Universaldilettanten

Love this portrait of Max Ernst with magnifying glass and sea horse (photograph by Josef Breitenbach, New York, 1942) - for me it’s the epitome of curiosity, ingenuity and wit. And look at the way he frowns and (sceptically? mockingly?) raises his left eyebrow.

Still have to get my head round this, but there seems to be a close link between collecting and artistic creativity - sort of a dialectical relationship, one often becoming the substitute for the other - and, in the same vein, between the artistic profession and dilettantism. Here are some relevant quotes:

Mark Dion sees himself more as a collector than as a creator in the traditional sense:

I am a bibliophile: I have calculated that, easily, I buy a book a day.

Keeping a scrapbook was an activity that no one really taught me, but it was something I always seemed to do. More than, say, traditional skills like drawing or sculpting.

For me, the dilettante is a much more interesting character historically than the expert.

Edward James, who never achieved the recognition for his poetry he desired, sought consolation in collecting:

When I feel depressed and think that I have wasted my life, I go into this little room and realise that I have been able to discover treasures on my own initiative, and this makes a vibration which chases away the sense of futility.

Marcel Broodthaers’s artistic persona entails the frustration of being unable to become a collector:

Since I couldn’t build a collection of my own, for lack of even the minimum of financial means, I had to find another way of dealing with the bad faith that allowed me to indulge in so many strong emotions. So, said I to myself, I’ll be a creator.

Daniel Spoerri calls himself a “Universaldilettant.”

Cornelia Parker thinks that artistic activitiy and expertise are mutually exclusive:

I’m fascinated by that period of time, by those polymaths. I’m very jealous of it because people could have all these different lives, and now we’re forced into specialisms, and that’s why, even as an artist, I resist being forced into any category other than “artist”. I’m not a painter or sculptor or a conceptual artist or a word-and-image artist. Why do people have to invent categories? I’ve always resisted that. I enjoy making art because I can do a residency at the Science Museum or visit churches or argue with NASA; I can draw from all kinds of sources and not be an expert at anything but I can touch on lots of things and make something that might be a little nugget or amalgam of those things as a way of understanding the world.

Max Ernst, in his autobiographical notes (intriguingly all kept in the third person), stresses the fact that he became a painter largely as a dilettante rather than as a professional choice:

Peint moins par l’amour de l’art que par paresse et tradition millénaire.

The artist as jack of all trades, master of none? The artist as slacker? Or rather the artist as heir of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century polymath, trying to make sense of the world by re-arranging its material and drawing out connections between fields and phenomena?

The World in Miniature

Joseph Cornell, The Hotel Eden, 1945
(assemblage with music box).

Rowing in Eden, by Eric Anderson Reece

The hands had flown off the clock at the Hotel Eden
and above its blank face

a small wooden door opened in silence
to announce the eternal now

The concierge introduced himself as Pascal
“The Pascal” we asked

He shrugged and said “Here at the Hotel Eden
you are what you were before the the“

He rang for the bellhop whose pillbox cap read Apollinaire
“The Apollinaire” (we couldn’t help asking)

He blew a soap bubble out the bell of his tiny clay pipe
and said “Every poem is the world in miniature”

Then he showed us to our room on the eighth floor
right between lilas and pensee

Outside the window a troupe of angels
was dancing Swan Lake atop a single obelisk

Below the belfry a cockatoo still held in its beak
the chord that once woke monks to their vespers

Apollinaire suspected the bird was an invention
of the well-dressed American poet

who sat each day in the French garden
writing obscure madrigals on paper wings

“He says we are all fictions
but that he believes in us anyway”

The day stretches out infinitely
At the Hotel Eden where the hour is always the same

even your mind can only imagine the present
“It is a great relief” I admitted

Apollinaire smiled around the stem of his pipe
and said “It pleases the Chinese poets especially”

From the balcony I gazed out across the blue gulf
A woman in a tiny white boat rowed alone

with the clock’s missing hands
“She never stays long” explained Apollinaire

“I’ve heard she prefers the Hotel de l’Etoile
on the other side of the horizon

where even the starfish (those masters
of every element) dive down from the sky

to hear Orpheus tear his throat each night
with the song of his eternal longing”

In Jonathan Safran Foer (ed.), A Convergence of Birds. Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell.

