Category: surrealism
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(post)colonial imaginaries: arabesques #2
These images are all from the exhibition “Présences arabes – Art moderne et décolonisation. Paris 1908-1988,” at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris from April to August 2024. La Musée d’Art Moderne propose de redécouvrir la diversité des modernités arabes au 20ème siècle et de renouveler le regard historique sur des scènes artistiques encore peu…
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unexpected encounters #15: are, bure, boke
By modernity, I mean the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” Photography is painting with light! The blurs, the spots, those are errors! But the errors are part of it, they give it poetry and turn…
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unexpected encounters #12: road trip journal
The truth is that in this house with its four walls of glass I feel … always on alert. I am always restless. Even in the evening. I feel like a sentinel on guard day and night. I can rarely stretch out and relax … Edith Farnsworth, quoted on panel at Farnsworth House [Sally] Hemings’…
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unexpected encounters #7: aesthetics
Beauty will be convulsive, or it will not be. André Breton, Nadja Greece’s government has said the country is “turning a page” after Eurozone member states reached an agreement on the final elements of a plan to make its massive debt pile more manageable. The government spokesman, Dimitris Tzanakopoulos, hailed “a historic decision” that meant “the Greek people…
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unexpected encounters #6: exit
The error of the Surrealist militants was to imagine the surreal to be something universal, that is, a matter of psychology, whereas it turns out to be what is most local, ethnic, class-bound, dated … Believing that the images they sought came from the unconscious, whose contents they assumed as loyal Freudians to be timeless…
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unexpected encounters #2—imaginary, symbolic, real
The Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real are an unholy trinity whose members could as easily be called Fraud, Absence and Impossibility. Wikipedia, “The imaginary (psychoanalysis)” 2.1 cool yourself together. London, July 2001 For Lacan, the driving-force behind the creation of the ego as mirror-image was the prior experience of the phantasy of the fragmented…
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unexpected encounters #0 [contents]
A complete transmutation followed by a pure act such as love will necessarily be produced every time that the given facts—the coupling of two realities which apparently cannot be coupled on a plane which apparently is not appropriate to them—render conditions favorable. Max Ernst, quoted in André Breton, “The Surrealist Situation of the Object” CONTENTS…
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window shopping #4 (Paris)
Surrealism has always courted accidents, welcomed the uninvited, flattered disorderly presences. What could be more surreal than an object which virtually produces itself, and with a minimum of effort? An object whose beauty, fantastic disclosures, emotional weight are likely to be further enhanced by any new accidents that might befall it? It is photography that…
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window shopping #2 (Italy)
The mainstream of photographic activity has shown that a Surrealist manipulation or theatricalization of the real is unnecessary, if not actually redundant. Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by…
Camera lucida 