Salvador Dalí's Dream of Venus at the 1939 New York world's fair: capitalist funhouse or surrealist landmark?

For the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, New York, Salvador Dalí created a surrealist funhouse called Dream of Venus. This installation, which included sound and performance, aimed at a controversial sensation, a truly surreal experience for its visitors. Labelled as “tacky, Oceanside amusement park attraction” and wrapped up by consumer commodity, however, Dalí’s surrealist funhouse is been said to have lost much of its provocative power. This contribution investigates to what extent the avant-garde aesthetics and politics became part and parcel of American consumer culture, commodity culture and capitalism. Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s poststructuralist analysis of the axiomatic regime of capitalism and their view on madness provides a toolbox for taking a closer look at surrealist (vain?) efforts to combat capitalist dominion

The creative power in the failure of word and language : on silence, stuttering and other performative intensities

While a ‘good’ style, for Quintilian, is correct, lucid, elegant and balanced, Gilles Deleuze, in his essay He Stuttered, examined the style of a language in disequilibrium. These two concepts of style may be used to interpret Pieter De Buysser’s L’opéra bègue / Stotteropera (2004). The Flemish theatre-maker and playwright challenges the comfort of spectators, forces them to stutter in their interpretation and to dissolve closed identities. Jacques Rancière, who considered the contradictory history of rhetoric and the model of the ‘good orator’, has argued that politics revolves around what is seen and who has the ability to see and the talent to speak. The question is whether L’Opéra bègue / Stotteropera takes part in a certain recasting of the ether performances that leave the spectator stuttering can be termed ‘political performances’

Reenacting modernist time : William Kentridge's the refusal of time

In The Refusal of Time (2012), South African artist William Kentridge reveals how the Western time regime is a central tenet of modernity, capitalism, and colonialism. Featuring a remarkable reenactment of the famous serpentine dance of Loïe Fuller, this multimedia installation provides a sharp comment on the Western conception of dance history. In having this iconic dance reenacted by Dada Masilo, a dancer of color, Kentridge questions white supremacy in the history of dance. Moreover, having the film sequence of the dance solo shown backward, the images also dismantle the modernist, chronological conception of time and history. This critical reenactment, like the dancing figures in the closing parade of The Refusal of Time, in fact reveal the modernist desire to reenact history along a chronological timeline. Connecting Kentridge’s The Refusal of Time with Deleuze’s onto-aesthetics, this chapter observes how reenactment can articulate an ontological politics of time and movement