Eugene & Erró

Here are some paintings from two 20th century artists whose work I recently caught wind of---the Russian surrealist Eugene Berman (1899-1972) and Icelandic postmodernist Erró aka Gudmundur Gudmundsson (born July 19, 1932).

Some of Eugene Berman's work reminds me of Dali's desolate haunted dreamscapes.

The works of Erró on the other hand are abundant kaleidoscopic collages of pop culture and modern media. Famous works of art commingle with comic book heroes, Disney cartoons, and the imagery of popular advertisements in his all-encompassing feasts of visual consumption. His work feels like a perfect representation of what postmodernism claims to be---sampling from all available art forms, the raw materials deconstructed and reorganized, juxtaposed and arranged to make one see it all in a new way.

A Drought-Ending Inundation of Art

This blog has been dormant for so long I don't quite know where to begin in trying to reawaken it. So I'll start with some pieces of art by Frantisek Muzika that I found on Tumblr a while back and was blown away by.

(click to enlarge)

Muzika was a Czech surrealist painter active throughout the 20th century. Unfortunately, I can find relatively little about him on the internet despite the radiant splendor of his work. He was a contemporary of Dali's and his work bears some resemblances with its barren landscape backdrops and bizarre structures, but there appears to not even be any books about his work out there. I don't even know what these pieces are titled. But the contours and textures of these odd stone slabs mesmerizes me.

I stumbled upon them via Tumblr, a platform I've found extremely satiating to my hunger for visual art. (I recently set up my own Tumblr page, nothing special, but if you're interested check it out.) How else would I have been able to discover this somewhat obscure Czech surrealist master?

Speaking of obscure, underappreciated 20th century artists, my Finnegans Wake reading group and I recently stumbled upon a treasure trove of artwork by the relatively unknown painter Elsa de Brun (aka NUALA) and have now taken it upon ourselves to bring her work back out into the world. NUALA created a set of 43 pieces called "Valentines for James Joyce" inspired by lines from Finnegans Wake. These pieces are all in charcoal with a depth and complexity that astounded us when we saw them in person. As a result, we are now in pursuit of gathering these pieces into book form and possibly a future exhibition to remind the world of this forgotten, brilliant and fascinating woman.

As for under-construction art books involving Joyce...

A big reason for my lengthy absence of late is that I've been fully devoted to writing my first book, an exploration of some fascinating links between Salvador Dali and James Joyce centering around one particular painting. If you've read this blog for any amount of time, you're probably aware of the source material and how important this project is to me. This work has been going on for a very long time but it's now finally picking up and progressing toward completion. It's been a classic creative struggle in that the bigger and more significant the project is, the harder it is to work on, but a helpful guide to creative battles called The War of Art has helped me properly direct my focus.

With my writing energies being poured into to that project, my output on this and my other blog will likely continue to wane for a while but there remain tons of ideas ready to bloom both here and there so please do stay tuned. I also need lots of breaks from the artsy fartsy stuff so fantasy football, the MLB pennant race, and the latest greatest hip hop music should get writeups in the near future in this space as well.

In closing, another surrealist contemporary of Dali has intrigued me of late. German painter Max Ernst is properly recognized but I had never dug into his work much. Thanks again to Tumblr I've found some pieces that have really struck me with their mix of intricately detailed, vibrant bizarreness and precise, enclosed form.

Europe After Rain
(click to enlarge)

The Eye of Silence

Discovering New Old Minds: Remedios Varo and others

Personaje Astrale by Remedios Varos (1961)

Somehow I've only just recently heard of this woman. The internet is a glorious place.

Wikipedia:

Remedios Varo Uranga (December 16, 1908 – October 8, 1963) was a Spanish-Mexican, para-surrealist painter and anarchist. She was born María de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo y Uranga in Anglès, a small town in the province of Girona, Spain in 1908. Her birth helped her mother get over the death of another daughter, which is the reason behind the name.

