Revolution By Night

After researching the surrealist movement I was intrigued and drawn to the works of Hans Bellmer. Hans Bellmer was an artist best known for the life-sized pubescent female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. Historians of art and photography also consider him a Surrealist photographer. .Since 1926 he had been working as a draftsman for his own advertising company. He initiated his doll project to oppose the fascism of the Nazi Party by declaring that he would make no work that would support the new German state. Represented by mutated forms and unconventional poses, his dolls were directed specifically at the cult of the perfect body then prominent in Germany. Bellmer's doll project is also said to have been catalysed by a series of events in his personal life, including meeting a beautiful teenage cousin in 1932 - and perhaps other unattainable beauties.

Bellmer has suggested that this figure, standing in an open space with its blue background, recalls his memories of an enchanted garden which he visited when a child. By placing his creations in an ideal childhood, he recalls a period from his personal history in which he had no sexual anxieties. If the garden was an encompassing, supportive place, it is disrupted by the classic Freudian trauma: the discovery, by a male child, of a woman’s ‘lack’ of penis.

There was, in the surrealist movement, a tendency to evoke the uncanny from ordinary everyday objects. This could be striking, shocking and even traumatic. If the end vision is experienced as traumatic by some, this usually arises when the human body is made uncanny.

In the case of Bellmer’s photographs and sculptures of dolls, the body is dismembered into strange and wonderful collection of orifices, most of them sexual. Perhaps the term ‘convulsive beauty’ best describes these works of art.

REVOLUTION BY NIGHT

The design,concept and inspiration for my surrealist café/day club comes from a dream like perception of being in a garden that’s somehow not quite right. There will be vertical gardens dedicated to the expression of imagination free of the conscious control of reason and free of convention. The club will consist of two levels with an ambience of ‘pleasure and pain’. The first level will be for day time dining in an atmosphere where there are walls covered with moss, dandelions on the ceiling, tables and chairs made from vines and birds on the floor. A garden of Eden with a twist. The second level will be for listening to music on the roof top garden. Everything that we imagine in a backyard garden will be there but with a twist. Two headed dogs, clothes (fish) on the hills hoist that is actually a water feature, palm trees made from swords, mushroom umbrellas to sit under and listen to some cool tunes.