An exhibition held

We had an exhibition at a commercial gallery (Galleri Lili) in Stockholm throughout the month of April 2014. One of its main focuses was on intermediate forms, and we assembled a relatively large object section in order to investigate various aspects of intermediate objects. The exhibition space was also utilised for a small series of experiments and performances contributing to this investigation.

NN

NYMPH IMAGO- an exhibition about intermediate forms, unknown animals and the crystalised flutter of transformation itself.

As a homage to the revolutionary nature of imagination, the Surrealist Group in Stockholm with friends, issues an invitation to a spring exhibition, a collective attempt to make do with the petrified spirit of the times and conjure forth all the dimensions of reality, to temporary occupy space in order to smuggle down seeds of life between the high-rise buildings.

During three weeks we fill the exhibition space with objects and events which will remain in their moments of transformation: text, image and invisible sea-stars, fossilised nerve signals along the walls and a throng of enigmatic life forms moving in the periphery of the field of vision.

Take a pause from your rusty telephone, drag your body through the payment zones of the city, and help us finding out what it is that moves just behind the set.

Who or what is it that speaks through our mouth, sleeps in our beds, creates in our place? Mythological creatures, socioeconomical contingencies, schizoid partial personaliites, lightnings from the future? What are the prehistorical animals moving between the trembling membranes of the brain?

Through games and speculation you are invited to join forces with the exhibitors and reconstruct, imagine or reveal who was made what and who has made whom, or just to become uncertain about it all at last.

The Stockholm surrealist group and friends

JA

(Coordinators Niklas Nenzén & Lars Rosenström. Original setup of exhibition included John Andersson, Linnea Bergman, Erik Bohman, Christofer Dahlby, Kim Fagerstam, Mattias Forshage, Riyota Kasamatsu, CM Lundberg, Emma Lundenmark, Giuliano Medici, Niklas Nenzén, Lars Rosenström, Hugo Röjgård, Emil Särelind, Ika Österblad. Later participation also by others.)

Games about objects

These were the active investigations into the transformations during the course of the exhibition Nymph Imago:

1. Disguised as an opening performance, MF and EL carried out the game of questioning chosen objects simply by touching them and allowing them to inspire automatic speech.

2. During a game evening with friends and a few curious, we asked participants to pick an object in the exhibition and imagine what two things it was an intermediate between.
3. Similarly but the other way around, we asked participants to pick two objects in the exhibition and develop an image of the intermediate form between them.
4. Furthermore, a number of improvised enquiries and collective drawings were passed around founded in questions raised by the objects.
5. During the closing event, KE was quickly writing poems inspired by chosen objects and reading them aloud.

Boxes and marvel

introduction

Recently I've become aware of the immense popularity of Joseph Cornell in the US (in the most diverse camps), as well as that direction within conceptual art (especially in the UK) that "addresses" the natural cabinet in order to "pose questions" about the nature of collecting and knowledge. Based on that I am growing eager to make certain distinctions regarding my own boxes, especially with an exhibition coming up. This triggered a discussion about poetic phenomenology of objects in general, and about poetic phenomenology in general, two of the favourite subjects of the Icecrawler, and some initial contributions are therefore cited at some length here.

MF

My boxes investigate a poetic phenomenon and are intended to have a poetic effect or none at all.

Thus, I'd like to emphasise that to begin with, they are not aesthetical object in some utterly narrow sense, intended to please the eye. But they are also not primarily intended to arouse some amazement in a simple sense, as the old natural cabinets and Kunstkammern were; I am not picking the most spectacular or unique objects, there are no artisan skills, I am not aiming to impress.

They also don't have a primarily anecdotal or rhetorical purpose. I do not want (here, I do want that elsewhere) to teach and demonstrate the diversity and its implications through a combination of systematisation, sensory concretion and arousal of amazement mixed with afterthought and speculation. I couldn't care less about the concept of art, and I don't think it is exciting, necessarily productive, or even particularly interesting, to raise questions about game theory, play, collecting and systematics in an artistic framework. In no way do I want to "question" "highlight" "thematise" "address" the fascination before diversity.

Furthermore, it is not primarily about microcosms systematically mapping a personal mythology. And finally, it is not at all anecdotal objects in some sentimental, autobiographical meaning, it is not souvernirs and not diary pages.

However, all these possible aims or functions that I am here fending off, may actually be present in single boxes. But the point is that to the extent that they are, this is because they appear to be orchestrated by the poetic ambition and to orchestrate the poetic phenomenon, nothing else. It is all about an irreducible appropriation of the extended field of possibilities manifested in a poetical constellation of single more or less auratic objects released from utilistic functions including the aesthetical and privately signifying, nothing more, nothing less.

