KATHARINE CONLEY, SURREALIST GHOSTLINESS

par Georgiana Colvile

Since Katharine Conley's new book has not yet been translated into French, the problem of the title arises, the keyword ghostliness having no equivalent in French. One could say "Surrealism and its Ghosts" or "Ghosts of Surrealism," but I prefer to borrow Jacques Derrida's neologism, to whom the author of this book often refers, which gives "The Ghostliness of Surrealism" or "Surrealism and Ghostliness."

This book, remarkable for its clarity and openness, proposes a fascinating rereading of surrealism, while remaining faithful to André Breton's fundamental principles. Originally, the movement he founded defined itself as a revolutionary and marginal counter-culture. With the passage of time, it has been integrated into the corpus of "classics," has been catalogued in school textbooks and has joined the traditional history of plastic arts and literature, first French, then worldwide. Here, Conley offers us a decentralized vision of surrealism, by referring it to its enlarged borders, its differences and its hidden connotations. Surrealist Ghostliness (hereafter abbreviated as SG followed by pagination) presents an in-depth study on the double nature of surrealist creative production, based on the example of anamorphosis, a figure consecrated by Holbein's The Ambassadors (1533). The selection of 9 visual artists analyzed in this sense includes 5 women (Claude Cahun, Lee Miller, Dorothea Tanning, Francesca Woodman, Susan Hiller) and 4 men (Man Ray, Brassaï, Salvador Dalí and Pierre Alechinsky). Without directly pleading the cause of women in surrealism, Conley deliberately confirms their integration as acquired, and through her choice of artists she announces the exploration of various margins of the movement in question. The theorist focuses sometimes on creators on the temporal or spatial periphery of Breton's group, like Brassaï, Alechinsky, Woodman or Hiller, the last two being downright post-surrealist, sometimes on a minor or little-known aspect of their work, such as Man Ray's cinematographic objects, the "involuntary sculptures" of Brassaï and Dalí, Miller's Egyptian landscapes or Tanning's Gothic writings. To the various forms of marginality characterizing these works is juxtaposed their ghostliness and/or their anamorphotic level (term used by Baltrusaitis); their double meaning also corresponds to an access to the artist's unconscious, which is transmitted to the viewer. Moreover, all these particularities can apply as well to literature as to visual arts. According to Conley, the ghostliness of surrealism is linked to the mediumistic spiritism of the 19th century, to the jerky rhythm of automatism, to the sensual and tactile relationship with objects and to a triple mechanism of doubling, textual, visual and corporeal (SG, 8-12).

The examples used by Conley to demonstrate her theory of doubles and/or specters in surrealist art seem very convincing to me. She begins with one of the first members of Breton's group, Man Ray, whose work (photography, painting, films, objects) proves particularly multidisciplinary. The author cites an interview with Ray, who had declared that he always needed two juxtaposed objects which, separated, had nothing to do with each other (SG, 22). For Conley, Ray's fascination with objects and the word games he exchanged with Duchamp reflect the tactile or intellectual ghostly sensations that episodically haunt every individual, in the form of a Bretonian automatism qualified by Foucault as a "raw and naked act." Conley minutely examines in this sense the role of objects in 4 films by Man Ray (Return to Reason, Emak Bakia, The Starfish, The Mysteries of the Château du Dé) and maintains that the whirling dance of objects in these works, sketched by the scintillating movement of light captured by the camera, leaves like a ghostly visual trail, linking past to future and transmitting to the viewer the fascination thus aroused in the filmmaker (SG, 43).

From Man Ray, Conley moves on to Claude Cahun (1894-1954). The photographer and writer from Nantes had been the first of three surrealists to photograph a living human head under a glass bell, with the self-portrait Untitled (1925), a doctored image where life and death coexist, which later inspired Man Ray (Homage to D. A. F. de Sade, 1930), then Lee Miller (Tanja Ramm and the Belljar, Variant on Hommage à D.A.F.de Sade, c. 1930). Ray and Miller used the same female model, Tanja Ramm, in a ghostly attitude evoking the decapitations of the Revolution, whereas Cahun's self-portrait (her preferred genre) appears quite alive, despite the implicit presence of death. Other doubles are outlined there, including sexual ambiguity and the memory of 19th-century spiritualist photography. Conley also examines in detail the anamorphosis as it manifests itself in another photographic self-portrait, Human Frontier (Bifur, n° 5, 1930), as well as the spectral part of the past, negation and the unconscious in Aveux non avenus (1930, 2002), the photographer's anarchizing autobiography.

