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October Books
The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris
The artist Francis Picabia -- notorious dandy, bon vivant , painter, poet, filmmaker, and polemicist -- has emerged as the Dadaist with postmodern appeal, and one of the most enigmatic forces behind the enigma that was Dada. In this first book in English to focus on Picabia's work in Paris during the Dada years, art historian and critic George Baker reimagines Dada through Picabia's eyes. Such reimagining involves a new account of the readymade -- Marcel Duchamp's anti-art invention, which opened fine art to mass culture and the commodity. But in Picabia's hands, Baker argues, the Dada readymade aimed to reinvent art rather than destroy it. Picabia's readymade opened art not just to the commodity, but to the larger world from which the commodity the fluid sea of capital and money that transforms all objects and experiences in its wake. The book thus tells the story of a set of newly transformed artistic practices, claiming them for art history -- and naming them -- for the first Dada Drawing, Dada Painting, Dada Photography, Dada Abstraction, Dada Cinema, Dada Montage. Along the way, Baker describes a series of nearly forgotten objects and events, from the almost lunatic range of the Paris Dada "manifestations" to Picabia's polemical writings; from a lost work by Picabia in the form of a hole (called, suggestively, The Young Girl ) to his "painting" Cacodylic Eye , covered in autographs by luminaries ranging from Ezra Pound to Fatty Arbuckle. Baker ends with readymades in a vast interweaving of citations and quotations that converge to create a heated conversation among Picabia, André Breton, Tristan Tzara, James Joyce, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and others. Art history has never looked like this before. But then again, Dada has never looked like art history.
- GenresArt
476 pages, Hardcover
First published October 31, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 13, 2008
For my review, see http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071105/schwabsky
September 12, 2022
the opening quote: “an eel, held by the tail, is not yet caught,” makes me smile because it reminds me of the fact that we still do not know exactly how eels have sex. this is something that was discussed in the Roman era (the quote is apparently a “Latin proverb.”) Even though Socrates thought very long and hard about it, and wrote about it to boot, he couldn’t quite crack it. And though I am not an eel expert, as far as I know, no one has yet figured out how an eel really does reproduce. There are a lot of theories and some good scientific evidence, but the process is not 100% proven to date. They won’t do it in captivity. I won’t get more into it, because it’s actually quite weird and fascinating, but suffice to say the fundamental unknowability of something is indeed a theme. And certainly so is the silliness or undertones of sexualness to it, both Dadaist tenets. Maybe not an intentional side-effect of using slippery eels as epigraphical mascots on Baker’s part, but I think when we talk about Dada we often talk about the indefinability of art, and also a lot of the time, about sex. In every text about Dada the question of whether or not the urinal is art is repeated over and over to my chagrin - a very ouroboros-like pattern, indeed, the eel keeps eating itself and no solid conclusion can really be pinned down. That indefinability, however, is perhaps for the best.
In the introduction he charts this whole journey that this famed group of Dadaist artists go on together. At first I’m suspicious of this, because it feels too much like the masculine-modernist myth of the archetypal heroic journey, but Baker seems too clever for that, so it doesn’t really read that way, mercifully.
The self-marginalization in the introduction does give me a bit of pause, as someone interested in actual marginality (race, gender, queerness):
“A marginal period, a marginal figure, a blind-spot for art history: It is the argument of this book that from this half-forgotten, not-yet-congealed historical moment can emerge a rereading of the terms of Dada.”
Yet, I still find it useful that there’s a lot here on emptiness and failure, and I like to turn to Halberstam on Queer Failure in these instances. I’d love a modernism-specific queer failure analysis, but I also like that Halberstam doesn’t do it with Dada, a perhaps obvious choice, but instead with the film Chicken Run.
Early on, he establishes himself as committed completely to psychoanalysis, Marxism, and structuralism - an interesting cocktail which he’ll deploy in various ways, with various success.
