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2007 (rok
LXII) |
Summary: |
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Dariusz Czaja Leiris. Outline
A user’s guide, mode d’emploi, or perhaps mode
d’inemploi? At any rate, this is the first
Polish extensive guide to the works of Michel Leiris. Michel Leiris My Name is Michel Leiris, I Have Just Turned Thirty
Four Opening fragment of L’Age d’homme. Michel Leiris, „...Reusement!” The first chapter of the first part (Biffures) of Michel Leiris Le Sacré dans la vie quotidienne The text of a lecture which Michel
Leiris gave at Collège de Sociologie in Michel Leiris Journal 1922-1989 (fragments) Fragments of a monumental journal –
a collection of daily records and initial notes for planned texts
– published already after the author’s death. The selection
encompasses almost seventy years: from inspiration by Surrealism and
hermetic occultism to old age. The journal is predominantly evidence
of the writer’s wide-ranging interests and unusual
acquaintanceships. James Clifford The Tropological Realism of Michel Leiris This introduction to a special
edition of „Sulfur” (1986), devoted to Leiris, deals with his
life, artistic and intellectual friendships, travels, work methods,
autobiographical writings and ethnographic studies. Leiris was one
of the most self-centred men of letters who, however, incessantly
confronted that which was to be found outside his own person –
existence in the Denis Hollier The Holofernes Headline (Notes about Judith) An analysis of the role played in
Michel Leiris’ L’Age
d’homme by the Biblical legend of Judith. The decapitation of
Holofernes is a „prime scene of the autobiographical genre: an
autobiography produces the same effect as the act performed by
Judith – its separates the head from the body and renders the
person who embarks upon the task of self-presentation distant from
himself”. An identification of Leiris with Holofernes produces an
autobiographical project, conceived as an experience of that which
cannot be grasped by the grammatical first person – it makes it
possible for Leiris to vanish from his autobiography. Dariusz Czaja Judith’s Cut: The Excesses of Exegesis The Biblical Judith occupied a
significant place in the private mythology of Michel Leiris, peopled
by numerous female figures. Her portrait, outlined in the
autobiographical L’Age d’homme, differs considerably from the characteristic in the Old Testament Book of Judith. The author closely follows the changes and transition of meaning to
which Judith had been subjected in comparison to her Biblical
original. Furthermore, he reveals the peculiar exegesis conducted by
Leiris, indicating that despite the fact that its deciphering cannot
be defended upon the basis of an exegesis subjected to
methodological rigours, it still possesses an indispensable
existential value; reading it is treated in the categories of „creative
treason”. Philippe Lejeune Reading Leiris. Autobiography and Language An outstanding expert on
autobiographies meticulously analysed L’Age d’homme by Michel Leiris,
reading it sentence-by-sentence and word-by-word... Michel Leiris L’Afrique fantôme Fragments of a 650-pages long journal
from an ethnographic expedition from aspects of the work conducted by an
ethnographer (which Clifford Geertz stressed upon numerous occasions),
but also a dramatic disintegration of the „I“ – here taken to
its extremes – which is a characteristic feature of modernity. Tomasz Szerszeñ From Dakar to Djibouti, from Afrique to fantôme... „ Michel Leiris Voyageur et son ombre This Nietzschean title conceals a
historical presentation of Raymond Roussel, which Michel Leiris, his
earliest supporter in the next generation, presented in 1935, two
years after the protagonist’s death. The sketch played a prominent
role in propagating the works of Roussel in a perspective delineated
by Surrealism. Raymond Roussel African Fauna A translation and summary (made by
Jan Gondowicz) of a fragment from Impressions
d’Afrique by Raymond Roussel. Olga Stanis³awska At the Crossroads of Views. Poland-Europe-Africa In an introduction to a discussion
about Joseph Conrad and colonialism, the author proposed a synthetic
description of Polish encounters with Georges Balandier, Catherine Coquery–Vidrovitch,
Pierre Halen, Elikia M’bokolo, Silvère Monod, Jean Omasombo–Tschonda
Joseph
Conrad and the « Darkness » of Central Africa – a Record of a
Discussion The titular discussion was held in
2004 at Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Jan Gondowicz The Flavour of Man Joseph Conrad resorted to disguising
drastic themes (such as eroticism), which include anthropophagy,
described at least upon five occasions. Examined from this viewpoint,
Heart of Darkness discloses not only connections with the ethnological conceptions proposed
by J. G. Frazer, but also an allegorical key to the plot,
originating from Livy, whose writings the young Conrad read while
studying for his final secondary school examination in Cracow. S³awomir Sikora Nostalgia Realised Kazimierz Zagórski (1883-1944), a
Polish officer and engineer, arrived in with great attention, a feeling for
form and exceptional care for lighting. The sitters were almost
always carefully posed and, as a rule, are distant from stereotypes.
