DYN
DYN (derived from the ancient Greek term κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν , which is if possible) was an influential French-English art magazine, published by the surrealist Wolfgang Paalen in exile in Mexico with distribution in New York , Paris and London between 1942 and 1944 Issued six issues, one of which is a double issue.
backgrounds
Paalen's desire for his own art magazine is based on a complex, ideological dispute with André Breton that goes back to their Parisian collaboration in surrealism in the late 1930s. From the beginning of his membership, Paalen found himself in disagreement with Breton's absolute setting of the Marxist dialectic ( dialectical materialism ) as the basis of poetic being, which in his opinion contradicted his reference to mystical and esoteric traditions. If there is no energetic consciousness in matter, how can the development of life be explained from it, which ultimately leads to the awareness that matter is dead and without energy? Paalen tried to solve the problem through a radical break with the old teachings, which he wanted to replace with his philosophy of possibility. Very generally (according to Aristotle) matter (from mater = mother) should be seen as such that the possibility (dynamis) precedes reality (energeia), which removes it from any a priori definability. Paalen saw himself confirmed in this principle by his private scholarship in the most varied of fields; In DYN he placed the main focus on the current importance of cubism , quantum mechanics , the ethnological research of pre-Columbian art, especially the Maya and Olmecs and above all the totemic art of British Columbia , whose matrilineal culture and concept of space in sculpture and painting him particularly interested. For his idea of painting as an open space of possibility, he also referred to the dispute between Goethe and Newton about the true nature of light: "The question" Do the colors exist in white light before it passes through the prism that causes it to be divided? " seems equally distant from the ideas of Goethe and Newton, because the new physics replies that they do exist - "but only in the way that there is a possibility before the event that will tell us whether it has actually been realized" ( Louis de Broglie ) As a possibility. Does that mean that the new physics has dared to give up security in favor of the possibility? As a possibility, and before the material proof that there is no separation between inner and outer reality, only one precarious ideal borderline: may we not add that what is conceivable is also possible? The consequence becomes visible here, with which Paalen in the surreal from the beginning ism has already tried to break up the radically subjectivist approach through the idea of a latent cosmic all-weave in which the human organisms are woven in like fabrics and, by virtue of their emotional possibilities, can momentarily cancel the artificial separations.
New concept of space from the spirit of quantum physics
Gavin Parkinson, who in his book Surrealism, Art and Modern Science examined Paalen's handling of the groundbreaking theories of quantum physics , concludes that his “surprisingly complete knowledge of the new physics and philosophy also led to independent insights that are remarkably close those of the physicists who were responsible for the development of quantum physics reached. «Parkinson wants to tie this primarily to the Goethe-Newton dispute, which was discussed independently of each other and almost simultaneously in publications by Paalen and Werner Heisenberg , whereby one was identical The results came: a new confirmation of Goethe's color theory in the light of quantum mechanics. Parkinson compares the struggle for a form of cultural complementarity in Paalen's essay "Le Grand Malentendu" (DYN No. 1) with a lecture by Werner Heisenberg, in which he reflected on "The Goethean and Newtonian theory of colors in the light of modern physics" and "the Invoked dangers emanating from a scientific activity in which mathematical abstraction would be allowed to switch off the direct sensory experience of the world. ”Goethe's motifs in color theory were then still clairvoyant, but what he had once felt was now an acute danger: a Inexplicable natural science, in which unfounded action becomes possible when the scientist loses sight of the consequences of the unpredictable. Heisenberg gave the lecture on May 19, 1941 at the Society for Cultural Cooperation in Budapest, which is remarkable because at that time he had been working for the uranium project of the Nazi Army Weapons Office in Berlin for several years and shortly afterwards to his old colleague and friend Niels Bohr traveled to Stockholm to speak to him about the possibility of a weaponized use of nuclear explosions. Bohr was shocked, refused all further talks and went into exile in the United States, where he met key nuclear physicists and reported about an alleged secret Nazi project to build an atomic bomb . This meeting was widely regarded as a historic event of enormous significance, as Bohr's attitude convinced the researchers to launch their own program to build an atomic bomb ( Manhattan Project ), while the Nazi Armaments Ministry under Albert Speer decided in 1942, due to Heisenberg's concerns, that Abandon project. Although Paalen had no knowledge of the lecture or of the secret journeys and conversations of Heisenberg and Bohr, the morally precarious situation in which the international phalanx of nuclear physicists found itself at this time was evidently to be guessed and, conversely, hopes were great, at least some of them Actors would get to read his messages in DYN, especially since the thought he added to the idea of cultural complementarity could also be seen as a call to defend general human values against the total unleashing of war. Paalens DYN is borne by this ethical motivation; it is a standard that runs through all six editions.