In talking about the ink-splatter La Sainte-Vierge, which is supposedly the only organic mess in an oeuvre of drawings which are otherwise mechanical and gesturing towards the readymade, Baker makes an important art-historical point, namely, that works don’t really stand alone, even if they aren’t consistent with one another, and that it’s important to consider series and interconnections outside of whether or not they’re formally coherent. “The work was exceptional—it was a work whose very principle was the exception—but it was not singular.” He twins it with another drawing instead, the hole in paper titled “young girl” (ugh.) I think he’s correct in this analysis, and his sleuthing work to establish a basis for their twinning is impressive and he wants us to know that he’s the first one to make it, but I’m ambivalent about the rhetorical effect of this move.
“But the Dadaists were not known for their logic, nor for their blind faith in the telos of chronology.” Amen. Same here. Let’s adopt that attitude towards the art-historical monograph as a form.Yet he can’t resist the addictive spell of teleology, when he becomes fixated on how, within the pair, one drawing was “catapulted to cultural infamy” and one was lost to the “critical oblivion of the unexamined archive.” But, at least Baker’s critical attention to both of the drawings is admirable.
I love the form of the hole in art, just as a form, even if I’m not crazy about the gendered implication it often makes. Not on the topic, but, regarding HOLES; I was gifted, during an illness, a beautiful magazine called Inscription by my dear friend Sophie. The theme was HOLES - a concept that found form in the holes punched in the magazine’s pages and also in an exhibition my friend Victoria and I had put on in the winter of 2019. We were thinking about nets and moles and Deleuze and having a fantastic time with x-acto knives and woodcuts and film and fabric and homemade pickles. I crave this community of being an artist-in-cahoots with philosophy. That community is what Baker gestures toward quite effectively in this book. It’s a community of idea-sharing, as in Sophie giving me the hole-y magazine along with some fancy chocolates. And the anecdote about Picabia’s friends giving him a canvas as a present while he was holed up with an illness of the eye, referred to in the Artforum review of this book; “Thus, Baker persuasively argues, Dada’s happy failure lies in how it creates a mode of sociality from the ruins of the foundations of the symbolic economy of art.” And, since we’re still dealing with those ruins today, frankly, I’m invested more than ever in the community aspects.
Baker keeps turning back again and again to Duchamp’s Large Glass. It’s a creative move, I think, because it’s as if he keeps pausing to look through it, like it’s a kaleidoscope kept on his desk. I find it charming to read. Baker does other charming things throughout, in a way that feels very bold. He interjects things like “I apologise for the minute details, for the mundane quality of the evidence, but this story must be told,” when mining letters from the archive. It’s a tail-chasing move which alternates self-consciousness and complete confidence from sentence to sentence with slippery ease.
Regarding La Jeune Fille, Baker comes to the amusing conclusion that Picabia intended for his hole in the paper to be a device, (a machine, in his idiom) for male masturbation. That is clearly the joke, and I also think if you think that a hole in a piece of paper titled “the little girl” is this great deep psychoanalytic gesture toward the nature of difference and not a misogynist era-typical joke; you probably deserve to get a papercut on your dick.
But I can’t have animosity, because it’s revealed to be a corollary, too, to his ally Rosalind Krauss’ musing on collage - that it’s not a declaration of excessive presence (reproductive, copied and pasted endlessly) but instead “a mode of representation based on absence.” Here Baker turns toward the logic of the hole, the subtraction, the cut.
Man Ray perhaps says it all best, summing up everything thus far: “Dada is a state of mind. It consists largely of negations. It is the tail of every other movement.”
When Baker begins a new chapter, it’s quite radiant- he starts over at the beginning of the tail chase and gives us a new narrative.
