Veronica Lurk

Equivocal high priestess of Neo-Convulsive calligraphic automata, originator of the Enigma Scripts and their associated curiosa, scary femme-fatale Veronica Lurk personifies our erroneous zones – all our innate contradictions, aberrations and incongruities. Diva of Divergence and Digression, she is the very essence of everything gratuitous; everything anomalous and ambiguous; everything anachronistic, fortuitous, ‘off-centre’ and ‘off-the-wall’. Ms Lurk is the reification of singularity – even naked singularity. She is the Princess of Parody and the Patron Saint of Pastiche. As a familiar spirit of deviance and asymmetry, that irregular element always in the background, she embodies the consequences of indeterminacy, encapsulating the absurd in all its mutable, mutating, multifarious improbabilities. Known in Jet City as the Compulsive Beautician, Veronica Lurk is always extraneous – and completely unpredictable!

automatic drawing: Abra Cadavre #30 Veronica Lurk, 1973

 

Hermes Bird

 

The poet, through aloofness or detachment, fleetingly attained in reaction to the disgust provoked by the nigredo, the unregenerate night-world state, perceives how, divorced from everyday functions or associations, ordinary situations, objects, even people, may take on a magical perspective. They acquire an ephemeral, but nevertheless quintessential, glamour, or enchantment of absolute beauty. But, it will be seen that this ‘absolute’ beauty, this ‘threshold aestheticism’, is a coniunctio oppositorum, a union of opposites in the Hermetic sense. It contains not only the essential ‘gold’ of supernal beauty, but also a fearful purity of supernal horror – it is not only Naturalistic, but anti-Naturalistic – it is a force which consumes with a unique intensity. It is not only sublime, it is also of The Abyss. (from The Aesthetic Transformation of Perception, 1993)

Illustration: Dawn Voices/Hermes Bird, 1968

Tortured Souls

 

If Decadence is an art of aesthetic nihilism, then Expressionism is an art of tortured souls.
One should not underestimate the influence of Lotte H Eisner’s comprehensive exposition of the cinematic dramaturgy of Expressionist film in her book The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt. Originally published in French as L'Ecran Demoniaque in 1952, Eisner’s seminal work was revised for its first English publication in 1969, a translation by Roger Greaves. Not only did Eisner explain the historical origins of a ‘predisposition towards Expressionism’ she also identified all of the main features of the movement, defining key ideas including Stimmung, the brooding, speculative reflection of Grubelei and the visual effects of shadowy chiaroscuro, effects that evoke the ‘twilight’ of the soul.
These, and other features were characteristics of an aesthetic tendency which, emerging in the paintings of Kirchner, Marc, Kubin, Klee and others around the period 1908-1910, formed a bridge between the final phases of nineteenth century Symbolism and the emergent avant-garde of the twentieth century. The Expressionist sensibility – all art is a matter of sensibility – is a sensibility that favours violent contrast, it cultivates a mode of ultra-dynamism finding its most extreme resolution in a climactic paroxysm.
Yet, another dimension of the same sensibility, or ‘interior vision’, can be understood as a type of super-stylisation where objects are not so much represented, but rather apprehended through a process requiring the accentuation of ‘latent physiognomy, a term used by the theorist Bela Balazs.
Expressionist intensity generates a paroxysmal vision close to a crystallisation of form, disclosing a hitherto unnoticed, mysterious realm of experience differentiated from other forms of experience by a telltale ambiguity, ‘both attractive and repugnant at the same time’. This ambiguous uncanny realm, positioned at the cultural confluence of the Gothic, the Baroque and the Romantic is the disquieting locality of those tortured souls whose psychic disposition may best be understood by combining the viewpoint of Freud with that of Hoffmann.
It was the basic proposition of The Haunted Screen that cinema – a medium at once concrete and visual – and the inter-war German cinema in particular, found ‘its true nature’ and its ‘ideal artistic outlet’ in the ethos of Expressionism as explained here. The most outstanding example of this distinctive film-dramaturgie (Balazs) is, of course, Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari based on the book by Carl Meyer and Hans Janowitz and directed by Robert Weine in 1919. Here the Expressionist treatment is at its most extreme, and the style of acting is conditioned, not by psychological naturalism, but by the studio set design intended to evoke the ‘latent physiognomy’ of a small medieval town. The two lead actors, Werner Krauss in the role of the malign Dr Caligari himself, and Conrad Veidt playing Cesare ‘the sinister somnambulist’, managed to convey the desired mode of ‘bizarre exaltation’ and febrile energy that soon became known as Caligarism. It is known that Artaud admired Veidt’s portrayal of the somnambulistic agency of shadow, a performance that even today incarnates the very essence of catatonic horror – Cesare is an alien being ‘detached from his everyday ambience, deprived of all individuality, an abstract creature…’ who kills without motive or logic.
Moving with a particular and studiously executed gestural language through the artificial filmic environment of this paranoid scenario, and in jarring contradiction to the platitudinous realism of the rest of the cast (excluding Krauss), Veidt-Cesare embodies through his screen presence a new language of ‘reduced gesture’. His performance explores an almost linear theatrical formalism, echoing, to quote Eisner, ‘the broken angles of the sets’.
If Caligari himself is a nightmare incursion of malign, manipulative authoritarian power, it is Cesare, the agent of fate who exemplifies the notion of life as a kind of Gothic ecstasy of style. It is a style that, like the existential basis of Expressionism itself, ‘breaks the bounds of petty logic and causality’ and incarnates the immediate presence of the tortured soul.

