>> Emily Moore: Visual
culture in 2022 is a carnival
of mash-ups and collage.
Music is sampled, memes
gather variations,
and filters on social
media have become standard.
The ubiquity of visual
collage with its texture
and quintessentially
modern pairings of media
and material has trained our
eyes to recognize difference,
to accept the union of elements
that come from disparate planes.
What if we, as viewers, were
able to take that capacity
for visual reconciliation
and put it into the space
of language and ideas?
Today in From the Vaults, we
are going to take the advice
of artist Max Ernst and in his
words examine the "encounter
of two or more foreign realities
and the spark of poetry
that leaps across the gaps
as these two realities
are brought together."
In 1949, a Beverly Hills
bungalow come art gallery
published Max Ernst "At
Eye Level," a series
of poems written in
English paired with a series
of eight collages
all done by Ernst.
The collages are
quintessentially Ernstian.
Through cutting up mail order
catalogs, anatomical text,
and Victorian magazines, he
created surrealist scenarios
in which uncanny likenesses of
humans sprout wings, bend time,
and wrestle with madness.
Ernst would revisit this written
work and translate it twice
into his native German in
1955 and into French in 1967,
which we have here in
the Aramont Library.
While the collages
never changed,
Ernst welcomed each
translation as an opportunity
to revisit his poetry,
varying content and rhythm,
the work bending and
flexing to the nature
of the language it was becoming.
Each edition then is
both a distillation
of his original ideas and
also an evolution of them.
Through translation, Ernst
played with the relationship
between language and meaning,
disrupting textual continuity
in order to perfect its content.
We can think of collage as a
type of pairing or matching
of seemingly disparate objects,
something Ernst does
repeatedly throughout this text;
meanings paired with symbol
creating written language
which is, in turn,
reborn in each iteration.
Images are paired with text
demonstrating how the signifiers
of language can reference
themselves, circling back
to multiply, divide, substitute
and replace each other.
This collage, for example, bears
motifs common in Ernst's work.
The deconstruction of
idealized form, for example,
and the obfuscation of vision.
Scholar Margot Norris notes that
Ernst plays with the tension
of how the viewer
creates meaning.
He retains the syntax of the
body, keeping the torso and legs
of the classical figure intact
while manipulating its lexicon,
replacing its face with
the back of a woman's head.
This juxtaposition takes the
classical and makes it modern
through encouraging the viewer
to build a new visual language
with the components
of the old one.
So how can we think
about the ways that words
and images challenge and
complement one another?
Whether it's visual or verbal,
collage is not a
simple reconstruction.
It is the overt
re-representation of ideas
that are doubly-coded as they
are made with found materials
that adopt a new signification
of the concept or identity.
This new signification
can be seen
by bringing together the
three versions of this text
as seen here in a poem
accompanying a collage
that features the Venus de Milo.
In English, the poetry is spare.
It consists of a single line.
And like all the poems in the
first version, it has no title.
In the subsequent German and
French versions, Ernst engages
with the image he created years
earlier, giving the work a title
and describing it in new detail.
Her skin, he notes, is too cold.
Her base too old.
And he remarks on the
emptiness of form.
There is a really
terrific tension
between the different
versions in which the spaces
between language become visible.
Translation is an art and in
moving through three languages,
we get a window into Ernst's own
response to his creative work.
Each translation offered him not
only the opportunity to revisit
and revise but to also play with
the subtleties of each language.
His partner, fellow artist
Dorothea Tanning, described it
as "a refining and
re-breathing."
Ernst is able to excise
meaning and restructure it based
on whatever language
he was working in,
a collage of ideas,
symbols and sound.
To close, I offer the words of
Rene Crevel, writer and friend
of Ernst, who described the
sensation of seeing Ernst's work
as something akin
to becoming it.
"Because Max Ernst invites us
to the miraculous [inaudible],
our eyelids become wings,
our glances fly faster
than the wind."
Thank you so much for
joining us for this episode
of From the Vaults to spend
some time with another treasure
from the Aramont Library.
I hope you join us again soon.