I find it admirable how seriously and meticulously Baker analyses Picabia’s dick jokes, from the hole in the paper as risky masturbation device, to the toy monkey affixed to the canvas in Natures Mortes who pulls his tail through his legs like he’s clutching its dick and brazenly brandishing it to the viewer. This is clear. Baker doesn’t bother to go gender-studies mode on it though, unless you count psychoanalysis (which I’m notoriously ambivalent about.) His psychoanalysis is melded with Marxist ideas, in which he puts Phallus (object) into a grouping, pace the philosopher Goux, with Father (subject), Language (signs), and Gold (commodities). The flow of these supposedly mirrors Marx’s theory of the genesis of money. I like how creatively Baker pauses to reassert his structuralism and his Marxism, when it otherwise falls into the wayside, it’s as if his self-consciousness arises and feels the need to reaffirm himself and what he’s doing. I can’t tell if he’s performing this on purpose or not. When he asserts himself as a psychoanalysis devotee, he does so in exact tandem with his Marxism maths problems, which is a negation to say the least (again..perhaps on purpose? It has to be.) “The psychoanalytic oral phase, for example, with its incorporative mode of identification, corresponds with Marx’s first or “elementary” form of value.” Things get anally murky upon the introduction of breasts, eyes, and shit, but the phallus at least seems to correspond with the stage of the “generalised value form.” Each stage in the psychoanalytic cycle corresponds with another in the Marxist cycle, and I’m surprised he doesn’t bring up a third cycle just to top off the litany of correspondences - maybe, for illustrative purposes, the life cycle of a frog, from egg to tadpole and so on? It’d fit the theme of circles. Or, better yet, the menstrual cycle, the advent of which depends on a fundamental failure (to house an embryo,) and which, if you’re not trying to get pregnant, is truly as frivolous as the chasing of a tail.
On page 144, we hear Picabia in his own words for an extended paragraph, which, after such steady analysis, makes a lot of sense. Baker has fleshed him out so much that you can hear him and understand him better.
“My paintings are taken as works of little seriousness, because they are done without the hidden motive of speculation and because I produce them while enjoying myself like someone who is playing a sport. Look, boredom is the worst disease and my great despair would be precisely to be taken seriously.”
I feel like I caught on to this earlier - he’s just making jokes. But Baker, disobeying, takes the paintings critically quite seriously. Naughty, as that’d apparently cause Picabia despair - I wonder if he’s haunting Baker for his transgressions!
This book truly does feel like chasing your own tail; we’ll rhetorically turn again, but always keep coming back. While he was revealing puns earlier, he wants to be serious now: “In what follows, I want to take Man Ray’s transformation of Rrose Selavy quite seriously, usually rendered as a pun.” Baker does a funny thing in which he does the opposite of what previous people have done - and it’s this kind of youthful subversiveness that makes me think he’s internalised some of Dada’s teenage wit for the purpose of writing this. He’s truly put himself into the Zone to write this, it feels almost like method acting.
He moves to briefly touch upon the concept of fetish, one which I find quite interesting in terms of both Marxist and Psychoanalytic thought, the nexus of which seems to be Baker’s niche.
It’s too easy to caricature dada photos as misogynistic, Baker claims. I mean, it does seem a remarkably easy move for anyone who looks at them…but Baker likes things complicated and well-mined and I’m not quite sure that I can fault him for that.
He moves to use film theorist Kaja Silverman’s new theory of vision, one which is not an objectifying, Mulveyesque gaze and is instead, as he puts it, “redemptive.” I’m not quite sure that this can be applied to Dada, which seems much less about redemption and more about undoings. I thought we were chasing our tails here. He explains Silverman’s model of seeing as based upon affect, that we can’t truly “see” unless we can connect objects in the world with our desire of past objects. Like, we can’t see the nude woman unless we can connect it with our own mother, or something like that.* Not sure that’s exactly redemptive? But, it’s a symbolic order without “either unity or closure,” in that it’s not a set system as much as it is an order based on one’s own individual psyche (at least I think that’s what’s being said, it’s a bit difficult.) Apparently, language and words are much more “closed,” “the linguistic sign is a poor conveyor of affect.”
*Later on he notes the similarity to Barthes’ Camera Lucida, which is an infinitely more readable text that I personally quite enjoy, so I now actually get it. But, even later, he tells us that Silverman’s work might be like Barthes’, but only with a caveat: “The reconception proposed by Silverman then recodes Barthes’ account. The model of affective transfer, or what Silverman also names “girl love,” is not based “upon representational access to an irretrievably lost mother, but rather upon her recovery in a new form.”
