DIDIER OTTINGER, SURREALISM AND MODERN MYTHOLOGY

par Guy Delacour

Didier Ottinger's book is the most important on surrealism among those written by art historians in the last fifteen years. In its mass, the book production generated by the major exhibitions in Paris and London is unfortunately disappointing. It is in no way a cortege of Orpheus, but rather the return of old dinosaurs. Always reissues, and, moreover, the same hostile refrains to surrealism. The scholarly works of the last generation are the poor relations excluded from the feast who, like the publications of the Research Center on Surrealism, sometimes slip in as if by break-in.

In this disaster, Ottinger's work manages to stay afloat. On France Culture, its author himself presented it as a light format. This work is indeed unpretentious and in no way wants to do anything other than art history: interdisciplinarity is therefore absent from it. Ottinger appears little informed about the production of literary studies devoted to the old thematic of the relationships between surrealism and myths (1). He ignores poetry, politics, literary studies and belongs to another generation than that of W. Spies, Nadeau or Marguerite Bonnet etc. He studied art history with Bataille, having at his disposal the critical apparatus of La Pléiade for Breton, and especially the works of Rosalind Krauss, to whom he pays emphatic homage.

Ottinger knows how to present the often sordid stakes of art history and the museum world, of which he is part. In a few sentences of perverse simplicity, he engages in a systematic demolition of the fable spread by Clement Greenberg and his emulators, great organizer in recent decades of artistic modernity, who reduced surrealism to the needs of his presentation, carefully circumventing (2) "the nonetheless close relations of New York artists with surrealism."

All this is not new. When one has heard Ottinger commenting on the new arrangement of the rooms of the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou - Rothko, Matta, Masson, Gorky and Pollock being presented on the same walls - the well-foundedness of his criticism is evident. In fact, the essential merit of this book is to announce the orientations of the new generation of museum directors, opposed to "the modernist vulgate, this fable from across the Atlantic." But one will regret that Ottinger, one of the most promising exhibition curators, did not have the courage, any more than anyone to date, to really tackle a necessary and urgent revision (3).

The opportunity was missed to present surrealism differently to the general public, especially since it will be necessary to wait ten to twenty years to again have the material means mobilized by this year's exhibitions. A real book at least will have traced the contours of the "profound affinities of surrealism and mythical thought":

Rather than a movement inserted between one "ism" and another, it would be appropriate to connect surrealism to this recurring wave which, at regular intervals, revives the forces of phusis, makes chimeras proliferate, the free associations of the imagination.

By professional deformation no doubt, Ottinger has written this book like an audio-guide, helping the visitor to traverse the rooms of a virtual exhibition. Each chapter has as its title the entrance panel of a room, 14 in all. One speaks there of surrealism, mythology, Bataille, Breton, Péret, Duchamp, Malcolm de Chazal, Leiris, Walter Benjamin, Mabille, Jung (unwelcome to our taste), Charles Estienne, Carl Einstein, Baudrillard, Detienne, Victor Hugo (a truism, in these times), Eliot, Kafka, Ovid, Graham (J. of course), Suquet, Marcel Mauss, Frazer, Béguin, Maurice Heine, Everling (alas, we must indeed have a society woman, wife of a patron), Caillois, Ashton, Rosalind Krauss, Hollier, Bazin, J.-P. Vernant and P. Vidal-Naquet... and I forget some. We are there in good company, worthy of any honest contemporary man. That makes a lot for a light format. He did not want to omit any of the knots of Ariadne's thread.

The first room, Ariadne, is in full light: De Chirico and Nietzsche disorient us in the joys and enigmas of a strange hour. There is Picasso, the painter and his model, Picabia the sphinx, Duchamp and his balls of string, to the disgust of having seen them so much, finally Masson, a labyrinth unto himself.

The second is marked by the shadow of Fantômas. It is the kingdom of night. The child's brain will not cease to play intriguing games there. Magritte shows his sense of night there. If we want to leave, we cannot yet, because Brassaï's stairs still lead us to Fantômas, on the rooftops of Paris.

In the third, the Pythia has taken the garb of Masson, of Brauner with the enucleated eye, of the premonitory portrait of Apollinaire. For Ottinger, it is under the pressure of Bataille and his review Documents that surrealism, after moving away from communism, let the Pythia exercise her grip. The essential hinge spotted in the effectiveness of Bataille's maieutics, truly internalized by Breton during his New York exile, is a rewriting. The merit of this perspective is to sweep away the prejudice of an avant-garde piled up in a corner of the twenties/thirties and the cliché of the perpetual criss-cross Bataille/Breton presented as the struggle of low and high, of the scarab digging in excrement and the dragonfly flying in ideality. These fantasies, replaced by the idea of a permeability between these two heralds of the last century, bring more visibility to the Pythia's messages already present in romanticism.

In the fourth room, we encounter Minotaure, the monster and the review. It is Goethe who opens the door. This room is that of the surrealists' initiation to the "religious" phenomenon by Bataille, the great passage, to which is added the episode of Contre-Attaque, which "also opens surrealist minds to political alternatives that will have a fruitful posterity":

The first is the utopian thought of Charles Fourier, who figures among the master thinkers of the ephemeral revolutionary movement. The second is anarchy, which Benjamin Péret (4) discovers with enthusiasm during the Spanish civil war.

Evolving from communism to utopia and anarchy, social analysis surreptitiously slips from Marxist dialectic to the polarity of the sacred.

