Skip to main content

An Allegory Of The Exquisite Corpse



The Exquisite Corpse was one the favourite games of the surrealist artists. It involves a number of participants successively adding to an initial collage or drawing without being able to see the previous contribution(s). Often this involved folding a paper to hide what was already there. 

As such it is a supremely democratic art form; an example of the notion that the artists are the people and that the expression of their subconscious through automaticity is further enhanced when the manifestations of those expressions are combined in themselves in a chaotic manner. Although doubtless the surrealists would consider that to be objective chance.

That term 'manifestation' (or manif in the book) is critical for the purposes of this profoundly disturbing and very timely book by China Mieville which considers a version of the 1940s in which surrealist artworks are coming to life following the 'S-Blast" (classically this explosion occurs in Les Deux Magots) in occupied Paris and the Nazis are desperately trying to raise demons from hell (or at least from some of their revolting national socialist art works of the 1930s). 

As is remarked in the book, we land heavily on the 'surrealist side of the street' where the manifs are living art - the expression of the people's subconscious and the free association of their ideas. They may be strange (because we are strange) but they are peculiarly devoted to defending the interests of the city.

In contrast their enemies rely on the 'made demon' - the crafted, tooled and smooth representation of hell which will, given the chance, eat the manifs as they literally and metaphorically devour all other flowerings of art.

There are many spectacular passages: "In the post blast miasma, all Parisians grew invisible organs that flex in the presence of the marvellous."



A bastardised version of Leonora Carrington's 'Amateur of Velocipedes' appears riding through the city "tires singing, the cycle-presence wove between the shattered buildings of the Cite de Trevise, into ruins and shadows and out of sight". 

The finale of the book is one in which neither the manifs nor the demons hold sway. It is far more troubling than that in its Augustan calm. 

As an allegory of contemporary times and a tour de force in its own right this takes some beating. Surreal art feels increasingly important as the darkness seems to be closing in all around and the intemperate beat of demands for backward looking conformity in all senses becomes ever louder. The beauty of the surreal is that it is genuinely of 'us'; a direct reflection of our very human hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares. It is a 'realer' version of reality than the smooth representation of normality in which the unhelpfully fecund nature of humans can be controlled and tamped down.

Sadly, those who are not on the surrealist side of the street probably neither want nor care to read it. They're too busy raising demons.  


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Best (and Worst) Films of 2023

  One of the most joyful rediscoveries this year was Percy Adlon's  Bagdad Cafe  which in a wonderfully surreal manner captures the magic, literal and figurative, that a most unlikely outsider brings to the moribund, allowing them to realise what they have been missing through their obsessive introspection and to grow through the recognition of the value in difference. Could there possibly be a message in there? In the 'they do still make'em like that' category the outstanding example was the  The Three Musketeers: D'Artagnan  which was pure pleasure from the tip of its épée to the handle of its poignard, running full tilt with the ridiculousness of the plot half way round France and back across the Channel without pausing for breath. Hats are worn with an angle of jaunt worthy of an Expressionist noir, swords are barely ever in a scabbard, panelling is chewed liberally and Eva Green's use of her belle poitrine auditions it for separate billing in the cast list.
Post a Comment
Read more

There are worse things than cows on the line

A new explanation for the delay to my train this afternoon: cows on the line. This did, however, provide some time to reflect on other rather more serious characteristics of modern life than the inconvenience occasioned by the peregrinations of the odd Friesan.  So here are six which seem to me to be particularly pernicious aspects of our current situation.  1.  Libertarianism : otherwise known as letting me do whatever I want and a plague on everyone else. Such a convenient doctrine for the already powerful and utterly malign as a philosophy for the common good with a resolution to remove everything that might be a constraint or require a contribution to the commonweal. This is wholly distinct from liberalism and indeed individualism which are both important and positive. The basic issues that libertarianism always avoid are that a free for all never serves those without agency. The deep structural imbalances in society that fuel inequality have to be collectively addressed
4 comments
Read more

Museum Hours

A new blog which fittingly has a first post about the  film  which provided the inspiration; a quite wonderful, wry look at a few days in the life of a museum attendant in Vienna. There have presumably been easier pitches in the history of cinema but we should be deeply grateful that this gently subversive piece made it through. For this is a film that shouts quietly. About the way that we all too easily jump to conclusions about people based on what they look like and what they do; indeed how in a gallery we ignore or look down on the watchers without reflecting that they may be rather more acute in their observation of us. Our attendant relatively early lets slip that he spent much of his former life on the road with rock groups and in one particularly droll moment slightly hesitantly announces to an amused Mary Margaret O'Hara that he does still like heavy metal whilst looking as though he would be considerably more likely to put on a CD of Mantovani. About the way that w
3 comments
Read more