He goes into more semiotics, given further fuel by film theory. “This description will hopefully not sound strange to those readers unfamiliar with the basic outlines of Saussurean linguistics.” Eek.
But, he finally connects this litany of semiotic/psychoanalytic theory with an un-spaced line in Man Ray’s captioning. We come to realise that, unlike typical language, this form is far less closed indeed. Due to its punning and unspaced nature, MERDELAMERDELAMERDELAMERDELAMER, one realises, could be read several different ways, as in merde (shit), mere (mother), amer (bitter), and mer (sea). It’s actually quite clever, then, that Baker has spent this time setting us up to consider separate words - our normal mode of language - as closed symbolic orders and then presents a stringed pun to us to discern as far more open. He’s teaching me to fish, indeed, I reckon he’d be a good teacher, because even thought at this point in my life, I don’t personally enjoy semiotics or psychoanalysis, I’m enthralled by the sensation of cracking a code.
He does make it clear that he’s “not seeking the insertion of writing into modernist visuality, but a new or redeemed form of visuality counter to modernism’s concerns.” This of course necessitates a new theory of photography. Man Ray doesn’t describe his work as “readymade” in the way that Duchamp did, conversely, he called them “Objects of My Affection.” (Barthes, again, has helped me identify the pang of emotion in photography.)
he’s got an interesting observation on Man Ray’s Woman: “Of course the objects that make up Man Ray’s Woman are everyday objects, objects from the domestic sphere formerly of woman and mother alike - clothespins, for example - but they are also tools of the photographer’s trade, that bind or fuse the objects that go into the production and development of the photographic image…” this is clever, but unsatisfying, because I’d like to hear an expansion of the labour inherent in this process, and the material experience of making a photograph. We don’t get much material knowledge of artistic practice in this book at all, though, so, alas I know that I won’t get that.
finally, he leads us to realize, through Silverman and Barthes and the “objects of my affection,” that Dadaphoto with its caption “KEEP SMILING” suggests an opening up of love and joy as a result of the displacement of signifiers. It’s not anthropomorphism - I don’t have an affective response to the eggbeater as a lively little object, but instead as representing my mother. “What is joyful is the transfer of affect.” I don’t know if I can say I experience that but I can’t say he’s exactly wrong.
Each chapter opens with “and here is an image of Picabia,” it’s very poetic. I love how he’s tried to turn the monograph into poetry.
There is a lot of Bataille.
Still, by the end of the proper academic text itself, I continue to be interested by domesticity as a theme, from Man Ray’s clothespins to the description brought up on p.324 of Satie’s music as “furniture music,” connected by Baker to “something like Henri Matisse’s infamous desire to produce a form of painting that functioned like a comfortable armchair.” There’s a dissonance here - Dada seems the opposite of comfortable - how could sitting in front of 370 bright lights during a ballet performance be comfortable? - and yet, there’s continual nods towards domestic comforts. There’s a dissonance there that I’d like to uncover more of.
But then, finally, the reason why this book got more stars than I was initially going to give it - his epilogue, the likes of which haven’t quite been seen in academic monographs that I know of. It’s batshit!
Titled “Long Live Daddy: A Dada Montage,” Baker goes completely and delightfully off the rails (or perfectly on them, if you’re following that he’s a method actor of monograph-writing, embodying the attitudes of his subjects), and writes an extended poem. It’s rollicking: “iconography is the daddy-system of the image.” I’d been imagining before while reading this that Baker had some kind of weird occult connection with Francis Picabia, maybe even that Picabia had decided to haunt him for taking his work too seriously. I think the epilogue, to me, confirms this suspicion. Maybe Baker did a seance to try to connect to this flow - maybe even an ouija board. It’s a bit concerning, in parts, for its utter method-acting devotion, I’m almost afraid for him because this kind of embodiment can be destructive. It reads almost like automatic writing. He combines poetry with misplaced annotations - some are cut off (strategically) - “As Kaja Silverman has explained” - and then the sentence cuts off and moves elsewhere, denoted by a dash, like it’s a thought that gets interrupted - a relatable sensation which mirrors how a thinking-process happens remarkably well. The epilogue also serves as his collected and un-sorted notes and a record of his disparate thoughts - I love these records, and I am using this review as a record just like this. It gives him a home for explications - including his own close reading of a Deleuze passage - where they might not have fit in the main text. There’s wonderful discursions, too, that I think are awfully poignant, but which, again, might not read right in the main text. I’m grateful to his epilogue-cum-thought-diary for these, like “the fetish is less an object than a relation. It pertains to a place, to a situation, or rather to a direction, to a vector.” Yeah.
