RECORD OF A SURREALISTIC EXCAVATION AND "MEDIUMISTIC COMMUNICATION"
(A nod to Steven and Hazel Cline's "Undertakers and Underselves" there)
THE ART BEFORE THE ESSAY
In December of 2018, after having watched Jacques Demy's 1970 film Donkey Skin, I made the following art work as part of a series I was working on at the time. In nearly every piece of art of the series I had employed some form of geometric background, usually a checkerboard pattern, and in the bottom left corner of the painting had placed the representation of a television screen/monitor with an image in it from a movie. In nearly all I had painted also a nude female in a pose intended to be perceived as non-erotic and standing outside the typical sexualizing gaze, or the gaze that expects in art a certain way of approaching the female form.
To Discover, to Understand, 2018,
digital painting,
40 by 34.4 inches
reference model via Skydancer Stock
The image taken from Donkey Skin and placed in the television set is from a section in which a prince, after a dialogue on the function of unseen fairies as motivating forces, goes on a walk in the forest and encounters a rose that both sees and speaks. When asked by it what he seeks, the prince states "to discover, to understand", and the rose sets him on the path of love, guided by trust. In the forest, he then comes upon a house in which a princess is hiding from her father who had intended to marry her. In public, she goes in the disguise of a donkey skin, so that she is perceived as hideous and unclean, unfit even to get a glimpse of the prince, but she had managed to do so when he was previously passing through the wood. In her home, she appears as a princess and uses a mirror as a medium. Having climbed a ladder to look through an upper window, the prince sees her but is unaware that she has also seen him. In fact, she has been waiting for him as the agent that will release her from the ordeal of the donkey skin through their falling in love.
For obvious reasons, the tale is a peculiar one, even difficult. The king wants to marry his daughter. The king desiring to marry his own daughter was in early versions of this tale, predating the Charles Perrault, and was a predicament in other tales of this type. More modern versions attempted to soften the story by having the king wanting to marry an adopted daughter, still a desperate and terrifying situation for the princess. Demy--who was married to director Agnes Varda--sticks with the earlier type, making Donkey Skin partly a satire on fairy tales, and adds modern touches, while still honoring their awkward mysteries, such as a donkey that shits the jewels that have made the king rich. The king is played by Jean Marais, who starred as the beast-prince in Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, and the film also depends greatly on this connection with Marais as the king who becomes as a beast in his pursuit of his daughter, and Catherine Deneuve as the princess who becomes a beast consequently, because she must go into hiding. The Lilac Fairy, played by Delphine Seyrig, had first guided her to ask her father for precious gowns of near impossible attributes, then finally for the skin of the magical donkey, which she has used to conceal her identity when taking flight to another kingdom. When the prince climbs up the ladder and gazes through the window into her forest home, one is reminded of the scene in Beauty and the Beast where Jean Marais, who also plays a thief, Avenant, has followed Beauty back to the castle of the Beast with the intent of stealing his riches. He climbs onto the roof of the Beast's treasure room where he clears a space and looks through the glass roof into the sparkling glory of the room. Then, as he breaks and enters, a guardian statue of Diana draws an arrow and shoots, killing him. At the moment of his death, he transforms into the Beast, and the Beast, who has been dying because Beauty had treated him carelessly, transforms into the handsome Prince Ardant. Deneuve, like the beast in Beauty and the Beast, must win the heart of the prince despite her not living as a princess, and in this scene becomes as Diana in the Cocteau film. She flashes a mirror she holds so that the light off it strikes the prince's eyes, briefly blinding him. In effect, she slays the old prince by transfixing him with the spell of love which transforms and renews him. In myth, all who, even accidentally, spied Diana nude in her bath, were struck blind. It is not so much a penance but a mystical relation of the transformative power of attaining the heart of the mysteries, Salome unveiled, and the price exacted. A variation is sensed in the story of Oedipus, who undoes the riddle of the sphinx, but for all his wisdom and cleverness he is unable to avoid fate. As foretold by the oracle, he slays his father, the king, and accidentally marries his mother. Upon discovery of this, Oedipus blinds himself. Though he is then a cursed exile, his blinding has something of the character of the prophet, Tiresias, a man-woman, able to hear the song of the birds, who was also blind. He had been deprived of his sight after having seen the nude Diana, and was thereafter granted the gift of divination. Indeed, Oedipus had, at one point, sought the counsel of Tiresia, which had been one of the actions that had set in motion the revelation of his truth and identity.
Though beauty is found in the beastly, these stories are not the equivalent of the trite panaceas that urge one to make lemonade out of lemons, or assure a suffering or wronged individual that all things happen for a reason so chin up as providence takes care of all things.
My interest was in the mystical rose as a medium that comprehends the desire for discovery and understanding is a quest for love and that it must be undertaken with trust.
