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Prehistoric Future
MAX ERNST AND THE RETURN OF PAINTING BETWEEN THE WARS
By RALPH UBL, Elizabeth Tucker THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2004 Wilhelm Fink Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Paderborn / Germany
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-02931-3
CHAPTER 1
FROM DADA TO SURREALISM
THE GHOST STORY OF MIMESIS
WHERE PAINTING WAS: BRÜHL, 1909
On a summer day in Brühl, during what he would remember two world wars later as his carefree and high-spirited youth, Max Ernst posed at his easel (fig. 1), which he had set up in a tree-lined lane that can be seen in the painting and the photograph's background. The way the young Ernst holds his neck awkwardly forward, away from his stiff collar—as though he were not outside in nature, but instead were being made to stick his head through the hole in a carnival cutout—brings to mind the Dadaist who would title one of his best-known collages The Hat Makes the Man (C'est le chapeau qui fait l'homme). By the spring of 1910, Ernst would parody the photo in the magazine of his graduating class, Life at Our School (Aus dem Leben an der Penne), by drawing himself in a similar pose, though as a bust, holding a gigantic palette. The caption cites Wilhelm Busch: "A young man with a hopeful heart takes quickly to the painter's art." In a school magazine like this one, parody is surely an affirmative practice, since it is precisely the students' most cherished aspirations that are singled out for teasing. In the photograph from 1909, Ernst had in fact adopted the artist's pose suitable for a young painter en plein air. The pose emphasizes his distinctive artist's gaze and thus the mode of painting that the picture on the easel exemplifies: an impressionism already past its prime. As is well known, impressionism's fundamental tenets assert the mutuality of hand and eye. The individual act of seeing corresponds to the equally individual act of painting; artistic authenticity originates in the density, darkness, and idiosyncrasy of the body, which are expressed equally in the artist's hand and eye; and, finally, visual stimulus and tactile brushstroke—the trace of the world and the trace of art—become coextensive on the surface of the painting.
Consequently, a painting like the one resting on the young Ernst's easel was more than a successful illusion of fleeting nature. It could also be read as an imitation of the process of perception, equivalent to the traces that nature leaves on the retina. Thus, it was a "mimesis" of nature that drew on perception theory to make current the ancient double meaning of the term: here "mimesis" means both the illusionistic simulation of phenomena as well as the active re-creation of forces operating within them—it relates to both the products and the processes of nature. Modernism's art theory famously brings this double meaning into play whenever depiction or illusion is dismissed as extrinsic, while performative imitation is reclaimed for modern art as a deeper, more intrinsic relationship to nature. Within the modernist understanding of history, impressionist painting marks the last possible mediation. It depicts the phenomenal world as a fleeting apparition and simultaneously imitates it, inasmuch as "imitating nature" can also be understood as the subject's reflexive activity in aspiring to imitate the process by which nature is visually perceived.
Since this double meaning of mimesis plays an important role in what follows, I propose making a simple terminological distinction: I will use "illusionism" to refer to mimesis (or imitation in the broader sense) that takes phenomenal nature for its object; whereas I will use "imitation" in the narrower sense to mean a type of mimesis that aims for the active re-creation of a nature that, however it is understood, precedes phenomena. When mimesis is no longer taken seriously and is repeated with mocking unbelief, I call this parody "mimetism (of the second order)," following Gérard Genette. This parody targets illusionism as well as imitation, most often both.
The theorem of the living unity of illusion and imitation of nature in impressionist painting can be found in the photograph's constellation of motifs in a threefold transfer between eye and hand: first, from the seen (and photographed) section of nature to the painted one; second, from the palette to the canvas; and third, from the artist's gaze to the artist's hand. The isomorphism between the trace of light on the retina and the trace of paint on the canvas is supposed to attest to each of these three turns. But it is not necessary to relate the motifs to one another in the organic movement of a spiral. The photograph can just as well be dissected with a gaze trained in avant-garde painting critique—with the gaze of Dadamax, who was responsible for the collage The Hat Makes the Man. Then we don't see a spiral movement anymore, but isolated elements engaged in a play of doubling—photograph and oil painting, oil painting and palette, eye and hand. When the pose becomes rigid, when nature turns into a backdrop and the shirt collar stiffens, then the mediation between illusion and imitation, between visual perception and its re-creation by the artist's hand, also ceases to function.
The art-historical caesura between the impressionist unity of mimesis and its Dadaist disintegration into a play of doubling is described in what follows as a multiply delayed occurrence. It happens not as a smooth cut, but in many separate ruptures, followed by seismic shifts, which make visible how mimesis was stratified and how its return was prepared. In this phenomenon of the return by which the mimetic is brought back to the art of the avant-garde, three moments can be distinguished: First, the two aspects of mimesis—illusion and imitation—are exposed to various attacks, for though illusionism had already been discredited by prewar modern art, imitation of a deeper force (such as nature or life) was still a strong ideal and, therefore, a valid object of Dadaist critique. Second, the processes of anti-mimesis are combined with mimetic residue. And third, the 1920s bring the return to a mimesis that is eerily alive. While Ernst's Dadaist works preserve a mimetic residue in an essentially mortified state, his surrealism posits mortification in order to discover in it a ghostly afterlife—a simulacrum of the simultaneously illusory and imitative mimesis whose living unity the young Rhineland painter had hoped to discover on his excursions into the countryside. The following attempt to describe the history of Ernst's artistic practice along the thread of its mimetic play can therefore be summarized as follows: Where painting was—painting as a sensory plenitude of the visual and tactile, simultaneously imitation and illusion—Dada and surrealism would come to be: Dada as painting's mortification and surrealism as its haunting return.