The photographs certainly focused on a person and not a certain
larger entity, which anthropologists were in the habit of calling
culture. Both those portraits which showed only the face and those
of a larger fragment of a person display features of
individualisation (arrangement, lighting) although Zagórski
frequently appeared to attach just as much attention to the
sitter’s face as to the hairdo, scars or other ornaments (which,
it must be stressed, were their owners’ pride). Naturally, the Zagórski photographs
are not devoid of certain ideological operations (aestheticisation,
hieratisation, operations associated with temporality, sometimes a sui generis objectivisation). The decontextualisation which he sometimes allowed
himself in portraits treating particular parts of the body as equal
brings the applied operations close to certain phenomena discernible
in contemporary photography (e. g. R. Mapplethorpe or I. Penn). The
text originally accompanied an exhibition of photographs by
Kazimierz Zagórski (National Art Gallery Zachêta 2005, with the
author as co-curator); now, it has been expanded by means of an
appendix containing an extremely interesting album by Edward Piterek,
a Polish airman in Michel Leiris Théâtre joué et théâtre vécu dans le culte de Zâr „Demonic possession is a theatre in
itself, since objectively it refers to a depiction of a mythical or
legendary figure by man-the actor”, Leiris wrote when during his
Dakar-Djibuti mission he studied the Ethopian zâr cult. In time, he started to attach great importance to
its „spectacle aspects” which, following in the footsteps of
Alfred Métraux, he described as „ritual comedy”. The author
drew attention to assorted degrees of the authenticity of „possessions”:
from a so-called enacted theatre which is a purely functional
element whose purpose is to release social tension, to the „experienced
theatre” (authentic possession). He also stressed the line between
the two states, so thin that for all practical purposes it cannot be
designated. In his reflections about the character of possession
Leiris came close to the conception of the actor as it is presented
by Sartre in L'Être et le néant. Michel Leiris Francis Bacon face et profil In this classical essay Leiris
interpreted the oeuvre of his friend, the acclaimed painter Francis
Bacon. In doing so, he developed the conception of „live presence”
displayed in the Bacon canvases, which is the reason why they „resemble
life” and their realism shocks. The latter feature has little in
common with naturalism and should be compared rather to Joyce’s
epiphany. Looking at these paintings we are, Leiris wrote, „trapped
by a sui generis liturgy in
blanco, without any reference to
transcendence, existing only for its own sake, and more poignant
since it is uncontaminated by any sort of meaning”. Francis Bacon, Michel Leiris About Oneself / To Each Other An acclaimed painter and a renowned
anthropologist, Francis Bacon and Michel Leiris, remained friends
from the mid-1960s until death. This was an unusually intensive „relationship”
– let us recall that Bacon twice portrayed the author of L’Age d’homme and created a
series inspired by Leiris’ Le Miroir de Dariusz Czaja Francis Bacon: Traces of a Catastrophe Not surprisingly, paintings by
Francis Bacon were usually commented by resorting to an instrumentarium derived from a dictionary of the history of art. The author proposed a
different perception and tried to view Bacon’s works thorough the
prism of concepts not from the realm of aesthetics but theology. By
referring to numerous statements made by assorted commentators he
traced the obstinately recurring motif of evil. This is a proposal
to treat Bacon’s oeuvre as a
painterly introduction of the presence of evil and as sui generis „theological treatises” stressing the motif of irremovable evil in
human existence, a strong presence of the infernal element in the
world. Michel Leiris Alberto Giacometti This short text, published in Marek Kêdzierski Giacometti before Giacometti The first years spent by Alberto
Giacometti in Paris: the cooperation with the periodical „Documents”,
the beginning of a friendship with Michel Leiris, the decision to
join the Surrealists, the difficult relationship with André Breton,
