Week 6, Project One (Generative Systems): Objects of Desire and Transgression

   The found fecundity of a butterfly shape, forever modified by that magical riboflavin, is polydextrosely delicious and desired for its ability to morph.  In this case, the shape in question was found by the zephyr-like Grace Voilà, aptly nicknamed by Bosphorus Merganthum, a benefactor and friend.  The spot where Grace happened upon the striking hesperiidae is within a neighboring district known for its accumulation of ascorbic acids and glycol mono cultures—all natural and artificial flavors, of course.  Truly, there have never been a more corrosive people, and Grace loathed their pretentious and obsessive customs.  Yet the deep, angling rows of periwinkle anemones and weeping willows that this region cultivated countered any cultural malady, even if they did overly pasteurize their language. 

   Grace was intent that day to meditate on the pink princess franchise, a recent gift from Bosphorus, and a sticking point of their relationship.  She yearned to withdraw, if only for a moment, into a small mounding of hybridized roses flanked by carnauba trees laden with palm oil.  The snowflakes, jimmies, and skittles she often found there always made Grace content, and she knew that once she entered a private space she would have clarity and the presence of mind to rethink the franchise.  When Grace entered her favorite alcove, she noticed a most curious silhouette caught in a nesting of modified cornstarch and marshmallow crème glaze.  The gelatin-infused air had drawn in this winged creature, its cherry-tipped antennae attracted to the sickly sweet smells.  Grace gently rescued the arresting entity.  She felt drawn to its outline and immediately recognized a fragile psyche, one not so unlike her own.  It was a pretzel of a prize, a pretiola before fasting. 

     In that moment of recognition, the Locust Beans splayed open the protection offered by the caranauba trees with their buttery knives, exposing Grace and the butterfly.  In the distance, Grace could hear the echo of a loon cry, a warning of the deep sorrow to come in Babylon. The snowflakes, the  jimmies, and the skittles were all taken into custody by the Locust Beans, and the progenitor of dead language, that fortified Iron Candle and holy Sire of totalitarian tea and garden parties, offered only wafers of glazed cakes in memoriam, his hand forever extending over the shape of a hysteresis loop like a piece of star-fruit.

http://butterfliesofamerica.com/astraptes_palliolum_types.htm

My Process:

I first started with rummaging through our snack drawer at home and using the 3rd line of the ingredients listed. Then I took one of my daughter's cookbooks and took the last part of the directions listed for recipes that I just happened to open the book at.  My last source was a Victorian book on floriography, and I gleaned random phrases from each paragraph of one chapter. Once I typed all of these words and phrases into a Word doc (alternating them as I went), I then cut and pasted my overall find into Google translator and went through at least 6 translations (cannot remember in which order).  I took the regurgitated text and then started with some of the interesting phrases that were strung together (pink princess; magical riboflavin, Bosphorus merganthum; snowflakes, jimmies, and skittles; progenitor of dead; cherry-tipped antennae).  I started with magical riboflavin and took some of the other words in my list (modified, polydextrous, delicious, fecundity) and tried to put them together, which finally led to: The found fecundity of a butterfly shape, forever modified by that magical riboflavin, is polydextrosely delicious and desired for its ability to morph. Once I had this opening a narrative took over.  I thought I would write into a poem but a narrative arc begged to be written.  I used the generative list as my word pool, dipping in to it to try on different patterns, and then supplemented with the narrative that kept building out of the phrases I was able to string together.  I worked through many variations as the sensory appeal was a bit tricky to navigate. 

Week 5, The Sleep of Reason: Fini and the HyperFeminine

Ophélia, 1963

<http://www.leonor-fini.com/accueil/peintures/annees-60.html>

For this week's Surrealist exploration, I gravitated to the work of Leonor Fini, marginalized female painter and self-professed cat lover.  Her affinity for felines and fashion design made us kindred spirits; her ability to transcend reason in her creations through sensuality and feminine forms made me a fan.  Most of Fini's work I have viewed certainly reveres the female body--its fluidity and power palpable in all her mediums. There is also a hallucinatory essence to many of Fini's bodily forms, and a recent news article affirmed my sensibility: "[Fini] claimed that her dreams were the main source of her strange and irrational imagery, which often involved women playing weirdly erotic games without men...[and] she asserts the enduring power of the feminine" (Kent).  I question the author's use of the word "weirdly" as it seems to demonstrate a Protestant-like qualifier to distance oneself from first-hand knowledge of anything potentially salacious, but I do accept the entrée of "erotic" in relation to Fini's work.  I cannot say that all of her work connotes an eroticism (her earlier work in the 1920's and 30's does not quite seem there yet), but as a whole her oeuvre does embody a suggestiveness of something beyond the visual, something to be felt and subsumed by.   