Mattias Forshage

(Joseph Cornell)

brief comments

"The interesting things turn up in the last paragraph. This is something I'd like to know more about, even though it's not necessary. But you may very well examplify, the poetic phenomenon surfaces when Tintin blows his nose in the thrown glove falling in a bottle in the whale's stomach. When Maldoror suddenly turns, terrified, etc. /.../ As it now stands I get the impression that the polemics is the point of the text as if you wanted to exhibit the boxes polemically or perhaps are embarrassed by possibly being mixed up with cultural careerists."

Riyota Kasamatsu

"While reading the text I see primarily a negative constructivity emerging, since the poetic effect is in a theoretically self-effacing way connected with as well as relieved from those of its adjacent signifyings and constitutings that surrealism has made itself acquainted with in its historical oppositional role. Riyota may be right that this via negativa feels, from a worldly standpoint, stylistically oppositional and clumsy. But that poetry which we are encouraged to look out for is actually characterised like a negation of the negation in the manner of the mystic, the dialectician or the charlatan. It is not its utilistic forms (including the aesthetical ones) or reifications but also doesn't necessarily exist independently of them, and instead it lives right there exiled in thought or in the "concept" in order for everyone to rediscover in the temporarily actualised field of possibilities?"

Niklas Nenzén

"It sounds very interesting /.../ Poetry is the breathing of the soul. It is not about something but out of something. It is like stock which has been boiling for very long, that essence collected at the bottom. One finds poetry in simplicity, silence, nature. /.../ Snails growing out of the body."

Gabriella Novak

An ambitious interpretation

"I think it was clarifying/.../ it addresses a few ways to look at objects or phenomena in the context of an exhibition, to suggest what concerns the present ones rather than judge others. The movement passes through some negative definitions into a positive one, and the text presents several types of signs, or of functions of signs, where the last one is the poetical.

I was most surprised by the distinction between simple amazament and that which concerns the poetic sign. If we try to distinguish the signs through their structure or diagram then both have launch pads for the soul, but that sign which brings "amazement in a simple sense" has a fixed cosmic referent (nature as larger objectively existing reality behind the object, in the relief of which the mystical, religious, terrifying or romantical of the object trickles or pours forth) while the diagram of the poetic sign appears sketched as entirely, and necessarily, separated from the world (the referent, denotation, directness-towards-the-world of interest and intentionality) and the subject (with its collective as well as individual psychology I suppose). The positioning of the poetic sign against the aesthetical I assume tries to separate those emotions or "Gefühl" which are actualised in connection with dimensions of the expression such as hue choice, geometry, brush stroke width, line curvature intensity, lighting, etc etc, dimensions which often cross-pollinate synaesthetically, but I suppose that what MF is trying to say is that it's not about it being a radical separation between those dimensions within the poetic sign, but rather that they are not essential for it. But then there remains two non-signifying and one signifying dimension, the way I see it. First the concepts, which I suppose it is crucial for the poetic sign to have an exchange or linking with (such as the concept of Tintin, the concept of the cigar, etc), and then the purely material intensities of the expression (which if detached from the aesthetical and the signifying becomes void, empty form) and finally, if this dimension isn't already covered by, and incarnating, the aesthetical; the transcendentally symbolic. I reversed the order here but I hope it will be obvious that the presence of the signs in the objects shows that there is a relationship of signifying within it, while the transcendentally symbolic is, just like pure material intensities, elements of the sign which have a positive reality in themselves before they are related to subjects, objects/cosmos, or concepts.

I would like to see some elaborations.

Is that the way the signs of simple amazement are distinguished from your poetic sign through maintaining an essential relationship to the world?

Why fence off the relationship to world and subject but not to concepts?

Does the enjoyment of the poetic sign demand a kind of surrealist epoché in relation to a natural utilistic attitude? An epoché that has to be taught to the spectator for the exhibition to have the intended effect? (As 3d-glasses for a 3d-film)

/.../

It seems very nuanced to want to "empty" only certain dimensions of the sign, or characterise different signs as different cheeses characterised only by their distributions of cavities.

Especially in relation to Dogen Zenji or Madrid. The "zen-signs" or "zen-machine" of Dogen had emptiness at the subject's place, emptiness at the object's or the world's place, emptiness at the relation's place, and emptiness at emptiness's place. Now Dogen "empties" places, but keeps the places (which creates a generative void), while MF seems based on his idea to want to remove some places and keep some, empty some and fill some."