In the upper right corner of the image for some reason I elected to include the geometrical figure of what amounted to a dissected circle within a square, making it rather appear as stained glass, though not. I wasn't sure why I put it there, as I didn't find it...pleasing, or even sensible. It just belonged.
ON THE ESSAY
Down my father's mother's side of the family I am descended from individuals who were involved in the Alphadelphia Association, a Fourier socialist phalanx in Kalamazoo, Michigan in the 1840s, an ancestor being also its last president. His son, my grandmother's grandfather, having spent part of his youth at Alphadelphia, went on to other communes, including the Fourier phalanx in LeGrange, Indiana, perhaps the Wisconsin Phalanx (as Schetterly, an Alphadelphia founder had done, going to both the LaGrange and Wisconsin phalanxes as well), the Oneida Community, and the Francis Barry "free love" commune in Berlin Heights, Ohio. Along the way he met my great-great grandmother, had a family, and when the first freethought town in America was founded, under the name of Liberal, Missouri, they moved there. They were mystic, socialist freethoughters. Freethoughters tend to deny any mysticism in the freethought movement of the 1800s, but it was there. It was certainly there with Charles Fourier, and though that mystical aspect was played down, something was being communicated that either attracted or produced mystic, socialist freethoughters.
In September of 2020 I was contacted by a Fourier researcher because of my online presence concerning Alphadelphia. For 20 years I had attempted online to gather material on Alphadelphia, and research the involvement of other families, such as if they went on to participate in other progressive communities, as had mine. This personal effort was both initiated and frustrated by the suppression of even the knowledge of 19th century socialism to the point of near erasure, polished off by McCarthyism. As for the Fourier researcher who contacted me, because of my family's association with Fourierism, I was asked a few questions and we had an occasional correspondence that had only to do with my family's involvement at Alphadelphia. Eventually I was invited to write up a brief something of my own which would be published in their special issue for a Fourier studies journal. I realized, going through past issues of the journal, that it had material on the embrace of Fourier by Andre Breton and other surrealists, and that in 2006 they'd published a piece written by an individual who knows a couple of surrealist friends of mine and who had art shown in an exhibition that was staged a couple of years ago by these two individuals. I liked this connection.
I deliberated on the essay for some months, which was supposed to have been prepared, I was told by June of 2022. Finally, I sat down to tackle it in earnest, then as I didn't know where to begin, I took a nap, had a dream that somewhat startled me, and determined that I would begin with that dream. Then, though I had written the esay, I didn't send it off, being in the thick of some ongoing personal things. As I missed the deadline, and didn't hear anything, I thought it was over and done with. Oh, well. I thought maybe I would put the piece up instead on my website. Then I was contacted in September of 2022 and asked if I'd prepared a text. I sent it. It was accepted and I received then the unexpected invitation to submit a piece of art to go along with it if I liked.
I won't go into the essay I wrote, reserving that for the publication, but I will discuss the art that I produced to accompany it.
Well, I won't go into the essay I wrote except to relate part of it concerning a dream, because to discuss the art is impossible without discussing the dream.
ON THE ART MADE TO ACCOMPANY THE ESSAY
Below is the dream I'd had, as mentioned above, and written about in the essay.
After several weeks, even months, of deliberation, I finally sat down to write, then instead took a nap, and dreamed that a family bible with a peculiar cover had appeared after many years, and upon its appearance my grandmother Noyes had dropped dead and I was looking at her face, eyes wide open, framed in close-up as with a camera. This rather replicated a scene in a Danish TV series called "Rita", wherein a grandmother in an emotionally-complicated family system suddenly drops dead and is found by her granddaughter lying on her kitchen floor with her eyes open wide in astonishment. Only I didn't think of that woman in the dream, my grandmother instead looked like the lovely Delphine Seyrig as the Lilac fairy godmother in Jacques Demy's "Donkey Skin", only she was instead Jeanne Dielman in Chantal Ackerman's "Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles". In real life, my grandmother didn't resemble Delphine Seyrig. However, like Jeanne Dielman, she was a person of routine, ruled by the clock and habit to the point of rigorous order...
With the invitation to submit a relevant photo, such as of my ggg-grandfather who had been an Alphadelphia Association president, or even a piece of art from my website, knowing that Andre Breton and some other surrealists had been attracted to Fourier's utopianism, I wanted to do a piece of art, but I also felt restricted to having Alphadelphia as the subject, and felt that it should be. What to do? And I had just a few days to come up with something. At first I'd been excited about this, but then I became stuck and couldn't break through. Then I got the idea to use the dream I'd had, and to start with the above piece of art from 2018, in which I had already the rose from Donkey Skin. But now what to do with it? How to connect it to Alphadelphia?