One gets to witness him going back and forth, arguing with himself, in ways I recognize myself zig-zagging when I read: “so Deleuze is naive.” and later, “Deleuze, rather, is utopian.” I now believe you have to think through it and somehow record that process of thought, however meandering, in order to realise how you got there. That’s the importance of the thinking-journal (which can find its form in an epilogue like Baker’s, a diary, a blog, or a review, maybe).
Indeed, “our head is round in order to allow thought to change direction.” Amen. Hallelujah.
In the introduction he charts this whole journey that this famed group of Dadaist artists go on together. At first I’m suspicious of this, because it feels too much like the masculine-modernist myth of the archetypal heroic journey, but Baker seems too clever for that, so it doesn’t really read that way, mercifully.
The self-marginalization in the introduction does give me a bit of pause, as someone interested in actual marginality (race, gender, queerness):
“A marginal period, a marginal figure, a blind-spot for art history: It is the argument of this book that from this half-forgotten, not-yet-congealed historical moment can emerge a rereading of the terms of Dada.”
Yet, I still find it useful that there’s a lot here on emptiness and failure, and I like to turn to Halberstam on Queer Failure in these instances. I’d love a modernism-specific queer failure analysis, but I also like that Halberstam doesn’t do it with Dada, a perhaps obvious choice, but instead with the film Chicken Run.
Early on, he establishes himself as committed completely to psychoanalysis, Marxism, and structuralism - an interesting cocktail which he’ll deploy in various ways, with various success.
In talking about the ink-splatter La Sainte-Vierge, which is supposedly the only organic mess in an oeuvre of drawings which are otherwise mechanical and gesturing towards the readymade, Baker makes an important art-historical point, namely, that works don’t really stand alone, even if they aren’t consistent with one another, and that it’s important to consider series and interconnections outside of whether or not they’re formally coherent. “The work was exceptional—it was a work whose very principle was the exception—but it was not singular.” He twins it with another drawing instead, the hole in paper titled “young girl” (ugh.) I think he’s correct in this analysis, and his sleuthing work to establish a basis for their twinning is impressive and he wants us to know that he’s the first one to make it, but I’m ambivalent about the rhetorical effect of this move.
“But the Dadaists were not known for their logic, nor for their blind faith in the telos of chronology.” Amen. Same here. Let’s adopt that attitude towards the art-historical monograph as a form.Yet he can’t resist the addictive spell of teleology, when he becomes fixated on how, within the pair, one drawing was “catapulted to cultural infamy” and one was lost to the “critical oblivion of the unexamined archive.” But, at least Baker’s critical attention to both of the drawings is admirable.
I love the form of the hole in art, just as a form, even if I’m not crazy about the gendered implication it often makes. Not on the topic, but, regarding HOLES; I was gifted, during an illness, a beautiful magazine called Inscription by my dear friend Sophie. The theme was HOLES - a concept that found form in the holes punched in the magazine’s pages and also in an exhibition my friend Victoria and I had put on in the winter of 2019. We were thinking about nets and moles and Deleuze and having a fantastic time with x-acto knives and woodcuts and film and fabric and homemade pickles. I crave this community of being an artist-in-cahoots with philosophy. That community is what Baker gestures toward quite effectively in this book. It’s a community of idea-sharing, as in Sophie giving me the hole-y magazine along with some fancy chocolates. And the anecdote about Picabia’s friends giving him a canvas as a present while he was holed up with an illness of the eye, referred to in the Artforum review of this book; “Thus, Baker persuasively argues, Dada’s happy failure lies in how it creates a mode of sociality from the ruins of the foundations of the symbolic economy of art.” And, since we’re still dealing with those ruins today, frankly, I’m invested more than ever in the community aspects.