While I only see one mention of Salvador Dali on her wiki page (noting that she attended his alma mater, the San Fernando Fine Arts Academy in Madrid) she was born only 4 years after him, was a fellow Spanish surrealist painter, and her work certainly bears a slight influence of his.

Even better: Dali had the exact same history behind his birth. His parents had a previous child named Salvador Dali who died before the age of two so nine months later they had another baby boy and named him Salvador Dali.

Definitely need to pick up a book on Miss Remedios Varo soon. She's my kind of thinker:

"Varo was influenced by a wide range of mystic and hermetic traditions, both Western and non-Western. She turned with equal interest to the ideas of C. G. Jung as to the theories of G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, Helena Blavatsky, Meister Eckhart, and the Sufis, and was as fascinated with the legend of the Holy Grail as with sacred geometry, alchemy and the I-Ching."

*   *   *

Some other new old minds I've recently discovered and taken an interest in...

Benjamin Lee Whorf
Wiki:

Benjamin Lee Whorf (April 24, 1897 – July 26, 1941) was an American linguist and fire prevention engineer. Whorf is widely known as an advocate for the idea that because of linguistic differences in grammar and usage, speakers of different languages conceptualize and experience the world differently. This principle has frequently been called the "Sapir–Whorf hypothesis", after him and his mentor Edward Sapir, but Whorf called it the principle of linguistic relativity, because he saw the idea as having implications similar to Einstein's principle of physical relativity.

Throughout his life Whorf was a chemical engineer by profession, but as a young man he took up an interest in linguistics.

Whorf discovered that the Native American Hopi language seemed to have no concept of time as a series of discreet events, that they were experiencing everything as one event.


Fred Hoyle
20th century English astronomer who coined the phrase "Big Bang" although he strongly rejected the theory. As Wiki explains carefully:

While having no argument with the Lemaître theory (later confirmed by Edwin Hubble's observations) that the universe was expanding, Hoyle disagreed on its interpretation. He found the idea that the universe had a beginning to be pseudoscience, resembling arguments for a creator, "for it's an irrational process, and can't be described in scientific terms" (see Kalam cosmological argument). Instead, Hoyle, along with Thomas Gold and Hermann Bondi (with whom he had worked on radar in World War II), argued for the universe as being in a "steady state". The theory tried to explain how the universe could be eternal and essentially unchanging while still having the galaxies we observe moving away from each other. The theory hinged on the creation of matter between galaxies over time, so that even though galaxies get further apart, new ones that develop between them fill the space they leave. The resulting universe is in a "steady state" in the same manner that a flowing river is - the individual water molecules are moving away but the overall river remains the same.

Hoyle also rejected the theory that life had originated on earth, postulating the idea of panspermia, essentially that small pieces of life are flying around the universe on meteoroids, asteroids, etc. As he said it once:

"If one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure or order must be the outcome of intelligent design. No other possibility I have been able to think of..." 

Of course, Hoyle was a staunch atheist, a Darwinist, etc. but scientifically the only conclusion he could derive was that an intelligence had purposefully designed DNA and spread it throughout the universe.

Edgar Mitchell
Wiki:

Edgar Dean Mitchell, Sc.D. (born September 17, 1930) is an American pilot, retired Captain in the United States Navy and NASA astronaut. As the lunar module pilot of Apollo 14, he spent nine hours working on the lunar surface in the Fra Mauro Highlands region, making him the sixth person to walk on the Moon.

Okay, so he's an astronaut. Big deal.

From an interview:

SET  In 1971, as you pulled away from the Moon and made your way back to Earth, what did it feel like to be in the space between worlds?

