Last
night Indil-cat and I went to the Melbourne International Film Festival to
see a brilliant Australian-Berlin collaboration by a brave new
director Brodie Higgs called 'Elixir', a working title with no particular meaning and for which no 'better' name was ever found.
The
surrealists from the 1920's are alive and (more or less) well in modern
day Berlin living in a communal warehouse studio called the Glasshouse, named
after André Bretons actual Parisian house where he hosted his
troublesome friends. André and his friends are reeling after the death
of Jacques Vaché (who died of an opium overdose in real life). A new
comer to the house André picks up in the streets, Bohemian Lexie, a
writer who expresses herself as a graffiti artist, becomes the catalyst for
exposing the souls of each of the Glasshouses's residents.
Tristan
Tzara, one of the founders of the Dada art movement, hatches a wild
plot to sabotage Malcom MacLaren's (father of punk fashion which Brodie
says is just a rip off of Dadaism) Art Week fashion show in a way that
reminded me totally of our children's CAD fashion design performances
that were often surrealist and involved shooting the audience with guns
in a way which in hindsight was perfectly Dadaist.
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| India d'Scarlett CAD 2009 |
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| India d'Scarlett CAD 2009 |
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| Savannah d'Scarlett CAD 2012 |
The
movie is richly surreal and satisfying in its commentary on the
commercialism of art close to my heart - one of my pet hates is the
propensity of people to purchase art 'to match their decor' reducing it
to mere 'decoration' rather than for the art itself.
Surrealism
evolved out of the DADA art movement. During the war, André Breton, who
had trained in medicine and psychiatry, served in
a neurological hospital where he used Freud's psychoanalytic methods
with soldiers suffering from shell-shock. He met writer Jacques Vaché
and admired his anti-social attitude and disdain for established
artistic tradition.
Back
in Paris, Breton joined in Dada activities and started the literary
journal Littérature. He began experimenting with automatic
writing- spontaneously writing without censoring the thoughts—and
published the writings, as well as accounts of dreams, in the magazine.
With
two others he began to attract more artists and writers; they came to
believe that automatism was a better tactic for societal change than the
Dada attack on existing societal values.
Freud's
work with free association, dream analysis, and the unconscious held
great importance to the Surrealists in developing methods to liberate
imagination. They embraced idiosyncrasy while rejecting the idea of an
underlying madness. Salvador Dali, arguably the most well known
surrealist, later proclaimed, "There is only one difference between a
madman and me. I am not mad." (A line that gets used in the movie btw).
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| Salvador Dali 'The Persistence of Memory' 1931 |
I
still think Dada is one of the more intellectually interesting art
movements. Dadaists called it anti-art because it represented the
opposite of everything which art stood for. Where art was concerned with
traditional aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics - it was intended to
offend. The movement was a protest against the bourgeois cultural and
intellectual conformity—in art and more broadly in society—that
surrounded the outbreak of WWI. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos and
Hugo
Ball - one of the Dadaists said "For us, art is not an end in itself
... but it is an opportunity for the true perception of the times we
live in'.
A
reviewer from the American Arts Review journal said at the time that
"Dada philosophy is the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive
thing that has ever originated from the brain of man."
The
Dadaists would meet at soirées at a Zurich nightclub called Cabaret
Voltaire (the fantastic alternative band in the 80's was named after
this) where performances or 'happenings' of spoken word, dance and music
happened. These soirees were raucous forums for new forms of
performance, such as sound poetry and simultaneous poetry that mirrored
the maelstrom of World War I raging around it.
I love the fact that one of Tzara's writings, a melody called bizarrely Vaseline symphonique, required ten or twenty people to shout "cra" and "cri" on a rising scale when it was performed.
Tzara
was hilariously subversive in performing Kokoschka's short play 'The
Sphinx and Strohmann' . Performed in total darkness, the actors in masks
that covered their whole bodies and Tzara had the part of the parrot
and proceeded to ruin the performance by making thunder and lightning
sounds in all the wrong places and maintaining that this subversion was a
deliberate part of the Dada anti-establishment intent.I think we need more performance art that extends the dimensionality of static visual art and inspires us to feel on all levels.
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| Oscar Kokoschka's 'The Bride of the Wind' 1914 |
Kokoschka
by the way painted the famous abstract expressionist painting 'The
Bride of the Wind' a self portrait with his lover Alma Mahler, wife of
Occy's favourite composer Gustav Mahler. By the way a film was made of
Alma's life called 'The Bride of the Wind' and check out the poster art
for it - they used Gustav Klimt artwork stylisation for it! The
inhumanity of it!
In terms of painting art George
Grosz evolved from the nihilistic protest of Dada to a more focused
expression of his disgust at the cruelty and decadence of the
bourgeoisie. He exposed the hypocrisy of the politicians, the press, the
army, the ruling classes and their corrupt clergy that the DADAISTS
hated. Grosz wrote, "Man
has created an insidious system - a top and a bottom. A very few earn
millions, while thousands upon thousands are on the verge of starvation.
But what has this to do with art? Precisely this, that many painters
and writers, in a word, all the so-called 'intellectuals' still tolerate
this state of affairs without taking a stand against it......To help
shake this belief and to show the oppressed the true faces of their
masters is the purpose of my work".
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| George Grosz 'The Pillars of Society' 1926 |
'The Pillars of Society' by George Grosz 1926 shows a group portrait that manages to portray 'all the true faces of their masters' in one room.
The
German officer wearing a monocle and a swastika, duelling scars on his
cheek and a thin slit of a mouth aggressively exposing his teeth, the
glass of beer and sabre exposing him as a drunken warmonger. The
delusional thoughts coming out of his head show his lack of self
awareness.
Behind
him on the left is a portrait of press baron Alfred Hugenberg, wearing a
chamber pot engraved with an Iron Cross as a hat symbolising the bias
of his newspapers and Grosz's opinion of them. His blood stained palm is
the bloody consequences of his newspapers' propaganda (symbolized by
the pencil)
Behind
him on the right is a portrait of Friedrich Ebert, the leader of the
Social Democratic Party and the first President of Germany from
1919-1925. His leaflet reads, "Socialism is Working" and a flag of the
Weimar Republic. Grosz gives him a pile of steaming faeces for brains.
In
the background is a clergyman whose sanctimonious face is flushed with
the long term effects of alcohol. With closed eyes he preaches from the
safety of his room, blind to the reality of the burning city outside
his window and ignoring the brutality of the civil war that unfolds
behind his back.
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| Raoul Haussmann 'Spirit of Our Times' 1920 |
Early Dada anti-art is probably best portrayed in Raoul Haussmann's 1920 ‘Spirit
of Our Time’. It is a satirical illustration for his statement that the
average supporter of what he considered to be a corrupt society “has no more capabilities than those which chance has glued to the outside of his skull; his brain remains empty”.
Maybe
we'd do well to reflect on this in today's society. Cat Girl's
housemates, Dutch, German and Japanese, recently commented that their
Australian workmates 'could be so draining sometimes - all they talk
about is the weather and trivial stuff' - how many people you know have
shut themselves off in the less dangerous position of intellectual
muteness? What gets sacrificed in this numb social mindsoup is
creativity and passion - is being safe because we fear embarrassment and
humiliation for standing out worth it?
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