Images produced without manipulation (DSLR Camera, Canon). They are part of a project I undertook while in Paris (January & February 2018), visiting, registering and studying works in museums and churches (for more information, see here).

Original works photographed here include Karel Appel's Femme et oiseau (1953), Mark Rothko's Untitled (Black, Red over Black on Red) (1964), Yves Klein's ANT 76, Grande anthropophagie bleue, Hommage à Tennessee Williams (1960), Orlan's Le Baiser de l'artiste. Le distributeur automatique ou presque! n°2 (1977/2009).

And here it goes my fauve and intentionally distorted paraphrase of Matthew Gale's Introduction to his Dada & Surrealism (Phaidon, 2011):

"The idea that Dadas and Surrealists can still have a radical message [isn't certainly] perverse. We [long for] a period now embalmed in black-and-white photographs and films. [Now is] a period of crisis between empires [Trump's America, China, the fucking Mercosul, Venezuela, Israel, Europe, Brexited Kingdoom, Russia] and revolutions [#occupywallstreet, #giletsjaunes, #gretathunberg, #extinctionrebellion, #boycottbrazilianfood], between [deadpan decadent] patriarchy and the seething [puritanical depravity of the everlasting corporations, omnopoly & illegitimate powers that be]. However, like the German Dada George Grosz, a [legion of] artists [are] willing to stand up and say 'No!' to the stultifying [& philistine] materialism of [Global mass enslaving surveillance internet of things CO2 & plastic stifling] civilization... Dada emerge[s], energetic and anarchic, in the middle of World War [III]. Its participants formed groups openly opposed to the establishment values that had helped to bring about mass [extinction and the Earth's total final demise]... These prewar activities were seen in cities from Moscow to [Aleppo, São Paulo and Buenos Aires], but above all in Paris [and the Land of the Southern Lapwing]..."

Other useful quotations:

"In meinen Gedanken habt ihr alle Platz. Warum sind eure so klein? Die Posaunen dada sind die Posaunen des Weltgerichts. Die Posaunen blasen ALLE Töne" (Johannes Baader [not to be confused with Andreas], Dada Germany).

"Le surréalisme doit être conçu comme une dynamique dont aujourd'hui le vecteur n'est pas à chercher dans la Révolution surréaliste, mais dans la Brèche" (André Breton, "Perspective Cavalier," 1963).

"Quelques jeunes hommes intelligents stranded in Zurich desire correspondence with other unfortunates similarly situated in other corners of the earth" (Ezra Pound).

"... isn’t the act of the cannibal part of the mystery of the Eucharist, where one subsumes Christ’s body and blood, which are really transformed into bread and wine?" (Frédéric Prot, about Yves Klein; I didn't know anything about the way Klein's painting were made and photographed it because of the strong sensation it provoked on me; but this connection between cannibalism and transubstantiation strikes a bygone leitmotif present in my own theoretical work, besides the medieval connotations of the blue).

"Isn't repeating oneself precisely what painting allows one to do, especially once one has found one's particular language, the stylistic invention that will allow one to move inside it and inhabit it, growing and changing within the new syntax one can call one's own?"
"As the instrument of penetration the wedge is gendered male. And the wounded sphere is female. But as labial surface stroked by its active, possessing partner, the wedge reverses its sex, flipping into an unmistakable image of the genitality of the woman. Swish. Flip. Alter... Lips" (Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious).

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Pompidou: warum sind eure so klein?

Creative Fields