EM  I’ll have to set up the story for you just a little bit. The spacecraft was oriented perpendicular to the plane that contains the Earth, the Moon and the Sun. Not flying perpendicular to that plane – but moving through it back to Earth. The spacecraft was rotating to maintain the thermal balance of the Sun. What that caused to happen was that every two minutes, with every rotation, we saw the Earth, the Moon and the Sun as they passed by the window. The 360-degree panorama of the heavens was awesome and the stars are ten times as bright and, therefore, ten times as numerous than you could ever see on a high mountaintop on a clear night. It was overwhelmingly magnificent.

SET  What were you thinking then?

EM  I realized that the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft had been manufactured in an ancient generation of stars. It wasn’t just intellectual knowledge – it was a subjective visceral experience accompanied by ecstasy – a transformational experience.

SET  You were raised as a Southern Baptist and studied as a scientist. Then you had this visceral, spiritual experience in space: how did you reconcile this with your upbringing and training?

EM  The experience in space was so powerful that when I got back to Earth I started digging into various literatures to try to understand what had happened. I found nothing in science literature but eventually discovered it in the Sanskrit of ancient India. The descriptions of samadhi, Savikalpa samadhi, were exactly what I felt: it is described as seeing things in their separateness, but experiencing them viscerally as a unity, as oneness, accompanied by ecstasy.

SET  Can you speak to the division that is often drawn between science and spiritual experience, between the material world and consciousness?

EM  The materialist worldview says that everything is due to the bumping together of little atomic structures like billiard balls – and consciousness is an accident of that encounter. The opposite extreme is the idealist interpretation, which has been around since Greek times or earlier. It says that consciousness is the fundamental stuff, and matter is an illusion, a product of consciousness.

Science and religion have lived on opposite sides of the street now for hundreds of years. So here we are, in the twenty-first century, trying to put two faces of reality – the existence face and the intelligence or conscious face – into the same understanding. Body and mind, physicality and consciousness belong to the same side of reality – it’s a dyad, not a dualism.

Okay, one last Mind, whose theories tie together nicely with what Fred Hoyle said above.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

You rang?

Wiki:

Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (17 September 1857 – 19 September 1935) was a Russian and Soviet rocket scientist and pioneer of the astronautic theory. Along with his followers, the German Hermann Oberth and the American Robert H. Goddard, he is considered to be one of the founding fathers of rocketry and astronautics. His works later inspired leading Soviet rocket engineers such as Sergey Korolyov and Valentin Glushko and contributed to the success of the Soviet space program.

Tsiolkovsky spent most of his life in a log house on the outskirts of Kaluga, about 200 km (120 mi) southwest of Moscow. A recluse by nature, he appeared strange and bizarre to his fellow townsfolk.

While conjuring up new scientific plans for rocketry, astronautics, and space stations at the turn of the 20th century in his secluded log house, Tsiolkovsky had some other brilliant, profound, unflappably optimistic ideas. He strongly believed the human race would advance toward colonizing the Milky Way. As he wrote in his 1928 book The Will of the Universe. The Unknown Intelligence:

"The finer part of humanity will, in all likelihood, never perish---they will migrate from sun to sun as they go out. And so there is no end to life, to intelligence and to the perfection of humanity. Its progress is everlasting."

Look Around (Wonder)

"Time is only floating in your mind" - Stevie Wonder

"Everything we see is inside our own heads" - Buckminster Fuller

"The 4th dimension is time,
it goes inside the mind
when the chakras energize
up through the back of your spine"
- The Rza

"there is a future in every past that is present" - James Joyce (Finnegans Wake p. 496)

Unfortunately, I do not have much TIME to write but I do want to mention a few things. I enjoyed a nice, delicious Thanksgiving Day last Thursday (featuring two separate vegan feasts, actually), during which time it struck me that in the last 5 years I've eaten a Thanksgiving meal in 4 different cities (New York, London, San Diego, Austin in that order).

Yesterday I unloaded a stack of about 10 unwanted books at a used bookstore to begin the process of down-sizing to prepare for an upcoming move to a different apartment. This will mark the 5th time I've moved in the last 4 years. Prior to that I spent the first 22 years of my life living in the same bedroom, let alone the same address.

