Modern and Contemporary Art and Design Essay
Ophelia Kingdon
“SURREALISM attempts to discover and and explore the “more real than real world behind the real”.
To re-establish man as psychology instead of anatomy,
To revivify mythology, FETICHISM, parable, PROVERB and METAPHOR.
To re-create man’s efforts in the light of Freud’s analysis of the subconscious.
To exploit the mechanisms of inspiration.
To intensify experience.”
In this essay I will be examining three chosen artefacts. I will be looking at how these three different artefacts project certain ideas and manifestos. In particular – Surrealism and the Unconscious. I will be looking at how these artefacts interrelate with one another, and although through different mediums and intentions, how they can be connected conceptually through the ideologies and philosophies that they reference. Surrealist artworks are not related stylistically, they are bridged together by “a certain commitment to the unleashed imagination” (Matthew Gale, as stated in lecture on Dada, Surrealism and the Unconscious)
My three objects are:
A Comme Des Garçons harness suspender dress from the Spring/Summer 2014 that I own.
Canapé en temps de pluie,’ a fabric sculpture by Dorothea Tanning which was included in a series titled ‘Hôtel du Pavot’. (1970-73)
The film ‘Eraserhead’ directed by David Lynch (1977).
I will be exploring how these artefacts present the human body and manipulate thought. I will also look at how these artworks exist as a result of surrealism, and therefore as a result of the theories of Sigmund Freud, from which the surrealist manifesto derived from. Ultimately to access the “superior reality” of the subconscious mind. In “The Unconscious Mind”, by Sigmund Freud, he claims that the subconscious mind is where memories and our most basic instincts are stored. All of my chosen artefacts introduce the physicality of the body, and how this effects the mind in a way that cannot be accessed in the everyday. They are all surreal visions of what the human body could be. These artefacts I which will be writing about confront the mind and represent the unconscious mind in a way that may not have been otherwise accessible.They encompass what Andre Breton (Poet, one of the founders of surrealism) believed that art and literature could portray.
Comme Des Garçons dress:
Image Reference: https://huibenshop.com/products/comme-des-garcons-ss14-harness-suspender-strap-skirt
The dress is made of 50 percent wool and 50 percent nylon. The bodice of the dress is comprised of many straps that cross over one another, essentially creating a cage across the chest of the wearer. The lower half of the dress is made up of of many, small, soft and intricate pleats, creating movement, volume and changes in light within the dress. These pleats are all consistent, exactly the same width and weight. Due to its cage-like structure, there is a given feeling of the body being bound, trapped or enclosed. Rather than this dress being something restricting or constraining, it more poses a question of what binds the body, and although yes, the dress is binding the body, it is more a comment on how the body has been unbound and liberated.
Rei Kawakubo (the Japanese designer behind Comme Des Garçons) creates dysmorphic fashion collections that distort the human body and create unfamiliar silhouettes, ones that dismiss the human form and conceive something else altogether. Although not subjectively beautiful in her designs, Rei Kawakubo does not create to intentionally repulse. I believe that dress is surrealist because of that fact. It is not subjectively beautiful. Wearing a surrealist piece of clothing is dressing in a that is far more than attempting to be as beautiful as possible. Kawakubo talks about how she designs clothes for women that want to attract men with their minds, not their bodies. In Kawakubo’s mind, the body is an easel to display something, she displaces the body and puts it into a new context based on her clothing.
Comme Des Garçons can transform a woman into a walking ‘other’, a ‘weird’ and ‘ugly’ other. "It is exposed but uncovered, clothing that taps into this intellectual voyerism promotes the duality of intrigue and the inaccessible”
The way that Kawakubo’s garments can be viewed in sex appeal, or lack thereof, links to Freud’s theory that everything comes down to sex. That everything relates to sex. (This is not something that I personally believe about Kawakubo’s work but it is something that can certainly be investigated for the purpose of this essay) One one hand Rei Kawakubo’s work can be seen purely as objects, simply set out to exist. On the other, they alter the body so much, that they cannot be simply viewed as this. They have the ability to repulse, and the ability to remove all sexual desire. Once this sexualisation, or once again, lack thereof, has been identified and removed, a whole other world can be explored. “What someone wears is an expression of oneself. When you’re just comfortable with what you’re wearing, you don’t have new thoughts.”
