Terra Incognita: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis and Sexuality in the Pacific Region

Abstracts

Tyler Cann
“South Seas Surrealism: the Body in Len Lye’s Old Brain”

While shuttling between Australia and New Zealand in the mid-1920s New Zealand-born artist and filmmaker Len Lye copied large sections of Freud’s Totem and Taboo, longhand, into his sketchbook. On each facing page he also assiduously sketched works of Australian Aboriginal, Māori, and African art. In his ‘strong’ reading of Freud on animism, Lye came to understand these works as representations of a projected bodily consciousness. Emulating this process, Lye practiced empathy with objects in motion, as well as with Oceanic, prehistoric and African art itself. Though Lye later disavowed Totem and Taboo, Freud offered the artist a way to inhabit the ‘primitive’ body through a kind of empathic intercourse with the world. Lye’s desire to access the pre-linguistic ‘old brain’ in this way became the basis of his Surrealist graphic work, film and sculpture while in London and New York.

Tyler Cann, Curator, Len Lye Collection, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth,
New Zealand.

Barbara Creed
“The Unheimlich Pacific of Popular Culture: Surreal Geography and the Darwinian Sublime”

From films such as The Island of Lost Souls (1933) to the first King Kong (1933) the mysterious waters of the Pacific have offered a fantastic range of monstrous beasts – human and animal alike. Since the publication of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle (1839) and On the Origin of Species (1859), the popular view of The Pacific, already seen as a place of inversions and marvellous monstrosities, came to incorporate an unheimlich dimension based on fears of nature, atavism and degeneration. Novelists such as Herman Melville, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs portrayed the Pacific as a surreal place of uncharted islands, subterranean worlds, ruined temples and unheimlich creatures. The Pacific became an imaginary place – Europe’s unheimlich other - where the forces of devolution, fate and randomness held sway. How do surrealist ideas, Darwinian theory and the Freudian uncanny come together in representations of the Pacific? This paper will explore cinematic and literary visions of the Pacific as an unheimlich and surreal space.

Barbara Creed, Professor of Cinema Studies, School of Art History, Cinema, Classics
and Archaeology at the University of Melbourne

Christine Dixon
“Max Ernst’s collection in the National Gallery of Australia”

In 1985 the National Gallery of Australia bought that part of Max Ernst’s collection of ‘tribal’ art bequeathed to his widow, Dorothea Tanning. The 96 works in the Surrealist artist’s collection held in the NGA in Canberra include African, American and Oceanic sculptures, and a few textiles. I will examine the Oceanic works in the light of the artist’s taste, and their influence on his artistic practice. Many questions arise, such as what knowledge of the cultures did the artist have? Was his interest purely aesthetic? Did he borrow forms or motifs from Papua New Guinea and other cultures to use in his own painting and sculpture? Was his a quasi-Orientalist attitude, and did he seek an authenticity in non-European art which was lacking in his own heritage?

Christine Dixon, Senior Curator, International Painting and Sculpture, at the National
Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Kyoko Jimbo
“Toshiko Okanoue : Surrealism in Japan and the World of Collage”

The medium of photography, and the approach that utilizes collage techniques in photography, is the expressive domain that shows the greatest faithfulness to surrealism’s ideas. The ideas and methods of surrealism spread widely in Japan from the latter half of the 1930s up to the outbreak of World War II in the Pacific, inspiring the formation of many photography clubs in which amateurs played a central role. This gave many expressive artists a forum for their work that encouraged and motivated them. With the outbreak of the war, the activities that had engaged those photography groups came to an end, but after the war, new engagement with surrealism can be seen in the work of individual artists. The collage artist Toshiko Okanoue, who was active for a period in the 1950s, bursting upon on the art scene like a comet, is a fascinating artist who drew her inspiration from the works of Max Ernst. In this presentation, I will discuss this artist from Japan (the only Asian country conspicuously influenced by surrealism) while also discussing photography and collage, seeking to consider the question of surrealism more deeply.

Kyoko Jimbo, Curator at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography

David Lomas
“The Rose and the Virus": Reflections on 1980s Gleeson

In 1983, the Australian surrealist artist James Gleeson embarked on a new body of work that has continued to pour out without interruption up to the present. Pictures in this ‘late’ manner are more abstract than anything he had produced before and were more readily accepted by public institutions and collectors than the small-scale images of the male nude with inescapable homoerotic associations that were his staple output up until that point. Commentaries on Gleeson’s work, including the late works, have tended to concentrate on the un-contentious matter of his use of surrealist techniques, and, with few exceptions, avoided speculation about meaning or content. My paper will explore a possible relation between the apocalyptic/sublime tenor of much of Gleeson’s painting in the 1980s with the unfolding of the AIDS epidemic in that decade. It was at the height of the panic caused by this illness that Gleeson in an interview in 1986 spoke of the rose and the virus as being equal parts of nature, by way of justifying the presence in his art of ugliness and horror. I am interested in how the AIDS imaginary at that moment shared certain features of an aesthetic discourse of the sublime and also in how this is refracted in Gleeson’s painting. For Gleeson, in the era of AIDS, the un-representable object of
which his art affords a ‘negative presentation’ (Kant) in the guise of formlessness or quasi-abstraction is desire itself. He thus achieves a kind of universality that transcends the specificity of the circumstances from which it arose and enables his art to speak to everyone, gay or straight.