Baker keeps turning back again and again to Duchamp’s Large Glass. It’s a creative move, I think, because it’s as if he keeps pausing to look through it, like it’s a kaleidoscope kept on his desk. I find it charming to read. Baker does other charming things throughout, in a way that feels very bold. He interjects things like “I apologise for the minute details, for the mundane quality of the evidence, but this story must be told,” when mining letters from the archive. It’s a tail-chasing move which alternates self-consciousness and complete confidence from sentence to sentence with slippery ease.
Regarding La Jeune Fille, Baker comes to the amusing conclusion that Picabia intended for his hole in the paper to be a device, (a machine, in his idiom) for male masturbation. That is clearly the joke, and I also think if you think that a hole in a piece of paper titled “the little girl” is this great deep psychoanalytic gesture toward the nature of difference and not a misogynist era-typical joke; you probably deserve to get a papercut on your dick.
But I can’t have animosity, because it’s revealed to be a corollary, too, to his ally Rosalind Krauss’ musing on collage - that it’s not a declaration of excessive presence (reproductive, copied and pasted endlessly) but instead “a mode of representation based on absence.” Here Baker turns toward the logic of the hole, the subtraction, the cut.
Man Ray perhaps says it all best, summing up everything thus far: “Dada is a state of mind. It consists largely of negations. It is the tail of every other movement.”
When Baker begins a new chapter, it’s quite radiant- he starts over at the beginning of the tail chase and gives us a new narrative.
I find it admirable how seriously and meticulously Baker analyses Picabia’s dick jokes, from the hole in the paper as risky masturbation device, to the toy monkey affixed to the canvas in Natures Mortes who pulls his tail through his legs like he’s clutching its dick and brazenly brandishing it to the viewer. This is clear. Baker doesn’t bother to go gender-studies mode on it though, unless you count psychoanalysis (which I’m notoriously ambivalent about.) His psychoanalysis is melded with Marxist ideas, in which he puts Phallus (object) into a grouping, pace the philosopher Goux, with Father (subject), Language (signs), and Gold (commodities). The flow of these supposedly mirrors Marx’s theory of the genesis of money. I like how creatively Baker pauses to reassert his structuralism and his Marxism, when it otherwise falls into the wayside, it’s as if his self-consciousness arises and feels the need to reaffirm himself and what he’s doing. I can’t tell if he’s performing this on purpose or not. When he asserts himself as a psychoanalysis devotee, he does so in exact tandem with his Marxism maths problems, which is a negation to say the least (again..perhaps on purpose? It has to be.) “The psychoanalytic oral phase, for example, with its incorporative mode of identification, corresponds with Marx’s first or “elementary” form of value.” Things get anally murky upon the introduction of breasts, eyes, and shit, but the phallus at least seems to correspond with the stage of the “generalised value form.” Each stage in the psychoanalytic cycle corresponds with another in the Marxist cycle, and I’m surprised he doesn’t bring up a third cycle just to top off the litany of correspondences - maybe, for illustrative purposes, the life cycle of a frog, from egg to tadpole and so on? It’d fit the theme of circles. Or, better yet, the menstrual cycle, the advent of which depends on a fundamental failure (to house an embryo,) and which, if you’re not trying to get pregnant, is truly as frivolous as the chasing of a tail.
On page 144, we hear Picabia in his own words for an extended paragraph, which, after such steady analysis, makes a lot of sense. Baker has fleshed him out so much that you can hear him and understand him better.
“My paintings are taken as works of little seriousness, because they are done without the hidden motive of speculation and because I produce them while enjoying myself like someone who is playing a sport. Look, boredom is the worst disease and my great despair would be precisely to be taken seriously.”
I feel like I caught on to this earlier - he’s just making jokes. But Baker, disobeying, takes the paintings critically quite seriously. Naughty, as that’d apparently cause Picabia despair - I wonder if he’s haunting Baker for his transgressions!
