Shijo Surimono with fireflies and grasses. Japanese woodcut.
As an act of Buddhist kindness, Basho once ingeniously reversed a cruel haiku made up by his witty disciple.
Kikaku had said: ‘A red firefly / Tear off its wings / A pepper.’
Basho substituted: ‘A pepper / Give it wings / A red firefly.’
From André Breton, Ascendant Sign, 1942.
Eileen Agar, Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse, 1936.
“It consisted of a cork basket picked up in Saint-Tropez and painted blue, which I covered with fishnet, a lobster’s tail, starfish and other marine objects. It was a sort of Arcimboldo headgear for the fashion-conscious.”
Writing is slow. You sit at your desk surrounded by books and notes and at the end of the morning you realise all you’ve done is stare at your computer screen.
Here’s artist Eileen Agar’s take on inspiration:
My own method is to put myself in a state of receptivity during the day. I sit about sometimes for a quarter of an hour or more, wondering what on earth I am doing, and then suddenly I get an idea for something. [...] Later on [...] I might take a snooze and after that it comes together quite simply. It may well be that we hunt too much when we are completely on the alert. Too much awareness can be as inhibiting as too little.
Eileen Agar, Am I a Surrealist?, in Mary Ann Caws (ed.), Surrealist Painters and Poets: An Anthology.
Rosamond Purcell, Goliath beetles.
From Illuminations: A Bestiary, 1986.
Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity is seen as futility. However, I like the word; it suggests something quite different to me. It evokes “care”; it evokes the care one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilized before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing; a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental. I dream of a new age of curiosity.
Michel Foucault in an interview with Christian Delacampagne, Le Monde, 6./7. April 1980.
John Rylands Library, Deansgate, Manchester (staircase).
Citing Foucault is sort of an academic trope; reading or hearing “in a Foucauldian sense” in a study, an article or a paper never fails to make the hair on my neck stand up. Every once in a while, however, my defence mechanism is weakened and statements actually get through to me, such as Foucault’s call for a non-judgemental, creative criticism. Isn’t it being put into practice by bloggers for example, who review books or retrieve pieces of information from the daily data overload and reflect on them – amateurishly no doubt, but with passion?
I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgements but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes – all the better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms.
Michel Foucault in an interview with Christian Delacampagne, Le Monde, 6./7. April 1980 (translated and republished as The Masked Philosopher).
Surrealist Map of the World, 1929.
From a special issue of Variétés, a Brussels-based magazine, entitled Le Surréalisme en 1929.
The Surrealists amused themselves by creating a map that puts imperialist powers in their place. For example: other than Alaska, the United States are invisible; mainland Britain is dwarfed by Ireland; Easter Island looms over a tiny Australia; and only two cities are marked, Paris and Constantinople, with the rest of France and Turkey missing.
More than anything, this is a map of the Surrealists’ cultural ideals. A 1925 Surrealist declaration stated, “Even more than patriotism – which is a quite commonplace sort of hysteria, though emptier and shorter-lived than most – we are disgusted by the idea of belonging to a country at all, which is the most bestial and least philosophic of the concepts to which we are all subjected… Wherever Western civilization is dominant, all human contact has disappeared, except contact from which money can be made – payment in hard cash.”
Quoted from Katharine Harmon, You Are Here. Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination.
~~~
World map with territories re-sized according to the variable “extinct species”.
From Worldmapper.
Extinction is when there is no reasonable doubt that the last individual of a species has died. Shown here is where over 700 species known to have become extinct last existed. Included are mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, invertebrates and plants.
Many more species recorded as recently becoming extinct lived in the United States than anywhere else, followed by the United Republic of Tanzania, Uganda and Mauritius.
A large number of species live in Ecuador. The Galapagos Islands, where Charles Darwin developed his theory of evolution, are part of Ecuador. Many islands are prominent because islands are often home to unique species.
Territory size shows the proportion of species worldwide that became extinct between 1500 current era and 2004, that became extinct there.
Quoted from Worldmapper.
Mark Dion, Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacy, 2005, desk.
Inventory
by Günter Eich
This is my cap,
this is my coat,
here is my shaving set
in a linen bag.
A tin can:
my plate, my cup,
in the metal
I have scratched my name.
Scratched it with this
precious nail,
which I hide
from greedy eyes.
In my haversack are
a pair of woolen socks
and some things I don’t
tell anyone about,
it serves as a pillow
at night for my head.
The cardboard lies here
between me and the earth.
The pencil lead
I love the most:
by day it writes verses for me
that I have thought up by night.
This is my notebook,
this is my canvas,
this is my towel,
this is my thread.
From The Faber Book of 20th-Century German Poems, edited by Michael Hofmann.
Mark Dion, Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacy, 2005, left rear corner.