MAX ERNST AND HANS ARP; OR, BREAKING DOWN THE BLOT
Let's take the photograph further. Imagine that, sometime between 1919 and 1921, while working together on Bulletin D, Die Schammade, or the FATAGAGA pictures, Max Ernst and Hans Arp came across the prewar photograph, taken three years before the friends first met, and ten years before they met again under the auspices of Dada. The play of doubling that separates the oil painting from its subject and the posing artist from surrounding nature would probably have seemed to Arp like an allegory of the kind of vanity that, according to him, was the characteristic fault of illusionistic art. In those same prewar years, he himself had begun the search for a new form of nature study, which he intended to be conceived as a radical turning away from visual illusion and a regaining of an originary re-creation of nature: "I gave myself to the study of nature, lay motionless on a table for unutterably long periods, and attempted to dream like a mountain, slowly, deeply and endlessly slowly." From Arp's self-experiment, it becomes quite clear that mimesis as imitation aims to produce a structural analogy to what is being imitated: the analogy between the unutterably long, motionless repose of the mountain and the sleep of the artist. Second, imitation achieves this analogy less in the product than in the process. Imitation is performative—the artist plays the mountain in actu, in the rise and fall of his breath, in the coming into being and passing away of his dreams. There is also a third related characteristic of imitation as Arp understands it: imitation and organicity condition each other. In the case of the mountain, this means that imitation results in bringing what is imitated to life. The structural analogy between nature and art, the performative enactment of this analogy in artwork, and the resultant bringing to life are the three aspects encompassed in Arp's dream of the ideal imitation of nature.
In Arp's ink drawings, made in the Dada years from 1916 to 1921, the illusion of nature dissolves into dark blots and light intervening spaces. Indeterminate suggestions of the figural—possible proto-forms of future mountains, forests, or mythic creatures—are encased like decomposing fossils (fig. 2). The amorphous facture—which is not like handwriting but instead appears distinctly anonymous, accidental, and thus quasi-natural—invites the viewer to an imaginative seeing of resemblances. This type of seeing does not aim to contour stable figures, so much as to suffuse the dark blots and white spaces with life, to induce in them the germination of possible images.
Arp dreamed of a primordial mimesis that does not yet know the play of doubling of photograph and oil painting, oil painting and palette, hand and eye. He wished for a nature that neither makes itself available nor allows for reinvention, since it is always present and effective as an originary totality. The one who imitates this nature by dreaming with the mountain and seeing with the accidental blot trusts in a maternal whole that expresses itself even in dead forms. An allegory of this desire for a universal suffusion with life can be read in the story that Arp told in which he discovered the biomorphic forms that would be the basis for his ink drawings. The setting is the shore of Lago Maggiore, at the foot of Monte Verità. "In Ascona, with ink and brush I drew broken branches, roots, grasses, and stones, which the lake had washed onto the shore. I simplified these forms and unified their essence in animate ovals, emblems of the eternal transformation and becoming of the body." Specifically, "broken branches, roots, grasses, and stones" become models for a drawing activity that aims to create "emblems of eternal transformation." Where the waves wash inanimate or lifeless things onto shore, Arp finds elements for a primordial generation of the organic from nature's broken and discarded remains—and this also means a primordial generation of animate forms from dried ink and paper.
Ernst admired the Dada veteran who in 1914, instead of lining up with the so-called "August volunteers," fled on the last train to exile in Switzerland. However, unlike Arp, Ernst did not want to escape the play of doubling. After four long years in the field artillery, where his job was to read landscapes with diagrams in order to give coordinates to the gunner, he was no longer able to believe in a natural, originary art. A portrait of a friendship, homage to Arp's dream and at the same time the destructive analysis of it, Arp Microgram 1:25,000 (Microgramme Arp 1:25.000) (fig. 3) demonstrates the difference between the two artists. The title specifies the perspective: what we see are samples of Arp's microstructure, six different samples of a thousandth of a gram of Arp, magnified by a factor of 25,000. And what do they show, these minimal samples magnified to the extreme? Crustaceans and fossil fishes, mountain ranges and cross-sections of the earth's interior.
The accompanying legend suggests that the diagram could possibly be deciphered. The circle of friends comprising Paris Dada—who published the magazine Littérature, in which the diagram first appeared in 1921—liked to organize social games such as questionnaires and ranked lists, and at the same time understood the secret as a power around which a society could form. Ernst used the crypto-portrait to introduce his friend, and simultaneously his own poetics, to this specific readership.
