Crazy Artists, Crazy Authors, and Blog Comments as a Slush Pile Unfiltered
“Experimental fiction is the art of telling a story in which certain aspects of reality have been exaggerated or distorted in such a way as to put the reader off the story and make him go watch a television show.” - George Saunders (via.)
The other night, I attended “No More Bush Tour” at PA’s Lounge, a bunch of bands celebrating the last days of the shrub, including Bobb Trimble, whose obscure early-80s psychedelic records were rereleased on Secretly Canadian last year, the hypnotic Fahey-like guitar sounds of Jack Rose and several others. Between the acts there were literary readings, most memorably Damon Krukowski, (of Damon and Naomi, the best two-thirds of Galaxie 500.)
Krukowski and Yang run Exact Change, publishing experimental classics like Denton Welch’s In Youth is Pleasure, Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, Comte de Lautréamont’s Maldoror, Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, and Unica Zürn’s Dark Spring. It’s an impressive catalogue of books (beautifully designed by Yang.)
They focus on Surrealism, Dada, and Pataphysics, and all of the books are at least 50 years old. Nevertheless, Yang and Krukowski receive a fair share of requests to publish new work over the years. Many of the queries are strange. Very strange. One writer says he will “expose Marquis de Sade as the rank amateur he is” with his forthcoming novel including such horrors as “AIDS in preschools,” and other gruesome situations. Another was an extremely bizarre and lengthly erotic work — with numbered paragraphs — about a “brand new spiritual organ.”
I was reminded of the room in the Museum of Jurassic Technology with letters to Mount Wilson Observatory from amateur astronomers. (”Hydrogen, was created by Electricity between Nitrogen and Oxygen and the three forms the Trinity of Life Even as Electricity, Nitrogen and Etholeum form the trinity of all planetary existance. Electricity the (passtime p) thru Nitrogen the passtime Entrance ( ) Hydrogen between Nitrogen and Oxygen and these ( ) forms the air and the water with the surface of the earth.and that of the water between which is the trinity of the worlds existance. By the gathering of the water below and above to form the firmament which in the beginning God called Heaven, and wherein we live.”) And of the colorful stories of friends of mine who looked over the slush piles at their respective publications
Once I was a judge for a film script competition and it was a frustrating experience because, while everything I read was silly, I felt morally obligated to read closely in case I should glaze over the one line that might reveal a seemingly horrible script as a Hal Hartley-style farce.
A letter to Krukowski pronounces “we’re all insane unless something’s going wrong.” A crazy person zen koan that is kind of endearing, and an example of how the Diane Arbus question never went away.
One might look at the variations of “outsider art” and the mixed emotions of exploitation, sympathy, and curiosity of its spectators. And outsider musicians like Daniel Johnston, Roky Erickson, and the documentaries about them that never quite articulated whether their (in Erickson’s case, new-found) success was based on talent or novelty.
Very often, I turn to Paul West’s “Mem, Mem, Mem,” published in The American Scholar (and Harper’s) last autumn, as an example of sifting a golden kernel out of what might otherwise seem like nonsense. In it, West, once a first rate literature scholar, describes his condition of both Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia the only way he can now: in aphasiac language.
You disentangle the least bit of wiry fluff that has been haunting your tongue for half an hour, and assign it to the unwilling project of the human mess. These rank as contributions in some way or other, but the assorted confectioneries are too massive to eat, and the strand of henpecked fluff is too narrow, which makes them both second-rate substitutes and sees them out. What I’m trying to say, in language ever more oblique, is that the human psyche can sometimes see evidence of what is not present to the senses.
The book, The Shadow Factory, was released last April.
The other question this raises is whether we accept “crazy” experimental things from people so long as they appear upstanding. A recent Washington Post article on Jeff Koons says the most surprising thing about Koons is how polite and sane he appears. I find that least surprising. As Mikita Brottman said, “I have art students who grasp pretty complex ideas but can’t put them into words. If someone is a great video-game designer or great artist or a great musician, when if comes to speaking about it, if they aren’t articulate, they’re seen as freaks.” Naturally, the normal articulate ones are those most likely to receive grants and succeed in other ways.
Then there’s JG Ballard, whose novel Crash famously received the verdict “This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do Not Publish!” from a publisher. That it was ever published must have something to do with Ballard’s record of several conventional(-ish) novels prior and that’s he’s Cambridge educated, undeniably intelligent, and presentable.
Were JG Ballard completely inarticulate about his ideas, and were that his only work, would Crash have the same power? Do we look at the man behind the curtain because we are too timid to align our sympathies with the work of a person who might genuinely be mad?
