A New Art Medium: I. How Poetry Devours Walls

Leonardo,Vol. 2, pp. 419420 Pergamon Press 1969. Printed in Great Britain DOCU A NEW ART MENTS-DOCUMENTS The Editors will publish in this section of Leonardo, from time to time, documents that may cast a new light on signijicant aspects of contemporary3ne art. Such texts may be in the form of manifestos, ‘conversations’ between artists,reprints of articles long out ofprint, translations, etc. Readers are invited to recommend to the Editors materialfor possible publication in this section. Des textes capables de montrer sous un jour nouueau certains aspects particuliGrement inte‘ressantsde I’expressionartistique contemporaineparaitront de temps Ir autre dans cette section de Leonardo. Ces textes seront soit des manifestes, soit des conversationsentre artistes,soit des re‘impressionsd‘articles depuis longtempts e‘puisks, traductions, etc. Les lecteurs sont invite‘s Ir signaler a la Re‘daction des textes de ce genre,pour une e‘ventuellepublication dans cette section. 1. HOW POETRY DEVOURS WALLS* Leo Malet** ‘ ...a wall-sized paper such as one cannot contemplate without a surge of emotion ...’ Andre Breton Under the heading dkcollage, the Dictionnaire abre‘ge‘du surre‘alisme has the following entry: ‘Lto Malet has proposed to generalize the process which consists of tearing off portions of a poster so as to reveal parts of another (or others) which it covers and to speculate on the feeling of oddity and uneasiness that the resulting ensemble produces [13.’ This discoveryseemed so important to AndrCBreton that several months later, he again referred to it as one of the milestonesin the methodological treasurehouse of Surrealism [2]. Although eight years have passed since my encounter with the startling image of a woman on paper, a bleeding nun who had descended into the street, it may be useful in a publication devoted tothe conquest of the world through images to take this word image in its general sense and to relate briefly the circumstances under which this encounter took place. On a summer afternoon in 1934 while strolling *Excerpts from LA conqukte du monde par I’image, brochure published by Editions de la Main B Plume, Paris, April, 1942. (Out of print). (Translated from French by Judith Applegate.) **Artist living at 113 C rue Henri Gatinot, 92 Chatillonsous -Bagneux,France. (Received 14 March 1969.) along the Avenue Pierre Larousse in Malakoff (a suburbof Paris), my attention was stronglyattracted by a poster showing the head of a woman. I could not say whether or not she was beautiful, as the quality of the drawing was extremely poor. I wondered what in this poster, apparently so entirely devoid of interest, could have drawn my attention to it. I then noticed in the woman’s hair, held by a band, a huge red rose that seemed to have been vdded as an afterthought. I first took it for a collage similar to one a friend and I had noticed several months before on the fence of a construction site: a couple on a poster had been decapitated and on their shoulders rested the heads of two dress-maker’s dummies emerging from what was no doubt a tailor’sad underneath. But upon closerexamination I sawthat this was not true. Thewoman with the red rose was not a collage at all-the unusual impact of the rose was due only to the incompetence of the artist. As I continued my walk, dreaming of the possibilities of wall-collages, I could not help making an analogy between the woman with the rose so badly balanced on her head and a character from ‘1’Age d’Or’ (a film by Louis Bunuel and Salvador Dali) who is seen walking across fields with an enormous stone on her head. (This scene from film struck me all the more forcefully because one of the first reproductions of Salvador Dali’s paintings that he showed me, called ‘Illuminated Pleasures ’, depicted the same character, repeated a 419 420 L ~ o Malet number of times, riding a bicycle with a wellbalanced accessory on her head.) When I passed through the same street the next day, I saw that since the night before the poster had undergone an astonishing transformation. The right eye had been carefully cut out with a razor, evidently in...