Touching and Imagining: An Introduction to Tactile Art

by Jan Švankmajer, Cathryn Vasseleu (Introduction), Stanley Dalby (Translator)

Jan Svankmajer wrote this remarkable book on tactile art when he stopped directing films and experimented intensively with tactile art after repeated censorship by the communist governmnent of Czechoslovakia. Illustrated with over 100 imges, this book is organised around many reproductions of Svanmajker's wondrous tactile art objects, tactile poems, experiments and games. It includes dialogues with, and artworks by, other collaborating artists from the Group of Czech and Slovak Surrealists. Svankmajer also gathers together as contributors such notable exponents of tactical experience as Edgar Allan Poe, Guillaume Appollinaire, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Meret Oppenheim, Edith Clifford Williams, Ay-O, Valie Export, F.T. Marinetti and Karel Teige.

Genres: Art

308 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 24, 2013

About the author

Jan Švankmajer was born in Prague. An early influence on his later artistic development was a puppet theatre he was given for Christmas as a child. He studied at the College of Applied Arts in Prague and later in the Department of Puppetry at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts.

He contributed to Emil Radok's film Doktor Faust in 1958 and then began working for Prague's Semafor Theatre where he founded the Theatre of Masks. He then moved on to the Laterna Magika multimedia theatre, where he renewed his association with Radok. This theatrical experience is reflected in Švankmajer's first film The Last Trick, which was released in 1964.

Under the influence of theoretician Vratislav Effenberger Švankmajer moved from the mannerism of his early work to classic surrealism, first manifested in his film The Garden (1968), and joined the Czechoslovakian Surrealist Group.

He was married to Eva Švankmajerová, an internationally known surrealist painter, ceramicist, and writer until her death in October 2005.

Švankmajerová collaborated on several of her husband's movies, including Alice, Faust, and Otesánek. They had two children, Veronika (b. 1963) and Václav (b. 1975, an animator).

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. He continues to make films in Prague.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Švan...)

Reviews

[Bea · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5*

[Malcolm Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

What persuaded me to buy this book was watching the lubricous shaggy dog story of a film, 'Conspirators of Pleasure' which was directed by Svankmajer, and released in 1996. Oh dear me, I did not feel right in quite a positive way after watching that film several times over. The editing of the film was what kept me watching, along with the sensual use of everyday materials, the minimal dialogue/musical soundtrack, and the stop motion animation. For something audio/visual it was a sensory overload of a film in the way that tactility, and sensuality/sexuality were made so central to the plot.

But to cut to this book, when I bought it I expected that the contents of it were source material for the film, but they are a lot more besides. The book starts with several prefaces and introductions including one by the author to the English Language edition. The original text was completed in the Czech language in 1983 and has been subject to minor edits and variations up to this 2014 English language edition which has pages and pages of notes, an index, a bibliography and a filmography.

Svankmajer had been a leading surrealist in Czechaslovakia and film maker since 1964 In 1973 he was stopped from completing his film 'The Castle of Otranto' (1973-79) and exploring tactile art was his rather angry response to the production of the film being halted. His many short films films exploring what the phrase 'tactile art' means can be found on Youtube. A highlight among them is 'Dimensions In A Dialogue' where clay-mation animation goes very much where Aardman films fear to tread, exploring aggression and many other feelings that are common but difficult to express in animated form.

Since Surrealism is forever drawing from the writings of Sigmund Freud then so does Svankmajer, often via the writings of other surrealists. Chapter titles include 'Tactilism' 'Touch' 'Between utilitarianism and imagination', 'Restorer', 'Sources of tactile imagination', 'Short Anthology of tactile at', 'Inside', 'Afterword Tactilism Reviewed'. In the chapters he quotes many different schools of surrealism and includes many surreal image from the like of Man Ray, Francis Picabia, Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Jean Dubuffet, Claes Oldenburg, Umberto Boccioni and Max Ernst amongst many others. Many quotes by surrealist writers and European writers are scattered between the pictures where one of the most significant contributors is Eva Svankmajer (1940-2005), Jan Svankmajer's wife and collaborator over the decades.

If there was one thing that I would have liked it was that some of the images would have been colour prints rather than them being depicted in black and white. The black and white images made what they depicted seem flatter than they surely were.