When it comes to experimental literature (or film, art, etc,) I find myself less capable of explaining what it is I like or dislike about it. And I am reluctant to suggest many of these titles to others simply because I can’t determine whether it’s the work that’s so moving or the result of projecting my own values and ideas on vague atmospheric paragraphs.
This is all a very long way to go about mentioning Mattathias Schwartz’s riveting New York Times magazine piece, The Trolls Among Us.
There’s not much I can build on what was already written (so very well!) by Schwartz, and commented on just about everywhere else. But it’s applicable here, because you find the strangest comments on the most MSM websites: CNN, New York Times. Conviction that their words are worthy of being printed in the grey lady. Finally the crazies have a platform. And so long as it’s left unmoderated, if there is a Cassandra among them, we might find her.
Automatic drawings by Unica Zurn
Previously:
Why Read at All?
Unica Zurn and Rachel Feinstein Currin: Fantasies Embodied
Related links:
- Damon and Naomi
- Damon Krukowski interviewed in The Modern World
- Naomi Yang interviewed in Dust Bureau
- Unica Zurn on Myspace
- “Under-Appreciated Existing Legal Remedies for Trolling, Defamation and Other “Malwebolent” Invasions of Privacy,” TLF
- The Chimeras of Unica Zurn, artnet
- Who cares about Ann Quin? Lee Rourke
Fantasies Embodied
For an artist, the quest to find the ideal woman is conflated with the capacity to create her — and that depends on one’s true talent. Botticelli, Modigliani, any painter of portraits is defining his idea of beauty. Curiously, some artists chose wives they believe resemble the women in their art work. Is it a sixth sense or just rationale?
It was love at first sight for Hans Bellmer when he met Unica Zurn. He said she resembled the perverse dolls he sculpted and painted. Some critics mistake his work as violent toward women, but his violence is directed at the Aryan ideal of women (He began his doll series in Berlin in 1933, becoming more prolific after moving to Paris in 1938, while befriending the Surrealists.)
If Zurn did not really resemble the dolls in physical likeness, she resembled their brokeness, figuratively. “One can see me as the type of man with antennae that can pick up a potential woman-victim … It remains to be seen if I immediately, from the first time we met, “sensed” that Unica was a victim. If Unica seriously asked herself this question, which she may have done, she would, I think, reply YES!” Hans Bellmer wrote a letter to his psychiatrist friend in 1964.
Artnet describes her life as reading “a bit like a Freudian case study.” Zurn, whose artistic talent matches Bellmer’s, and was also a gifted fiction writer, was plagued with deep depression and schizophrenia. She threw herself out to window to her death in 1970, (Bellmer died of old age shortly after.) It looks like I’m not the only one who thought the underrated film Love Object was a tribute to them.
In a recent profile in the New Yorker, (accompanied by this amazing portrait by Elinor Carucci,) John Currin says he was encouraged by a friend to check out a performance, because one of the artists looked like the girls he was obsessively painting. Soon they were married. But Rachel Feinstein Currin, like Zurn, is no blank canvas one might project any fantasy upon. What likely happened is her vitality brought Currin’s images to life.
Michael Guzzaniga, author of “The Mind’s Past” likes to play a somewhat cruel party trick. He will tell someone he’s thinking of four numbers that are in a pattern. After answering “no” to a several suggestions, he will then answer “yes,” to four in a row at random. After the experiment, he asks the participant what was his method for finding the answer. Rationale: everyone has one.So once love is discovered, simulacra of it begins to resemble one’s adored.
Even if Unica Zurn were Asian or forty years older, Ballmer would have found traces of her in his dolls. And Currin’s ladies are so exaggerated and parodied that plenty of wide-eyed voluptuous women could be said to resemble them.
So maybe the question is what is compels a person to draw people they’ve never seen.
Radiolab interviewed writer and painter Joe Andoe last spring. At one point in his life he was obsessively painting canvases of seemingly random images: horses, pastures, and the face of a young woman. As he let go to his obsessions a story began to emerge from the series, it was in fact a memory he’d suppressed for thirty years. I’m not going to reveal what happened as the piece is so well edited, and says so much about the interplay of the subconscious and the creative process, it’s a must-listen.
Related links:
- Unica Zurn’s Myspace tribute
- The Semiotics of Schizophrenia: Unica Zurn’s Artistry and Illness, Modern Language Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2
- Heroes: Hans Bellmer, V Magazine
- “The Lives of Muses” by Francine Prose
- “The Mind’s Past” by Michael S. Gazzaniga
- “Jubilee City” by Joe Andoe
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