everyday surrealism
Mar. 8th, 2013 10:28 pmEarlier tonight I was sitting in a crowded shop, eating a very good amaretto almond ice cream and rereading Caitlin Kiernan's The Drowning Girl. I was somewhere around the bit of Latin ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sovay did.
Then I noticed I'd started paying attention to the background music in the shop, because it was doing that incredibly aggravating thing where it was a piece of music I had obviously heard many, many times before, such that I was humming bits of it before they happened, but I couldn't remember what it actually was. If I'd been able to mentally say, oh, this is x by x group, I could have cheerfully gone back to my book; but instead I found myself straining to pick out each note of it among the conversations and the general cheerful rustle, and as I mentioned humming bits, and going Matmos? no, Portishead? no, the end of an obscure Kate Bush? no, and racking my brain.
And as I was doing this I was staring straight ahead of me at the plate glass window which is the front of the shop, and reflected in it at a slight angle was the entirely silent television which was playing as I guess visual interest over the counter. I could see the TV very clearly, since it was dark out already, with only a slight shimmer of angle to show it was a reflection.
Then two things happened at the same time: the first notes of 'O Superman' came over the speakers, so that I could relax and say to myself oh of course, it was an instrumental Laurie Anderson, what was I thinking; but simultaneously, on the silently reflected television-- quite distracting, so that I could not go back to my book-- Gene Kelley kissed Debbie Reynolds goodnight and set off down the street with his folded umbrella, in the immortal start of the title number of Singing in the Rain.
I know that in A Clockwork Orange Stanley Kubrick was trying to make the song (and, by associative extension, the film) Singing in the Rain disturbing, psychically displacing, by connecting it cinematically with rampaging violence. As compared to the vagaries of pure, random chance-- I looked around; no one else in the shop was paying the slightest attention, or in any way controlling the television or speaker system-- Kubrick was a fucking amateur.
so you better get ready, ready to go, sang Laurie Anderson, as Gene Kelley hopped up on the lamppost, you can come as you are, and pay as you go, and he threw his arms open in that gesture of ultimate welcome to love and life and everything in the future, here come the planes. All of this in the little, glowing, semi-transparent slightly-wobbly reflection, the kind of reflection you can see through if you squint and which is most present if you let your eyes drift slightly out of focus.
Hopping up and down in the puddle at the side of the street: 'cause when love is gone, there's always justice (this is the bit where she's neither speaking nor singing really, somewhere between the two, and she sounds so resigned), and when justice is gone there's always force and here he was whirling his umbrella in those wild circles, and when force is gone there's always Mom (hi Mom!) and Gene Kelley bowed to the advertisement girl in the shop window, who has over the years seemed to me more than a little creepy anyway, and I picked up my amaretto almond and my book and got the hell out of there. Which I maintain was completely reasonable of me.
As I've mentioned before, one of the primary artistic ideas behind surrealism is its relation to one another of things which seem unrelated, as free-associatedly far from one another as possible, and which are then demonstrated to be logically related after all, or even at the core identical. As a political movement, surrealism prided itself on taking ideas which were cherished, deep tenets, and relating them to the unloved, the bizarre, the immoral, the not sensible-- rather like satire, but a satire in which the analogies draw themselves, and the artist is not as sharply in control of the associations in the audience's minds as a satirist would generally like to be. The beauty of randomness, that's a part of surrealism, too, the things that come up from automatic writing, from throwing words cut out of a dictionary onto a piece of paper. Bibliomancy, megapolisomancy. Or, as I had tonight, restaurant background iPodomancy. The meaning is not inherent in the random things themselves, but in the mind which patterns the randomness together. What you see in a surrealist collage, or hear in a Dadaist sound poem, is what you brought to it, and the artfulness of the surrealist artist is in making a collage or a sound poem which causes you to bring the deepest, most frightening, and most beautiful parts of your capacity for making meaning. But of course those parts can also be evoked from other sources.
Which is to say, if I'd not been paying attention (as everyone else in the shop was not, and as I was mostly by luck) and if I'd not had the associations I have with the pieces of media involved (I suspect), I would not have managed to scare the bejeezus out of myself tonight in a way that I experienced as a genuinely traumatic artistic experience, along the lines of the most upsetting pieces in surrealist and dadaist exhibitions. What I am wondering now is whether I'd rather have the kind of mind that does this sort of thing to me, or not, as the case may be. I guess overall it is probably worth it? But this sort of thing can be very, very tiring.