La Toilette Inutile, 1964
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/6467290/Leonor-Fini-surreal-thing.html>

Asphodèle, 1965

<http://www.leonor-fini.com/accueil/peintures/annees-60.html>

Panning through Fini's work, I was compelled to focus on her work from the 1960's, particularly the oil paintings I have displayed here: Ophélia, La Toilette Inutile, and Asphodèle.  It was their similarities that I found most provocative; the repetitive image of the completely reposed body that has abandoned itself to a nirvana- 

like plane speaks to an awareness of the unconscious, that space where reason does sleep.  Fini's Ophélia hearkens to the tragic Shakespearean Ophelia, her dead, pale body floating horizontal in the brook, encumbered and weighted down by a dress, yet the dark and cool tones of this painting metamorphose into a palate of warmth in La Toilette Inutile.  The facial features come into high relief here and the feminine body seems to lift from that horizontal plane, radiating from within while the dress (La Toilette Inutile, the useless dress) appears to be consumed by flames. The triumph comes in Asphodèle where the bodily form is now vertical and has shed itself of any dress, its nakedness glows and embraces the swirling residues of its transmogrification.  The title Asphodèle affirms the death of the dress by alluding to the herbaceous asphodelus, a plant often used in reference to the underworld in Greek mythology. Further, there is an acceptance of nature in the title in that the worldly confines of dress and identity through dress must be shed in order to return to a pre-Ideal-I state, the place before language and where only sensory is known.    

Although Fini created these paintings over a span of three years, I find it hard not to think that the triad is a movement towards something, an understanding of how language functions, a work of identity in progress, a reclamation of the feminine form, and a subtle yet powerful middle finger to the Surrealist male status quo.  Instead of seeing Fini's work as periphery to a movement, affronted by artists like Dali ("[Fini is] Better than most, perhaps.  But talent is in the balls" (qtd. in Kent)), images like these should be felt, intuited, and appreciated for attending to the other than visual elements of being human through--paradoxically--a visual medium.    

Works Cited

Kent, Sarah.  "Leonor Fini: surreal thing."  The Telegraph.  30 Oct. 2009.  Web.  22 Feb. 2013.  <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/6467290/Leonor-Fini-surreal-thing.html>

"Leonor Fini." Minsky Gallery.  2010.  Web.  22 Feb. 2013.
<http://www.leonor-fini.com/en/home/minsky-gallery.html>

Week 4, Manifestos, Poems, Performances: Claude Cahun and Dada Bending

Studies for a Keepsake (four heads under globes), 1925
imaged acquired at: http://www.lenatenaglia.com/art1thesis.html

Claude Cahun, 

"Under this mask, 
another mask. 

I will never finish 

removing all these faces." 

http://www.igpoty.com

Like an unfurling fern, Claude Cahun's depicted identity spirals outwards yet never quite loses what has come before, and it seems to encompass the many promises of identity.  Her images gesture for a bridging between the subject-object, the viewer and the viewed, for the spectator is likewise taken in and forced to confront sensuality intersecting with body politics.  A cochlear imagery seems apposite given that I have unknowingly run across one of Cahun's many masks before, specifically her "Autoportrait."  During the laborious hours of thesis research a few years ago, I came to know the feminist philosophies of Diana Tietjens Meyers, and interestingly enough, the cover design for her book, Gender in the Mirror: Cultural Imagery & Women's Agency, engaged my interest because of a black and white image that stared back at me, demanding to be confronted; it was Cahun's "Autoportrait."  In it Cahun reclaims the gaze by looking directly into the lens, holding taut the collar of a checkered jacket, her boyish haircut smooth, and her lips partially pursed.  It is a bold image of equanimity, and yet another side of her is captured in a mirror.  This double looks away, the pose speaking of the duality of the self and the fracturing of identities.  

