144/Dimensional Drift Machine: Dekka Raymaker/Penumbra Carter at Burning Life 2009

Posted by Alpha Auer





Collage: In Profils Perdus Soupault says: "... In the course of our inquiry we had discovered that the mind released from all critical pressures offered images and not logical propositions..." The imagery of collage, its image-work is not amenable to rational control or explanation. André Breton recalls how he used Freud’s methods of investigation, as he experimented in written monologue by throwing out ideas on paper, followed by a critical examination. Breton noted that the writings were ‘strange’, invested with a ‘very high degree of immediate absurdity’. It was out of this experiment with Freud’s method that Breton founded surrealism defining it as ‘pure psychic automatism’, which through the spoken or written word, or some other means of expression, would reveal ‘the real process of thought’.

Collage consists in reassembling preexisting images in such a way as to form a new image answering a poetic need. Max Ernst defined it as "the chance encounter of two distant realities on an unsuitable level", a formula which is an alternate codification of Lautréamont's proposition: "Beautiful as the encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table, it gives us a remarkable method of triangulation that does not provide measures, but brings to the surface unrevealed mental images". Aragon states that collage "is more reminiscent of the operations of magic than of those of painting”. Everything hinges on the artist's success in persuading us to recognize as accurate the relationship now established between normally distant realities as well as in making us recognize their connection on the plane of poetry. Asked, whether he thought that his collages were visible poetry Jean Arp replied "Yes, this is poetry made with plastic means".










A conglomeration of protagonists: a bird, a skeleton in a wheelchair, empty chairs arranged in a circle waiting for their occupants, a fiery bathtub, a windmill have been placed in a landscape perfectly gridded by rows of stakes, over which loom a number of ever so graceful Picabiaesque towers. A collage of three dimensions. I do not know what this is. I do not understand it - on a conscious level - any more than I "understand" Max Ernst's collages or Eluard's poetry. However, just as its Dadaist and surrealist predecessors the impact of that what I am looking at (as well as hearing!) is utterly remarkable...

Dekka Raymaker and Penumbra Carter's installation at Burning Life 2009 is one of the most compelling works of art that I have been immersed in in quite some time. Teleport directly from here!