At the bookstore I almost bought a couple of really cool-looking books that intrigued me, but decided at the last minute it didn't make sense to bring more books home when I'm trying to purge belongings. On the topic of TIME, though, the books bear mentioning. They were both part of the excellent Introducing... series published by Totem Books, a collection of paperbacks with illustrations and basic introductory overviews for a whole variety of topics. I can highly recommend the James Joyce, Friedrich Nietzsche, and The Universe editions and if there's anyone else you're interested in learning about (famous minds, but also concepts or historical periods are covered), this series of books is perhaps the best thing to look for. Anyway, the books were Introducing Relativity and Introducing Quantum Theory (for a total of $12), I will hopefully grab them at some point in the future when I get to settle down in a new place.

In between our two Thanksgiving feasts last week, my girlfriend and I sort of randomly made our way over to the movies to see whatever was playing at that time. The film we saw was Martin Scorsese's new 3-D excursion Hugo. The young protagonist Hugo works as a clockmaker (or timekeeper) in the Montparnasse train station in 1920s Paris. Honestly, we had to leave the film early because of time constraints but it was an okay film. Visually beautiful but a bit slow-moving. The reason I bring it up is because of a brief but very noticeable cameo by none other than JAMES JOYCE himself. And, of course, after all the work I did on my big essay this year comparing Joyce and Salvador Dali (noting that there is no record of them ever having met), the scene shows James Joyce and Salvador Dali sharing a table at a café in the train station. It's one of the first scenes in the film.

This morning I received word from the editors of the James Joyce Quarterly that they will have an answer for me within the next two weeks about whether or not they will accept my Joyce-Dali paper to be published in their journal. Very hopeful, very excited.

And now, to tie a knot on this synchronistic little post, here is a famous picture of a train crash at the aforementioned Montparnasse train station in Paris in 1895:

And here is a famous Surrealist painting called Time Transfixed by René Magritte.

"Thought Through My Eyes": Epilogue, Part 3 (Expansive Bibliography)

To finally close out this treatise, I would like to share thoughts on some of the books used in the research process.

The Secret Life of Salvador Dali by Salvador Dali

Published in 1942, this is really the definitive text to read for those interested in Dali. His writing style is superb though often flashy and exuberant as he tells the story of his life starting with intrauterine memories (seriously). The intrauterine stuff was actually very interesting, especially as compared to Stanislav Grof's research on the subject (which came decades later). As often seems to be the case, Dali's artistic intuition is so precise that it matches perfectly with later scientific findings.

Next to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, this was one of the main texts for my paper and (as the point is belabored in the paper) its style of "autobiographical mythology" certainly makes for an interesting comparison with Joyce's autobiographical novel. One of the differences between them though is that Dali's book is filled with beautiful hand-drawn illustrations depicting symbols, scenes, characters, etc drawn from the story.

Diary of a Genius by Salvador Dali
Although the opening pages, detailing his disputes with the Surrealists and André Breton, make for interesting reading, I didn't find this book to be all that good. Sure, Dali's writing style is always entertaining but this book is literally a diary, a daily account of a few years in Dali's life and we get to read how many times he crapped that day, what he ate, etc. It's not all boring, but I wouldn't read it again.





The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali (as told to André Parinaud)

This book is a written account of Dali dictating his life, his work, and his theories to Parinaud and it makes for a great read. It was composed in the 1970s when Dali had been a famous artist for about five decades so there's plenty to talk about and in the 300 pages there's tons of great material. There are illustrations (and photos) in here as well, hand-drawn in an interesting charcoal style. Plenty of great material on the paranoiac method in here, it's also got the only mention of Joyce by Dali that I've been able to track down. Very briefly, he shares Helena Rubinstein's account of the great writer: "nearsighted and smelling bad."


