Compulsive Beauty

October Books

by Hal Foster

In Compulsive Beauty , Foster reads surrealism from its other, darker as an art given over to the uncanny, to the compulsion to repeat and the drive toward death. Surrealism has long been seen as its founder, André Breton, wanted it to be as a movement of love and liberation. In Compulsive Beauty , Foster reads surrealism from its other, darker as an art given over to the uncanny, to the compulsion to repeat and the drive toward death. To this end Foster first restages the difficult encounter of surrealism with Freudian psychoanalysis, then redefines the crucial categories of surrealism—the marvelous, convulsive beauty, objective chance—in terms of the Freudian uncanny, or the return of familar things made strange by repression. Next, with the art of Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, and Alberto Giacometti in mind, Foster develops a theory of the surrealist image as a working over of a primal fantasy. This leads him finally to propose as a summa of surrealism a body of work often shunted to its the dolls of Hans Bellmer, so many traumatic tableaux that point to difficult connections not only between sadism and masochism butal so between surrealism and fascism. At this point Compulsive Beauty turns to the social dimension of the surrealist uncanny. First Foster reads the surrealist repertoire of automatons and mannequins as a reflection on the uncanny processes of mechanization and commodification. Then he considers the surrealist use of outmoded images as an attempt to work through the historical repression effected by these same processes. In a brief conclusion he discusses the fate of surrealism today in a world become surrealistic. Compulsive Beauty not only offers a deconstructive reading of surrealism, long neglected by Anglo-American art history, but also participates in a postmodern reconsideration of modernism, the dominant accounts of which have obscured its involvements in desire and trauma, capitalist shock and technological development.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Art History, Theory

338 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Hal Foster is a Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University specializing in 20th century art.

Note: for the comic book artist, see Harold "Hal" Foster.

Reviews

[Curtis Anthony Bozif · Rating 2 out of 5]

I learned (again) that love is homesickness.

[Beāte · Rating 3 out of 5]

sudden fear in the forest of symbols.
attempts to integrate art and life
dream interpretation
Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain
point o f the mind at which life and death, the real and the
imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable,
high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.
new conception of art: the image as an enigmatic
trace o f a traumatic experience and/or fantasy, ambiguous in its curative
and destructive effects.
Love is homesickness
Treatment at these
institutions included free association and dream interpretation, the very
techniques that inspired the automatist devices o f early surrealism.
why would the little boy symbolically repeat an event,that was precisely not pleasant?
Inquiry: one lives, one dies. What is the role o f will in all this?
It seems that one kills oneself as one dreams. It is not a moral
question that we pose: is suicide a s o lu tio n ? Suicide
is a badly conceived word; the one who kills is not identical to the one
who is killed.
death is a dissociative principle
passive “ spectator” o f his own work, or
an “ agonized witness” o f his own life.
confusion between internal impulse
and external sign;
confusion: the compulsion to
repeat. a real event that produces an unconscious effect.
repetition that is regressive, generally defusive, even deadly
Compulsive beauty is like a train . . .
the mannequin, doll, or dummy as a disguised self-portrait,
concerned to work over cathected memories: he too restages primal fantasies
and/or traumatic events concerning identity, difference, and sexuality
In
“Memories o f the Doll Theme,” the text that introduces the first doll
his photographs
often present both poupees in scenes evocative o f sex as well as death
the first doll as a way to recover “ the enchanted garden” o f childhood
mechanism o f the poupee: its interior is filled with
miniature panoramas intended “ to pluck away the secret thoughts o f the
little girls.”
the dolls are
“ captured” by his look, by his grasp. How are we to understand this? doll suggests an obsessive fragmentation o f a female figure
doll is “ a
series o f endless anagrams”
desire o f children to “ see the soul o f their toys” as a
“ first metaphysical tendency,” whose failure is “ the beginning o f melancholy and
Gloom”
manipulates the
dolls as i f to ascertain the signs o f difference and the mechanics o f b irth. in his
destruction o f the dolls he expresses a self-destructive impulse.
marks the dolls, many o f which read simultaneously as a
corpse and a corps morcele
perversion o f the dolls is precisely a turning away from the
father,

[Bennett · Rating 5 out of 5]

since i bought this book in the Dean Gallery bookshop in 2000 it has been one of my essential "to hand" books on surrealism. deftly exploring the Freudian dimension of the work of (pre WW2) surrealists, it weaves an illuminating web of cultural and poetic resonances around the work of Ernst, Breton, Bellmer, et al. very highly recommended (if you're into surrealism and/or psychoanalysis)

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes I really hate Hal Foster, but that's why I love him.