"What I'm dealing with is so vast and great that it can't be called the truth. It's above the truth." - Sun Ra

Sunday, March 30, 2014

Surrealist Collage Exercises #1-7


 I made these collages via an exquisite corpse style random image grabbing collages over the last few days (though the images are all from my hard drive, many having been snatched and forgotten over the decades. The main rule for my version of this surrealist game is to layer the images however as long as the final image resists easy interpretation and lends to a paranoid-critical collapse of signification (i.e. you can hallucinate things that aren't really there--or are they?--when you stare for a long time). I kept the figures and faces to see if the cult of celebrity and film blogging might be tied in somehow.

The persecution of Mia
Outside Santiago

Scarlet O'Hara under the Alphaville Hanging

Amok Monument

 Sadomasochistic Crest Kiss (portrait of Barbara Crampton)


2 comments:

Unknown said...

Those are really amazing. I didn't think much of them initially, but second time around, I've stopped on each one for significant amounts of time, finding more and more little things I didn't notice on a passing inspection.

I think "cult of celebrity" has a lot to do with it. Celebrities stand for things in our read. We see some celebrities and think of a whole series of ideas, or see characters from movies and have a bunch of emotions that are compacted into that image.

It's a good way to get a spark out of someone's head, using images like that.

Erich Kuersten said...

Thanks Katy - that's the idea - to misuse those significations and icons to create breakdowns of meaning - ideally - ala Antonioni or the surrealists - the game of it is to remove any definitive figurative aspect for maximum hallucination quality - but since 90% of all the pics on my HD are from movies, there we are -- god knows what the original surrealists would have made with photoshop - they would probably have gone insane, or insaner...