of the decade.

[16] Cf. the two Pfemfert articles in the third year fo the "Aktion": "Die Wir des Doktor Hiller", Die Aktion 1913, 637f. and "Der Karriere-Revolteur", Die Aktion 1913, 1129-1136

[17] Benjamin, Der Autor als Produzent, 690

[18] Baumeister, 102f., describes Pfemfert's strategy as the "creation of a counter-public sphere on conscription".

[19] Baumeister, Die Aktion 1911-1932, 103

[20] Heinrich Mann, Das junge Geschlecht, 97

[21] Hiller, Philosophie des Ziels, 39

[22] Hiller, Philosophie des Ziels, 43

[23] Cf. for instance, Hiller, Philosophie des Ziels, 52

[24] Hiller, Philosophie des Ziels, 53

[25] As explained in the commentary for the Benjamin edition, for unknown reasons the lecture probably did not take place. See also Fuld, Benjamin, 235

[26] Hiller, Philosophie des Ziels, 33

[27] Hiller, Philosophie des Ziels, 33

[28] Hiller, Philosophie des Ziels, 45

[29] Foucault, Die politische Funktion des Intellektuellen, cf. also Deleuze/Foucault, Die Intellektuellen und die Macht

[30] Benjamin, Der Autor als Produzent, 692f.

[31] Benjamin, Der Autor als Produzent, 700f.

[32] Benjamin, Der Autor als Produzent, 701

[33] Benjamin quoted from Fuld, Benjamin, 226

[34] See, for instance, Bourdieu's concept of the media intellectual and my conclusions in Raunig, Wien Feber Null, 63-77

[35] Deleuze/Parnet, Dialoge, 52

[36] Deleuze, Unterhandlungen, 252

above copied from: http://www.republicart.net/disc/aap/raunig07_en.htm

Gareth Lloyd: Towards an Aesthetic of Dissent, María Esther Maciel

María Esther Maciel, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil


The now has converted into the topos of contemporary sensibility. Not a closed now where past and future are elided, but a moveable point of temporary intersections. Where the memory of the world is inscribed and erased. Where the senses migrate to the until then unexplored zones of the body. Where the margins and the center become a non-place. A space of small things, of detritus, of desires for impermanence. A time of cultural intersections. Consumption and waste.

If, within this perspective, utopian promises no longer trace the paths of the present, and the future cultivated by the historical movements of the avant-garde no longer occupies the center of the temporal triad, it is left to each artist to create his own way of looking, and with it to invent his own now. As Paul Auster says, seeing is a way of being in the world. And we might add: of leaving the world, to then find it again in a state of otherness.

Gareth Lloyd invents his now from a gaze in transit. A gaze that not only sees, but critically reads the time (historical and personal) in which the artist is inserted, and extracts from this experience a new horizon for his vision. In other words, the mobile nature of his work is justified by the attempt not only to capture, through images, some visual signs of the last three decades, but also to reconstruct a personal trajectory: one which he himself as an artist has sought throughout this period, in his intense but non-complacent dialogue with Pop Art, media iconography, and the aesthetic legacy of the modernist tradition. Through this experience he has known how to convert the look into a movement of traversing the limits of time and space, in search of a viable alternative sensibility for the present.

One may say that the way in which he undertakes this search is by putting on the surface of his pictures, in conjunction and disjunction at the same time, various modes of handling the question of image in the contemporary culture of the turn of the century. For this purpose, he makes use both of icons produced by the mass media and of some metaphors that modern poetry (more specifically those of Mallarmé) has left us. And he adds to this his own aesthetic proposal, which is simultaneously the sum and subtraction of the two other approaches. He manages to construct from this game of paradoxes a kind of visual narrative, through which he tells-in oblique ways-the story of the process of creation.

Perhaps the best way of showing how this narrative is constructed is beginning with one of the works in this catalogue, entitled "Two Icons from the Seventies." In it are found two fragments of two representative icons of the political/cultural clash between capitalism and communism during the Cold War. On one side, the supposed back of Clint Eastwood, one of Hollywood's myths; on the other, the arm of one of Mao's soldiers. Between the back and the arm, there is a strange symmetry, as if these parts completed one another in some way. And yet, there is a fissure, a gap between them. We might say that what separates them is also a kind of distance that unites them. Above these images, two others with no figure, almost empty, are placed, as if they were blank pages from a notebook or paper, for a drawing that does not yet exist. The background of the picture is dark, stained with chalk and water.