the fascination with primitive and non-European art, the search for
a suitable form of artistic expression, the death of his father, the
rejection of Surrealism... Michel Leiris Le Miroir de Several key fragments of Leiris’
famous essay about tauromachy, published in Polish in Michel Leiris Rafaelillo, 9 octobre, Nîmes An impression about Rafaelillo – a
toreador from Ludwik Stomma Anthropologist and the Corrida In an ethnological interpretation of
the corrida the author considered successive parts of the spectacle
(with a detailed examination of its components), conceived as stages
in a ritual in which the bull is first humiliated and then ennobled
– as in the knighting ceremony. In this way, the bull becomes a
worthy opponent of the matador, with whom it engages in a duel. José Ortega y Gasset Sketch of an Epilogue for Domingo Ortega Remarks on the „geometry” of the
corrida, the Navarran and Andalusian species of the bull, and
corresponding choreographic norms, determining the style of the
fight and the gesticulation characteristic for the Basques and the
Andalusians. Jean Clair From the Corrida to the Crucifixion Fragment of an introduction to the
album Picasso. Sous les soleil de Mithra on the presence in Picasso’s oeuvre of certain
cultural motifs concentrated primarily on the bloody sacrificial act,
the bullfight (ancient and contemporary), the lethal gaze, the
symbolic identity of the eye and the testicles, fairground
acrobatics, the ladder to heaven and the Crucifixion. José Bergamin The Silent Music of the Corrida The spectacle of tauromachy possesses
its own silent music intended for the eyes. The mystery of the
bullfight reaches the ears via the eyes and vice versa, and then it
dies in ecstasy, immortalised in a fleeting albeit indestructible
form … Georges Didi-Huberman Dancer of Loneliness Why do Le Miroir de la tauromachie and the writings of José Bergamin about the corrida contain an essential
reference to Christian mystics, St. John of the Cross or Nicholas of
Kusa? What actually is the essence of Bergman’s „silent music”?
What sort of a connection is there between tauromachy, the dance,
„Andalusian illiteracy” and theology? Manuel Delgado Ruiz The Leiris Tauromachy as Embodied by Us A commentary to the taurological
works by Leiris, the art of tauromachy and the eroticism patterned
on it, which resigns from the fulfilment of the orgasm for the sake
of a „feminine” model – aesthetisation, theatralisation, delay.
The character which Michel Leiris ascribed to the corrida is the
same which the theoreticians of postmodernism refer to social
relations dominating in present-day culture. The most important
moment in life and in the arena is the one when the toreador and the
beast, I and the Other, pass without touching each other. Pedro Almodóvar did not want to make
movies about the corrida and recreate the bullfight: in two
breakthrough works, Matador (1986) and Talk to Her (2002), he
transferred the psychology of the bull-man relation to that of
man-man. The author of the article proposed a detailed analysis of
both films with the assistance of the corrida envisaged as a key,
and presented extensive source material (i. a. about the famous
toreador Manolete). Jan Gondowicz Leiris within the Range of the Alchemy of the Word All the literary and ethnological
works by Michel Leiris are an autobiographical experiment. Similarly
to other representatives of the Surrealistic stand Leiris made
creative use of the mechanics of the play on words, elevated above
comic functions according to the Freudian thesis about the
connection between a joke and the subconscious. In his version,
however, this meant that for years he was engaged in creating his
own lexicon of associations, an instrument of self-analysis, and a
pursuit of the collective mythology concealed in the recesses of the
language, and studies on the limits of speech as evidence of the
submission or resistance of thought towards its rules. Michel Leiris Sésame In this fragment of an essay Musique en texte, musique antitexte, which accompanied Langage tangage, Leiris
indiciated the sources of his fascination with the language, found
not only in numerous „hermetic” texts but also in the experience
of studying sigi so, the
secret language of the Dogon people, during his expedition to Africa. Emphasis was
