Surrealist Ghostliness by Katharine Conley

Surrealist Ghostliness by Katharine Conley

Author:Katharine Conley [Conley, Katharine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-1-4962-1152-1
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2018-07-14T16:00:00+00:00


32. Dorothea Tanning, Murmurs (1976). © Dorothea Tanning. Private collection.

A small mythical creature like the winged creature in Birthday, a visible and embodied psychic “spirit,” hugs the female body around the neck and looks directly at the viewer with a calm, confident gaze. This fixed look lends gravity to the leaning body and suggests that the abandon with which the woman’s body arcs backward is purposeful, that the whirling space toward which the body inclines attracts her without destabilizing her. The allure of empty space also attracts the viewer, and, though it does not seem to confuse the leaning body, it has an unexpectedly vertiginous effect. What we see in the dizzying space are other bodies, recognizable in the shape of a hand, a knee, an arm, a breast, a leg, that are far away but luminous and spinning, like the stars at night when seen with one’s head thrown back like the figure in the painting. Tanning’s psychic geography here envelops her central figure and situates her squarely within a vast yet incongruously accessible universe in which ghosts have bodies that visibly coexist with our own in a newly baroque form of the doubleness typical of surrealist ghostliness.

In Murmurs, Tanning claims, she hoped to capture the sounds of space, planetary echoes, myths, memories, and constellations. She wanted this space to be “as endless as any space can be in a painting that listens to its murmurs” (Tanning: Birthday and Beyond). Murmurs recalls the circular paintings by Tiepolo that decorate the ceilings of Venetian palaces and create the baroque illusion of additional space, making rooms “full to bursting,” like the desert in Chasm. With Murmurs Tanning opens up a wall and gives us the impression that we could plunge through it fearlessly, like the body that dominates the work. The immense space of Murmurs might not have been possible without Tanning’s three-dimensional objects. More than ever we have the impression of being able to circumnavigate this painted body, the way one can walk all the way around one of her sculptures. The density, texture, and ghostly spinning sense of this space represent the culmination of Tanning’s work, her most definitive stylistic signature. The viewer “is invited to enter into her paintings,” as Alain Bosquet has claimed (n.p.). Sculptural, these paintings reveal a life bubbling just below their calm surfaces. Quoting Rimbaud, Breton concluded the “Manifesto” with the phrase “Existence is elsewhere” (Manifestoes 47). Tanning devoted herself to the concrete investigation of this surrealist tenet, except that, for her, that ghostly “elsewhere” was often just below the surface of the most ordinary objects and spaces in our houses. Tanning quotes Rimbaud in her description of painting toward the end of Between Lives; her mission, she writes, has always been revolutionary: “You have been bold, working for change. To overturn values. The whirling thought: change the world. It directs the artist’s daily act. Yes, modesty forbids saying it. But say it secretly. You risk nothing” (326).

The drama of Tanning’s works emblematizes one



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