Inventory
by Jorge Luis Borges
To reach it, a ladder has to be set up. There is no stair.
What can we be looking for in the attic
but the accumulation of disorder?
There is a smell of damp.
The late afternoon enters by way of the laundry.
The ceiling beams loom close, and the floor has rotted.
Nobody dares to put a foot on it.
A folding cot, broken.
A few useless tools,
the dead one’s wheelchair.
The base for a lamp.
A Paraguayan hammock with tassels, all frayed away.
Equipment and papers.
An engraving of Aparicio Saravia’s general staff.
An old charcoal iron.
A clock stopped in time, with a broken pendulum.
A peeling gilt frame, with no canvas.
A cardboard chessboard, and some broken chessmen.
A stove with only two legs.
A chest made of leather.
A mildewed copy of Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs,” in intricate
Gothic lettering.
A photograph which might be of anybody.
A worn skin, once a tiger’s.
A key which has lost its lock.
What can we be looking for in the attic
except the flotsam of disorder?
To forgetting, to all forgotten objects, I have just erected
this monument
(unquestionably less durable than bronze) which will be
lost among them.
From Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Sand.
Threats to biodiversity and causes for the extinction of ecosystems and species are often summarised with the acronym HIPPO: habitat destruction, invasive species, pollution, overpopulation and overexploitation. Two recent artist’s projects are concerned with the i in HIPPO: Jacob Cartwright’s and Nick Jordan’s Alien Invaders: A Guide to Non-Native Species of the Britisher Isles and 2005 Turner Prize winner Simon Starling’s Henry Moore/Zebra Mussel project commissioned by the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto.
The former, a small artist’s book published by BookWorks, takes the form of an illustrated natural history guide listing invasive species introduced to the British Isles, such as the American Bullfrog, the Chinese Mitten Crab, the Giant Hogweed, the Grey Squirrel, the Pharaoh Ant, the Ring-necked Parakeet, the Ruddy Duck and the Wels Catfish. In the manner of a scientific guidebook, each entry gives information on the category and origins of introduction, problems caused by the introduction and efforts of control or eradication. It is only upon closer examination that one begins to doubt the scientific objectivity and reliability of the entries, which appear to be interspersed with rather obscure references and bizarre cultural anecdotes. The artists intervene by providing us with highly selective and sometimes dubious information. Thus we read under the heading ‘Origins of Introduction of the Grey Squirrel‘:
In ‘Dixieland‘, Gray Squirrels have long been desirable table fare, enriching the poor rural diet (Metzger, 1953). Skinned and simmered in broth until the meat falls off the bone, this traditional dish (called ‘limb chicken‘) was said to be a favourite of the young Elvis, and is typically served with jalapeno fritters and deep-fried grits.
(The reference ‘Metzger, 1953‘ isn’t traceable, since the book lacks both footnotes and bibliography; and do I need to mention that, quite fittingly, ‘Metzger‘ translates into ‘butcher‘…)
Simon Starling’s Toronto project involves sinking a replica of Henry Moore’s bronze statue Warrior with Shield into Lake Ontario, where it will become encrusted with Zebra Mussels, one of the most aggressive invasive species introduced to North America (for a synopsis of how English sculptor Henry Moore is linked with the city of Toronto, see here).
While Cartwright’s and Jordan’s book, sort of a cross-pollination of fact and fiction, of science and art, raises questions of authenticity and the impossibility of scientific objectivity and detachment, the Zebra Mussel project is concerned with issues of transformation and cultural colonialism. Both projects, which by far exceed instances of more ‘conservationist‘ environmental art from the 1960s onwards, are examples of how artists use processes of nature to reflect on broader cultural issues.
From Poul Beckmann, Living Jewels.
“Billet d’autobus roulé “symétriquement”, forme très rare d’automatisme morphologique avec germes évidents de stéréotypie.”
Brassaï, detail from Sculptures Involontaires, 1933.
I’m thinking about changes in scale as an instance of the marvellous at the moment, so here are some (patchy) notes:
[...] there is something miraculous about minuteness and precise intricacy, something mysterious about a spider-like wealth of detail, something awe-inspiring which overwhelms us with the simultaneous conception of our own greatness and our own littleness. So felt King David of Israel when he looked at the stars, and so again do we when we lie in the long grass as children to observe the insect world where, even before hearing of Fabre, we know with intrigue and presentiment how intensely complex must be the lives and customs of that diversity of peoples, from the ants and ladybirds down to those curious flies and rare beetles whose names even adult persons seem to be specialists to have learned.
(This might finally explain my fascination with Sir David Attenboroughs 2005 BBC natural history series Life in the Undergrowth, exploring the lives of invertebrates. Of all his programmes, it’s by far my favourite…)