Christian Andersson

"I am initially grateful that you (CA) elaborate on the distinction between simple amazement and poetic. There is a lot in what you say. Simple amazement puts itself in a simple relation to a big, by a certain necessity somehow abstract, generalised magnitude of the background: nature, god, or whatever. It always become something of stage props, somehow homogenised. It is a gothic amazement. And even though reactions are rarely simple, I believe it is somehow characteristic for this amazement that it primarily arouses a passive emotionality which often isn't even emotional: one smiles, puts the thumb up and says "awesome". No, that was not what people did in the natural cabinets. O, I really like these simple movements of emotion too. Because when strong they are also necessarily less simple, will always harbour an uncanny ambivalence, a fascination and fear and longing for the unknown, this immense threshold chafing the arch of the foot. Ok no waterproof shots here either. It may be true that the "poetic sign" is distinguished from that of simple amazement "by maintaining an essential relation to the world" in the sense that all ambivalences, accidentals and particularities are an important part of the whole, mainting its essential amazingness by not resisting being reduced, while this can be contrasted against the essentiality of simple amazement – on the one hand logically risking to empty the world of essence by idealising and rhetorically reducing it to a selected rhetorical function, a "major point", an "essential meaning", but on the other hand also places its faith in the same world as something in principle accessible beyond the speech it gives rise to, an "unio mystica" that isn't integrating the potential directions of its dynamic but instead autotomises them as crimes against the unity.

I also completely agree, and I am grateful for your claiming it, that any polemical edge is a secondary thing; the aim is to relativise all the girders that common rationalisations often get stuck at, and typically wishes to have as fundamental bolts that the whole structure can be reduced to. If I am excused for seeming stuck in architectural metaphors, it is the space that is created which is the raison d'etre of the building, not any of its girders... And in that case I am connecting metonymically to the space created in a box, where the coincidence and the potential interactions of the objects play. And intertextually to another draft I've been circulating, about the concept of "atmosphere", which is also about generating space. The spaces created by the holes in a cheese, it's a little bit like those classical plasticine models of anatomical structures, single organs and entire bodies, like trees of coral, filigree-works making up jungles of petrified worms. The structure is constituted by the possible routes throught it, not by the scaffolding, not by the allegedly structural elements that are actually just scaffolding for the really possible routes...

What type of epoché the appropriation of poetic pleasure demands I also wonder how to understand or describe. Let's continue the discussion."

Mattias Forshage

(Kathleen Fox)

(Peter Wood)

(Peter Wood)

concretisation in terms of objects

Of course, boxes are an arena for surrealist objects to meet, to play, to develop relationships. The "night at the museum" fantasy lies at base, animated film is one of the nearest responses; what are in fact the chosen objects doing – when relieved of utilitarian purpose, when allowed to develop hidden urges and potentialities, and various relationships to other such objects.

And this is one of the factors that make it important to distinguish between the poetic dynamism of the objects in a surrealist box, and the dynamism of pure marvel of objects in the cabinet framework: in the cabinet it is till the amazing, exotic and impressive purpose or original connections of the object that counts, the objects are still defined by their original framework (still "doing their job") and have not entered the poetic state of vacancy-availability-freedom.

But far worse is of course the framework of conceptual art, where the work is reduced to the very question that spawned it, which it is intended to express, and which therefore makes it completely redundant as a work of art. The objects are here again hired to do a onedimensional work, to stand as mere signs, as preconceived hints of a particular statement.

Though of course both works of pure marvel and conceptual works might have specifically poetic dynamics in spite of the intentions of the artist...

(Dominique Paul)

(Dominique Paul)

(Josette Exandier)

(Gilles Ghez)

(Gilles Ghez)

(Gilles Ghez)

concretisation in art history terms

Surrealists started to investigate boxes in connection with the "object craze" in the mid-30s, when the fetishistic vigilance towards found or odd items were solidly connected with the overall goals of the movement through Hegelian notions of "objectivity" (objective chance, objective humor, found objects etc).

Of course it had an immediate historical precursor in dada and constructivist assemblage as well as "readymades", but significantly further back into popular forms of wonderboxes, from commercial viewing-boxes over classical natural cabinets or kunstkammern to all kinds of fetishistic shrines for ritual purposes.

Now with the new sense given to this activity in surrealism, Joseph Cornell stood out as the foremost surrealist artist specialising in boxes, but important early examples are also to be found in several of the poems-objects of André Breton. Partly very different yet in the same area were Kurt Schwitters' and then Louise Nevelson's sculpture.

Certain artists kept experimenting with boxes through the 40s and 50s, but in the 60s it became more widespread and has in fact been one of the common genres of surrealist art since. Mimi Parent, Robert Guyon, Tom Gutt, Josette Exandier, Peter Wood, Ragnar von Holten, Milan Napravnik, Jan Svankmajer, Gilles Ghez, Dominique Paul, Kathleen Fox, etc...

And of course artists outside an explicit surrealist framework make boxes that are perfectly surrealist in the sense of superordinating their purely poetic content, even in Sweden.