Without a doubt, the ingenious articulation of the two icons of the Seventies (both converted into stereotypes of a given moment of world history) point critically to an aesthetic mode of representation based on the ideas of identification and consumption. That is, a mode of representation which has its aesthetic appeal in the iconic image, canonized by the media of mass culture. And when I say critically, it is by thinking of the form in which this articulation occurs in this work, since the figures are not presented directly but metonymically, through fragments, as if when the artist does present them, he has already put them in a state of precariousness, of erosion.

On the other hand, the presence of disinhabited and denuded images suggests another possible path of representation: that which is sustained by Mallarmé's idea of silence, of the abyss, of the blank page/canvas, in short, of non-representation. Yet, a more attentive look can perceive that the surface is not so white, for it contains light touches, diluted spots, yellow pigments; and that the silence is traversed by small, nearly imperceptible noises. They seem to tell us of the impossibility of attaining absolute silence or nothingness, showing that purity is an illusion. In this sense, the artist also makes a critical reading of the aesthetic project of a certain current of modern art and literature: that which is sustained by the negation/destruction of reality and language itself, in search of something beyond the materiality of the form.

It is important to note that these two forms are not presented as opposite or mutually exclusive. They are superimposed, joined, making one relative to the other. In the simultaneous convergence or divergence between them, a new space and a new time are created for the image. Through the paradoxical game they engender, the artist seeks an alternative form for his own sensibility.

If this alternative form in the work in question still appears as a state of search, one may say that it will appear in a more explicit form in other works of his, as, for example, in the picture entitled "Slight Adolescent Girl". Here the icon is implicit (the traditional figure of the Madonna and child) and makes itself seen at first in the image from a package of soap-powder (put on the surface and stained with pigment). On the right appears a kind of blank, the slightly pigmented emptiness of an almost empty page. In the middle, another image already appears, merely sketched on a surface that is also stained, traversed by dilutions, containing an inconclusive, ill-defined drawing of an adolescent girl. The lines of the figure are tenuous and dispersed. In it, the figure loses its compactness and weight.

The limits established between the three images bring them together in the same proportion as they distance them (as in "Two Icons of the 70s"). These images are also placed in a background with no homogeneity. The one in the middle, in which the two others are condensed and dispersed, represents the way of access to a new approach to the seeing (mediatized on the left by the consumerist appeal and on the right by the completely silenced appeal). This approach, which refuses the stereotype without destroying it, is the alternative that the artist offers for his time. "De-doxify" our cultural representations, without the destructive gesture that defined the so-called "tradition of rupture" is Gareth Lloyd's movement. He seeks to extract a modest figurativeness from the lightness and incompleteness of the line, without compression, without visual saturation, at the same time that he places this figurativeness in a dialogical relation with other models of representation of our culture.

To achieve this form, the artist traverses different moments in his creative process. If we distribute all his works along a diachronic line, by following the thread of this process we encounter what was called at the beginning of this text a visual narrative. In this narrative, we first encounter the works aimed at a direct confrontation with the figurative mode, proper to mass culture, which finds in Hollywood cinema its best expression. This confrontation appears as a challenge: how to critically deal with the logic of consumption that structures the representation of images in the contemporary world? Through the modernist path of rupture and aesthetic autonomy? Through the idealized path of abstraction? Aware that the modernist response to this conflict no longer suits the critical demands of the present, the artist chooses another path: that of erasure, of dilution. From this choice arise other works like "Icon," in which part of a photograph of a Humphrey Bogart type appears blotted out by another ground, in a movement of foregrounding the background. Little by little, the space of erasure (generally represented by the brightness of a intense yellow, such as in the picture "The Desert and Perspective") will expand in other works and completely obliterate the consumption and identification mode. At this point, the artist stages his own exile in the space of the uninhabited images and begins to explore the signs of expansion: the desert and the sea. Within this field, other associated images come in: sand, night, rain, and wind. They come in various works to show the ambiguity of edges, limits, given the near impossibility of making precise the point where these elements come together and draw apart. One may say as well that in the works of this series an implicit complicity with the idea of loss is found. An elegiac but unsentimental atmosphere makes itself felt in some of them. This is the case, for example, in "The Death of a Stereotype," where the image of a masculine figure (Richard Burton) appears partially diluted in black, on the dark surface of the background, beside a section of bitumen, simulating the gloss of film. Disappearance, solitude.