I actually had been entirely unaware until several months prior that Andre Breton had written Ode to Fourier, and though I'd read some on the surrealist enthusiasm for Fourier I do not have an English translation of Ode to Fourier. However, I looked it back up, wondering if I might find something in the French for inspiration (a language of which I no longer have a grasp, though I was doing a double major of English Lit and French when in college and had done a couple of years of translating French surrealist poetry). Searching for the French text, this time I realized that some art had accompanied the Ode to Fourier publication, done by Frederick Kiesler.
Andre Breton's Ode to Charles Fourier, with art by Frederick Kiesler
Frederick J. Kiesler, art for
Andre Breton's Ode to Charles Fourier.
Medium:
hand-colored lithograph.
From artnet
I reflected on them but neither piece of art gave me any direction.
This is the process that followed. I took the one very small photo I had of my ggg-grandfather and layered it over the digital painting, and playing with how I filtered it, I realized that it actually fit very well over the figure of the woman. That seemed nicely serendipitous, and I liked the blending of male and female as Fourierism was greatly concerned with the equality of the sexes. Now what? It didn't used to be, but Google Maps now shows a location approximately near where the Alphadelphia communal mansion had been in Michigan, but I wasn't finding anything that would really work in the contemporary landscape.
I turned next to the what I call the "stained glass" portion of the original painting in the upper right corner. All the digital paintings in this set had a geometrical background of some type, but this was the only one in which I'd placed a geometrical figure like this, the circle sliced into four sections by the squares. I found a high school photo of my grandmother online in which her hairstyle reminded me of Delphine's, a cross between the waves of the Lilac Fairy in Donkey Skin and the fluffier bob in Jeanne Dielman, and I placed it so it was a faintly discerned presence in the middle of the circle, the portrait behind it solidifying a square around the circle. Suddenly the stained glass window portion made complete sense for the first time. I knew, when I had done the original painting, that for some reason this geometrical section highlighting the circle in the square needed to be there, but I didn't know why. So I simply went with the feeling that it should be there.
I was still not quite certain about the direction in which I was moving with this art for the Fourier piece. I did another search for writings on Breton's Ode to Fourier and this time I landed on the below art, which I'd not seen previously. I thought I'd already seen the art used for the cover. What was this? With the off-center sectioning of the circle in the square on a geometric background, it reminded me a lot of my digital painting with the circle in the "stained glass window" against the checkered background. There was such a strong resemblance someone might imagine I'd taken inspiration from that piece of Kiesler art, instead of this being pure happenstance that came of my placing that "stained glass window" in the original painting, uncertain why it belonged, then with this variation placing my grandmother's image in there in such a way that the borders had created a square around the circle. This serendipity made me feel I was going in the right direction.
Ode to Charles Fourier by Andre Breton (Paris: Editions de la Revue Fontaine, 1947).
Artist:
Frederick J. Kiesler
Publisher:
Ed. de la Revue Fontaine,
1947
From Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Feeling confident now that I was moving in the right direction, the rest of the image quickly pulled itself together. Instead of focusing on land I switched to water and took a screengrab of the Kalamazoo river from Google Maps, an area right next to where the Alphadelphia mansion had been, and put it under the woman's feet, and it fit well. The dream had in it a family bible, and what I had instead was a copy of my gg-grandfather's recording of family members and their birth and death dates when he was at LaGrange in 1848. I took part of this and layered it in on top of the Kalamazoo river. I took the title from the cover page of the Alphadelphia Association Constitution and put the lettering in the upper left corner of the painting. Finally, I took the Kiesler geometric art that had accompanied the Ode to Fourier, reduced it in size, and placed it over a photo my ggg-grandfather was holding, the subject of which was impossible to discern except that it was of a couple of people.
When I was near done with the image, I realized what my subconscious had zeroed in on in selecting Delphine to represent my grandmother in the dream--other than the fact that Jeanne Dielman has always reminded me of my grandmother. Delphine = the delphia in Alphadelphia. Delphi was the site of an oracle of Apollo, and may mean "fish with a womb". Located at a sacred spring, it was considered the center of the world--at least the world of the Greeks--its navel. As a fount of sacred origin it was sensibly one of oracle as well.
Preparing for the upcoming Surrealistic "Undertakers and Underselves" Excavation and Mediumistic Communication Exhibit here, this a timely conjunction.
NOTE: Lest the reader imagine I had a strong relationship with my grandmother, there were no strong relationships with anyone in my family--they were all intensely, overtly destructive and the family was irretrievably broken apart. So there's no sentimentalizing or idolizing here. But I've heard that my gg-grandfather was a gentle sort of soul who perhaps erred in trusting too much, and though I know there were problems, there was something decent going on back in those generations with, for instance, the personal freethought constitution of respect for one another that was written by my gg-gandfather's family, of which I have a copy, and the socialist concerns of my gg-grandfather's and ggg-grandfather's generations, the desire for a situation in which all might live in concert, everyone assured of food and home, meaningful employment, and a place in a community that invited and valued poets and artists, and intellectual and spiritual curiosity.
When the essay is published I'll put a link here.
