I’ve been pretty preoccupied posting about music lately and I haven’t touched on anything truly diabolical or bizarre since the release of the JFK files back in November. Luckily, there seems to be no end to tales of the otherworldly and just this weekend I stumbled across a story about a woman I’d never heard of before. Her tale involves antique alien encounters, elements of the supernatural, seance trances, automatic writing, a Martian named Leopold, and a bizarre-looking written language of seemingly-cosmic origin.

Here’s a bit about Helen Smith from the Wiki…

Hélène Smith (real name Catherine-Elise Müller, December 9, 1861, Martigny – June 10, 1929, Geneva) was a famous late-19th century French medium. She was known as “the Muse of Automatic Writing” by the Surrealists, who viewed Smith as evidence of the power of the surreal, and a symbol of surrealist knowledge.[1] Late in life, Smith claimed to communicate with Martians, and to be a reincarnation of a Hindu princess and Marie Antoinette.

In 1900, Élise Müller became famous with the publication of Des Indes à la Planete Mars (“From India to the Planet Mars”) by Théodore Flournoy, Professor of Psychology at the University of Geneva. The medium and the psychologist remained very close until 1899, when “Des Indes à la planète Mars” was first published. The book documented her various series of experiences in terms of romantic cycles: the “Martian” cycle, “Ultramartian” cycle, “Hindu”, “Oriental”, and “royal” cycles.

Here’s a sample of Smith’s Martian writing…

In 1900, a certain Mrs. Jackson, a rich American spiritualist who was impressed by Müller, offered her a salary which would permit her to quit her job and dedicate herself to pursuing and documenting her experiences. Müller accepted and was able to continue with further cycles. She also began to paint her visions and particular religious images of Christ.

According to Cabinet Magazine…

Over the course of the next two decades, Smith gave fewer séances and devoted much of her time to painting. Eventually, this work too attracted significant attention, including that of André Breton and the Surrealists. At her death in 1929, nine years after Flournoy’s own passing, the Geneva Art Museum sponsored a retrospective of her work.14 In some ways, the shift away from a verbal and toward a visual medium itself constituted a new language for Smith…

Here are a few of her works…

Detail from Ultra-Martian landscape painted by Hélène Smith.

From the seven-part series “The Materialization of the Girl of Jaïrus” by Hélène Smith.

Here’s a short video from my YouTube channel with some more information about Smith. Was this remarkable woman in possession of magical powers or just gifted with a remarkable creative imagination?

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This year we celebrate the 130th birthday of artist and chess aficionado, Marcel Duchamp who was born on July 28, 1887. It’s also the 100th birthday of Duchamp’s infamous readymade sculpture, “Fountain” — a urinal that Duchamp signed and dated with the pseudonym “R Mutt 1917.” Duchamp submitted the work to show in the April 10, 1917 exhibition of The Society of Independent Artists in New York. He also coughed up a $6 entry fee. The piece was rejected and Duchamp rose to champion his readymade works in print and through sometimes haunting photography, but a short time after the exhibition, the sculpture disappeared. Here’s The Daily Beast with more on that mystery…

But at some point after the pissoir-turned-artwork was photographed, the original porcelain Fountain was lost forever.
While many think it was accidentally thrown out shortly after it was created, with Phaidon even suggesting the dirty deed might have been done by Stieglitz himself, an article on the Tate website suggests the piece survived into 1918.
They cite photographs taken that year of a urinal hanging in Duchamp’s studio and suggest that it was disposed of sometime after those images were taken. While Duchamp eventually made eight replicas, it is largely through Stieglitz’s photograph that the piece went the 20th century equivalent of viral.
The loss of Fountain in no way affected its impact on the art world. Duchamp’s invention of readymades was an influential movement that would ultimately inspire the likes of Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, and many more.
It has also been the subject of more than a little merrymaking by artists. Brian Eno, Pierre Pinoncelli, Kendell Geers, and Chinese performance artists Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi have tried (many successfully) to pee in the reproduced urinals on display over the years. In 2006, artist Pierre Pinoncelli also attempted to attack the Pompidou Center’s Fountain with a hammer.
The original Fountain may be lost, but its memory and legacy very much lives on, as does the spirit of its cheeky creator.
Ahead of the official centennial of the Fountain on April 9, a secret quickly spread through the art world. Several museums around the globe were honoring the artist’s legacy by giving visitors who said the magic words free entry to their collections. All they had to do was approach the front desk and declare that they were “R. Mutt.”

Here’s a great BBC documentary about Dada and Surrealism, including the big splash made by Duchamp and his “Fountain…”

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This week, the Frist will open Real/Surreal: Selections from the Whitney Museum of American Art — it’s an exhibition of paintings, photos and prints that examine the way 1920′s European Surrealists like Dalí and Magritte influenced the American artists of the 1930′s, 40′s and 50′s.

