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Andre Breton’s collection at Centre Georges Pompidou

Visiting Centre Pompidou’s permanent collection means a walk through almost nine decades of modern painting. From the German Expressionism to the Abstract Expressionism, all the paintings responsible for the main art streams of the 20th century are clustered there. I adopted the strategy of passing quickly by the exhausting famous ones, searching the “bizarre” that would attract my attention.
It was Breton’s collection in front of which I spent much time. Consisting of many kinds of objects, it has at first glance a hallucinating effect, alternating different colours and materials. Displaying paintings, ethnographic and natural objects, Breton’s collection continues the tradition of the “Curiosity Cabinets”.
Such cabinets, reuniting all sorts of natural or invented curiosities were very popular beginning with the 16th century, when traveling and exploration became a frequent practice. The royal families of the countries with an active colonial policy, transformed those cabinets into a matter of pride, symbolizing their power. As admirers of beauty, painters also had collections. I remember seeing in Holland Rembrandt’s cabinet, that occupied a whole room, displaying among other oddities ostrich eggs, gigantic shells, minerals and elephant tusks.
The interesting feature of Breton’s collection is a harmonious dialogue between artworks by Picasso, Miro, Giacometti, Rousseau, Kandinsky and exotic objects: ex-votos, masks, anthropomorphic sculptures, skulls, fossils, funerary puppets from New Zeeland, New Guinea, Mexico or Peru. This dialogue must be understood also within the art context of the time, when most of the avanguard movements were interested in primitive and naïve art.(and continued the travel vogue to the far islands). The presence of the “objets trouves” reflects the favourite surrealist practice of finding by chance forms connected to dreams. Breton’s fascination with the exotic can be also linked with the Freudian texts on primitive symbolism.
Not long ago, I read interesting excerpts from Susan Stewart’s book “On Longing”, concerning the souvenir and the collection and mentioning often Baudrillards theories: “Jean Baudrillard writes in “Le Systeme des objets” that the exotic object, like the antique, functions to lend authenticity to the abstract system of modern objects, and he suggests that the indigenous object fascinates by means of its anteriority. This anteriority is characteristic both of the exotic object’s form and its mode of fabrication and links it to the analogously anterior world of childhood and its toys. (…) In Baudrillard’s terms, modern is “cold” and the antique and exotic are “warm” because contemporary mythology places the latter objects in a childhood remote from the abstractions of contemporary consumer society”.

On the futurist manifesto „The Art of Noise” (1913)

Like all the avanguard movements, futurism proclaimed a new era in arts. In music, the counterpart of the futurist painting manifestoes is represented by Luigi Russolo’s discourse on what he calls “Musical Noise”; this discourse is addressed in form of a letter to the composer Pratella. It is important that Russola is not a musician, but a painter “who projects on a profoundly loved art his will to renew everything”. Thus he tries to apply the parameters he strives for in painting, to music and this tendency to radically “reform” everything is typical of the avanguard artists.
Russolo proclaims in an aggressively tone the necessity to break with “the restrictive circle of pure sounds”, “that fails to arouse any emotion”, and to search instead the variety of noise-sounds. The futurists wish to go beyond the traditional art norms of the second half of the XIXth century is mirrored in Russola’s sound manifesto: he announces the dawn of classical music, labeling it as boring and affirming “ now we are fed up with Wagner and Beethoven”. The futurists revolt against the traditional art institution, the museum (because of its tendency to agglomerate, to deprive of the context and finally to produce a visual exhaustion) becomes in music the revolt against the orchestra. In comparison with the variety and impact of the Music of Noise, the orchestra remains “a hospital of anemic sounds”.
It is of utmost importance to relate the futuristic music/ art with the progress in the machinist domain. Futurism is essentially an urban movement, where pipes, engines, pistons, cars, trolleys and speed are key-elements in its inspirational process.

Fiona Tan’s “Rise and Fall”

At the 53rd Venice Biennale, the Netherlandish Pavilion was represented by Fiona Tan’s works. Placed at a twilight zone between film and photography, her audio-video installations take the viewer through a like an archive constructed narration, where people or voices are engaged in the flow of time and memory.
The video „Rise and Fall” is projected on two screens to emphasize the duality past-present: similar to a Mrs. Dalloway, the female protagonist in Tan’s video starts remembering her youthful image while performing her daily morning rituals: awakening from the sleep, opening the curtains, taking the bath, dressing (etc). The water is an important element, placed as an preamble to indicate that a memory is being remembered. On one hand it acts like a mirror that invites to contemplate the images of the past; it also suggests the rythmic temporal dimension, and on the other hand it is a metaphor for how memory is formed: slow-moving like a lake, or turbulent, as a waterfall. It is interesting to observe how the two screens on which Tan’s video is projected relate to each other: either showing two distinct images, recalling the parallel „then”-„now” or showing the same image, to suggest that memory is able to surpass the gap of time and to perceive thus past and future as a single, intense image.
Characteristic for Fiona Tan’s videos is a profound simplicity in narrative, accompanied by an expressive technique of revealing the images in „photographic moments”, “as if the cameraman hasn’t yet come to grips with the fact that he is filming and not taking a photograph” (Fiona Tan).

DÉRIVE

Through its multiple meanings, the concept of psychogeography has an unlimited dimension. Because of its essential affirmation as a corpus of inventive strategies in exploring the surroundings, this concept isn’t yet exhausted. It remains open for new techniques of experiencing aspects of the geographical environment. This explains the longevity of psychogeography and its integration in the contemporary art-world, that, on the other hand has an immense attraction for “games”.
While reading about the psychogeographical practice of Derive, I couldn’t help tracing analogies with some characteristics of the first wave of avanguard movements, especially with the surrealist practice of “automatically writing”. I’m talking about a contradictory feature that both movements have in common: on one hand they encourage a monologue with one’s personal emotions that awakens subconscious aspects (in Debord’s Derive introspection is generated by “drifting” about a geographical space; in Breton’s surrealism introspection is activated through continuous writing). But on the other hand they establish methods that guide this supposed individual aleatory experience.(indications on how long the experience should last, on practicing it in subdivisions within certain areas of activity).
Beyond these theoretical particularities, I think that the most interesting aspect of Derive is a reinvention of “seeing”. Through forgetting the architectural, historical, sociological (etc) implications of the environment, the eye receives a “purified” view and thus the chance to recompose another image (the “artistic” image) with the help of introspection.

INVISIBLE CITIES

The “ reflection” is a key-element in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. There’s a strong dialogue between real and imaginary images. Each city incorporates this duality. Calvino alternates two ways in creating his cities. One of them starts with familiar/ real features that introduce progressively (almost imperceptible) the fantastical elements, such as: Zaira – that could be every town in this world with a rich historical background; Eusapia whose underground replica reminds the ancient egyptian death valleys; the above the ground city of Baucis, similar to the greek monastery complex at Meteora (where one can only climb in a basket), or the by water mirrored Valdrada – that I immediately connected to Venice.
The other way of creating the cities is starting with the imaginary characteristics and progressively introducing connections to reality: so, after reading more paragraphs about Argia (that has earth instead of air) one realizes that it could be our conception about a “real”cemetery.
But whether Calvino uses the first or the second narrative strategy, the result, the “final” aspect of his cities is always a surprising one. An essential role has the reflection (the “double”, “twin”, “mirror”- image) and its property to act like an independent lens that has the power to modify what it sees.