For picture 1 of Arp Microgram, the legend reads: "Arp et la sagesse de sa jeunesse" (Arp and the wisdom of his youth). The fossil specimens—ferns, fish, crustaceans—presented on beveled stone slabs are like the trophies of Arp's youthful wisdom. His youth encompasses the youth of the earth, a prehuman prehistory that comes into expression in the artist. This romantic topos of the past as an impenetrable prior age to which only a certain few can give us access—among them psychoanalysts, poets, neurotics, and dreamers—points to Freud. In The Interpretation of Dreams (a book that Ernst made heavy use of ), Freud writes, "This profound and eternal character of humanity, upon the touching of which in his listeners the poet normally calculates, is made up of the stirrings of the spirit which are rooted in childhood, in the period which later becomes prehistoric." The famous parallelism of ontogeny and phylogeny—which dominated scientific thinking around 1900 through the enormous impact of Ernst Haeckel and which was also recognized by Freud as a precondition of psychoanalysis—thus forms the code that underlies the pictures and their captions in Arp Microgram. Prehistory can be taken to imply childhood.
Picture 2 illustrates how this primordial past continues to have an effect in the present: in sleep, which revives human prehistory again each night. The legend reads: "Arp sismographique a) sommeil calme sans fil b) sommeil agité" (Seismographic Arp a) calm, wireless sleep b) agitated sleep). Depending on whether his sleep is "wireless," connecting him with a peaceful dream realm, or whether he is badly shaken by nocturnal apparitions, Arp is either like a range of steep fold mountains, or like an already heavily eroded landscape of hills. Fossil specimen (picture 1) and dream (picture 2) lead back to a primordial history governed (according to Freud's Three Essays) by a polymorphously perverse sexuality, in which, according to the caption for the third picture, the "false key of the two sexes" is still unknown. Thus, in this picture, the combinatorics that joins various crustaceans into figures might stand for the polymorphousness of infantile desire, which likewise knows no single object.
Picture 4—"Chevelure arp et les sédiments journaliers de son intelligence" (Arp hair and the everyday deposits of his intelligence)—plays on the evident formal similarity between Arp's hairdo and a crustacean: the artist's mental work is a geologic process that preserves the living nature (fern leaves, small sea creatures) of a prehuman epoch. The fossil fish in picture 5 documents Arp in a state of total nakedness, as a fish out of water. As opposed to this skeptical cameo, picture 6 can be interpreted as the natural-philosophical apotheosis of the artist whose creative medium is the primordial time of his infancy. The caption for this picture reads: "Arp yellowstone-parc il y garde le cheveu de Bérénice" (Yellowstone Park Arp he keeps Berenice's hair there). Inside the earth, in geological cross-section lines, Ernst discovers the resemblance to a woman's hair and identifies this hair with the constellation Coma Berenices. The heavens are reflected in the depths of the earth; nature becomes visible as replete with correspondences. Arp, as his friend Ernst represents him, embodies this romantic nature—he is its conservation area, its Yellowstone Park, where the desire for resemblances can survive unimpeded, and where nature in its whole array, from tiniest to most gigantic, is filled with images. Here, Ernst could well be citing Freud, who compared the survival of the pleasure principle after the victory of the reality principle to the establishment of national parks after industrialization: "In the same way, a nation whose wealth rests on the exploitation of the produce of its soil will yet set aside certain areas for reservation in their original state and for protection from the changes brought about by civilization (e.g., Yellowstone Park)."
In this first, purely iconographic reading, Ernst's portrait appears as an encrypted homage to Arp's ideal of the natural origin of artworks. The earth imagines, generates various types of images (from impressions to diagrams), and projects them from its own depths out among the stars. But what the iconography of this work celebrates, it simultaneously destroys—with the crucial assistance of pictorial form.
The source material, taken from the Cologne Catalogue of Teaching Aids (fig. 4), exemplifies specific conventions for the representation of nature, among them the diagram. Ernst accentuates what is already present in the geology illustrations, which caught his avant-gardist's eye because they make nature available in many different forms of representation and therefore make it possible to assemble nature in arbitrary relationships. Does picture 1 relate to picture 2a as picture 3 relates to picture 2b? Or do 4 and 5 add up to 6? Are 1 and 3, or 4 and 6, findings from 2 or 5? There seems to be no doubt that in Arp Microgram, Ernst does what a reader of avant-garde theories would expect from a Dadaist: he summarily destroys organic imitation. The mountain that Arp wanted to bring to life through imitation is represented as having been cut into, dismantled, and measured—in source images that refer to the conventions for representing nature and their mortifying consequences, and in a pictorial form that excludes the concept of art's unmediated natural origin. Because of its proximity to writing, the pictorial form of the diagram accentuates the conventionality and mediatedness of iconic signs.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Prehistoric Future by RALPH UBL, Elizabeth Tucker. Copyright © 2004 Wilhelm Fink Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Paderborn / Germany. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS.
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