"Autoportrait," 1929
http://www.artforbreakfast.com/galerie-claude-cahun,188.php

At that time I did not know much of Claude Cahun--born Lucy Schwob in 1894--indeed, I had never heard of her.  It is by a fortuitous stroke of events, a course in Surrealism and Dada, that has provided another reflecting encounter.  This time I was able to put a name, a socially constructed identity to the striking image, an image I wanted to know more about, and given the background on Cahun--albeit it has thus far been a cursory glance at her work--it seems her image is a slippery one that cannot be contained; instead, it is perpetually reconfigured and in turn perpetually challenges any notion of gender identity. 

Cahun's quote above, from Studies for a Keepsake, struck me not only because of its lovely figurative language detailing the peeling away of faces ad infinitum, but also because it zoomed in on a particular body part: the face.  So much of what I have come across regarding issues of gender focuses on the body as a whole, and while much of Cahun's photographic art does exhibit the body, the examples of her visual art and writing used here seem to use the face as a metonymy.  In Cahun's Disavowals (coined as an anti-memoir), she "vocalizes her desire to create art that will 'shorten the leash between my mirror and my body'" (Bucknell).  The curiosity of such sentiment lies in Cahun's own emphasis on the body.  What draws me to the quaternion of heads displayed under glass in Studies for a Keepsake and the dual profile in "Autoportrait" is the emphasis on the face.  Such accentuation proves puzzling because the head as a focal point emphasizes disassociation with the body. The targeting of the head then may suggest the psychological tethering of gender. This emphasis on the face led me to another moment where Cahun pans in on facial details, particularly those of a man.  In chapter VII of Disavowals Cahun reflects on a dream vision of her father:

          Curiosity keeps me awake in front of a man face: skin pockmarked, battered,   
          granulated--but white, but livid; the skull flat, the forehead covered in hemp; 
          nose, mouth tumescent...the eyes vacant.   

The methodical nature of her study here and how she centers in on the finer details of the face while the subjected face is devoid of emotion suggests again of a mind-body disconnect, and yet the face has the ability to stand in for the body, a site and space of defining.  This time, though, Cahun does the defining.   

Que me veux tu? (1929)
http://www.metmuseum.org/en/exhibitions/objects?exhibitionId=%7B36D81705-241D-4934-AB02-FD7C8DBBB3E5%7D&rpp=10&pg=17

A synoptic video on Claude Cahun from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art:
Amelia Jones on Surrealism, gender, and Claude Cahun


Works Cited
Bucknell, Alice.  "Entre who?  French artist probes identity."  The Chicago Maroon. 
     6 March 2012.  Web.  16 February 2013.  
     http://chicagomaroon.com/2012/03/06/entre-   who-french-artist-probes-identity/

Week 3, Locus Solus: Fates, Knots, and Curious Refractions

The Three Fates; The Triumph of Death, a 16th century tapestry
 (Victoria and Albert Museum)
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O72702/the-three-fates-the-triumph-tapestry-unknown/

The phantasmagoric swagger of Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus compels the reader to meander the labyrinthine and exponential narrative, promising sensory overload at every turn of the page, every stitch of phrase.  It demands to be languidly consumed, and I was captivated and thoroughly engrossed with the whole of it, but I want to pause with excerpts from Chapter 3, or perhaps really just use these spots as a jumping off point, because they are visually impregnated with what seems to be Roussel’s overarching methodology.  