(Ragnar von Holten)

(Ragnar von Holten)

(Natalie Sutinen)

rehabilitation of marvel

There should be no attempt to belittle the importance of the sense of marvel though. It is clearly of one the things that characterise many of the things important in life, and it is a crucial component in art. Yet it alone does not art make.

Marvel, from electrified fascination to highly emotional astonishment, may be a proper basic response to abundance and beauty, and specifically be the appropriate recognition of psychic dynamism that has been great enough to go too far. But in art it will have to be employed by other spiritual agencies to become a specifically poetic vehicle; it will have to abandon massive impressiveness as a trope (which easily become a paradoxically homogenous screen), it will have to assume specific mechanisms of attaching to the most ambiguous and far-reaching aspects of the phenomenology of spirit.

Not the least by focusing on the elusive or even enigmatic little areas emerging, sometimes as surprisingly frozen spots in vast interspaces, sometimes as fine leaks from increasingly ambiguous relationships, leaks eventually forming lattices and streambeds, in both these images specifically creating an arena for unexpected, soft and sweet or jerking as well as awkward gymnastics of the spirit.

As manifestations of beauty or marvel, art (well at least good art) will be enjoyable anytime. As manifestation of poetry it can even contribute to make life worth living and reminding us what to focus on and demand of it. But what can make art actually particularly interesting on the other hand is specifically its capacity as a vast field of the phenomenology of spirit. It can lay bare and will examplify and illuminate specifically these mechanisms through which poetry works its magic.

(this is not a piece of art but a utilitarian artifact)

MF

the surrealist object part I

Two realms of objects

Gestalt psychology once emphasised the fundamental difference in the phenomenology of natural objects and artifacts. So as not to assume any particular metaphysical implications of these, we might rather say that there is a fundamental difference between discrete single objects as typically examplified by artifacts on one hand, and non-discrete objects as typically examplified by natural objects. So, artifacts are usually discrete, easily distinguished from each other, usually geometrically regular (or more or less complex assemblies of individual geometrical units), usually brightly coloured, easily sorted, stacked, and counted; they can be understood teleologically, in terms of intended function. Natural objects are usually the opposite: usually merging together, difficult to separate from each other and to understand the individual units among, indeed quite ambiguous in such ontological terms, and furthermore typically geometrically irregular and with heterogenous and often diffusely blending colours, unintelligable in terms of intended function without advanced theories (either a "secondary teleology" through a functionally focused adaptationist evolutionary biology, or theism).

Of course this is by no means a sharp border, there are several untypical objects from both sides. Every archaeologist will complain that it can be very difficult to separate artifacts among natural-looking objects. And there is nothing stable about them. Things are pulled out of the diffuse logical flow (in this sense "natural") and transformed into artifacts by slight manipulations and sometimes by this act of choice and removal out of original context itself. An obvious example is how shells, beautiful stones, interesting roots, dead insects, skeleton parts, etc, are picked up, collected and transformed into aesthetical and occasionally scientific objects, and how fruits and other plant parts as well as dead animals are picked up as food items. On the other hand, discarded and abandoned artifacts enter the sphere of unseparable natural objects; littering and ruins. In a sense, art is a big endeavour to create artifacts with the opacity of natural objects, which will be able to produce meaning far beyond the simple statement of their intended function, in a way that simulates or indeed becomes nature.

The distinction approximately corresponds with that between indoors and outdoors environments. An indoors environment is one intentionally structured, usually geometrically arranged, dominated by artifacts and their rational arrangement for a purpose. Outdoors is structured by other factors than reason and intelligence, and is dominated by natural objects - though in many cases, such as cities, baroque gardens, and agricultural fields, there will indeed be a superimposed artificial and gemetrically regular structure, but however one which will be immediately subverted by the action of weather, plants and animals; there will be leaves, twigs, dust and seeds moving around, snow and pools of water, emerging plants and mushrooms, as well as a more or less rapid weathering and irrational rearranging of the artifacts through the actions of weather, irresponsible or responsible humans, as well as by other animals and plants of course.

It seems like the ambiguity and transition in this respect has often been interesting to surrealists. The transformation of natural environments into manifested projection spaces for the imagination have often aroused a great interest; brut architecture, utopian city planning, theme parks, park planning, japanese gardens, futuristic visions, have all had their share of attention (often including suspiciousness) from surrealists. So has, and far less ambiguously so, that which moves in the other direction in the relationship, becoming secondary nature: ruins and abandoned environments, worthless places, vast ruderal areas, junkyards.