The Collector (II)

Real Gabinete Portugues de Leitura Rio de Janeiro
(from Candida Höfer, Libraries).

Isn’t it said of Psyche that she lost love for having tried to understand it? If the verb “make” were to replace the verb “understand,” we would have the life history of every couple on earth.
So my fingers have lost their passionate stutter and learned to flatter unknown skins as their humor dictates.
I’m joking.
I’m nitpicking.
I get the same sort of pleasure out of rearranging my library once a year.

From René Crevel, My Body and I.

The Collector (I)

Handelingenkamer Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal Den Haag (from Candida Höfer, Libraries).

Tuesday night I reorganize my record collection; I often do this at periods of emotional stress. There are some people who would find this a pretty dull way to spend an evening, but I’m not one of them. This is my life, and it’s nice to be able to wade in it, immerse your arms in it, touch it.

When Laura was here I had the records arranged alphabetically; before that I had them filed in chronological order, beginning with Robert Johnson, and ending with, I don’t know, Wham!, or somebody African, or whatever else I was listening to when Laura and I met. Tonight, though, I fancy something different, so I try to remember the order I bought them in: that way I hope to write my own autobiography, without having to do anything like pick up a pen. I pull the records off the shelves, put them in piles all over the sitting room floor, look for Revolver, and go on from there, and when I’ve finished I’m flushed with a sense of self, because this, after all, is who I am. [...]

But what I really like is the feeling of security I get from my new filing system; I have made myself more complicated than I really am. I have a couple of thousand records, and you have to be me - or, at the very least, a doctor of Flemingology - to know how to find any of them. If I want to play, say, Blue by Joni Mitchell, I have to remember that I bought it for someone in the autumn of 1983, and thought better of giving it to her, for reasons I don’t really want to go into. Well, you don’t know any of that, so you’re knackered, really, aren’t you? You’d have to ask me to dig it out for you, and for some reason I find this enormously comforting. [...]

Is it so wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It’s not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There’s a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colourful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music.

From Nick Hornby, High Fidelity.

A Bottle Full of Praying Mantises

I now live in a chateau about half a mile out, and none of my clients knows where… it has an incredible mediterranean view from the terrace. Besides four members of my staff, André Breton and Victor Serge and their wives live here. Breton is particular fun: I like the Surrealists. The first night, for instance, he had a bottle full of Praying Mantises, which he released at dinner like so many pets.

Quoted from Anton Gill, Art Lover: A Biography of Peggy Guggenheim.

What would Darwin say.

Gary Larson, Great moments in evolution.

Anti-Honey

The Calender of Tolerable Inventions from Around the World, a list or inventory of, well, inventions from around the world, is a collaboration between Benjamin Péret and André Breton, first published in 1950.

Don’t expect too much plausibility, rationality, humourlessness and dryness.

LADDER. - One of Rameses III’s gardeners, having observed the continuous upward movement of a tree frog along the trunk of a eucalyptus, noticed the evenness of its jumps and had the idea of compensating for the human paws’ lack of adhesiveness by means of horizontal bars maintained between vertical rods.

BIRDHOUSE. - Shelter designed by Elie Bonjour, colonel in the National Guard, to allow birds to await the return of fine weather.

SNAIL FORK. - During the dinner hosted by von Moltke to celebrate the surrender of Paris in 1871, his aide-de-camp, exasperated by not being able to extract a single snail from its shell, broke two prongs off his fork on the edge of the table.

MANNEQUIN. - Brought back, in about 1860, by Francisco Lazcano from the Carolina Islands, where they were worshipped by the natives under the name of tino.

CUCKOO CLOCK. - It was the Duke of Baden who imposed, by decree, the use of this timepiece to protect agriculturally useful birds by trapping the female cuckoo.

