Modernism Ep05 ⟩ “The Threshold of Liberty”

What is Modernism?
The Threshold of Liberty: Surrealism and the Haunted Space of the Self

This episode is so good that I have come out the opposite side of infinity and no longer wish to persuade anyone to attend. In fact, I hope nobody comes. Avoid the most inspiring forty-eight minutes Robert Hughes ever made, because inspiration here comes by way of bona fide demonic possession.

Especially avoid this episode it if you worship the dream-spaces of Mario Bava and Dario Argento: the artificial skies, impossible corridors, saturated colors, theatrical ruins, and malign geometries of Lisa and the Devil, Black Sabbath, Suspiria, and Inferno. Avoid it if you were formed by the folk-occult dread of Tigon, Amicus, Hammer, the BBC, and American occult television—Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, The Wicker Man, all those BBC witchcraft documentaries, Midnight Offerings, the Shatner-Borgnine masterpiece The Devil’s Rain, Evilspeak (the most accurate Lacanian depiction of the Christian revelation ever made), Umberto Ecco’s occult novels, and most of all Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.

Friends, there is a stratum of recently antique horror that wounds more deeply than monsters do. Its talisman is the bottomless spider-bite smile of Anthony James as the silent chauffeur in Burnt Offerings—the face of two generations ago that only now admits what it is. Daddy’s boot has been in your face all this time.

This week’s episode gives us the art-historical genealogy of that seductive horrific smile.

It’s the Surrealism Episode!

Hughes’s subject is Surrealism, the 20-cent’s most sustained attempt to free human life from logic, morality, usefulness, and the police supervision of the conscious ego. Its leader, André Breton, was Pope and the world-historical Zeitgeist Magus that Crowley only dreamed of being. Surrealism had dogmas, saints, rituals, baptisms, heresies, expulsions, sacred places, holy objects, and an invisible kingdom whose entrance lay somewhere beneath waking consciousness.

No one attending a Meetup disagrees with the occult metaphysics of Surrealism, which is “the conscious self is late, flimsy, and mostly decorative.” All philosophy readers hanker to insight behind the curtain, under the skin. We all know the truth: our innards are run by dream, desire, repression, memory, coincidence, sexual terror, inherited image, collective fantasy, and the Demon King who thinks us before we arise and pretend to be auto-nomous.

The Most Fun Art

Dream is insight; the pure form of the dream, deepest insight. Madness is evidence. Possession is revelation. Automatic writing, free association, found objects, Tarot, Rorschach blots, chance encounters, trance states, collage, and visual metamorphosis yield core samples from the unconscious, aka the True Self.

And when the occult tries to become real—when it tries to acquire an objective world instead of remaining a private belief—it produces Giorgio de Chirico’s space.

His paintings give the unconscious its perfect expression: immense plazas, hard skies, deep arcades, impossible perspectives, tiny human figures, statues, mannequins, towers, railway smoke, and shadows arriving from objects outside the frame. Everything is geometrically lucid. The perspective is didactically Apollonian. De Chirico is onto-industrial style—the exposed timber framing behind a theatrical flat, the stage-set support structure of reality. It is physical space qua metaphysical evidence.

And yet the scene has been abandoned by ordinary causality-grade reality.

That’s it! De Chirico the true father of all contemporary-pomo understanding of the optimal use-value of art.

Here is our central puzzle:

Why does psychic depth appear as external space?

Why does the supposedly interior unconscious arrive as plaza, desert, horizon, corridor, tower, empty sky, or infinite perspective grid? Why do Dalí’s beaches and de Chirico’s piazzas feel more inward than a face? Why does the dark underbelly of the self become spatial—and why does that space look almost exactly like the clear, public, Apollonian world of ordinary perception, except that it is haunted?

Hughes follows this problem through an extraordinary succession of artists and objects:

Böcklin’s islands of death; Max Ernst’s collage-terrorism; Henri Rousseau’s impossible jungles; Ferdinand Cheval’s Palais Idéal; Miró’s polymorphous bestiary; Gaudí’s liquefied architecture; Dalí’s poisoned miniatures; Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered teacup; Man Ray’s mutilated household objects; Magritte’s warfare between word, image, and thing; Bellmer’s violated dolls; Cornell’s sealed memory-theatres; Gorky’s biomorphic landscapes; and the early Abstract Expressionists’ attempt to paint the “tragic and timeless.”

Nature barely matters to the Surrealists. Their jungle is culture: arcades, wax museums, advertisements, shop windows, discarded photographs, mannequins, broken machines, cheap souvenirs, erotic commodities, and the Paris Flea Market—Hughes’s magnificent “unconscious mind of Capitalism itself,” where the commodity world deposits everything it has rejected, forgotten, or failed to sell.

Other Stuff After Surrealism

Hughes crosses the Atlantic and shows us Joseph Cornell turning cultural debris into private cosmologies. Arshile Gorky converting anatomy, landscape, memory, and trauma into fluent biomorphic space. Behold Pollock, Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, and Robert Motherwell inheriting psychic automatism, stripping away Surrealism’s theatrical dream-images, and using chance itself (anti-causality, anti-robot) as a “plastic weapon” for inventing form.

Free at last! On acid; in twilight/hypnogogic consciousness; the infant brain with every neuron connected to every other is most intimate with bottommost reality.

After 1945, the old dream of liberation mutates again. It passes through Art Brut, happenings, Christo, Chris Burden, body art, psychedelic self-expression, May 1968, Vietnam, the cult of youth, and the belief that exposing the self automatically produces truth.

Hughes then ends this question: Is all confession inherently interesting?

Or does private discharge become art only when it acquires form, structure, discrimination, and intelligible pressure? The Surrealist liberation of the unconscious produced masterpieces. It also produced the still-popular psychic laundry lists, therapeutic pap, documented gesture suites, cultivated derangement performances, and every bourgeois child demanding that his hallucinations receive institutional funding. Hughes is great here.

Bonus Practical Gift

For your immense entertainment value, we will descend the self-hypnotic stairway by means of Ouija boards, Tarot cards, Rorschachs, automatic writing, automatic drawing. We have at least two human guinea pigs willing to conduct low-budget traffic with the Dark Flows … live during the event! If you’ve never witnesses actual channeling before, you’re gonna love this.

All the paintings covered in the episode are collected here: The mighty painting PDF

METHOD

• Watch this week’s episode, located HERE.
• As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs for all the episodes we cover can be found here: THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK

Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.

View all of our coming episodes here.