Secret Noise: Marcel Duchamp and the (un)sound object

Marcel Duchamp’s enigmatic sculpture With Hidden Noise (1916) is widely known, but its complex relationship to sound has received limited attention. Containing a secret object whose presence and identity is registered only by the noise it makes inside a ball of twine held between metal plates, this performative aspect of the work remains unavailable for contemporary audiences; as such, it participates in what Christof Migone qualifies as the ‘unsound’, the latent aural registers of silence or suppressed noise. Considering the secrecy and sonic capabilities of this object, as well as the work’s collaborative contexts alongside the repeated interest in sound found elsewhere in Duchamp’s activity, gives access to reading With Hidden Noise as a proposition about hidden or embodied knowledge, a knowledge whose complex and hybrid nature is specifically registered through the promise of a performance of sound that remains tacit but resonant

Surrealist Networks and the Films of Maya Deren

The experimental film-maker Maya Deren rejected links between her work and surrealism; critics tend to either endorse this view, or be content with some general stylistic affiliations. Nevertheless, both the common context of New York circles in the mid-1940s, and emerging themes such as magic, ritual, gender and identity that are shared by Deren and surrealism suggest deeper affinities. Three films made by Deren between 1943 and 1946 (At Land, Ritual in Transfigured Time and especially the unfinished Witch's Cradle) can be used to plot a conversation between her work and surrealism, not in order to claim Deren for the movement, but to register resonances and consider some ways in which surrealism’s priorities shifted during and after the Second World War. Witch's Cradle, which features Marcel Duchamp and makes reference to surrealist exhibition contexts such as his Mile of String installation from 1942, may be read as an unravelling and rewinding of a skein of rituals and networks that would also inform developing surrealist theory and practice of the 1940s

Cubomania: Gherasim Luca and Non-Oedipal Collage

For nearly all Anglophone audiences of surrealism, devotees and scholars alike, the voice of Gherasim Luca (1913-1994) remains to be discovered. As a member of the short-lived surrealist group active in Bucharest between 1940 and 1947 – one of the most fervid chapters in the story of the international movement but also one of its least known – and in post-war Paris, as a lone poet of incantations of the void and its negation, close to André Breton’s surrealist circle without being drawn into it, Luca’s status could be seen as that of a troubling, liminal figure. This is no more than he might have wished, yet among those who do know his work there are many who consider it to be some of the most original of its time

Le Corbusier and Louis Soutter: ‘Complications and Attacks on the Beauty of Unity'

The sources of Le Corbusier’s status as the most influential architect of the twentieth-century may be traced above all to his theoretical writing, as communicated in his own carefully supervised book publications. A detailed and profound response to them comes in the form of unique artist’s books made from several of these works by the architect’s own cousin Louis Soutter, an artist often categorized as an ‘art brut’ visionary. This essay examines the ways in which Soutter’s dense figurative and decorative marginal drawings on the books emphasize the ambivalent tensions and exchanges between the two men and their apparently contradictory but equally complex world views. Krzysztof Fijalkowski is Professor of Visual Culture at Norwich University of the Arts. Recent publications include: Surrealism and Photography in Czechoslovakia (Ashgate, 2013, with Michael Richardson and Ian Walker); ‘Poétique/Politique: Picasso, Surrealism and Politics after 1944’, in Jonathan Harris and Richaerd Koeck, eds, Picasso and the Politics of Visual Representation (Liverpool University Press, 2013); and the translation and introduction of Gherasim Luca’s The Passive Vampire (Twisted Spoon Press, 2008)

Joyland

Text for Paul Gigby 'Portraits Emotions' exhibition and project website