| Artist: | Ernst, Max |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | from Une Semaine de Bonte (One Week of Kindness) | |
| Date of Work: | 1933-1934 | |
| Nationality: | German | |
| Context: | Post-War Fantasy | |
| Movement: | Surrealism | |
| Medium: | Photo-Montage Novel | |
| Subject: scene from a photomontage novel called "Une Semaine de Bonte" (One Week of Kindness), which Ernst made in a three week visit to Italy right at the time Hitler was taking power in Germany. Using found images from Victorian encyclopedias and novels, he cuts up his sources and re-contextualizes them into a seamless vision made to appear like a dream. The intent is to transform the banal and everyday into dramas of one's "most secret desires." (Contrast with Dada photomontage, which is decidedly not seamless in its cuts, clashing juxtaposisitons, and "edge," its content being aggressively and ironically focused on political satire rather than dream imagery; see Hannah Hoch and Raoul Hausmann). Here a bird-man in bowler hat is ushered into a bourgeois drawing room by a fine young lady; he will have to watch his step, however, because the odd family pet is rolling around on the carpet in this otherwise ever-so-proper fashionable room. Ernst plays here with Freudian dream theory (displacement, condensation, and fetish), plus alluding to a latent vs. manifest content. Style: Ernst follows Freudian dream logic in his photomontage strategies: 1) he displaces images from their normal context and source, exploiting irrational juxtapositions; 2) he condenses two dissimilar things into one image, for ex., the bird head on a man's body; and 3) he uses the bird as a fetish symbol, recalling his own alter-ego, Loplop, Superior of the Birds (birds will often figure into his work as symbols of seduction). The surreal photomontage differs from the dada photomontage not only in content (dream imagery vs. political satire), but in its seamless editing (vs. the dada photomontage is "cut with a kitchen knife" so you see the edits and disruptions; see Hannah Hoch). The surreal photomontage is less a social or political critique than an investigation into the surreal "marvelous" and the poetry of the unconscious. Context: Hitler had just taken power in Germany and the Nazis had already started to condemn the art of the avant-garde, including German Expressionism and Surrealism as aberrations and degenerate. The world was, in other words, fast becoming all-too-surreal. Ernst's surrealism is very much caught up in a reading of Freud (as a university student, he had studied abnormal psychology) and in games of mental subversion, making us question pre-conceived assumptions about reality. In the photomontages he sets out to de-rail waking logic in order to uncover a latent surreality; his art is a journey into an uncharted psychic landscape. He uses strategies of psychic automatism and exploits irrational juxtapositions as a point of departure and basis for inducing hallucination and a dream state. Collage here is not at all what it was in cubism; for Ernst and the other surrealists it is a way to transform the banal and everyday into the "marvelous," surrealism's form of the sublime, and a way to tap into one's "most secret desires." | ||