It was beautiful and frightening and may have changed my perception of one or two pieces of art which matter to me very greatly forever, and honestly all I did was go for ice cream.
sovay did. Then I noticed I'd started paying attention to the background music in the shop, because it was doing that incredibly aggravating thing where it was a piece of music I had obviously heard many, many times before, such that I was humming bits of it before they happened, but I couldn't remember what it actually was. If I'd been able to mentally say, oh, this is x by x group, I could have cheerfully gone back to my book; but instead I found myself straining to pick out each note of it among the conversations and the general cheerful rustle, and as I mentioned humming bits, and going Matmos? no, Portishead? no, the end of an obscure Kate Bush? no, and racking my brain.
And as I was doing this I was staring straight ahead of me at the plate glass window which is the front of the shop, and reflected in it at a slight angle was the entirely silent television which was playing as I guess visual interest over the counter. I could see the TV very clearly, since it was dark out already, with only a slight shimmer of angle to show it was a reflection.
Then two things happened at the same time: the first notes of 'O Superman' came over the speakers, so that I could relax and say to myself oh of course, it was an instrumental Laurie Anderson, what was I thinking; but simultaneously, on the silently reflected television-- quite distracting, so that I could not go back to my book-- Gene Kelley kissed Debbie Reynolds goodnight and set off down the street with his folded umbrella, in the immortal start of the title number of Singing in the Rain.
I know that in A Clockwork Orange Stanley Kubrick was trying to make the song (and, by associative extension, the film) Singing in the Rain disturbing, psychically displacing, by connecting it cinematically with rampaging violence. As compared to the vagaries of pure, random chance-- I looked around; no one else in the shop was paying the slightest attention, or in any way controlling the television or speaker system-- Kubrick was a fucking amateur.
so you better get ready, ready to go, sang Laurie Anderson, as Gene Kelley hopped up on the lamppost, you can come as you are, and pay as you go, and he threw his arms open in that gesture of ultimate welcome to love and life and everything in the future, here come the planes. All of this in the little, glowing, semi-transparent slightly-wobbly reflection, the kind of reflection you can see through if you squint and which is most present if you let your eyes drift slightly out of focus.
Hopping up and down in the puddle at the side of the street: 'cause when love is gone, there's always justice (this is the bit where she's neither speaking nor singing really, somewhere between the two, and she sounds so resigned), and when justice is gone there's always force and here he was whirling his umbrella in those wild circles, and when force is gone there's always Mom (hi Mom!) and Gene Kelley bowed to the advertisement girl in the shop window, who has over the years seemed to me more than a little creepy anyway, and I picked up my amaretto almond and my book and got the hell out of there. Which I maintain was completely reasonable of me.
As I've mentioned before, one of the primary artistic ideas behind surrealism is its relation to one another of things which seem unrelated, as free-associatedly far from one another as possible, and which are then demonstrated to be logically related after all, or even at the core identical. As a political movement, surrealism prided itself on taking ideas which were cherished, deep tenets, and relating them to the unloved, the bizarre, the immoral, the not sensible-- rather like satire, but a satire in which the analogies draw themselves, and the artist is not as sharply in control of the associations in the audience's minds as a satirist would generally like to be. The beauty of randomness, that's a part of surrealism, too, the things that come up from automatic writing, from throwing words cut out of a dictionary onto a piece of paper. Bibliomancy, megapolisomancy. Or, as I had tonight, restaurant background iPodomancy. The meaning is not inherent in the random things themselves, but in the mind which patterns the randomness together. What you see in a surrealist collage, or hear in a Dadaist sound poem, is what you brought to it, and the artfulness of the surrealist artist is in making a collage or a sound poem which causes you to bring the deepest, most frightening, and most beautiful parts of your capacity for making meaning. But of course those parts can also be evoked from other sources.
Which is to say, if I'd not been paying attention (as everyone else in the shop was not, and as I was mostly by luck) and if I'd not had the associations I have with the pieces of media involved (I suspect), I would not have managed to scare the bejeezus out of myself tonight in a way that I experienced as a genuinely traumatic artistic experience, along the lines of the most upsetting pieces in surrealist and dadaist exhibitions. What I am wondering now is whether I'd rather have the kind of mind that does this sort of thing to me, or not, as the case may be. I guess overall it is probably worth it? But this sort of thing can be very, very tiring.
It was beautiful and frightening and may have changed my perception of one or two pieces of art which matter to me very greatly forever, and honestly all I did was go for ice cream.