Illustration: Cesare the Somnambulist (1994)

Elements of Transmission

 

In automatic drawing graphical lines represent transient trace elements of transmission along neural pathways.

In his text The Automatic Message (1933), Andre Breton explained Surrealism's role in the 'determinaton of the precise constitution of the subliminal' but he also acknowledged that the conditions which validate an 'automatic' text or drawing are insufficiently known. Previously (1916) Austin Spare had defined automatism as an 'organic impulse' produced when the mind is in a 'state of oblivion'. By this means, he said, 'senasation may be visualised'. Just as Surrealists argue that Freudian theory helps to disentangle automatism 'from the sphere of spiritualist mystification' (Rosemont) it may be possible, as an extension of this approach, to suggest that automatist spontaneity is a manifestation of a little-recognized principle of self-activation, or self-determination, that is an essential property of reality.

Illustration: Lucifer Rising, 2006

Medium Of Doubt

 

Collage, an ambiguous, complex medium of doubt, to quote Werner Spies, is an aesthetic of radical juxtaposition. In his personal treatise Beyond Painting (1947), Max Ernst, with reference to both Rimbaud, and the famous 'chance encounter' from Book 6 of Les Chants de Maldoror, defined collage as an 'alchemy of the image...' . However,the photomontage style of collage finds its origins in the work of the Berlin Dada Movement who in turn were inspired by the inadvertent imagery generated by early cinema special effects and the composite images of 'trick photography'. The term photomontage was invented by the Berlin 'monteurs', Raoul Hasmann and Hanna Hoch.

From the Freudian perspective it may be that collage exemplifies one of the two 'laws' governing the behaviour of unconscious processes or phenomena (such as dreams): the law of Condensation, or Compression, as it is also called. (The second 'law' is the law of Displacement.) Freud explained Condensation as the 'inclination to create new unities out of elements that we would certainly have kept separate in waking thought...' In 'The Enormous Face' section of his novel The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), J G Ballard refers to the 'planes of intersection' operative on 'a third level, the inner world of the psyche' where, as on other levels, such 'planes' interlock at oblique angles and where one finds 'fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies...'

Elsewhere is the same book Ballard asserts that images are born at the intersection of such planes, when 'some kind of valid reality begins to assert itself.'

Illustration: Psychic Citadel, 2002

Epiphenomena Of Chaos

It is more than likely that the world we know, and the way that we know it, is an interpretative projection, the outcome of anthropocentric perspectivism. Some experts utilise the Anthropic Principle as an ‘explanatory’ device in Cosmology, encouraging – perhaps inadvertently – the view that there is no objective reality, simply interpretations of experience. To assert that the world or the universe is the way it is because if it were otherwise we would not exist is precisely that – it is an assertion, not an explanation. Assertions of this kind seem credible because they are both abstruse and coherent, features that promote an illusion of profundity. But the truth of an assertion guarantees nothing beyond logical coherence, because falsity, the opposite is truth, is simply incoherence – an intrusion of chaos. Epistemological relativism is of little help or value because hard facts are obviously obdurate – yes, two plus two equals four, even for the Vogon Captain or the hypothetical inhabitant of a planet orbiting the remotest star. A true proposition is a universal truth independent of cultures and societies but, and this is the tricky bit, it is still an epiphenomenon of chaos, and chaos encompasses both order and disorder.

Illustration: Echoes Of Ambiguity, 2009

The Fear Of The New

Walter Benjamin argued that mass dissemination always depreciates the quality of works of art, that ‘technologies of mass reproduction’ deprive art of a unique aura. It is true that this process partly accounts for the fading dynamism of the avant-garde – we now live in a post avant-garde era – as well as the democratisation of many forms of ‘art’ hitherto the exclusive sphere of privilege and wealth. Can it be that this ‘aura’ is not the aura of aesthetic qualities, but more a patina of ‘value’ that nowadays no one believes in, because everyone can see that ‘high culture’ was a propaganda machine for a wealthy elite of prelates and princes? Is it really the case that a good reproduction of the Mona Lisa is always a poor substitute for the original? Does the reproductive process really strip a masterpiece of its ‘aura’? One cannot fail to detect a certain taint of snobbery in all this. It is the same line of thinking that lead Clement Greenberg to contrast a poem by T. S. Eliot with a Tin Pan Alley song, before attempting to define the role of the avant-garde as protecting ‘culture’ from Capitalism. Heidegger maintained that scientific rationalism and industrialisation has destroyed the basis of art – he called this ‘the death of art’ – because the primordial national culture of olden days can no longer sustain itself, has sunk into a new age of darkness.
There is a fear behind these concerns – an apocalyptic fear – and a fear of The New.