And a special polemical case in this very matter is the category of surrealist objects. Surrealism takes objects out of their functional context and allow them to develop a natural-like semantical richness. The shared component in all surrealist objects is that they have been made poetic objects by having been taken out of their given context and allowed to develop a network of relationships, associations and determinations that are unrestricted by functional context. Then for the artifact-type objects this means more to take them out of utilistic context, and for natural objects to take them out of natural context. However, in both cases we must take care not to fall in the trap of establishing a new quasi-functional concept based on aesthetics in the narrow sense and/or anecdotal/selfbiographical sentimentality. Those objects which are put on a piedestal for being beautiful or for reminding someone of a beautiful event or period in life are only "liberated" in a weak sense, they are transposed into another utilistic context, less restricted for sure, and since that particular purpose is largely conditional and focused on a subjective level (also where the objects are marketed as commodities) they often have occasion to transgress it. Because it is only when they are allowed to be "worthless", to be isolated and reconfigurated without particular goals, that they can develop quite new unexpected relationships and insights. This state is far easier attained in an unordered accumulation of curiosities, or in a playful assemblage, or in a crowded exhibition, than when tastefully displayed with appropriate margins and spaces, but its not impossible among conventional aesthetical objects, nor in conventional art, or low-brow home decoration in general, nor by chance in the toolshed, the cellar, or even the marketplace.

Natural objects, merged as they are in the environment, are mostly in a sense asleep: associatively, imaginatively, symbolically, communicatively – and remember that these four aspects are all different, even though they partially overlap with each other. Bringing them out of context is a way of stirring them to wake them up, and it may be to an existence in slavery under some practical work task, or in tragical-pregnant isolation stretching out to establish relationships in all directions... Surrealist objects lie around longing for their freedom, planning for it, and occasionally allowing us to catch a glimpse of it, everywhere.

Some clarifications

I hope I don't have to say that it would be absurd to interpret these distinctions in terms of value; all different modes of being an object are perfectly legitimate ways of being an object. Of the two sleeping modes, the artifacts are characterised by their straightforward rational use value for us, and the natural objects by their non-rational use value for themselves (which may seem excitingly alien to us). The awakening mode, the objects released from utilistic connections from either camp, assumes a poetic use value, for themselves but in complicity with us.

If we are nowadays rather immune to the danger of getting dazzled by the artifacts after progress and rational solutions proved to be of limited application, there may still be an obvious risk of romanticising natural objects simply by being inexperienced with them and remaining uninformed about them: they may all seem so admirably inhuman, irrational and free for anyone who has no analytical tools for observing patterns in nature and thus keeps missing their modes of connection, modes of repetition, modes of labor, modes of economy, modes of utilism; such a person would believe every natural object encountered will be in itself free of determinations and thus a surrealist object. But of course, that person is likely to mostly stay in the city or at least not look very carefully around, in order to maintain that strange bias where only artifacts are typical objects and all natural objects are strange harbingers of a hidden world of wonders. It would be alien to me to suggest that natural objects are not interesting, exciting and beautiful objects in their capacity of natural objects, their own utilistic connection, (which is partly about their negating the artifact mode of utility and partly about aesthetical and psychological response to their general morphology, their organisation principles, their visual signals, etc) - but still that is what exactly what has to be superceded to make them surrealist objects rather than either scientific objects, aesthetic objects, objects of mere wonder and entertainment, or natural objects in their own right. I am talking about where they too are taken out of context. And this does not mean the vast sphere of antropomorphising, to regard the facial expressions of animals, the atrocities of insects, the mysterious behaviors of plants, as mere jokes for their unfettered variations of human analogues. I am talking about new and poetic contexts, where they may or may not evoke wonder or associations to their lifestyles and evolution, may or may not evoke transgressions of the notions of the human, but regardless of whether they do or not, remain open to establish new connections. Releasing them from their utilistic connection simply by stubborn ignorance of it is a very fragile form of liberation; it not only demands the same ignorance and non-familiarity of every observer, but tends to nivellate and therefore in the long term depreciate the whole world of natural objects.

Just like the poetic use of a shoe seems to presuppose observing the very transcendence from being a vehicle for containing feet and separating them from the possibly hostile ground into something else, and would not be the same thing for someone who had never considered using shoes; in the same way the strange shape of a mushroom will be a carrier of poetry rather than of superstitions when it is first understood and then abandoned that it is a mere temporary sexual organ of the fungus body interweaving the ground, and its sudden appearance comes from a very determined structure of chitine growing fast by absorbing very much water but then manifestating that structure only in an irregular form exactly conforming to the temporary configuration of the surrounding - now all of this is perhaps a bit mysterious indeed, but if we are excited about that, we are excited about the life of fungi, which biology has far more to teach us about than poetry has. There is a sense of wonder about a mushroom which simply does not depend on whether one associates to the particular forest habitat where it grew or not, whether one knows how it tastes or not, whether one has seen hundreds of mushrooms like it or not, whether one knows about the sexual mysteries of fungi or not, etc - and it is only when that particular sense of wonder is succesfully invoked that the mushroom becomes a surrealist object, a "liberated object", rather than an object of exoticism.