FALSE EYELASHES. - “When I have lashes like those, I’ll be all yours,” said Cléo de Mérode, passing in front of a hairdresser’s dummy modelled after her features. The next day, the acquaintance she had been addressing affixed fragments of the tail-feathers of a lyre-bird to her eyelids.

MUSTARD. - Produced in 1165 at the request of the Anti-pope Guido da Crema, who was looking for anti-honey.

BINOCULARS. - Suggested to his lord by the Comte de Permission as an imitation of snail’s horns, which allow one to see everything without leaving home.

COFFEE MILL. - Derived from the primitive goat mill the Abyssinians used to grind coffe (Everyone knows that goats are the source of the discovery of coffee.)

Extract from E.’s copy of Death to the Pigs: Selected Writings of Benjamin Péret (now out of print).

Roach Brooch

Wonder - thrilling, potentially dangerous, momentarily immobilizing, charged at once with desire, ignorance, and fear - is the quintessential human response to what Descartes calls a “first encounter.”

Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions

I watched an episode of CSI: NY with A. the other night, entitled A Daze of Wine and Roaches. The storyline was so absurd that I seem to have erased it from my memory immediately afterwards. But what I vividly remember is that the corpus delicti, effectfully crawling out of the victim’s mouth (who was murdered with a corkscrew, but I spare you the details), was a cockroach encrusted with tiny jewels. It turned out that the precious bug was a restaurant critic’s brooch that had escaped after a row with the restaurant owner, who was, quite understandably if you ask me, alienated by seeing the creature in his establishment (but again, never mind the details).

Upon googling the thing, I learned that it really exists (buy it here for $ 80), that it is an invention by New York designer Jared Gold and that it generated quite a bit of controversy in both the fashion world and the blogosphere (there’s a whole blog dedicated to it).

A. thinks I should try to incorporate it in my thesis. It’s true, I have an inkling that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century collectors of curiosities would have loved the jewel-encrusted cockroach. It crosses the boundaries between art and nature and provokes this ambiguous feeling of attraction and repulsion, of awe and uneasiness, of amazement and fear by which wonder is characterised.

Who knew that watching a crappy murder mystery series could turn into doing research. Well, sort of.

On Bullshit

Came across Harry G. Frankfurt’s little philosophical treatise On Bullshit today, published in 2005, and decided to read it some time soon, because, alongside the slightly lurid but admittedly intriguing title, the following small quote made me curious:

the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic.

Being sceptical as I am, I sense convoluted language and the attempt to be controversial and provocative just for the sake of it, but it might be relevant in terms of

• artists concerned with lying, faking, “truth” and hoaxes
• makeshift modes of production - botching, tinkering
• aesthetics of uncertainty
• decline of expert knowledge
• rise of amateur culture
• reconsideration of dilettantism.

See here for a slightly longer extract from Frankfurt’s book.

Maps of the Imagination

I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and I find it hard to believe. The names, the shapes of the woodlands, the courses of the roads and rivers, the prehistoric footsteps of man still distinctly traceable up hill and down dale, the mills and the ruins, the ponds and the ferries, perhaps the Standing Stone of the Druidic Circle on the heath; here is an inexhaustible fund of interest for any man with eyes to see, or tuppenceworth of imagination to understand with. No child but must remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest, and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies. Somewhat in this way, as I pored upon my map of Treasure Island, the future characters of the book began to appear there visibly among imaginary woods; and their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected quarters, as they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of a flat projection.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island

Passage quoted in Katherine Harmon, You Are Here. Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination.

I saw a copy of Olaus Magnus’s Carta Marina at the University Library in Uppsala last November and thought it so fascinating that I bought a black-and-white poster of it (which still awaits being put up somewhere, shamefully). First published in 1539, it is one of the earliest maps of the Scandinavian countries and the Baltic coast line, and while it is largely visionary and imaginary, scientists recently discovered that its depictions of sea swirls and currents are surprisingly accurate. For a closer view of the fabulous sea monsters and details such as amber collectors (section H) or seal hunters (section C), click on the digitalised version here.