Illustration: Montage I Fear Of The New (Neophobia), 2006

The Shadow Of The Uncanny

The longest period of human history is human prehistory – yet, generally speaking, the implications of this are not understood. Just as the greatest proportion of the sphere of the mind is a dark, undiscovered continent – the unconscious – so the greatest proportion of human experience, our pre-literate, pre-cultural history, is also a vast sphere of the unknown. All the phenomena of consciousness are infused with indirect, unconscious influences, similarly all the experiences and ‘achievements’ of mankind during the current, brief phase of evolution (‘history’) are rooted in an obscure and distant past. This past is inaccessible to us even though it overshadows every aspect of our daily existence. Like the microwave background radiation – the barely detectable evidence of the earliest cosmic era that permeates the present universe – vestigial traces of mankind’s earliest and most traumatic experiences permeate the contemporary actuality of being. We have become so adjusted to our present mode of psychical life that these vestiges have assumed the paraxial character of radical alterity. Their marginal presence is so tenuous and indefinite that we have never grasped their significance – that they constitute the weakest of evidence for the vacancy of collective amnesia, a yawning gap in the human time-line. Not so much a loss of memory but, perhaps, vestiges of inexplicable experiences endured during an era before the evolution of memory itself.
Picture the ‘space’ occupied by our fragile self-awareness bordered on two sides by gulfs of impenetrable darkness – on the one hand by an abyss of the distant past, on the other hand by the shadowlands of the mind.

Published in The Supplement Issue 22, 2005

Illustration: Echoes Of The Past, 2000

Supporting Statement

The particular areas of Western art which fascinate me illuminate the workings of the imagination from the earliest times – from Egyptian art to the proto-Art Nouveau designs of pre-Hellenic Europe (Minoan, Celtic), to classical Roman grotesques.
Medieval religious art – fired by superstition, fanaticism and the occult – engages my interest, as does Romanticism (for instance John Martin, Piranesi, Delacroix), Symbolism and the Surrealists.
Elegant design intrigues me, hence my liking for such widely placed examples as Minoan frescoes, Tiepolo and Art Nouveau.
Mysticism and mythology are, of course, relevant here and can be represented by Alchemy, which combines both these with visual art. Here I may refer to the writings of Jung, Robert Graves and Antonin Artaud, which have influenced my thoughts in this area.
Serious music is almost exclusively limited to Claude Debussy and Franz Liszt who I find to be the two most extraordinary and significant musicians: Debussy for his dreamlike fantasies and Liszt for his orgiastic virtuosity – the most eminent musician of our time is Duke Ellington.
The cinema is the art of today – Eisenstein, Bunuel, Lang, Fellini and Franju.
All this has obviously involved an interest in history which brings me back to people and books and what concerns me in general; all the threats to civilisation, as we understand it in the West, stem from ignorance – ignorance and illiteracy go hand in hand…

from an official document, 1969

Cyborg Apocalypse

In the future we will copulate with computers, we will all be Cyborgs, ‘mythic hybrids of machine and organism’ – the distinction between man and machine is based on a false proposition. If, as Haraway says, ‘the relation between organism and machine has been a border war’ we should step back and recognise that the machine is not the real enemy.
Let’s fuse with the machines – and the sooner the better! Hang on a minute – we already have!

Illustration: Cyborg Encounter, 2007

Medusa Cascade

Ladies and gentlemen,
The image you see here may well be an ideal work of art.
Perhaps it is a lurid and melodramatic allegory of the creative process?
You will observe how, on one level, the symbolism is obvious – an uncontrollable force overwhelms the ivory towers of pedantry and the bastions of patriarchy. It is a force from ‘beyond’ – it is the dark energy of unconscious drives, it is a monstrous incursion from the paraxial realm of Desire.

This oracular vision is presented to us by that Pythoness of Subliminal Terror, superstar choreographer of the Ballet Plastique des Noctambules, Ms Medusa Cascade – watch your step!

Illistration: Cometographia II, 2002

Demogorgon

Meet Demogorgon. Grotesque art is the antithesis of austere high culture: it is an art of unresolved conflict, abnormal ambivalence, polymorphic morphology, the macabre and the bizarre. The grotesque arises at the confluence of the absurd and the burlesque, black humour, caricature, hybridization and irony.

Illus: Demogorgon (The Mixologist), 2007  

Beyond Writing

Poetry is so easy these days – its blank verse for a blank generation – even so… All styles, from the fractured remnants of archaic stanza form to the modish Modernism of open field, ‘process’ and the like are available to the auteur. Pick-and-mix as you wish! But reject ever more sharply the vainglorious folie de grandeur of epic high seriousness. Embrace instead the cardinal virtues of the imagination – and what are they? Convulsive beauty, automatism, objective chance (phrases taken at random from a top hat), black humour (nothing is sacred), mad love (the amatory mode always appeals) and – no offence! – total freedom of expression. Oppose all the literary ideologies of the last four decades, put yourself on a collision course with ‘theory’, pour scorn on fashionable radical chic nonsense – it is hardly surprising, you might say, that the chattering classes of academia are fixated on language. We know that all the best work is off the radar.

Illustration: Beyond Writing, 1975 [detail]