Salvador Dali by Robert Descharnes
Descharnes is Dali's main biographer and this big coffee table art book has an engaging account of the artist's life and career while also displaying big, beautiful color images of many of his paintings. This is the first Dali book I read and it remains a great one.


Dali: The Impresario of Surrealism by Jean‐Louis Gaillemin
When I visited London back on Thanksgiving 2008, there was an art museum right on the Thames River that had a big Dali exhibit. Of course I checked it out and it was great (they had some of his illustrations of The Divine Comedy which I loved). Afterwards I was in the gift shop trying to avoid getting anything (so as to conserve my meager funds), but this little book caught my attention and I couldn't resist picking it up. I devoured it on the return flight and still pick it up every now and then. It's another book about his life and career but it goes a little bit deeper into certain things like frequent motifs or his interactions with people like Jacques Lacan. In fact, it was reading this book that first put me on to the role Lacan plays in this whole thing. This is a great introductory primer to Dali and his work, I highly recommend it. It's also a very tiny book that could fit in your back pocket.


James Joyce: Portraits of the Artist in Exile edited by Willard Potts
When I was at the Joyce conference last month I often brought this book up in conversation and it seemed nobody had heard of it. I can't recommend this book highly enough. It's a collection of recollections of Joyce by a number of writers, artists, scholars, etc. that encountered him at various points in his life all throughout Europe. It's a highly entertaining book of anecdotes and there's tons of material in it that I've never read anyplace else. This might be meaningless to most people, but it reminds me of the great baseball book The Glory of Their Times.  

James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism by Jean-Michele Rabaté
I've always thought this title sounds boring and overly academic but it's a great read. Rabaté is one of the best of the current Joyce scholars and he writes very well.

A Reader's Guide to James Joyce by William York Tindall
This book really came in handy when I first read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Tindall writes in a very clear and engaging style and he weaves through the mass of Joycean symbols and motifs very smoothly. My understanding of the symbols in Portrait really owes a lot to Tindall. (This is also a good book to have when reading Ulysses as he gives clear and brief breakdowns of each chapter.)

Coincidance by Robert Anton Wilson

I picked up this book very late in the research process and so I didn't include it in the actual bibliography but it certainly helped me put everything together. I've been admiring RAW for a while but this is the first book of his that I actually read and it was spectacular. It is a collection of essays dealing for the most part with instances of synchronicity all over the place in art, science, and history (there are also many essays about things that have nothing to do with synchronicity at all). He has three pieces on Finnegans Wake that are as interesting as anything I've come across yet on the Wake and which might convince you that Joyce was really working on some sort of unknown cosmic level. In one essay he details how the characters (and sigla) of the Wake coincide perfectly with the trigrams of the I-Ching and effectively ties both of those in with the composition of DNA. Really, really delicious food-for-thought. (There is also a footnote in which he claims certain parts of the Wake are influenced by Dali but I didn't find his argument convincing at all.)

Jacques Lacan by Elizabeth Roudinesco
For someone who lived such a wild, "rock-and-roll" lifestyle, I thought Roudinesco's account of Lacan was pretty boring. Her writing style was very dry and bland. Somebody at the conference asked me what's the best book on Lacan's life and, as far as I know, this is the only one and I wasn't too impressed with it.


How James Joyce Made His Name: A Reading of the Final Lacan by Roberto Harrari

Out of all the books I read for my study, this was the most difficult. The "final Lacan" is Lacan's 1975-76 seminar on le sinthome or "the symptom" and it's the one where he focuses entirely on Joyce who, he was convinced, was schizophrenic but was able to channel his madness through his art and thus remain on the safe side of sanity (although his daughter inherited the sickness and perished). That sounds easy enough to understand but Lacan illustrated his theories using the Borromean knot and twisted and tied everything in all different ways because he was at that time hanging out with a lot of mathematicians. In this book, Harrari tries to explain all of Lacan's darting thoughts but I found it impossible to follow. If you flip around the book using the index, though, it's easier to glean what info you need.