The choice of the Involuntary Sculptures (Minotaure, 1933) by Brassaï and Dalí contributes a collaboration of two artists, a photographer and a painter, another form of doubling, to Conley's topic, who qualifies this work as "ethnographic automatism" (SG, 69). During the thirties, the surrealists, already keen on psychoanalysis, began to take interest in ethnography as a "scientific method [...] offering a new way to study the unknown and explore the psychic geography of humans, habits and objects, by combining science and art, through photography" (SG, 71). Thus, the small fragments of detritus randomly collected by the two artists, then photographed by Brassaï, integrate into the review Minotaure, whose title refers to the mythological monster with double human and animal identity, as involuntary sculptures, or reinvented objects, as if masked, bearers of a "spectral beauty" (Dalí's expression), which combines the inanimate and the animate. Moreover, another ghostliness emanates from these heterogeneous elements: that of the blurring between the image's content and what the viewer projects onto it (SG, 80).

Until recently, the eventful life of American photographer Lee Miller (1907-1977) had mainly inspired biographical texts. Conley is among the first to explore her technical tricks and the ghostly plurality of her surrealist vision, dwelling here on the photos of Egyptian landscapes taken by Miller in the thirties, a little-known period of her photographic work. The author sees the desert spaces envisioned by Miller as haunted by human bodies, especially feminine ones, and compares Miller's reaction to landscapes to that of Brassaï to objects. The photos of domed buildings or rocks with bodily forms become organic, even tactile. Conley makes a long analysis of Miller's best-known Egyptian photo: Portrait of Space (1937), which she reads as an auto-reflexive meditation, where a specular portrait of the photographer would be inscribed, haunted by "the having been there of the photo" (Derrida and Barthes), attracting the viewer toward the interior of the tent, imaginary according to Conley, from where Miller seems to have captured the image of a torn mosquito net. The tear opens onto an expanse of sand, where someone seems to have fled. "Through her invocation of the photographer's body she makes her photos sensual [...] she allows the viewer to access a sort of surrealist double vision, which allows him to reflect his interior landscape while looking outward" (SG, 116). For Conley, the exploration of photographic mechanisms could lead to that of the latent and ghostly faces of the world, sought by surrealism.

The chapter on Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) proves the longest, the most in-depth, especially since it includes almost all stages of the artist's work, in any case her painting, her Gothic fiction and her fabric sculptures. Conley reveals an interior energy and an explosive force in Tanning especially in her neo-baroque paintings representing wildly determined adolescents, grappling with hostile elements that emerge from mysterious and inaccessible places where they desire to penetrate, behind walls or closed doors. The same force emerges from the self-portrait Birthday (1942), where the artist represents herself in a pretty old-fashioned dishevelment, adorned with branches and leaves, which could serve as a costume for Titania in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, accompanied by a fantastic animal alter ego, before a series of open doors and looking forward, toward a ghostly elsewhere/future. Conley establishes a parallel between these feminine pictorial protagonists and Destina, the heroine of Tanning's Gothic novel in two versions, Abyss (1977) and Chasm (2004), influenced by Ann Radcliffe's books. All these intellectual and sensual women, with very present bodies, seek to discover the experience of life and to construct autonomy for themselves, while intertwining their personal destiny with that of others. By analyzing other works, including the engravings of the 7 Spectral Perils of the fifties, the Tangos series and the soft sculptures including Sofa in Rainy Weather (1970), Conley concludes that Tanning does not obtain her spectral effects through anamorphosis. Her feminine characters, in the process of discovery, seek another reality and desire to find knowledge; they live in two spheres, one domestic and the other ghostly, mythical and exploratory. A convinced surrealist, the artist wanted to make visible the spectral and latent marvelous in daily life (SG, 149).

After Tanning, who lived more than 100 years, Conley turns to the young photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981), also American, a sort of meteoric feminine Rimbaud, who committed suicide at 22 while leaving an exceptional work, which Conley calls an "interior ghostly cartography." One often finds there settings of dilapidated houses with a haunted appearance. As with Cahun, Conley finds in Woodman a double reality characteristic of surrealist ghostliness and evocative of 19th-century spiritualist photography. Born eight years before Breton's death, Woodman as an adult creator is situated in the post-surrealist period. She had studied her medium as much in Italy as in the USA and it was in Rome at the Libreria Maldoror that she discovered surrealism and read Breton. As Conley notes, Woodman described herself in her notebooks as closer to Robert Desnos and the baroque aesthetic of the surrealists than to American Gothic. Conley chose one of the most spectral of Woodman's photos, House#3 (1976), for the cover of her book. This image includes most of the typical aspects of the photographer's work: a Rimbaldian self-representation (sometimes fragmented) where "I is another"; an "angelism" combining reality and surreality and expressing sexual ambiguity, a vaporous aura obtained by the use of blur; finally the bodily aspect, including of the house, which the protagonist does not fully integrate. The women in Woodman's photos come or go, sometimes stopping in the in-between of a threshold or crossing through a wall. Like Tanning's young heroines, Woodman's are in full quest, playful or not, for experience, for an otherness, for an elsewhere, both interior and exterior, while holding up a mirror to the viewer. In the deliberate blurring of certain images, Conley perceives a palimpsest effect (SG, 177).