M Forshage

the surrealist object part II

- the first steps in poetic semantics of objects

You have noted that so far I have been talking only about the act of constitution of the surrealist objects, the moment of sublation away from the utilistic sphere, the conditions for poetry to possibly emerge.

At this level, surrealist understanding of the object up to now has claimed to rest on mainly two foundations, first that of the object primarily being an object of desire (thus actualising the whole background of Freud's theories) and second that of the object being a unit of objectivity (thus actualising the whole background of Hegel's philosophy). The Freudian and Hegelian contexts are preconditions for the surrealist concept of the object, but it is very likely that the relaxed way they are assumed are missing aspects of the respective theories which it will be interesting to return to before the end.

Equally important but often less explicitly discussed in a theoretical context have been the recognition of the aspect of sensory-imaginational realism, clearly at heart of surrealism but developed theoretically rather in parallell by gestalt psychology, and by Bachelard's and Alleau's symbology (and in some way, but often rather twisted, and I don't them well enough anyway, in structuralism, philosophical phenomenology and semiology?)

So the next step is what goes in the poetic moment, when this "liberated" object actually starts establishing all new relationships it might, largely by means of our associations. I am just beginning my analysis in this field. And since I have recently been talking in a few places of the characteristics of poetic semantics, I hasten to say that this is exactly the same question, and it is probably the same as in the case of pictorial art too, only it will hopefully be easier to see some basic patterns if we retrict ourself to "assemblages" (= the meeting of objects) because we don't have a big problem in circumscribing the least signifying units there.

* There is one sphere of epistemic associations, or metonymical in the narrow sense; the ones that evoke aquired knowledge of previously established associations of the object, so-called background knowledge, which so to speak restores the object into the context it was taken out of. Obviously, this is an ambiguous category here.

* There is one sphere of biographical associations, the arousal of memory of (real or imagined) events where the object was brought up. This is a sphere which involves very individual elements, is partly dependent on simple empiricism and "life experience", and a sphere where most of the strictly speaking emotional response is evoked.

Those two spheres are in a sense central, because they will make up a big part of the experience, in spite of being quite different and separate from a response on the poetic level, but will, once the poetic-level response is there, often be hijacked by it and integrated into the poetic experience.

The poetic response itself is largely on the level of analogy. Or, say some, symbolism. There is a great deal of terminological conflict, ambiguity and opacity here, and care has to be taken in the end (if I may, just by pleading, not wake some of my friends' hobbyhorses red in tooth and claw here? cf i e "Laws of motion")

In here, let's first make a distinction between a static and a dynamic sector.

The static sector is that of established signs, those things that we may not call symbols but rather synthemes if we follow Alleau; the things that have a simple or unambiguous translation or refer to something deliberately hidden. This is the sphere of conventional signs, of conventional systems of symbols, of symbols in Freud's sense, and of those associations that some claim have a biological basis. (In fact, even though evolutionary biology and developmental psychology will have some interesting things to say about this, the old question of environment versus heritage is as uninteresting as usual, because as usual the biological perspective is unable to demonstrate something else than uncontroversial fundamentals as long as it sticks to its own strict methodology and avoids mere speculation, while the empiristic social science perspective is unable to demonstrate anything else than the variability of traits and never their origin or meaning. Both perspectives might deliver interesting suggestions, but when they claim to contradict or even disprove each other they are usually out of their league.) Concretely, this sphere will try (and sometime succeed) to impose certain limits on associations, and it may clearly increase the field of epistemic-metonymic associations (my first category above) by relating to usages in various traditional mythologies, secret languages, folklore, magic and religion (which, in their turn, will also invoke more or less reified moments of dynamic symbolism, to which we then turn):

The dynamic sector is the one we surrealists know well from Reverdy's definition of the poetic image and Lautréamont's standard example, and moves in the direction of symbols in Alleau's sense; connections that produce meaning rather than refer to a preconceived meaning. This is the sphere of poetry strictly speaking. But it must be noted that poetry is an integrative framework that will at will employ all the other modes of association in a dynamising movement. And that by becoming productive, triggering poetic response, cascades of images, atmospheres and suggestions that in turn will provoke concrete suggestions on different levels of both poetic creativity, extrovert action and transforming life experience and life strategies, this is also where they fulfill the famous Feuerbach thesis and start changing the world. And once I have reached this point in my argument, I need to halt and go back to work – maybe this is all in vain and already solved in either of those obscure disciplines that I'm not quite oriented in...)

A suivre.