This book truly does feel like chasing your own tail; we’ll rhetorically turn again, but always keep coming back. While he was revealing puns earlier, he wants to be serious now: “In what follows, I want to take Man Ray’s transformation of Rrose Selavy quite seriously, usually rendered as a pun.” Baker does a funny thing in which he does the opposite of what previous people have done - and it’s this kind of youthful subversiveness that makes me think he’s internalised some of Dada’s teenage wit for the purpose of writing this. He’s truly put himself into the Zone to write this, it feels almost like method acting.
He moves to briefly touch upon the concept of fetish, one which I find quite interesting in terms of both Marxist and Psychoanalytic thought, the nexus of which seems to be Baker’s niche.
It’s too easy to caricature dada photos as misogynistic, Baker claims. I mean, it does seem a remarkably easy move for anyone who looks at them…but Baker likes things complicated and well-mined and I’m not quite sure that I can fault him for that.
He moves to use film theorist Kaja Silverman’s new theory of vision, one which is not an objectifying, Mulveyesque gaze and is instead, as he puts it, “redemptive.” I’m not quite sure that this can be applied to Dada, which seems much less about redemption and more about undoings. I thought we were chasing our tails here. He explains Silverman’s model of seeing as based upon affect, that we can’t truly “see” unless we can connect objects in the world with our desire of past objects. Like, we can’t see the nude woman unless we can connect it with our own mother, or something like that.* Not sure that’s exactly redemptive? But, it’s a symbolic order without “either unity or closure,” in that it’s not a set system as much as it is an order based on one’s own individual psyche (at least I think that’s what’s being said, it’s a bit difficult.) Apparently, language and words are much more “closed,” “the linguistic sign is a poor conveyor of affect.”
*Later on he notes the similarity to Barthes’ Camera Lucida, which is an infinitely more readable text that I personally quite enjoy, so I now actually get it. But, even later, he tells us that Silverman’s work might be like Barthes’, but only with a caveat: “The reconception proposed by Silverman then recodes Barthes’ account. The model of affective transfer, or what Silverman also names “girl love,” is not based “upon representational access to an irretrievably lost mother, but rather upon her recovery in a new form.”
He goes into more semiotics, given further fuel by film theory. “This description will hopefully not sound strange to those readers unfamiliar with the basic outlines of Saussurean linguistics.” Eek.
But, he finally connects this litany of semiotic/psychoanalytic theory with an un-spaced line in Man Ray’s captioning. We come to realise that, unlike typical language, this form is far less closed indeed. Due to its punning and unspaced nature, MERDELAMERDELAMERDELAMERDELAMER, one realises, could be read several different ways, as in merde (shit), mere (mother), amer (bitter), and mer (sea). It’s actually quite clever, then, that Baker has spent this time setting us up to consider separate words - our normal mode of language - as closed symbolic orders and then presents a stringed pun to us to discern as far more open. He’s teaching me to fish, indeed, I reckon he’d be a good teacher, because even thought at this point in my life, I don’t personally enjoy semiotics or psychoanalysis, I’m enthralled by the sensation of cracking a code.
He does make it clear that he’s “not seeking the insertion of writing into modernist visuality, but a new or redeemed form of visuality counter to modernism’s concerns.” This of course necessitates a new theory of photography. Man Ray doesn’t describe his work as “readymade” in the way that Duchamp did, conversely, he called them “Objects of My Affection.” (Barthes, again, has helped me identify the pang of emotion in photography.)
he’s got an interesting observation on Man Ray’s Woman: “Of course the objects that make up Man Ray’s Woman are everyday objects, objects from the domestic sphere formerly of woman and mother alike - clothespins, for example - but they are also tools of the photographer’s trade, that bind or fuse the objects that go into the production and development of the photographic image…” this is clever, but unsatisfying, because I’d like to hear an expansion of the labour inherent in this process, and the material experience of making a photograph. We don’t get much material knowledge of artistic practice in this book at all, though, so, alas I know that I won’t get that.
finally, he leads us to realize, through Silverman and Barthes and the “objects of my affection,” that Dadaphoto with its caption “KEEP SMILING” suggests an opening up of love and joy as a result of the displacement of signifiers. It’s not anthropomorphism - I don’t have an affective response to the eggbeater as a lively little object, but instead as representing my mother. “What is joyful is the transfer of affect.” I don’t know if I can say I experience that but I can’t say he’s exactly wrong.