Yes, there, it is indeed a rewriting, in the bad sense of the term.

The fifth room is that of Pasiphaé's "Sadean aesthetic." One encounters there Masson's Pasiphaé, Giacometti's The Murdered Woman, Bellmer's Games of the Doll, Seabrook's photos, Leather Mask and Collar, Magritte's The Rape, Wild Animal Attacking a Nude Woman, The Kiss, and the cover of Minotaure, these last three works being by Picasso.

The sixth room is Acéphale, named after Bataille's review. Let us pass quickly, as this is so well known. As well as for the seventh, L'Age d'or.

Let us stop for a moment at the eighth, The Great Transparents, "at the crossroads of the Bretonian conception of myth." There, the art historian hits right on the question, so ductile and so hysterically taboo for art historians, of Duchamp's relationships with surrealism:

Far from a historiography, which, by phobia of surrealism, has produced a one hundred percent Dadaist Duchamp, it is appropriate to recall to what extent his path has not ceased to cross that of surrealism.

The ninth room is that of Quetzalcóatl. Very disappointing. To read only for those who still ignore the role played by the discovery of Mexican culture by Rothko (before the arrival of the surrealists in the Americas). This is a particularly failed chapter, and which moreover falls back into the vision of surrealism considered only from the angle of its contribution to the formation of the American school.

The same sin (drive out the natural, it returns at a gallop) operates in the eleventh room, The Moon-Woman. Admirable for those interested in the formation of the New York school, indispensable on Rothko, Motherwell, Stieglitz, Graham, Pollock, Newman, Gottlieb. As for the small paragraph truly concerning the surrealists, it will teach us nothing by recalling that Breton frequented second-hand dealers and antique dealers in search of Pueblo figurines. With accuracy, he nevertheless signals the role of an essential text at this period of surrealism, the Preface to the Anthology of Myths, Legends and Folk Tales of America, by Benjamin Péret. But it is to reproduce, worse, an error of the critical apparatus of volume III of Breton's Works (5), claiming that the latter would have engaged Péret to undertake a vast study on myths. Is it useful to specify that, far from having oriented any writing whatsoever of Péret, it is on the contrary with stupefaction that Breton discovered Péret's text? (6)

Not content to treat cavalierily the complexity of the intertextuality that links Breton and Péret, Ottinger, so keen on the relationships between Duchamp and surrealism, ignores the following significant fact (and to be explained!): this work by Péret is the only one of surrealism co-signed by Duchamp.

Duchamp and the ghost of his Soigneur de gravité (7) is the subject of the twelfth room. Excellent chapter.

Useless to detail the thirteenth room: The Mothers, one of the most fascinating.

The fourteenth room, Dionysos II (the return), is to our taste too cluttered by Barthes, idol here ridiculed by the author with his customary effectiveness, and by Jung. Ottinger oscillates between the taste for American painters and the return to the surrealists. Yet, he is superb and has panache. He overflows on all sides the periodization linked to the denounced vulgate. He evokes, without unfortunately really analyzing it, the role of Charles Estienne in the evolution of surrealism, and many others. Difficult to break with more power the underlying ideology of the major exhibitions of this year 2002, by recalling Breton's recognition, devoid of any formalist or ideological prejudice, of Duvillier, of Degottex in 1955 and his Far Eastern influences or again of Hantaï, Molinier or Mimi Parent. And if, in the 1960s, referring to Breton's mythologies, "Victor Brauner paints a cycle of paintings devoted to Mythologies and Mothers' Festivals (1965)," Ottinger concludes with pessimism:

But who, in 1965, still believes in the necessity of myths?

His book, in any case, allows us not to despair completely (perhaps?) of art history. Beyond its imperfections, and failing to propose a true alternative to Greenberg and his emulators of today, it is in fact a sort of bible for today's art histories, but which will have to be surpassed.

For all those who care little about historiographical questions, there will remain, among all the books on surrealism written by exhibition curators, a book friendly to surrealism, which is all too rare.

(1) To correct this insufficiency, one can for example read, in Mélusine n° XIX, 1999, T. Aubert's critical article, "Within Reach of Myth," pp. 349-355, which analyzes A. Tamuly's study, that of C. Maillard-Chary and the works of J.-C. Blachère.

(2) In Peinture à l'américaine in particular, Greenberg's essential work, absolutely to be read.

(3) Didier Ottinger is currently chief curator at the George Pompidou national museum where he has been curator of the exhibitions "The Capital Sins," David Hockney, Philip Guston. He is preparing there the Max Beckmann exhibition, much awaited.

(4) Poor Péret, always so mistreated by historiography, even in its most recent version. Let us recall however here that Péret never manifested particular sympathy for anarchism. Quite the contrary, he never ceased to mock these anarchists who became ministers thanks to the Spanish civil war. He found himself fighting in the Durruti militias only because the POUM did not want him and his friends. See on this subject the Complete Works of Benjamin Péret, at Losfeld, then Corti editions.

(5) Breton, Complete Works, volume III, Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, October 1999, p. 1210.

(6) See André Breton's letter to Péret, May 26, 1943, BRT C 262, Doucet archives.

(7) Superb passage of Ottinger's book, to be savored slowly and with delight. If Didier Ottinger had maintained his entire book at this level, worthy of a Robert Lebel, he would then have realized the program he calls for with all his wishes.