WHEN BEAUTY IS NOT ENOUGH – Xtra Magazine’s story commemorating one year without Hamish:

http://www.xtra.ca/public/Toronto/When_beauty_isnt_enough-7607.aspx

Fashion Televison also covers his passing:
http://watch.fashiontelevision.com/news/november-2008/clip116833#clip116833

Yesterday, I quoted a piece of Glisaine Wood’s curatorial text at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Surreal Things exhibit. The term ‘convulsive beauty’ was something I wanted to clarify a bit for myself. However, a little research proved that the term is as intangible as Surrealist logic/poetry. Instead of trying to pin convulsive beauty down to a single reductive concrete meaning I offer a reference to it from Breton’s 1928 novel Nadja:

“Beauty is like a train that ceaselessly roars out of the Gare de Lyon and which I know will never leave, which has not left. It consists of jolts and shocks, many of which do not have much importance, but which we know are destined to produce one Shock, which does…The human heart, beautiful as a seismograph…Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.”
— André Breton (Nadja)

 

I went to see the Surreal Things exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario (extended until Sept 19th) yesterday.  It brought me back into an old obsession in a totally new way. I’ve been captivated by the beauty of mannequins since I was about five years old. I wanted to share a section of the curatorial text below by Ghislaine Wood (also author of The Surreal Body: Fashion and Fetish) because I found it as fascinating as the art.

The Mannequin
For the Surrealists, the mannequin embodied the contradictions of modern life. It confused the boundaries between the animate and inanimate, human and machine, male and female, sexualized and sexless, and ultimately life and death. It was simultaneously a commodity, a simulacrum, an erotic object and the embodiment of the uncanny.

For Freud, the uncanniest objects were ‘waxwork figures, artifical dolls and automatons.’ In the Freudian uncanny, the mannequin also represented the suppressed primal human being emerging from the unconscious. Andre Breton saw the mannequin as the ultimate representative of what he termed ‘convulsive beauty.’

I am touched and honoured today to make contact with John Boland, the Webmaster to the Estate of Spalding Gray (spaldinggray.com). John left this comment under yesterday’s post but I thought I would share it here, too, cause Spalding is such an inspiration to me. This really made my day.
Below is his message to ninaarsenault.com

“most of all, Spalding Gray could surf an unpredictable, sometimes violent, sea of emotion, sensory details, memory, intellectual analysis, surreal personal metaphors”

Thank you for the wonderful, kind words about Spalding. I will add you to the monologist page and I think your whole piece would be wonderful under Fan Writings. Yes, there´s more…. »

I’m going to be adding content and links of stuff I’M PASSIONATE ABOUT to my blog and it really will be stuff I love, not just random stuff I surfed online. Usually it will be creative stuff that is inspiring my art practise. I just like to put my interests out there and see who is plugged into some of the same stuff as I am.

This video is an excerpt from THE RITE OF SPRING as choreographed by German dance/theatre artist Pina Bausch who recently left this world. Her work is violent, primal and punishing.