Oren Lavie : Her morning Elegance

Possibly the best stop motion animation I have ever seen.

Max Ernst

""The expressive possibilities of collage seem so simple that one is tempted to think that anyone could employ them to equal effect. Yet when one reviews the works of this early period - the printer's plate prints, say, those compositions made with the aid of old line blocks found in a printer's shop - it becomes obvious that Max Ernst's brilliant accomplishment consisted of having developed a syntax by which the employment of this found material could be controlled. For all their independence from traditional artistic techniques and the imitation of nature, it is surprising how much stylistic unity these works evince. Thanks to his stylistic syntax Ernst created recognizable links between the works, which form a coherent sequence. Criteria of choice and criteria of employment are everywhere in evidence. Indeed, the effect of every Max Ernst image depends largely on the fact that it sets its own limits. One might add, as a general principle, that the collages and frottages (and the painting and sculpture derived from these techniques) arc so astonishingly effective because their creator succeeded in placing conscious restrictions on the arbitrariness and amorphousness to which such semi-automatic techniques all too easily lead. Ernst not only created individual, disparate works; more importantly, with the aid of variations and series, he simultaneously created the climate in which these works live and breathe. And one should note that it was a climate his contemporaries found almost unbearably bracing. In an announcement in die schammade for the portfolio Fiat modes - pereat ars Max Ernst characterized himself, in an untranslatable pull on the German word for uterus, Gebarmutter, as 'der gebaervater methodischen irrsinns', the male mother of methodical madness. If we take 'methodical' to be the operative term which reveals the essence of his procedure, we have the precondition for the fascinating developments that now began."

(Artchive)

Hannah Hoch

Hoch's impact on Berlin Dada was profound. She was a master practitioner of photomontage -- a technique that all the dadaists adopted. With its roots in the kitsch tradition of splicing heads from family photos onto magazine pictures of ideal soldiers or angelic women, photomontage took images and type from the popular press and combined them in ways to reveal the fissures that ran through middle-class ideology.

Hoch's most famous work, "Cut with the Kitchen Knife: Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-belly Cultural Epoch of Germany" (1919), is a 3' x 4' collage bursting with images of German industry, military figures, and recreational gaieties. Amid these pictures, the word "dada" cuts like a knife, exposing the ludicrous contradictions that were Weimar. Other works such as "Hochfinanz" (High Finance) directly critique the connection between bankers, industrialists, and the military.

(Art and Culture)

Joachim Schmid

Using other people’s (often mundane) photographs, he creates artwork that is alluring, intriguing, and captivating. He revels in photographs that other people lose or throw away in public, especially if they seem to have been discarded with some animosity or intense feeling. He is very much a modern day anthropologist who tries to understand contemporary cultures by studying its visual garbage.

(Lens Culture)

John Stezaker

"Breathing new life into photographs salvaged from forgotten film archives and obsolete magazines, John Stezaker intuitively transforms these found portraits into otherworldly, uncanny beings. Playing with our fascination with the face, Stezaker’s subtle yet unsettling interventions toy with the subconscious and the surreal.

Using a manual cut-and paste technique he continues the rich history of collage by dissolving the naturalistic picture plane and constructing a fragmented and dislocated view of contemporary reality. The individual images fuse and separate before our eyes, opening up new characters, relationships and meanings." (Stills Gallery)

I think this may have possibly been a daydream.

Eleven, ten and nine. Boredom hits this infertile awareness.

Will someone please tell Gustave Flaubert to stop touching the lamp shades? ...otherwise the phasers will have to be set to 'kill', as per Picard's instructions.

Thank you.

Harry Everett Smith

Harry Everett Smith's long term friendships with many of the Beat writers led to the release of Allen Ginsberg's First Blues in 1976 as well as unreleased recordings of Gregory Corso's poetry and Peter Orlovsky's songs.

Most of Everett's significant artworks materialised in the form of video's that synchronised with music, often inspired by the none objectivism of Malevich and the Suprematist movement.

Jan Svankmajer

"Švankmajer has gained a reputation over several decades for his distinctive use of stop-motion technique, and his ability to make surreal, nightmarish and yet somehow funny pictures.

Švankmajer's trademarks include very exaggerated sounds, often creating a very strange effect in all eating scenes. He often uses fast-motion sequences when people walk or interact. His movies often involve inanimate objects coming alive and being brought to life through stop-motion. Many of his films also include clay objects in stop-motion, otherwise known as claymation.

Food is a favourite subject and medium. Stop-motion features in most of his work, though recently his feature films have been including much more live action sequences rather than animation.

Many of his movies, like the short film Down to the Cellar, are made from a child's perspective, while at the same time often having a truly disturbing and even aggressive nature. In 1972 the communist authorities banned him from making films, and many of his later films were suppressed. He was almost unknown in the West until the early 1980s."

Funny World #3

These walls are pissing people and liquid, both persisting on touching my shoulder, dribbling an intense feeling of vertigo limbs shaking and nagoy lips that float past my left tiffy viewer.

I stand nervously for ten minutes then sit and fall asleep. I can feel my heart beating outside of itself, am I still awake or is this idea just caught in my teeth?

There seems to be a crease in your sun, and all this time I'm gluing feathers to the moon, losing touch with these walls and becoming desperate for answers, I'll build a desert for all these thoughts.

A mirror looks at us both pretending, squirting skulls when it seems therapeutic. It hurts to know that Roman Polanski and Jean Luc Pickard hide in my head, provoking a broad and inclusive mind with lines per inch and a colour theory that tastes like shit. it's all a bit alien to me, let's just react and start to think that this is healthy.

Why have I not seen you? We are shooting up all this matter from a single source and all this seems to be actually happening now, all sprinkled with icing incorrect, sayings and falling diamonds. I'm losing interest in all these sharp folds. My beholding fingers and endless juxtapositions make it very hard to see things correctly.

If I write my name on you, will you belong to me?

She is everything at once, scattered and connected like azure seas and impossible birds. She looked like a velcro feeling, a disparate illustration of everything in between. Come back twice as strong, she said, take responsibility for anything in this surge of bezoominess.

She knows about these two kinds of visual emotions. The first time I called, she asked if we were miscommunicating or if I felt the same.

I wanted to hold you in this infinitely blissful electricity with emotional fingers and erupted words, but you never happened.

To see all these horses and numbers absorb the atmosphere and project it into fuck all, I don't even know what to do but at least I have you, little sausage cat, laid underneath that door. Meet me with a bunch of words from an intellectual document, entitled, watch what you're not so good at, internal cares and external somewheres-down-the-line, give me power and things that sometimes stop me from being.

I sit there stewing outside my head, eating nine pence noodles. I adore her.

Call me so I can feel that uneasy warm feeling again, I've not seen you and you haven't seen me inspired, and that's just the trouble, your beauty makes me stupid and I'm chasing this little touch of regret.

I love you, my secret whispering.