Voodoo Gong: the Apeman Walking Backwards to Hell

an exhibition of drawings, photographs and collages 
by Merl Fluin and Paul Cowdell
 

at Arkitektvägen 44, Stockholm, Sweden
Saturday 24 November, 14.00 –18.00
Sunday 25 November, 12.00 –15.00
Other times by appointment: arkitektvagen44[at]gmail.com or +46 736 17 20 20

Merl Fluin and Paul Cowdell are members of SLAG (the Surrealist London Action Group) and sometimes also of the Stockholm Surrealist Group. They are also the joint directors of the Bureau of Surrealist Ethnology. They have participated in Surrealist explorations and events internationally, including in Athens, Chicago, Istanbul, London, Prague, Reading (Pennsylvania), Santiago de Compostela and Stockholm.

The title of this exhibition was suggested through objective chance in a letter to Merl and Paul from their friend John Andersson. The images presented are all the results of investigations into automatism, dreams, objective chance, interpretive delirium and mad love.

Under a branch of acutely observant owls

Weary, trying to pass under a branch of acutely observant owls, I leaned back in horror to grab my ankles.

"Turn back!" the fattest of the birds cried, rising as to warn. But it was going nowhere, since the odd and cursed follower of my strayings had already seized it by the legs.

And as that composite beast, half light, half shadow, casually introduced himself to the dreamer´s hearing, saying: "Your posture now embodies the correctly conducted procedure of self-observation according to me, the abominable Piltdown Man", the horrified owl was screwed on to my neck while violently flapping its wings, thus propelling a bristly appearance to my soon externally materialized  ears. 

At the same time a certain dimness and immobility set in to restrict my hitherto unbounded headless vision. And as bedazzlement shortly befell the synergy of our as yet unspecialized imagination, we were one.

No longer weary, the carriage could pass under the branch and roll into the woods, to the bleating glee of cheerful comrades.

Where are they now?

/ NN

XX

/ G N

Ornaments

particles emerge, move about, are enlightened

like predator fish striking at its prey

soon to have never eaten again

dressed for a party as thieves

when sleep is poured into tall glasses

we deviate inwardly, to circulate

of the slowing down of the clapper´s pendulum motion

or why we are here, the depth of waves

we know nothing, therefore time-being never splits

we are ornaments, our task is to sit crouched

over the dead trunks of our dredged victims

being as foolish as we are unafraid of being caught

our sun rises with modification

it goes down, for something it must do

over the walls, chairs, hand shanks, beds

pregnant with stature, like the mobile continent

of nondecomposable plastic debris that is driven by

the Gulf Stream back and forth between the coasts

we set about to prowl along the roads and walls

/ NN

They passed close by me

the lovers 

and the lyrebird

sacrificed for the monster analogy

when children play with illusion

standing at the eye of soul  

in relative and mental kingdom

Temptation!      GNovak

                                       

gabriellanovak.com 

For those who will not be able to read most of the new novel by Mattias Forshage, Tesserakt eller Konsten och dödsstjärnan (Tesseract, or Art and the Deathstar) (oh, in fact there are some parts in English in it, but they wouldn't tell the main stories), we can at least give a hint about the contents by this box from the ongoing solo exhibition of MF's in Stockholm suburb Abrahamsberg, a box "Tesseract 1: the haunted house" which deals with some central themes.

Open Air Reverie

Shroud in sloe bloom

There is a woman, appropriately undressed and swept in sheets, who wakes up in the morgue. Lunar-like blue-grey light suggests it is night and there is a window. Nobody knows how it happened, there was just this mess made, and the sheets left behind, and then she seems to have resumed her life in secrecy.

Far later, after trainrides and sloe bushes, but still asleep, I am struck by the possibility that this woman in the morgue was Leonora Carrington.

MF

one of several legs

Sheila Legge, who was the "surrealist phantom" in a few photographs and live performances in 1936, remains the surrealist phantom in her elusiveness. Biographical data about her are very scarce, and when you are searching for them, you end up in more traces of others' similar and similarly futile quest than in any answers.

Sheila Legge was, according to her contemporaries, an important presence in the early English Surrealist Group in 1936. She was a good poet, she had a secret affair with René Magritte, she made her famous appearances as the surrealist phantom, and she disappeared. She came from Oxford to London, but her birthdate remains unknown just like all the details of her background and later life.

Among the false leads surrounding this absence of biographical information, a few Sheila Legges or Leggs have died in recent years (though all seem too young to be her). Sometimes there will involontarily gleam forth some perhaps surrealist humor even in her independent namesakes. The Glasgow Herald of 19/3 1988 reported that "Meningitis victim Mr Andrew Buck, 24, has been brought out of a deep coma by his neighbour's bark. Mrs Sheila Legg sat at Mr Buck's Bristol hospital bedside mimicking her two dogs as he lay unconscious for four days."

MF

Kaleidoscope

We'll be damned! Finally there is a book available about the surrealist movement, as not confined to a certain "heroic" period or a certain famous geographical distribution; but as truly internationalist and a lasting pole of regroupment, as it actually is! Is this the first time ever a comprehensive presentation of this is compiled before the eyes of the reading public?

728 pages of Miguel Perez Corrales Caleidoscopio surrealista is now available (La Página, Tenerife), and on the side of it Miguel is posting plentiful newsflashes and selected highlights of the past in his newly launched blog Surrealismo internacional.

(more detailed discussion forthcoming at the Icecrawler)