Junk for Code

Photography and surrealism

Ken Merfeld (Link courtesy of Zone Zero)

We have met Ken before. From Zone Zero

In an earlier post on Lisette Model I mentioned the connection between photography and surrealism.

I post this as another example of that connection.

Surrealism is more than being about our dream fragments. It is also what comes up from the unconscious----the content that we would like to forget, and which psychoanalysis probes.

I am reading Bataille. An article he wrote called The Solar Anus, which is about repulsive matter. It is an all out assault on the dignified world constructed by instrumental reason. In one section of this text Bataille writes:

"Beings only die to be born, in the manner of phalluses that leave bodies in
order to enter them.

Plants rise in the direction of the sun and then collapse in the direction of
the ground.

Trees bristle the ground with a vast quantity of flowered shafts raised up to
the sun.

The trees that forcefully soar end up burned by lightning, chopped down, or
uprooted. Returned to the ground, they come back up in another form."

Life is interpenetrated by death.

We are reminded of this everyday, when we walk along the southern coast line of the Fleurieu Peninsula. For instance, on our walk this morning along one of the beaches of the southern ocean, the poodles came across a dead seagull, a dead seal, a fish skeleton and a rabitt carcass. It is much an everyday part of the beachscape as the seaweed.

Of course Bataille's assault on dignity and beauty goes much further than this. There is a lot of violence and obsession in The Solar Anus.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at December 21, 2003 03:44 PM | TrackBack