November 04, 2004

a surrealistic impulse

This European image by Miro looks as if it could be easily situated within Australian surrealism and culture:

MiroFarm3.jpg
Joan Miro, The Farm, 1921-1922, Oil on Wood

The painting has the unsettling quality of something observed (19th century colonial buildings of pastoralism) and, at the same time, something dreamed of or remembered (a life of play and leisure in the landscape).

It is an expression of a divided consciousness and the aesthetic indeterminacy of Miro who sank into his art the oppositions of his subjectivity: Catalan and Parisian, traditionalist and Cubist, naif and cosmopolite.

So we have a fractured or split subjectivity.

That is us. We are schizophrenics out for a walk in a consumer society shaped by instrumental rationality, rather than neurotics lying on the analyst's couch.

The surrealistic impulse is the flow of desire, a self in flux, a self in becoming. Life is a flow of becoming.The liberatory impulse is the unrepressed gratification of sensual desire with its promise of a guiltless and nonrepressive way of life. The sign of that life of liberated instincts is childhood.

It is a very seductive image of redemption.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at November 4, 2004 04:37 PM | TrackBack
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