Appearance and distribution
With their full-page color reproductions and the long essays, which were repeatedly loosened up editorially with poems and aphorisms, with an original, signed woodcut in the first sixty copies of each edition (which was also hand-colored in the first twenty copies) and current book reviews or Following exhibition reviews , Paalen single-handedly managed to get close to his role models, Minotaure and Cahiers d'Art , despite the technical difficulties involved in printing in Mexico . The project was pre-financed by Eva Sulzer and Octavio Barreda, editors of Letras de Mexico and later by El Hijo pródigo, who also organized international sales. In Mexico, the magazine about was Ediciones Quetzalm the bookstore in the César Moro worked to relate, in New York over the Gotham Book Mart, the Weyhe Bookstore and the Wakefield Gallery, from 1943 also on the bookstore of the Hamburg exiles George Wittenborn in London and Paris via the Zwemmer and Maeght galleries .
Content and employees
Paalen dominated the content of his magazine, the first issue of which he played almost alone. In total, he published seven longer treatises and numerous smaller reviews, articles and literary contributions. However, the list of editors and collaborators expanded considerably after the first edition, with Alice Rahon , Eva Sulzer, José Miguel Covarrubias , César Moro , Henry Miller , Anaïs Nin , Gordon Onslow Ford , Robert Motherwell and Manuel Álvarez contributing over the six editions Bravo , William Baziotes , Roberto Matta , Jackson Pollock , Harry Holtzman and Henry Moore each with articles or illustrations. Above all, the survey as to whether dialectical materialism is still scientifically valid in DYN No. 2 was intended to provoke the surrealists around André Breton in New York and motivate them to start over. It consisted of three questions that Paalen had sent to 24 well-known personalities and the answers received from Albert Einstein , Clement Greenberg and Bertrand Russell, among others . The majority responded with no, Russell declared frankly: "I consider the metaphysics of both Hegel and Marx to be pure nonsense - Marx's claim to be scientific is no more justified than Mary Baker Eddy's ."
reception
In the spring of 1942, the New York art world was amazed and surprised at the quality with which Paalen's magazine DYN came up. Peggy Guggenheim , who was in the process of adding to her collection and cataloging it, was so enthusiastic that she immediately called Julien Levy , Paalen's gallery owner, to secure one of the pictures that remained there. “There is a veritable flood of correspondence,” Paalen wrote enthusiastically to a friend, “the response that DYN finds far exceeds anything I dared to imagine in the most optimistic moments. Enthusiastic letters, accusing letters, stacks of manuscripts - in short, long live America, where the intellectuals find such a passionate audience despite everything. "The few copies that reached Europe during the war were passed on to artists and philosophers. Douglas Newton, for example, the curator of Nelson Rockefellers , first met DYN in London, where the philosopher GE Moore , a colleague of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein at the University of Cambridge , showed him an edition. Lee Mullican, an artistically gifted soldier who drew aerial maps in Hawaii for the U.S. Army, encountered a copy of DYN at the Honolulu Academy of Fine Arts. “What I saw in it,” recalled the later friend and Dynaton painter, “was actually what I wanted to do. I knew that right away. […] It sounds naive, but I was really drawn to these kinds of things that I didn't know before. That was different from regular surrealism. It was different from Cubism, which had always been my big deal before that. Here was a magazine that published articles and pictures about things I was not yet aware of. […] Paalen's philosophy, his ideas about science, color, and the possibility of connecting with that which had never been seen before, and all of this. ”DYN made a clear mark on the ideas of the younger generation of New York painters in particular Traces. Robert Motherwell had translated Paalen's essay L'image nouvelle into English (The New Image) and published a selection of the essays from DYN as the first issue of the series Problems of Contemporary Art, in which the founding manifesto of Abstract Expressionism, Possibilities, appeared shortly afterwards ( Edited by Motherwell and Harold Rosenblum). The latest research has shown that even André Breton , who snubbed off contact with Paalen before the first issue of DYN was published, was continuing a kind of argument with Paalen in the background through his magazine VVV . Although he was not reconciled with Paalen until 1953, Breton said to Benjamin Péret as early as 1945: “In the last analysis, Paalen was the only one who tried to do something, and it is such a great shame that this something was done a little against us. But I keep enough freedom to recognize what he is and what he can do. And in general, under the current circumstances, I appreciate that it is less important to adhere to the rules of principles that have been formulated than to stay alive with new proposals. «The thesis of a hidden political argument between DYN and VVV was particularly good Andreas Neufert prove in his Paalen biography "On love and death". He continued the thesis that Yve-Alain Bois had already suggested in 2004 in his essay "1942a - The depoliticization of the American avant-garde ...".
