How to Be a Surrealist (by Dean Young)

Sleep well. A gland in the command
center releases its yellow hornet
to tell you you're missing the point,
the point being that getting smacked
by a board, gored by umbrellas, tongue-
lashed by cardiologists, bush-wacked
by push-up bras is a learning experience.
Sure, you're about learned up. Weren't
we promised the thieves would be punished?
Promised jet-packs and fleshy gardenias
and wine to get the dust out of our mouths?
And endless forgiveness? A floral rot
comes out of the closet, the old teacher's
voice comes out of the ravine, red-wings
in rushes never forget their rusty-hinged
song. Moon-song, dread-song, hardly-a-song
at all song. Let's ignore that call,
let someone else stop Mary from herself
for the 80th time. It's never really dark
anyway, not even inside the skull. Take
my hand, fellow figment. Every spring
we'll meet, definite as swarms of stars,
insects over glazed puddles, your eyes
green even though your driver's license
says otherwise. And yes, mortal knells
in sleepless hours, hollow knocks of empty
boats against a dock but still the mind
is a meadow, the heart an ocean even though
it burns. As long as there's a sky, someone
will be falling from it. After molting,
eat your own shucked skin for strength,
keep changing the subject in hopes
that the subject will change you.

auto-destruction

 The moment this project was assigned, I recalled a conversation I recently had with a good friend of mine, a non-UNCSA visual arts student. I played La Valse by Maurice Ravel for her, an orchestral work in which a (relatively) traditional waltz unravels into chaos over about thirteen minutes. After listening to it, she showed me James A. M. Whistler's painting, Nocturne in Black and Gold. I have not been able to confirm this, but she told me that, because Whistler used certain chemicals in his paint, some of his paintings are not displayed upright for more than a few hours to keep the paint from running.

Both of these works of art are self-destructive, albeit in different ways. Ravel carefully constructed La Valse with every intention of having the piece implode on itself. Whistler may have just been trying to keep his paint wet for as long as possible. I find the idea of turning a medium against itself intriguing. I designed this project to not only destroy itself, but to also create itself (at least theoretically). I have taken the very means by which one traditionally uses watercolors (the addition of water to powdered paint), deconstructed it, and pushed it to an extreme.

I rubbed the dried pigment into the watercolor paper using both my hands and a palette knife. I then slowly dripped water onto the paper. At first, this “makes” the piece from the perspective of how watercolors typically work. If the water is allowed to completely fill the container that the paper is resting in, it should completely wash the paint from the paper, leaving perhaps only a grayish stain.

The non-art implications of this are familiar to any self-aware American. In this country where bigger is supposed to be better, we are beginning to realize that such a tendency toward excess may be our undoing.

Now that I've figured out what I want to do for my final project, I can't go to sleep. I can't persuade my brain to stop worrying about logistics. I do take that as a good sign, though. I look forward to this project.

Situationist International

“Modern technology, they argued, had made it possible today for people to forgo work by necessity and to spend their life in activities they would choose freely. But the established powers did not allow this to happen. To insure the continuous expansion needed to maintain their hold, they created artificial scarcity by incessantly promoting new cravings and aspirations.”(Maayan)

How prescient the Situationists were! In the new millennium more than ever do people feel the iron hold that consumerism has over their lives. How often are we counseled by doctors against the negative effects of stress? Yet, such stress is a natural reaction to the unnatural position people of the contemporary world that requires constant competition to reach the top of the social ladder. Though I am certain many students of the School of the Arts change their minds about their career path after graduation, I think that the majority of us come to school having already rejected the possession-centered lifestyle peddled by society (at least in theory). This is because we students have found something we love to do. The Situationists are highly preoccupied with having people find what they love without being tempted by the bait put forth by corporations and governments. To do this, they suggest solutions such as psychogeography, the concept of which gives me the warm fuzzies, and self-managing groups.

The idea of psychogeography could also be applied to education. The idea of exploration as the primary source of knowledge is not a new thought, but its connection to Situationism is. If somehow this idea had been put into practice in the education system during the 1950s and '60s, I think the Situationists would have found a population more responsive to their ideas and, therefore, a foundation upon which to build a new kind of society.

Ideas such as self-managing groups are, I feel, only possible as an alternative to government if the current government is overthrown while, simultaneously, peoples' ability to make their own decisions is bolstered through an educational system derived from the concept of psychogeography. To overhaul the government/corporations is not enough; people must be taught how to work together to solve problems that would have been otherwise solved without their input by those in power.

“In their view, art's ability to isolate aspects of existence and to highlight their quality of the absolute made it easier for people to overlook the misery of everyday life. And even if occasionally art conveyed that misery, or through innovations in style or content challenged prevailing values, it always ended up by being assimilated into mainstream culture and by having its nonconformist works transformed into commodities.”(Maayan)

I have to agree with with Maayan deems the artistic wing of the early Situationist movement. Debord himself claimed that the group wished to “extend the nonmediocre part of life,” yet he denies art as a nonmediocre aspect of life. I think the mistake that the Situationists made was to assume that art could not be part of everyday living, when I believe it not only can be part of everyday living but should be a part of it. Because art is seen as something to be contemplated, it should be right up the Situationists' alley to promote life being contemplated in the same way. Through ideas like dérive, the Situationists approach the idea of teaching the public to be open to the emotional aspects of their surroundings, but to me, they fall short in their specificity. Should the Situationists have adopted the promotion of the arts in addition to their other concepts, I think they would have found art to be an excellent tool for reminding people how to evaluate their lives. Art could be seen as a practice run for the real world.

And who cares if it gets co-opted? Make something new. The constant pressure to stay ahead of the mediocritizing effect of advertising and government slogans would have kept the Situationists on their toes and forced them to evolve ahead of the established ideas that they fought. While I appreciate their intense desire to avoid being assimilated into the machine of modern society, the Situationists seemed naïve to not recognize just how good that machine is at removing all meaning and replacing it with dollar signs. It is too idealistic to expect to be able change society without resistance from those profiting from the status quo, so why not make use of that resistance? Deny the artworks once they have lost their value. Take such opportunities to show the public the difference between that which is significant and that which is nothing more than a contrived product.

the envelopes were just a match

I think the class (as in the students, not the course) needed today.

A bit of out order, but oh well.

Project #4: Sound Machine

This project presented a unique challenge to me. I first envisioned a Rube Goldberg machine, but then I worried about getting it properly set up in class. (In class, I watched as other students dealt with that problem.) Instead, I started thinking about the sound I wanted. Water glasses. Creating a machine to play the rims seemed too daunting, but surely I could come up with something to hit the glasses.

I should have asked for help immediately, because PVC pipe stuffed onto a cork "liquid nailed" onto a spinning motor the size of my pinkie nail was not going to work. I asked the opinion of a few family members, who happily pointed me to a hoarder's dream basement. I found a hot glue gun (my savior) and some weed-whacker line/rope/whatever that red plastic thing is and got to work.

Once the machine was spinning, everything fell into place.

The project was required to have five steps from origin to sound, and those five steps had to take up at least three feet. I decided to define my one "sound" as a combination of sounds, much in the way that arpeggiated notes may sounding at different times, yet they can create one chord. My weed-whacker chord was a foot long, giving the water glass circle a circumference of over three feet.

This assignment was technically demanding, and I assumed I had skills that I did not. In the theory vs. practice debate, I've tended in the past to do my best work on the theory side of the spectrum. I'd like to try to change that, and this project was a good start.