also placed on the role played by Essai
de sémantique by Michel Bréal
from 1897, „where the perception of the tendency of the
Indo-European languages to express everything in the form of
activity assures that even the grammatical turn ‘clou prend un s au pluriel’ is the onset of a myth...” Michel Leiris Conception et réalité chez Raymond Roussel Leiris portrayed Raymond Roussel,
living alone among three cooks, three gardeners, three drivers and
three Rolls Royce cars, upon the basis of his own recollections and
a study by the psychiatrist Pierre Janet, whose patients included
the writer. This is a canonical likeness of Roussel as a man and an
artist, founded on a psychoanalytical parallel of his unusual
creative method and his paranoid personality, overwhelmed by
anxieties and fears. Dariusz Czaja The titular „ Andrzej Sosnowski Notes on How to Perform Opera Michel Leiris Turandot The notes about Puccini’s opera
come from Operratiques. In the exotic setting of Turandot Leiris
discovered motifs similar to those which captivated him in L’Age d’homme. An identification of Calaf and Holofernes, as well as Judith and
Turandot reverted him towards autobiographical themes: he planned
writing a book on Turandot or the Triumph of
Holofernes... Jean Jamin Reticence: Leiris, Lévi-Strauss and the Opera Two outstanding French ethnologists
– Michel Leiris and Claude Lévi-Strauss – were also great opera
lovers and experts. Both not only wrote about it but also introduced
operatic and musical motifs into their works (the former attached
importance to Puccini, Verdi and Leoncavallo, and the latter,
naturally, to Wagner). Their approach, however, differed totally, as
evidenced specially by a text—replica which Lévi-Strauss wrote
after the posthumous publication of Leiris’ Operratiques – a collection of
extracts and fragments about the opera. The author of Structural Anthropology remained sensitive to purely musical questions: the essential role of the
score, while Leiris focused on the libretto (Louis–René des Forêts
recalled: „The striking feature of our conversations, which I
confirmed while reading a collection of his posthumous notes
entitled Operratiques, was the fact
that he was interested less in music as such, and more in the
spectacle and, primarily, in the contents of the libretto. Here he
was unbeatable, capable of recounting in detail the plot of every
opera, even if it was immensely convoluted and improbable, as is
frequently the case with Verdi”) and, first and foremost, on the
spectacle itself. This fundamental controversy about the character
of the opera was presented by Jean Jamin, another ethnologist and a
friend of Michel Leiris. Tomasz Cyz Turandot or Liù after Pucccini The text of Turandot or Liù is a painstaking attempt at deciphering the opera by Giacomo Puccini. The
author interpreted this work within the perspective of the
composer’s oeuvre (Turandot is his
last, unfinished opera – Puccini, who suffered from cancer of the
larynx, died while writing it), his life (Liù, the second
most important female protagonist, is an homage paid by the composer
to his servant, Doria, who committed suicide after his wife accused
her of having an affair with him), the period (the end of the first
world war, the birth of Italian fascism), music in general (the
emergence of the twentieth-century avantgarde), other works about
the Chinese princess (Gozzi, Reinhardt, Busoni, Koch, von Einem,
Vakhtangov), the spectacle by David Pountney and Valeriy Gergiev
(Salzburg, 2002), the two endings of the opera (by Franco Alfano
from 1926 and by Luciano Berio), and the reflections of Slavoj Žižek.
„Žižek wrote that although Liù’s suicide cannot be
eradicated, it must remain ’deprived of an effect’, if Calaf and
Turandot are to live as if nothing happened. As if nothing happened... Is that possible? And was it possible for
Puccini who never completed his own work?”... Tomasz Szerszeñ „Documents” 1929-1930 „Documents”, founded in 1929 by
Georges Wildenstein, was an unusual and perhaps one of the most
interesting episodes in the history of the inter-war European
avantgarde. The motor forces of the periodical were three
extraordinary men: Carl Einstein, Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris.