More art magazines of surrealism
- Acéphale , surrealist magazine designed by Georges Bataille, published from 1936 to 1939.
- Documents , surrealist magazine published by Georges Bataille from 1929 to 1930.
- Minotaure , main organ of surrealism, published by Albert Skira in Paris from 1933 to 1939.
- La Révolution surréaliste , a fundamental art magazine of surrealism, founded by André Breton, published in Paris from 1924 to 1929.
- View , an American art magazine mainly focused on surrealism and avant-garde, published from 1940 to 1947.
- VVV , a surrealist magazine that was publishedin New York from 1942 to 1944under the aegis of André Breton .
Reprints
- Christian Kloyber (Ed.): Wolfgang Paalen's DYN: The Complete Reprint . Vienna and New York: Springer, 2000.
further reading
- Annette Leddy and Donna Conwell (2012): Farewell to Surrealism: The Dyn Circle in Mexico. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, ISBN 978-1-60606-118-3 .
- Andreas Neufert: To love and death. The life of the surrealist Wolfgang Paalen. Berlin (Parthas) 2015, ISBN 978-3-86964-083-9 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Paalen here quotes from Louis de Broglie's pioneering study on quantum physics Matière et lumière (Albin-Michel, Paris, 1938)
- ↑ Wolfgang Paalen: "Theory of the Dynaton", in: Lee Mullican [including]: Dynaton, The San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco 1951, pp. 20 ff.
- ^ Gavin Parkinson: Surrealism, Art and Modern Science. Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Epistemology, New Haven / London 2008, p. 161 (Chapter 5: "Quantum Mechanics and Particle Physics. Matta, Wolfgang Paalen, Max Ernst", p. 145 ff .; sva: "Paalen, DYN and Complementarity ", p. 157 ff.
- ↑ Werner Heisenberg: "The Goethe and Newtonian theory of colors in the light of modern physics", in: Geist der Zeit. Wesen und Gestalt der Völker (1941), No. 19, pp. 261ff
- ^ Gavin Parkinson, Surrealism, Art and Modern Science. Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Epistemology, New Haven / London 2008, p. 163.
- ↑ Wolfgang Paalen: "Inquiry on Dialectic Materialism", in: DYN (Jul./Aug. 1942), No. 2, p. 49 ff.
- ^ Mary V. Dearborn: Mistress of Modernism. The Life of Peggy Guggenheim. New York 2004, p. 189.
- ↑ Wolfgang Paalen to Jacqueline Johnson, March 26, 1942 (Lucid Art Foundation, Library, Paalen Papers).
- ↑ Amy Winter: Wolfgang Paalen. Artist and Theorist of the Avant-Garde. New York (Praeger), p. 123.
- ↑ Lee Mullican in conversation with Paul Karlstrom, May 22, 1992, on behalf of the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
- ^ André Breton to Benjamin Péret, February 23, 1945, quoted after. Andreas Neufert, On love and death. The life of the surrealist Wolfgang Paalen, Berlin (Parthas) 2015, p. 491.
- ↑ in: Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin HD Buchloh, "Art Since 1900, Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism", London (Thames & Hudson), p. 292f.