A spiral staircase as 
mise en abîmehttp://eye-grotto.blogspot.com/2011/02/mise-en-abyme.html

Roussel begins with an image of a "gigantic diamond" one that "attracted our attention already from afar by its prodigious brilliance" (41).  The use of a prismatic object first suggests the importance of visuality and optical illusions alluding to the many-sided nature of his tale (the matryoshka principle, as mentioned in discussion, or mise en abîme comes to mind).  His use of the siren call through the dancer Faustine as mermaid offers another form of attraction: beauty and feminine sexuality.  What is so curious about the use of visual cues to lure in spectators is Roussel’s thematic repetition of threads, cords, knots, and grid systems (Cartesian divers no less!).  While Roussel weaves all of the stories together with fragments constantly carrying and spilling over into other stories, multiplying the visual cues for the reader and creating a spiraling effect (a process of sublation where nothing really is lost), there are likewise repetitive reminders that these threads are bound to something and not necessarily controlled by the story or the characters but by another force.  For instance, Faustine “remained confined within a very restricted register,” and one of the other Cartesian divers, Alexander the Great, is tied to “[a] golden thread” (Roussel 42).  The pervasive thread imagery—indeed it runs throughout the novel—along with his repetition of the number three, allows for a reading of the Fates, calling to mind the Moirae, the mythological goddesses Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos who control human birth and death.  

Thread[s] woven
http://www.coolhunting.com/style/string-theory.php

Such an understanding may provide yet another layer representative of the anxieties of birth and death and how tethered the conscious is to the body.  Given Roussel's incantation-like repetition (in symbolic and forever morphing form), it would seem that the pattern he is providing is not only a roadmap for readers, a connecting of the dots of the many narratives, but also a seductive form of mastery, a child-like means of memorization.    

week 2: the subversive text

Can art be subversive?  My first instinctual, fight or flight liberal-minded reply is a vociferous, “well, of course it can be,” yet if subversiveness entails the motivation to rebel against that which is conformist or the status quo, then does not the subversiveness eventually become void of subversion since it must, at some point, become a means of conformism (a new order) itself? 

Before I continue to rebel, or “push against [my] inner Devil’s Advocate” it may prove productive to explore when art can be subversive because it seems to me that the question is a matter of time and space as well as mode. 

I recently worked on revisions for an essay with the subject matter of subversiveness, so for the sake of convenience and relevance a text that comes to mind is Edna O’Brien’s short-story “A Scandalous Woman” (1974).  Her short story explores much by way of the private sphere of women in rural Ireland.  It is through her juxtaposition of the symbolic representations of a patriarchal system of religion with the more fecund, traditional folkways connected with time-honored female influences that O’Brien was able to expose the strangulated roles of women within the rural Irish landscape.  What fascinated me most about her short-story as a means of subversiveness is what Ronan McDonald claims to be “a subversive strategy of understatement” (249). Simply, the nature of the short-story is to withdraw from the didactic, allowing for what is not said or what is implied through metaphor to depict the author’s message.  O’Brien would have naturally gravitated to subtle subversiveness given the time frame when she wrote “A Scandalous Woman.”  Revolutionary changes in Ireland concerning women’s issues were still hampered during the early 1970’s considering the nonexistence of divorce and legalized contraception—even with the backdrop of the Western feminist movement.  Therefore, the time and space in which she wrote dictated the mode of subversiveness (it is also of interest to note that some of her earlier novels were banned in Ireland).  

The writings of O'Brien and other women Irish writers helped to promote Ireland’s recent progressive social changes, but their artistic ventures were of a kind of subversiveness.  Until the factors of urbanization, economic upswing, and second wave-feminism could truly take root in Ireland, it is only natural that subversive strategies of coding (or understatement) would be an effective modus operandi.   

This brings me back to the original question of art as a means of subversion, as a means of political change.  The slippery nature of such a question is its ability to dictate an either/or answer, a yes or no.  Can art bring about political change?  Yes, but art in and of itself is not subversive (how was that for equivocation?).  The system that envelops the art, the time and space in which it exists (if it does at all), and the language and all its history and subtexts that define and motivate it represent the intertwined nature of such an understanding.  But once subversion takes place, when does it end?  

Works Cited
McDonald, Ronan. “Strategies of Silence: Colonial Strains in Short Stories of the  
          Troubles.” Yearbook of English Studies 35 (2005): 249-263. Literature Resource   
          Center.  Web. 17 Sept. 2009. 

O’Brien, Edna.  “A Scandalous Woman.”  Stories by Contemporary Irish Women.  Eds. Daniel J. Casey and Linda M. Casey.  Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1990.  Print.