Even if you’re not in Nashville, the questions the show raises are curious ones — the most important being “What are we talking about when we talk about the surreal?” Antonia found an old episode of the BBC show Arena that offers a great little primer on the subject: “Memoirs of a Self-Confessed Surrealist” features British critic/singer George Melly recounting his own surrealist roots and name-checking the other U.K. artists whom he counted among his comrades in arms. Along the way he traces European Surrealism from the nihilism of Dada through the shock of Duchamp. Melly died in 2007, but not before he gave us these eloquent lines about dreams, freedom and poetry:

Surrealism is the spirit of the dream coupled with reality. It’s reality as it might be. It’s reality infused with poetry. It’s not mystical — it relies only on what is there, but it combines these two to produce a world totally free.

Here is “Memoirs of a Self-Confessed Surrealist”…

Stay Awake!

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As we talked about on this week’s episode of Coincidence Control Network, Robert Hughes has slipped this mortal coil for that great rant in the sky. A consummate art critic, Hughes was as accessible as he was incisive — rather like the Carl Sagan of the cultural set, complete with his own blockbuster public television series.

Hughes wrote for TIME and he narrated a number of art programs for PBS and BBC but his masterpiece was The Shock of the New. Along with its accompanying book, Hughes’ Shock traced the development of modern art from Impressionism through Warhol. Debuting in 1980, the series’ last episode was prescient skewering of the art world’s increasing commercialization.

Cantankerous but committed, stubborn but straight-shooting, Hughes was a knowledgeable critic, a fantastic writer and someone who clearly felt that art and culture weren’t just the preserve of the privileged.

I’ve gone ahead and pulled together a Hughes playlist on my YouTube channel. So far I’ve added all 8 episodes of Shock including “Episode 5: The Threshold of Liberty.” Here is where you’ll find Hughes’ hilarious dismissal of Surrealism. I still don’t agree with everything he says here, but that’s not really the point. You don’t have to read or listen to Hughes to agree with what he says. It’s quite enough to simply enjoy the way he says it.

Stay Awake!

Love me two times.

As our our post-title implies, this entry will be an “exquisite corpse”.

The Wiki-Wik has a pretty good take on this process:

Exquisite corpse (also known as exquisite cadaver or rotating corpse) is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. “The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun“) or by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed.

The technique was invented by Surrealists and is similar to an old parlour game called Consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. Surrealism principal founder André Breton reported that it started in fun, but became playful and eventually enriching. Breton said the diversion started about 1925, but Pierre Reverdy wrote that it started much earlier, at least before 1918.^[1][2]

About a week ago, two of my co-conspirators – Melinda Ann Baker (Writer/Femme Fatale) and Duncan McDaniel (Painter/Junior Werewolf) stopped by my Parisian flat as they are wont to do when the sky goes  dark and their lips are parched for lack of alcohol and refined conversation. We welcome plenty of both at this, the House  of Dreams.

I’m not sure how it all got started, but I will give Melinda the credit as I believe she was the one to first mention the desire to “play a game”.  I nearly busted out the Crowley Tarot before she spoke the unspeakable name of the corpse.

Don't fear the reaper.

What has developed since then is an ongoing-good-time as well as an ambitious, evolving, long-term-plan to create a number of writings to eventually be compiled in what we hope will be a published volume.  However, even a Surrealist prospers from a few guidelines.

Abres los ojos...

This is a good recipe for a corpse – exquisite or otherwise:

1. Open your third eye and seek out a nearby text. Any book, magazine, flyer, poster, website – perhaps this luminous scroll? – will do.

2. Find a random passage and copy a found sentence onto a piece of paper.

3. Pass the paper from comrade to comrade in any way that seems to fit the mood.

4. Each person generally writes one sentence. Feel free to write sentence fragments, letting your co-conspirators finish your thoughts.

5. Before you pass to the next writer, fold the paper back so that the only part of the text they can see is your most recent contribution. The sentence you responded to is hidden from the next writer who is only allowed to see what you have just written.

6. Write quickly. Don’t think too much. This is an exercise in the irrational. Attempt to be perfectly imperfect, Grasshopper.

The wind doesn't try to blow, it simply blows - like Charlie Parker.

For your enjoyment, here is one of our latest greatest corpses:

“This is a very powerful misconception – that American fashion is just blue jeans and sportswear and not creative,” said Valerie, director of The House of Gauche: a French fashion firm that specialized in the violent and the shocking. “The House”, as the local benefactors called it, had a back room. In it was a tiny record player and a chaise lounge – their seat of overindulgence and – sometimes – missionary sex. In Ancient Rome, during the Festival of Pan, the women wore flowers in their fur. In those days women were easy to talk into almost anything a  man could imagine. Ahhhh…I look back on them with utter disgust; women have no business suckin’ my junk…unless I’m harder than a chiseled obelisk. In Ancient Egypt, the Pharaoh took his leave as the slaves on the plateau raised the question,  “Am I God?”.