Now, it is the "spectral palimpsests" (SG, 179) that interest Conley in the Belgian painter-engraver and former member of the Cobra movement, Pierre Alechinsky (born in 1927). This artist, who had studied printing, has often blurred the border between art and craft. He created surrealist ghostliness effects in the 1980s, by superimposing the past time of history and the spontaneity (true 'impulse' for Alechinsky) of a present haunted by the past, which for me evokes Deleuze's "sheets of time" and Alain Resnais's historical films. Alechinsky adds a material and tactile dimension by painting or drawing with India ink on 19th-century maps whose aged material he loves, thus approaching children's drawings and art brut. His multiple palimpsests lay the ghosts of Cobra and surrealism on those that emerge from historical maps. Images juxtapose fragments of writing, which contributes to the fact that Alechinsky considers his painting as a language. A Belgian living in France, the painter is situated between 2 cultures and identifies with Gilles, character of the Binche carnival, memory of his Belgian childhood and representative of disorder facing order in general or the chronology of History in particular. According to Conley, the way the artist incessantly and systematically interweaves writing and painting constitutes a paradigm of surrealist ghostliness, close to the word games of Desnos's Rrose Sélavy series (SG, p. 184).

Alechinsky is of the generation that joined the surrealist group after the Second World War, from 1947 to 1966 (year of Breton's death). He knew Breton and Conley recounts how the two men dialogued about Cobra and surrealism while pacing the streets of Paris (SG, 198). But Susan Hiller, artist, collector, organizer of an exhibition at the Freud Museum in London and subject of the last chapter of Surrealist Ghostliness, born in the USA in 1940, is too young to have known the Parisian group, as was Francesca Woodman. Hiller also discovered surrealism in Europe, she settled in London after completing her American anthropology studies, traveled to France and began practicing automatic writing. Later, convinced that "the return of the figurative in art had its historical origins in surrealist practice" (SG, 204), Hiller began studying Breton's movement through Freud, by constituting her personal archive of anodyne and worthless objects, classified and catalogued like Freud's own collection of ancient and precious objects. She defines her collection From the Freud Museum as a "postmodern reconsideration of surrealism as Freudian" (SG, 203). Like Conley, Hiller consciously uses the metaphor of ghosts. She said in an interview that our lives are haunted by personal or collective ghosts (SG: 205). Hiller feels that her current collection, like the Freud Museum where it was first exhibited, remains haunted by the founder of psychoanalysis (SG, 207). Conley adds that we all live in Freud's house, whose theories have influenced our creativity, our interpretation of History and tightened our links with surrealism. She also emphasizes that Hiller, whose class of anthropology students had been strongly influenced by the feminism of their generation, continued in the path of women such as Cahun, Miller, Tanning and Woodman, who themselves opened the doors of surrealism and claimed their place in the movement (SG, 204).

In a succinct conclusion, Conley returns to the origins of surrealism and the specter of the 1914-18 war, which had aroused great curiosity toward Freud and his theories of the unconscious among the young poets and painters around Breton: "The ghostliness of surrealism, which surfaced in their artistic production, constitutes an exacerbated sense of mortality combined with a transposition of spiritism, very popular during their childhood, and which was also at the origin of Freud's first experiments with hypnosis" (SG, 227). This resulted in a new structure of automatism and word games, a tendency toward anamorphosis and other forms of duality, a strong drive toward the collection of objects, dream narratives, physical, tactile, and sensual experiences, or other attempts to stop time... Today, the ghostliness evoked by Conley still extends an Ariadne's thread to explorers in love with surrealism and her book will surely become an indispensable tool for teachers and researchers.

Currently Dean of the Faculty of Letters & Sciences, Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the College of William & Mary, previously Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, Katharine Conley is the author of two other books on surrealism: Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marvelous (Nebraska, 2003) and Automatic Woman (Nebraska, 1996).