M Forshage

That elusive object of objectification

Note on phantom objects

We can't say it's not the case that every object is a phantom. Phantomness could be one of the things which interests us, or not. When the phantom object was recently suggested as a theme by the Leeds surrealist group, the Surrealist group in Stockholm responded, as it often does, with the idea to invent a game around it. If nothing else so for the very need of avoiding all these irrelevant or relevant, banal or innovative, arbitrary personal associations, and let surrealist method have the casting vote. Candidates were lining up, so much could be dismissed (candidates here referring to ideas not persons). We didn't spend much time looking up exactly which objects Breton had in mind if he mentioned phantom objects in "Crise de l'Objet" or if Dalí gave them a particular place in his theory of paranoiac-criticism, we felt the concept merited a more active contribution than that. There are other surrealist games about phantom objects. Perhaps "L'Un dans l'autre" is about phantom objects. We wouldn't want to be reinventing L'Un dans l'autre. Or perhaps its more about analogy in general. Isn't the phantom object something different and far more specific than just any object residing in another object in accordance with the principle of analogy? Phantom objects can perhaps be expected to be haunting, simultaneously touchable and untouchable, residing in everyday objects, such as the unmentionable horror making the prospect of putting your down hand down the rotten treestump so dreadful in Hugh Sykes Davies' 1936 "Poem", one of the most luminous contributions from english surrealism historically. But we wouldn't want to be reinventing his lovecraftian paranoia. Previously we have in Stockholm been working with "the mnemonic function of objects" and the "objectification of morals". We don't know if those are about phantom objects. There is a particular aspect of being which lets objects disregard their utilistic function and become available as imaginative objects, to join the preparations for real playing. Phantomness becomes metonymic as the elusiveness of that concept represents the elusive particular type of being we associate with phantoms, but talking linguistics is not the point. Instead, we have a habit of ending up discussing methodology. It appears like very much of the activity of the surrealist group in Stockholm is a perpetual delaying of formulating conclusions, by means of an unrestricted increasal of theoretical problems involved as well as dream and chance material into the apparently simplest of questions. We can't say it's not a poetic quest, even though some will be repelled by the shamelessly analytical framework occasionally employed. For six months we have been pondering how to devise a game involving phantom objects.

premonition of a locomotive

Stockholm surrealist group: excerpts from email discussion

EB:
A propos of phantom objects, but not quite a game suggestion yet:
Benjamin borrowed a dear old marxist conflict between form and content, the one between means of production and conditions of production: technical advances do as far as they're able borrow available (social) forms, but will sooner or later end up in conflict with the latter and bring about a formal "revolution". The marxism of the second international placed, as we know, the conflict on the level of the mode of production, while Benjamin interested himself for how the conflict expressed itself on the level of technical innovation.
Benjamin: "When trying to learn them properly, errors and mistakes occurred. From another viewpoint these attempts are the most true proofs that technical production in its initial phase was a prisoner of the realm of dreaming. (During certain stages, not only architecture but also technology bears witness of a collective dream.)"
Marx: "To what extent the old form of the means of production initially dominates the new form, is shown/.../ perhaps most strikingly: the locomotive that was experimentally constructed, before the present locomotives appeared, a locomotive which had two feet that it alternately raised just like a horse"
Thus the horse haunts the locomotive, the canvas the camera, the wood the steel, etc.

MF:
The classical example of a phenomenon contrary to that horse locomotive is what Apollinaire back in his days defined as surrealism "when man set out to reproduce walking, she invented the wheel, which isn't similar to walking at all" (approximate quote). A game could aim at reinventing the wheel, and finding those old idle ghosts haunting us because we are surrealists? Or do we want to find a specific absence in the single objects? What functional-auratic-sentimental inherent object has been completely chased off out of the object at which I am pointing? Which is the unforeseeable wheel which will totally replace the obsolete ridiculousness I am here hugging?

CA:
So, the game would consist of establishing a contact with the exterior, slightly more on the exterior's condition than usually, in order to bring about a transformation instead of the habitual, and thus chasing off the ghosts/ the phantom object part?

NN:
Erik, Erik Homburger Erikson said in a freudian context (three Erik in the same sentence!): The faucet is not a phallos symbol, but the phallos is rather a faucet symbol, since the the faucet would never have been invented if it wasn't for primary experiences of needing to pee while asleep etc, experiences which have very little to do with the aims ascribed to the object. This makes the plausible problem solvings of everyday life into mere post-factum-rationalisations, or distortions of their latent content, which may not at all, or only to a very small extent, have something to do with the formal.
The horse memory of the locomotive ought perhaps to go further back than the horse, to some primary process primordial scenes?
Perhaps that is the explanation of the film manuscript I dreamt in November, "The memories of a locomotive"!