The escape from exile is made by crossing the desert, a humble crossing: clandestinely, on the back of a donkey, in the morning rain. On the sand, the flower, the footsteps of an elephant, the features of adolescence, (transition) the lion. A new form insinuates itself, leading both back to earlier works like "Zephyr" and "Ellipse", and to a passage ahead of itself. The work "Leaving the Twentieth Century" is the creative response to this movement. It shows us how the artist, on leaving the century/desert, finds a new outlet for his own language and begins to take an alternative form from the contiguity of the prosaic and the backgrounded: girls/rain, toys/shadow, animals/blurs. Objects sketched as incomplete figures, drawn out of the layers of the as yet unseen appear, whose function is not so much to represent, but to suggest.

If, as Italo Calvino would say, we live in a culture in which the all-powerful media can do nothing but "transform the world into images, multiplying it in a phantasmagoria of mirror-games images that are mostly destitute of the internal need that should characterize every image," it is left to the sensibility of artists like Gareth Lloyd to invent new forms of the visual apprehension of the present and extract from them an aesthetics of dissent.

above copied from: http://www.cornermag.org/corner05/page04.htm

Assembling Magazines (a.k.a. Compilations), Stephen Perkins

The concept of assembling is very simple, contributors submit a specific number of copies of their work to a central editor who in turn collates one copy from each artists' submissions into the final 'assembled' product, the number of artists submitting work defining the number of pages in each assembling. The presentation of the final magazine varies, some have loose covers inside of which the pages are placed, some are stapled together, others are bound and a number of others have been placed in a variety of different containers. Assemblings are a particularly unique concept which attempted to resolve a number of issues during the late '60s to early '70s, and its surprising that it has received such scant attention in the writings on artists' publications throughout the period under discussion.
The little documentation there is on the introduction of the assembling technique into artists' self publishing activities gives no authoritative clues as to when and who first utilized this method. Confounding this lack of information are writers who refer to the 'assembling aesthetic,' but are quite unspecific as to whether they mean assembling in the sense that everything that was sent for submission to a magazine was included (i.e. the magazine was assembled from all of the submissions), or whether they are talking about an assembling magazine in the definition I have given above.(1)
So for the moment I can only conclude that the first assembling magazine made up of multiple submissions from contributors was the magazine Notebook, compiled from 69 contributors and coordinated by Dana Atchley in Canada and completed at the end of 1969 and early 1970. (2) This same year (1970) saw the first assembling publication in the United States, edited by Richard Kostelanetz and Henry Korn, called appropriately Assembling. As one of the better known assembling magazines, and with the concept disseminated in Kostelanetz's prodigious writings, it came to serve as a model for further developments in this field. Since that time assemblings have flourished as an important international self publishing activity with approximately nine new assembling projects starting yearly from 1968-86. (3)
Assemblings represented another in the continued attacks during this period on established artworld power structures, in this case the power invested in what Kostelanetz terms the "...editorial/industrial complex..." Assemblings completely inverted the prerogative of editorial authority, and represent a decisive shift in the role of the editor to that of collator or compiler.
Some of the key points in this new self publishing paradigm can be summarized by the following:

Assemblings provided a means for artists to publish experimental work for which there were no established outlets.
Assemblings represented an 'open system,' or a participatory democracy in which editorial control was shifted away from a central authority and onto the participants themselves.
Central to the concept of assemblings was the element of diversity. In the following passage Kostelanetz characterizes the work submitted to the first issue of Assembling, "...visual poetry, verbal poetry, abstract photography, playlets, minimal poetry, verbal collage, stream-of-consciousness narrative, representational graphics, picture-accompanied words, scenarios for happenings, sculptural documentation, personal journal, aesthetic manifesto, etc.." (4)
Assemblings develop as unique forms of collaboration, and over the years become increasingly international in character.
Nine years later in 1979 Pawel Petasz from Poland would extend the assembling aesthetic one step further with his Commonpress, in which each issue was to be compiled by a different editor. As of 1992 approximately 64 issues have been executed (some still awaiting completion).
By way of a footnote to this section, and in answer to the question of where the idea of assemblings came from, I have to hesitantly conclude that at some point this technique crossed over from the science fiction community to the art community (further research in this area is needed). Coupled with the rise of science fiction fan clubs was the formation of amateur press associations or alliances (APAs), and to quote Fredric Wertham in his books on fanzines:

These are organizations where people send out fanzines through a central distributor. A fanzine distributed by an APA is called an apazine. The first fan APA was founded in the mid-thirties. The members send their copies to a CM (Central Mailer) who collates the copies, staples them under one cover, and sends them to every member in what is called an mig (mailing). The CM is also called an OE (Official Editor). (5)