Each chapter opens with “and here is an image of Picabia,” it’s very poetic. I love how he’s tried to turn the monograph into poetry.
There is a lot of Bataille.
Still, by the end of the proper academic text itself, I continue to be interested by domesticity as a theme, from Man Ray’s clothespins to the description brought up on p.324 of Satie’s music as “furniture music,” connected by Baker to “something like Henri Matisse’s infamous desire to produce a form of painting that functioned like a comfortable armchair.” There’s a dissonance here - Dada seems the opposite of comfortable - how could sitting in front of 370 bright lights during a ballet performance be comfortable? - and yet, there’s continual nods towards domestic comforts. There’s a dissonance there that I’d like to uncover more of.
But then, finally, the reason why this book got more stars than I was initially going to give it - his epilogue, the likes of which haven’t quite been seen in academic monographs that I know of. It’s batshit!
Titled “Long Live Daddy: A Dada Montage,” Baker goes completely and delightfully off the rails (or perfectly on them, if you’re following that he’s a method actor of monograph-writing, embodying the attitudes of his subjects), and writes an extended poem. It’s rollicking: “iconography is the daddy-system of the image.” I’d been imagining before while reading this that Baker had some kind of weird occult connection with Francis Picabia, maybe even that Picabia had decided to haunt him for taking his work too seriously. I think the epilogue, to me, confirms this suspicion. Maybe Baker did a seance to try to connect to this flow - maybe even an ouija board. It’s a bit concerning, in parts, for its utter method-acting devotion, I’m almost afraid for him because this kind of embodiment can be destructive. It reads almost like automatic writing. He combines poetry with misplaced annotations - some are cut off (strategically) - “As Kaja Silverman has explained” - and then the sentence cuts off and moves elsewhere, denoted by a dash, like it’s a thought that gets interrupted - a relatable sensation which mirrors how a thinking-process happens remarkably well. The epilogue also serves as his collected and un-sorted notes and a record of his disparate thoughts - I love these records, and I am using this review as a record just like this. It gives him a home for explications - including his own close reading of a Deleuze passage - where they might not have fit in the main text. There’s wonderful discursions, too, that I think are awfully poignant, but which, again, might not read right in the main text. I’m grateful to his epilogue-cum-thought-diary for these, like “the fetish is less an object than a relation. It pertains to a place, to a situation, or rather to a direction, to a vector.” Yeah.
One gets to witness him going back and forth, arguing with himself, in ways I recognize myself zig-zagging when I read: “so Deleuze is naive.” and later, “Deleuze, rather, is utopian.” I now believe you have to think through it and somehow record that process of thought, however meandering, in order to realise how you got there. That’s the importance of the thinking-journal (which can find its form in an epilogue like Baker’s, a diary, a blog, or a review, maybe).
Indeed, “our head is round in order to allow thought to change direction.” Amen. Hallelujah.
April 3, 2018
I would prefer my art history/theory with a little less psychoanalysis. Still, a very engaging meditation on the Paris Dada movement centered around Picabia's work from 1920-24 (with some digressions into his mechanomorphs dating back to 1915). Especially interesting in conversation on the dialogue between the works of Picabia and Duchamp (the book, at times, being as much or more about Duchamp than Picabia). Hearing such a deep description on the staging, music and performance of "Relâche" was especially nice and allowed me to place "Entr'acte" (which I have only known as a stand alone film for the past 25 or so years) in it's proper context.
May 4, 2008
Francis Picibia is one of my favorite artists, and this is a very good study on the man and his times. The thing I am wishing for is a straight ahead biography on the man himself. This is not it. But still any book on this great personality and visoinary is OK with me.
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