Tuesday, June 25, 2024

It goes without saying that miserabilism, an apparition which may be held to be one of the specific phenomena of these last few years, miserabilism, this plague against which the moment has come to take energetic measures, permits of as many variations in art as there are categories of misery: physiological misery, psychological misery, moral misery, etc. The time has come to study it clinically.

Miserabilism cannot pass for having raged in France in an endemic manner. The Middle Ages, as elsewhere, were exempt from the contagion. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries turned their backs on it, in so doing braving the already deliquescent Italy of the popes. Against its infiltrations the nineteenth century, for which the Beast had taken the name academicism, reacted in heroic manner (Hugo, Nerval, Géricault, Corot, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Gauguin, Seurat, Henri Rousseau). Behind them, the great bridge whose first spans were laid by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sade, the French Revolution.

Today, miserabilism, in this very country, is the offspring of the perfect coupling of those two vermin, hitlerite fascism and stalinism, as thick as thieves in their attempt to apply the death sentence to artists by injecting them with their poison. It also produces deferred results, since we are still saddled with the nauseating aspect of existentialism, Léger’s repulsive Eves in air-chambers, and Buffet’s clown-Christs fashioned from ribs of an umbrella blown inside out – a bankrupts’ stock exchange quoted at a million apiece or more.

There should be no need to emphasize that quarrels between rival factions play no part whatsoever in this. The whole question and the only question is that of ‘sacred language’. ‘Can one,’ asked Eugène Soldi already in 1897, ‘separate a concrete fact from a generalized idea, from an abstract thought? Can one give an idea of the ideal without exalting the sense of a reality? Can the human brain conceive a thing lacking attachment to the real? No’. The case is overwhelming. But the depreciation of reality in place of its exaltation  - there we have miserabilism, there is the crime.

ANDRÉ BRETON, "Away with Miserabilism!"(1956)

(translated by Simon Watson Taylor) 


Any idea what Andre's on about here?

It seems like possibly a rather local and very topical response to something-or-other.


Saturday, June 8, 2024

 “And you have absolute power, absolute control, over everything in those worlds. Pigs can fly, forests can walk. The river can sing and flow uphill. At your command the world could blow itself to ice and dust.”

Oliver Postgate on worldbuilding, Seeing Things


(via Rob Chapman)

 'pop songs celebrate not the articulate but the inarticulate ... they measure the depth and originality of their emotions by reference ...