References
1. Further research could reveal that an assembling magazine from Germany, Omnibus News, edited by Thomas Niggl, and often quoted as a leading influence in this genre was indeed an assembling in the strict definition of the term. Differing accounts of its method of production have led me to omit it for the time being.
2. Banana, Anna. "Mail Art: Canada & Western U.S.A." Flue, 4 (3/4): 25, 1984.
3. Perneczky, Géza. A Háló. Budapest: A Héttorony Könyvkiadó, 1991.
4. Kostelanetz, Richard. "Why Assembling." The Publish-It-Yourself Handbook: Literary Traditions & How-To. Bill Henderson, ed. New York: The Pushcart Press, 1973. 83-94.
5. Wertham, Fredric. The World of Fanzines. Carbondale & Evanston: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973.

Bibliography
Ashton, Dore. "New York commentary." Studio International, England, 175(900):272-273, 1968.
Review of Aspen Magazine (#5/6) edited by Brian O'Doherty, and S.M.S. (#1, 1968), edited by William Copley. Both of these are assembling-type publications presented as boxes containing original intermedia contributions from a variety of now well known artists.

Crane, Michael. "The Spread of Correspondence Art." Correspondence Art. Michael Crane & Mary Stofflet, eds. San Francisco: Contemporary Arts Press, 1984.
Assembling, Ovum, Hexagano & VILE (#7, Stamp Issue), mentioned in brief passage on assemblings. "In an assembling-type publication, each participant becomes editor and publisher by sending a specified quantity of pre-printed pages to central point for collation, binding and distribution."

Friedman, Ken. "Notes On The History of the Alternative Press." Lightworks, (8/9):41-47, 1977.
One paragraph on the early assembling magazines such as Amazing Facts, Omnibus News, Space Atlas, Assembling, Orgon, and Ovum.

Friedman, Ken. "Mail Art History: The Fluxus Factor." Flue, 4(3/4): 18-24, 1984.
One paragraph mention of early assembling magazines in relation to Amazing Facts Magazine, published by Fluxus West in 1968, a magazine put together loosely on the assembling principle.

Kostelanetz, Richard. "Why Assembling." The Publish-It-Yourself Handbook: literary tradition & how-to. Bill Henderson, ed. Yonkers: The Pushcart Book Press, 1973. 83-94.
Established and edited by Kostelantez and Henry Korn, this article gives a good overview of why they started Assembling, and the material they received and problems inherent in editing a magazine of this sort. This article covers up to the third issue. "Somewhat influenced by a beautiful German book called Omnibus (1969), we hit upon what we think is the most appropriate structure for a cooperative self-publishing channel. In brief, Assembling invites writers and artists whom we know to be doing unusual work, which we broadly characterize as "otherwise unpublishable," to contribute a thousand copies of up to four 8.5 x 11-inch pages of whatever they want to include."

Moore, Barbara & Hendricks, Jon. "The Page As Alternative Space: 1950 to 1969." Artists' Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook. Joan Lyons, ed. Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop, 1987.
One paragraph mention of assemblings. "Another economic short-cut is to have each artist in an anthology actually produce his or her own page in the requisite number of copies for the edition, in a predetermined size. An early example of such an "assembling"-type work is Eter, which was coordinated by Paul Armand Gette beginning in 1966 in Paris. Not all of the issues used this method of publication, but under somewhat different titles (Ether, Eter, Contestation, New Eter) the magazine continued publication into the early seventies."

Perneczky, Géza. A Háló. Budapest: A Héttorony Könyvkiadó, 1991.
One section of this book is devoted to assembling magazines under the title, 'The Omnibus and Its Passengers.' At the end of this book is a synopsis in English of this chapter, and also a checklist of issues of Commonpress realized and others in progress. "The editorial method of "assembling" was favoured primarily by the adherents of mail art, who preferred to see "loose diversity" rather than the individual merits of the works, and for whom "mass effect" was a priority."

Phillpot, Clive. "Art Magazines and Magazine Art." Artforum, XVIII(6): 1980.
Short mention of early '70s assembling magazines. "In the early '70s the L.A. Artists' Publication, Assembling, and the Ace Space Company's Notebook 1 and Space Atlas exemplified an approach to magazine making whereby virtually anything was included, provided contributors submitted 200, or 500, or whatever number of copies of their work that was required to make up the predetermined size of the edition. Among the offset, mimeoed, or Xeroxed contributions were many that were intended as multiple printed artworks. These magazines were open to almost anyone who felt like contributing, and their editors pared their role down to little more than coordinators."

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