Their project – a combination of science and art, of that which is
part of the past and the avantgarde, of the European and the
non-European – remained an isolated Nietzschean attempt at „re-evaluating
all”. „Documents” was also, and this is slightly less obvious,
an uncommon atlas of images. This emphasis on visual experience
brought the project conceived by Bataille and Einstein close to the
conceptions launched by Aby Warburg. If the Mnemosyne atlas is a sui generis „anthropology of the memory of forms” then „Documents”
can be recognised as an „anthropology of that which is formless”… Denis Hollier The Question of Lay Ethnography (The Enthropological
Wild Card) Who was Carl Einstein? What was the
role played by the exotic in the conception launched by the editors
of „Documents”? For what purposes did they need ethnography? In
„Documents” ethnography was identified with the supreme form of
that which Bataille soon described as heterology. Ethnography
appeared to be the saviour of the heterogeneous at the same time
when it became obvious that the historical fate of differences is
their obliteration. (In Tristes Tropiques Claude Lévi-Strauss
coined the famous neologism of „enthropology” in order to
suggest that the founding motif of anthropology was the prompt
disappearance of its object. In turn, fascination inspired by exotic
otherness was enrooted not in pleasure stemming from otherness as
such as from anxiety about it or, to cite Roland Barthes, not so
much from an ethnographic interest in the positive aspect of studium as from sensitivity to that which in Camera lucida he described as a wound, punctum... Krzysztof Rutkowski The Toe Can a toe become a philosophical
problem? The Big Toe is the title of an unusual essay by Georges Bataille,
written in 1929 and published in „Documents“. A brilliant
commentary was written by Roland Barthes... „Bataille thought in
the Nietzschean style: that which is loftiest and most noble in man,
for example, the head, remains in a mysterious relationship with
that which is most mundane. (...) Barthes demonstrated that
Bataille's wisdom consists in using scientific discourse in a
contrary, artistic way which, one would like to say, is doubled or
even multiplied. This is scientific discourse in inverted commas,
shifted, opened, sometimes mocked and at the same time deceitfully
and faux naively proposed precisely as a scientific discourse.
According to Barthes in the text by Bataille, truth and wisdom stem
from fiction which, successfully composed, allows a brief,
flickering, but true grasping of the truth...”. Krzysztof Rutkowski The Ear The essay by George Bataille entitled
La mutilation sacrificielle et
l'oreille coupée de Vincent Van Gogh was published in
the last issue of the periodical „Documents”. The author of this
article presents his own version of the story by Bataille. „Three
doctors described the case of Gaston F., recounted by Bataille in
his essay about an ear, and did so even more readily since Dr. Borel
personally drew Bataille’s attention to this case when Bataille
told Dr. Borel about Vincent Van Gogh’s obsession with the Sun
(...) There is no reason to separate Van Gogh’ ear and Gaston
F.’s finger from the famous liver of Prometheus if we regard as
justified an identification of the eagle the nourisher, the aetos
prometheus of the Greeks, with a deity who
robbed the Sun of its fire. (...) Each „Icarus-like being” who
soars towards the Sun, approaches it much too closely, or wishes to
steal its fire, is a self-mutilating being: it is Vincent Van Gogh,
it is Gaston F.”. Julia Holewiñska Lens under a Mask. On the Theatrical Aspect of
Photography by Claude Cahun Surrealism and photography share a
fascination with duality, the mirrored reflection, and the
doppelganger. The first three decades of the twentieth century were
also a time when not only taking photographs but also the photograph
as a such, conceived as an effect of activity, assumed the features
of a theatre, when photographic reflections became simultaneously
theatrical thought, and when the limits of the traditional approach
to assorted domains of the arts were crossed. One of the artists
situated on the borderline of the arts – between the theatre and
photography – was Claude Cahun, a niece of the writer Marcel
Schwob, who in the theatralisation of her own person went much
further than Duchamp for whom it was only a „staged” episode.