My second artefact is a soft fabric sculpture by Dorothea Tanning. It is constructed out of tweed, upholstered wood sofa, ping pong balls and cardboard. Her collection of sculptures in which Canapé en temps de pluie (my chosen one of hers) is a part of is a collection called Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202 (Poppy Hotel, Room 202).
This piece in particular portrays a human like figure intertwined with a couch upholstered out of tweed. The figure is also upholstered, and morphs itself into the couch.
The sculpture is said by her to be related to a song that was popular when she was a child. The song was about a Women named Kitty Kane, the wife of a Chicago Gangster who poisoned herself in a hotel, in room 202. The lyrics she was referencing go like this:
In room two hundred and two
The walls keep talkin' to you
I'll never tell you what they said
So turn out the light and come to bed.
Dorothea Tanning’s work aligns with the surrealist ideal that art can access the unconscious mind.
Surrealist art often encapsulates objects that are not meant to be together. This is an example of objective chance, the chance encounter of these materials and visual triggers that create the sculpture Tanning has constructed. “Chance is the form of manifestation of an exterior necessity as it opens a path in the human unconscious” Andre Breton.
The relationship between the human figures and the furniture indicate the possibility of violence and mental struggle experienced by women. This is displayed both aesthetically within the sculpture, and its mere impermanence. Tanning wanted to give life to the materials that she was working with. She did not care that her artwork would probably not last due to the materials that she worked with.
“This terribly non-mainstream piece was, more than anything, a challenge to myself, a bet that I made with myself, and only me, that I would give real physical life to a bunch of tweeds and stuffing. Now, when you look at its triumphant? paroxysmic? despairing? physicality you are not quite sure that materials are only tools, that the inert is the inert, that life is something else.”
Eraserhead (1977) Was director David Lynch’s first film. It is a black ad white surreal and to some, horror film that follows the story of a man named Henry. The film is the unfolding story of the pregnancy of Henry’s girlfriend and the birth of his child. The ‘child’ is not human, but a strange and sickly alien-like creature that does not stop crying. The mother is subsequently driven insane and leaves Henry alone with it.
Image Reference:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_TRju1TnYfxU/TQoUfaeEreI/AAAAAAAABGk/pvieu8AXogY/s1600/eraserhead.jpeg Alone with this personification of his uttermost fear. Eraserhead does this in a dark and eery way. It is dreamlike, and envelopes the viewer into an almost hypnagogic state. While reflective of real life themes and occurrences, Lynch finds the horrors and fears that can be present in such normalcy and intensifies them. There are many analysis’s of this film, but the overriding conclusion is that Lynch’s film is a reflection of Henry’s subconscious fears of relationships, sexual encounters, childbirth and the fear of being a father. The fears coming to life in Henry’s dreams are an example of something that can be linked to Freud’s theory of the unconscious, that dreaming results from the unguarded thinking of our subconsciousness.
Eraserhead can also be linked to my two previous objects in the way that the human body and form is shown and depicted. Similar to the way that Rei Kawakubo’s clothes remodel the body, and the way that Dorothea Tanning has morphed feminine figures into furniture, David Lynch has taken something which should be human. Babies are usually associated with cuteness, something small that we are naturally drawn to care for and look after. Lynch has taken this and turned it into something perturbing and unsettling. Whilst most obviously shown in the alien child, a similar human distortion is shown later in the film in the facial structure of the lady who sings inside the radiator.
playful. disturbing. access the unconscious mind
Freud and his concepts a bout sex. go on yammer and look at the lecture that taLked about sex robots. Bodies and what sex appeal means.
Bibliography:
Julien Levy, “Surrealism”, the Black Sun Press (1936) 1-5