Stale Slices

Lying down on the scholarly page, we know that many academics free associate; their material not the unconscious but those texts sleeping on their shelves. The call for Doctor Freud loud when writing about pictures; for how else comprehend what's not in words?

A lion-hearted general, with a lioness jumping up at him - symbolising as it were the psyche lowered to the level of a wild beast - stares admiringly, with rigid bronze features, at a blurred portrait of Napoleon, the representative of power, of the state, of authority. There is a striking contrast between the head, which clearly bears its metallic origins, and the soft contours of the powerful torso formed by another technique. Perhaps in this way the artist is pointing to the contrast between the fanatical, rigid will of the dictator and the fact that he belongs to a broader humanity, as his bodily shape demonstrates. Thus the very first picture in the series documents in a few expressive forms the problem of the will to power.1

A man thinking? We have our doubts. This chap can't look at pictures with the naked mind. No, he sees a painting through frosted glass; through the heavy-duty words, the pebbled panes, the impenetrable phrases, of some scholarly monograph. Telling him what to think, they console for lack of insight, hide his embarrassing want of taste, that dull vision. Thinking too difficult, old boy? No worries, we’ll help you out; as they snigger at a mind bereft of invention; giggle as they pump this vacuum glass full of fusty air. The reason why books so loved, so desperately needed; also their danger; a substitute for thought, they become a zimmer frame for the limp intelligence.

You commiserate over those arthritic pronouncements, but ask what have I to say....

Maybe nothing. Words not the best way to understand art; while description is often otiose. Robert Wyatt, in a wonderful interview with an interviewer who needs language like a monoglot a translator, says that there is no need to translate his songs into words, for a music’s meaning is the music.2 For a musician the medium conveys the message; the notes embodying a feeling that words are too crude to catch. Literature plays the same game, though a complex argument must be made to substantiate this apparently paradoxical statement. But that is for another time; for now let’s keep it simple. If we are using words to capture magic they have to be as finely drawn as the art which is their victim. If not a master craftsman, carving the deft phrase, then an artful thinker laying out thought as fine as a painter’s brush strokes. 

I see you. In this two-way mirror, our shared screen, I see those pursed those lips, that ghost of a frown, your hobgoblin of a dismissive head-shake. I know. You think I’m evading your request (or was it a command?). Maybe I am. Perhaps, as with much art, I have nothing to say about a work not one of Max’s best. 

Is there anything you can write? you ask, as you fidget on your seat, treat the keyboard as a drum. 

Turn down the central heating, my friend, open the window, let a cold scarf of wind wrap around that red neck…. It is possible that Ernst too was enthralled by Freud and Breton’s Left wing cant; the collage a crude satire of authority, our Darwinian beast. This is possible. But Max has always seemed livelier than some doltish cook re-heating corpse cuts. We suspect more ambiguous feelings. We imagine the artist’s insect eye.... 

Max domesticates authority, turns the beast into a tame version of man. The portrait of Napoleon, that battlefield supremo, has become a cartoon; with war, that supreme crime, transformed into a comic escapade, a child’s entertainment. War is for kids. And the old soldier? Putting on fancy dress to impress himself: he must look like a real animal when Max paints his picture. As with much of Surrealism, it is a joke; the reason Monty Python nicked most of its best lines.

We shouldn’t forget that this artist is smart. The best way to deal with authority, and this Max knows, is to reduce it to tiny tot size; ridicule humanity’s strongest weapon. Max fight a general, take down some head of state? Havin’ a laff arnt u? Better make them a teddy bear; we cuddle, lick and kiss.

To understand this work, is to understand something about Max, his dislike of his father, a symbol of power, its wilful obtuseness. A life-long rebellion of a child using a child’s tools.

The sclerotic academic can only repeat the Freudian cliché; he has no idea how it can be twisted into different shapes. Here the shape isn’t interesting, for its relies on Max’s familiar repertoire. The feel of a formula. But unlike prof, Max doesn’t borrow his formulas from elsewhere but creates them out of himself. A lesson all should learn. The meaning of art is not out there waiting to be found, labelled, catalogued; it’s not some bibliographic hen to pluck. No! We must create meaning for ourselves, art to stimulate new feelings, new ideas….

Too often we have the taste of stale bread. Academics and curators serving up ideas that have been left out too long on the table.

Then the question of style; this a bureaucrat who writes memoranda mistaking them for paragraphs. No insights here! Such characters clop, clump, clomp over the surface of things. While we…we stumble over their words like pebbles on a beach. The only patch of sand cleared by Max himself.

Max Ernst was born in the year 1891, as a Prussian subject, in the Rhineland. Difficulties began in his parental home, and at school, as the belief took root in the son’s mind that he was born to paint. The grown-ups sought to suppress this idea by force. The educational folly of the grown-ups was no match for the mind of the boy. To resist it was associated in his mind with a secret feeling of joy. This feeling was to have decisive importance for his later life: it opened up to him almost limitless possibilities of finding, wherever his destiny and the events of the world might bring him, wonderful friends among like-minded people, among devils and angels all free as air. This explains the so-called ‘many-sidedness’ of his work.

A painter may know what he does not want. But woe betide him if he wants to know what he does want! A painter is lost if he finds himself. The fact that he succeeded in not finding himself is regarded by Max Ernst as his only ‘achievement’. [M.E.]3

Note the stress on the unknown, the ambiguous, the unseen. His work is all about mystery. Here is the critic’s chief problem: their very raison d’être is to destroy what the artist creates.

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Notes

1.  Dieter Wyss, in Uwe M Schneede, The Essential Max Ernst. 

2. Robert Wyatt on Rock Bottom.

3.  Max Ernst in The Essential Max Ernst.

             Une semaine de bonté