Duchamp as Rose Sélavy remained two persons, while Claude Cahun
standing in front of the lens, although disguised, was still the
same person … Incessantly questioning her identity, she created an
unusual photographic theatre (indistinguishable from „life”).
Who was Claude Cahun? A woman or a man? A photographer or a
photographed object? An actress or a director? „Herself” or „the
other”? Or perhaps she was Leiris’ Judith?? Ma³gorzata Baranowska Leiris and Nerval Gerard de Nerval inspired the
Surrealists not only by means of his extraordinary works or
alchemical interests but also by the fact that he was the first to
have discovered the possibility of „rendering life a metaphor”.
Nerval appears in one of Leiris’ dreams as a phantom; in this
manner, he plays in the Leiris imagination a role which he
indubitably longed for while alive: he becomes a dream… Katarzyna Kaniowska Leiris and Ethnography An attempt at perceiving the
ethnography of Michel Leiris through the prism of the programme
declarations of Surrealism. Leiris comprehended ethnographic
writings in a manner typical for every Surrealist: writing is a form
of self-expression as is ethnography. The ethnography represented by
Michel Leiris concentrated on a description of the unknown
discovered in the known. This is a „reversed” ethnography since
the examined object casts light on the examiner; the otherness of
that which is unknown becomes a pretext for self-cognition, for
discerning and describing the unknown in us. Ethnography, Leiris
seemed to maintain, can (but does not have to) offer hope for
discovering some sort of a way of establishing relations with the
world which would assist in understanding not the order of the world
but its disorder and differentiation; it is also helpful for finding
balance between alien elements, mutual strangers. Ethnography is
tantamount to manipulating details, Leiris wrote, shifting small
registers of reality, noting down thoughts, and documenting the
world on innumerable fiches. The essence of all those activities is
not a reconstruction of the described. The most important value is
reflection: the self-reflection of the subject. Michel Leiris „You’re not wrong when you say that I am the only
Surrealist who became an ethnographer” Fragments of an interview which Jean
Jamin and Sally Price conducted with Leiris at the end of his life.
The author of L’Afrique fantôme described, i. a. his early days as a Surrealist, told
about the strange relation between Surrealism and ethnography, and
discussed contemporary and African art... Giorgio Agamben Aby Warburg and „Anonymous Science” (fragments) A portrait of Aby Warburg, the author
of a project of a scientific discipline transcending the traditional
history of art. The objective of this „anonymous“ science is
neither the formal-aesthetic aspect of the image nor the essence of
the artist’s personality. In the science proposed by Warburg, the
attitude of artists towards imagery passed on by tradition is
envisaged not as indifferent reception but a confrontation of sorts.
Its target is a diagnosis of the Western man upon the basis of his
phantasms. The Warburg project may be recognised as a foretaste of
the future „anthropology of Western culture”, examining the „symbolic
whirling of collective memory”. Micha³ Rydlewski Appreciated Heritage, or Ethnographic Surrealism Today An attempted assessment of the
positive contribution made by ethnographic surrealism to the
anthropology of contemporaneity. In order to fulfil this task the
author follows the concurrence of conceptions and values, the
perception of cultural reality envisaged as an artificial order, the
obliteration of boundaries between art and science, the role played
by experiment and the origin of the intellectual climate. The
article reflects on the possibility of „depicting” post-modern
experience by deploying the instruments of visual anthropology since
it is the latter which makes it possible „to see more” and is
specially predestined to portray the cacophony of urban space.
Seeking technical skills and the type of experiment in the
construction of a film it expresses special affiliation with J.
Rouch and Z. Rybczyñski. The article attempts to demonstrate the
form which ethnographic surrealism, using new media techniques,
could assume today. Ludwik Stomma Tradition Fragment of a book entitled Wstyd, dzieciñstwo, czas... Antropologia historii (Shame,
Childhood, Time… An Anthropology of History) to be published by SENS. The author follows the historical motifs of
the symbol of the cockerel as an ersatz state emblem of |