David Lomas, Reader in Art History at the University of Manchester and Associate
Director of the Centre for Studies of Surrealism and its Legacies

Martinus Dwi Marianto
“Surrealism in Yogyakarta”

Undoubtedly, European surrealists affected the development of a genre of surrealism in the modern arts of Indonesia. In Yogyakarta, one of the main cities in Indonesia, home for many artists coming from across the country, surrealism emerged and flourished in almost every period. The questions are, first, to what degree has European surrealism affected surrealism in Yogyakarta? Second, what kind of surrealism is being developed there? Third, are there any correlations between surrealism and a socio-cultural setting in which so many different interests of powerful groups of people, with their own logics, paces, and purposes, operate in the city’s life and shape the features of Yogyakarta? In this state, the surreal is real. Surrealisms have become the staye of mind; and for some artists it has become a kind of refuge when many things seem unbearable

M. Dwi Marianto, Director of the Program Pascasarjana, ISI Yogyakarta

Anne Marsh
“A Surrealist Impulse in Contemporary Australian Photography”

This paper will consider the ways in which contemporary photo-based artists have engaged with a surrealist legacy. Exploring the body and sexuality through a range of works, the author will look at the ways in which the photographs can be analysed from a psychoanalytic perspective. The writings of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Zizek will be drawn upon but the author will allow the artists’ works to determine the sense of engagement. Artists to be considered include: Pat Brassington, Farrell and Parkin, Lisa Roet, Jane Burton and Rosemary Laing.

Anne Marsh, Associate Professor, Faculty of Art & Design, Monash University.

Stephen Mould
“Dusan Marek, a land-locked Czech Surrealist in the antipodes”

An account of some aspects of his journey into Terra Incognita, his flight from his homeland and his journey to Australia and subsequently to the heart of the Surrealist world, New Britain. A discussion of Marek's background in Czechoslovakia - a Terra Incognita for most people, and the lacunae which exist when dealing with his origins and formative period as an artist. Marek's position as the only Surrealist who worked in Australia and the pacific region. What Surrealism meant to Marek, and how did it manifest in his life and work. The impact the epithet "surrealism" had upon his life and career in exile. Marek as painter, teacher and film-maker. Brief descriptions of the principle films, and presentation of 2 or 3 animated films.

Stephen Mould, Head of Music and Conductor at Opera Australia.

Ken Wach
“Ivor Francis’s Schizophrenia of 1943”

The work Schizophrenia was painted by the artist Ivor Francis in 1943 at his studio-home in the outer suburb of Prospect in Adelaide in South Australia. The painting has not been analysed or explained in any extended way and attracted no academic paper and no detailed research, despite the fact that its iconographical examination reveals much about Surrealist sources and approaches in Australia. Broadly, Francis’s painting Schizophrenia speaks of a transposed Surrealism, a Surrealism expressed with Australian inflections and intonations. Various Surrealist attributes resonate in Francis’s important painting Schizophrenia. The painting, doubtless propelled by the content of Reg Ellery’s psychological texts and mindful of Max Harris’s expositions, is an aesthetic tour de force that well illustrates, not only the place, but also the pervasive influence of Surrealist aesthetic principles transposed into Australia. Given all of this, Ivor Francis’s painting Schizophrenia is Australia’s first major painting with a defined mental illness as its thematic subject.

Ken Wach, Associate Professor and Head of School, The School of Creative Arts, The
University of Melbourne.

Anthony White
“The Cunningham Dax Collection and Surrealist Discourse”

This paper is about the interpretation of art work by people who experience mental illness and the conceptual frameworks provided for their interpretation by the discipline of psychiatry and the work of the surrealists. My discussion will focus on the work of Graeme Doyle, an artist, poet and performer living and working in Melbourne, whose paintings and drawings form part of the Cunningham Dax Collection of Art, Creativity and Education in Mental Health in Parkville. I will address a series of questions: When we view the work of an artist who experiences mental illness, how useful is psychiatry as an interpretive framework? How relevant are the insights provided by artistic and literary traditions? What does the work of the French Surrealists have to tell us about the relationship between mental illness and subjectivity, and how might it be relevant to a discussion of artists practicing today in Australia? Could the work of Graeme Doyle
suggest a new set of interpretive strategies and insights that relativise both the psychiatric and surrealist discourse about art and mental health?

Anthony White, Lecturer, School of Art History, Cinema, Classics and Archaeology,
University of Melbourne.