Issue 0 : Eroticism Release
Issue 0 : Eroticism was released at Grunts Rare Books in conjunction with the “Hans Bellmer” gallery show.
André Breton published his first Manifesto of Surrealism one hundred years ago, in October 1924. Through adapted techniques, the surrealists accessed the poetic powers of the unconscious and the transformative energies of erotic desire, with the aim of revolutionizing life at all levels—individual and everyday as well as collective and political. The surrealists investigated modes of writing and art-making that transgressed the boundaries perpetuating oppressive, ideological structures. Through these creative acts of insubordination, they sought to renew human thought, reasserting the sovereignty of passion and imagination.
Working individually and in collaboration, artist Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) and writer Georges Bataille (1897-1962) produced some of the most enduringly searing and transgressive works of erotic art from the surrealist milieu. Bataille penned his pornographic novel Story of the Eye (Histoire de l'oeil) under the pseudonym Lord Auch in 1928, amidst post-war French reconstruction and political unease; a later version of Histoire de l’oeil, published in Paris in 1951, was censured and banned by the Criminal Court of the Seine due to its explicit depictions of sex and violence. In 1933, with Hitler rising to power, Hans Bellmer completed his first poupée, a ball-jointed doll in the form of an adolescent girl whose articulated body afforded infinite recombinatory possibilities corresponding to the artist’s polymorphously perverse desires.
Hans Bellmer is on view at Grunts Rare Books, 1500 S Western Ave, suite 403, from November 22, 2024 – January 17, 2025. The gallery is open to visitors on Saturdays and Sundays, 1:00-4:00pm. An opening reception will be held on Friday, November 22, 6:00-9:00 pm. Concurrent with the opening is a reading in celebration of the release of ISSUE 0: EROTICISM by the surrealist publication Veilance, from Veilance Press. Among the readers are Issue 0’s featured writer, pseudonymous Daniel H. Hoffmann, who will read excerpts from Bedtime Stories, and Eden Jolie and Els Deitz; co-founders and editors at Veilance Press. The publication highlights the surrealist techniques of dream interpretation, automatic writing, and most essentially, the written anatomy of eroticism.
Text courtesy, J. Biles, E. Jolie, and T. Payton.