THE MEMORIES OF A LOCOMOTIVE

Niklas Nenzén


I´m with a group of people watching a movie made by Merl which is narrated live in english by Emma, who impresses us with her broad theatrical texan accent, similar to how Dolly Parton or the actors in "Gone with the wind" speaks, or maybe even Elvis. She has an overly educational intonation, in the style of old children´s programmes.
 
The film is shown in a room where a lot of glasses are standing here and there on the floor. Each glass has a toothbrush standing in it. We get a little uncomfortable as we realize that Emma and Merl have stolen our toothbrushes, mixed them all up and placed them in this room and in the movie. Film starts.
 
FIRST SCENE: A room with a lot of glasses standing here and there on the floor. Each glass has a toothbrush standing in it. Camera focuses in on a train-set for kids among the glasses.
 
EMMA´S VOICE: Do you know what memories are? Do you know that sometimes they have never occurred, but that they´re still memories? Let´s look at what this locomotive remembers.
 
As the camera focuses in very close on the locomotive, the picture turns black.
 
SECOND SCENE: Camera sweeps slowly (from left to right) over a darkened room in a doll house. We see a dining table and some empty chairs.
 
THIRD SCENE: Winter in a village in northern sweden. A bit from the above (as from the second floor of a nearby house) we see where the main road is crossing the railway. The gates are down. A train passes by with A LOT of noise. Crashing sounds.
 
FOURTH SCENE: Same view, later on. Gates are still down. Some policemen walk about as if investigating the scene of an accident (implying an overrun car out of picture to the right). Something´s wrong with this. The policemen are walking a bit above the ground, they are passing the gates as if they´re not there and they generally don´t seem to relate accurately to their actual surroundings. It becomes clear to us wathing the film that the policemen are superimposed on the first scene artificially, them being a transparent layer from another film entirely.
 
FIFTH SCENE: The policemen are not policemen anymore, just a group of people walking about. The camera follows them as they cross the railway and follow the main road out of town into the snow-filled countryside. The group is aware of being superimposed and out of synch with the visible landscape. Their reaction to this is healthy and experimental; they try out new ways to walk, new paces, new angles of walking and so on. The creator of the film ingeniously helps them out with this, by moving their filmic layer about, adjusting it to - or distancing it from - the underlying layer. As she´s eschewing their layer, the group is actually moving like parallellograms!  I comment to my fellow spectators about Merl´s skills in doing this: She´s driving them like a car!
 
EMMA´S VOICE: They´re searching for the house of luuuv!
 
SIXTH SCENE: Arrival at a big old house. Emma stands in front of it, gesticulating as she speaks.
 
EMMA: Do you know who lives there? A woman with long black hair and ten dark children... Do you know what they´re all doing there all day long and all night long? Theyre miiiiining for luuuv! (she pronounces it "meaning") Yes they are! And do you know what they´re eating, this woman and all her children? They´re eating white chocolate and nougat and nothing else, yes indeed! Because that´s what GOLD is all about! It - will - melt - your - TEETH - down! Mmmmm... Do you know what that meeeeans? It means that there ain´t enough straws in the whole wide world to fill an old BUCKET!
 
SEVENTH SCENE: During her last sentence the picture of an old tin bucket with some dry grass straws standing in it is gradually superimposed over the previous scene.
 
(The word BUCKET is voiced explosively and in an intentionally vulgar way, which makes me wake up.)

BOXES

- Excerpt from a documentation/evaluation of an exhibition/event in Stockholm in May; exhibiting works by John Andersson, Mattias Forshage and Niklas Nenzén, including performances by Christian Andersson, MF, Micke Lundberg and Emma Lundenmark, for the event of the release of four books by MF at Styx publishers. The whole documentation can be downloaded as a pdf, and the books (in swedish) can be purchased from styx

SURREALIST BOXES are confined arrangements of surrealist objects. Primarily it is about invoking and/or investigating the poetical accomplicity and non-utilitarian autonomy of the objects. Thus the individual objects included are selected (or rather present themselves) to the extent that they produce real encounters (taking part in chains of chance events as well as mere glimpses of dynamic and elusive meaning-production and in the end in the radicalisation of living) first with the finder/ boxmaker when they are found (trouvés) and then with each other within the box. (Philosophically, in the process the subject/ object-relation is addressed and challenged. The box format also brings in the notion of portability with everything relating to it regarding notions of freedom, repetivity and male sexuality at the same time as the box itself (Büchse) remains a traditional female sexual symbol and an obvious site for secrets, enigmas and treasures.) Thus, surrealist boxes can be characterised as snapshots of, or experimental setups for, the secret lives of objects in a portable arena. (...)

Biological time (box by M Forshage)