2009 AAANZ Conference Abstracts - The Art Association of Australia ...

presaged with the advent of the nuclear age.
Jane Eckett is a doctoral researcher at the University of
Melbourne, engaged on a PhD thesis titled Modernist Sculpture
in Australia: Group of Four, Centre Five and the Europeans.
With degrees in both science and arts from the University
of Queensland and the University of Sydney, she worked in
Ireland for the past nine years as a director of Whyte’s fine art
auctioneers. In 2007 she completed a Masters by research
(MLitt) at Trinity College Dublin and since then has tutored in the
history of sculpture at University College Dublin.
7. Surrealism, Sublimation, Paranoia
Raymond Spiteri
This paper discusses the role of the psychoanalytical theory
of sublimation in the theory and practice of surrealism circa
1930, focusing on the nexus between André Breton, Salvador
Dalí and Georges Bataille. Breton’s critique of Bataille in the
“Second manifesto of Surrealism” was a response to the
threat he perceived to the political position of surrealism in
Bataille’s ‘dissident’ surrealism, in that it threatened the carefully
maintained rapprochement between creative endeavour
and political action that Breton had sought to sustain since
1925; to delineate the relation between creative endeavour
and political action Breton advocated that artists and writers
explore the Freudian notion of sublimation from inside – that
as specialists in the exercise of the imagination, artists and
writers were better qualified than doctors or psychiatrists to
theorize the character of creative endeavour. Breton’s call was
itself a response to Bataille’s writings, particular his demand to
explore psychological states without ‘transposition’. The artist
who would respond fully to Breton’s call was Dalí, who would
initially seem closer to Bataille; yet Dalí answers indirectly in La
Femme visible, a short book published in 1930, that represented
his first major contribution to surrealist theory. Dalí introduces
paranoia as a specific mechanism in La Femme visible – a
theme he would develop in his later writings as an alternative to
automatism – but at this point paranoia functioned less as an
alternative than as a supplement to automatism. Sublimation
and paranoia constitute the matrix shared by surrealism and
psychoanalysis, and a discussion of their vicissitudes promises
to illuminate this moment in surrealism’s history.
Raymond Spiteri is a Lecturer in Art History at Victoria
University of Wellington. His research addresses the culture and
politics of surrealism, and he is currently working on a study of
the Breton-Bataille polemic.
8. Surrealism, Science and the Everyday: The Paintings of
Remedios Varo
Natalya Lusty
In Varo’s work material objects and elements from the natural
world take on an anthropomorphic dimension, disturbing our
everyday sense of order and equilibrium. In her paintings we
are confronted with the secret life of things, to borrow Bill
Brown’s well worn though aptly surrealist phrase, as they come
to be animated by the world of physical laws and imaginative
possibility, revealing a kind of hypervisual unconscious. This
seems to question not only the privileged status of the subject
(as Baudrillard would have it) but also to reveal the poetic
possibilities inherent in our relationship to objects and space.
Varo’s representation of the prosaic and poetic nature of
scientific invention and engineerial fabrication, evident in many
of her paintings from the 50s and early 60s, demonstrates a
fascination with the dynamic interrelation between art and
science and the natural and material worlds. As the daughter
of a hydraulic engineer, Varo was early trained in mechanical
draftsmanship, and on the many trips with her father, across
Africa and Europe, she would have witnessed first hand the
hubristic creations of a modernity intent on transforming the
physical landscape with its geotechnical mastery. While critics
have emphasized the magical or mystical elements in her work,
Varo’s fascination with laws of physics, the world of science,
the feats of engineering as well as the intricate skill of domestic
craft are, I would argue, equally prominent themes in her mature
work. In many of these images an inventive modernity clashes
with archaic architectural forms, medieval cloaked and hooded
figures, and pre-modern scientific laboratories, conveying a
powerful sense of Surrealist disjunction and shock. I argue that
Varo’s images thus register an attempt to reconcile mysticism
and science in a way that refigures the surrealist journey as
intimately bound to everyday space and objects.
Natalya Lusty is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Gender
and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She is the
author of Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Ashgate, 2007).
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