Rene Magritte Fish Out Of Water
Kathryn Garivay
Rene Magritte reveals the strangeness hidden behind the most familiar things. the collective invention depicts a fish merged with a woman's legs stranded on the beach. this is mockery of the traditional mermaid. Rene's painting strips away the beauty and mystery surrounding the mermaid. He removed the beauty by using the opposites.
Also the fish is stranded thus removing all the elegance of the mermaid, a fish out of water. this is a stark opposite to mermaids or sirens who in myths would lure men into the sea with their beauty.
Although disc sports, and disc golf in particular, have captivated me for, uh, pretty much ever, I draw a lot of inspiration from other sources--books, music, artwork, nature. I find many stamps on golf discs to be too intricate in the linework, or totally unrelated to what they're nominally promoting.
I wish I had a Marauder's Map. I like the idea of boring golf being equated to being up to no good. And so I'm'a throw an efficient Comet shot down the middle instead of trying something riskier or fancier.
I find it difficult to beat a Ratatat playlist--instrumental or remixes--for getting into a putting groove. I like that this was the first track of their first release--and at the time I felt like the way for me to play best was quickly, reactively, and instinctually.
Sometimes an artist wants you to interpret a certain thing from their work. Is a pipe a pipe? Maybe a disc is just a disc, or something more. Or less. I don't know. I like the Surrealist and Dada movements in early-20th century art as a response to a rapidly changing world. It seemed like a fun thing to put on a disc, so I did it, with apologies to Rene Magritte's genuine creativity and far better use of oil paints than me.
Also loosely borrowed from an old Ching Roc design that had a multi-colored "Striped Mullet" on it. A biologist friend suggested finding a species native to Maryland, and I quickly settled on this little cutie. To be clear, I'm not naming myself the Maryland Darter ("Fish" is just fine) and I've long resisted logos and iconography that leans into "Fish". Say anything enough in a specific context and its general meaning gets lost. As such, the word "fish" is something I associate with myself more than any particular animal. The Maryland Darter (shown on the stamp about double their actual 3" length) is probably extinct, since it hasn't been seen since 1988 and had an extremely limited environment and living conditions. My background in water resources and interest in being outside is always a big influence on my desire for conservation. Anyway. Just like it would be presented in a field guide. Perhaps this will become a series. Perhaps not. If I was more forward-thinking I probably would have started with this five years ago, but here we are.
Benevolent, beautiful creature, or a deadly assassin? There are so many depictions of this mythical creature, from ancient scrolls to pop culture, from maps to modern literature. This is a History 101 exploration of how mermaids have been portrayed in art through the ages.
Often shown sitting alone, yearning for human company, but unable to live on the land. These wistful creatures are perhaps the most common in art history. Her beauty is tempting, but her mood is forlorn. The well-known image below was inspired by a poem by Alfred Tennyson from 1830:
Early mapmakers would include sea monsters in their illustrations, indicating dangerous seas or areas of frequent bad weather. A very visual clue for possibly illiterate sailors. Early cartographers (map makers) were artists and explorers and there are many beautiful examples which include mermaids.
Mami Wata means Mother of the Waters and she is known across Africa. Myths vary, and in some, she can be gender fluid. The unifying characteristic of all these myths, however, is that Mami Wata is a benevolent creature, offering healing and wisdom, and warning of natural disasters.
In 1822 showman PT Barnum exhibited his Feejee Mermaid (or Fiji Mermaid). It created immense interest but sadly was later found to be a very clever con. Visitors hoping for a fishy beauty instead found a dried-up corpse composed of half a fish sewn onto half a monkey. Similar fake mermaids can be found in museums across the world.
A famous Greek tale involves the sister of Alexander the Great. Thessalonike was transformed into a mermaid upon her death in 295 BC, and she lived in the Aegean Sea. Only if her brother was said to be alive and ruling the world, would she allow safe passage to ships. Perhaps the most well-known tale is written by Homer, where the sirens of The Odyssey try to lure heroic Ulysses to a watery death.
Suvannamaccha (the golden fish) is depicted in murals and paintings and appears in the epic poem The Ramayana. Suvannamaccha meets one of the heroes of the tale, Hanuman, who is trying to build a bridge of stones across the sea. She tries to stop him, but falls in love with him, and ends up helping him in his task.
Victorian painter John William Waterhouse is a favorite of the British public. His romantic, nubile female nudes are a perfect example of the male gaze. There was an uproar when Manchester Art Gallery removed Hylas and the Nymphs from the display as part of a project with artist Sonia Boyce, looking at issues of race, gender, and sexuality. The gallery states that the (temporary) removal was part of a discussion around the presentation of women in art history, particularly the sexual objectification of the female body. The almost exclusively male press and art historians did not approve.
It is no surprise that mermaids appear in literature as well as visual art. The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Anderson in 1836 is perhaps the most famous. Arthur Rackham, esteemed English illustrator, produced some gorgeous images that are still very collectible. In contemporary fiction, two recent novels have explored deep cultural issues around power, sex, and the place of women in society. The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey and The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gower are both highly recommended.
As science and reason asked us to give up our mythical creatures, still we clung to the mermaid. In the 1970s, Pop Art fanboy Roy Lichtenstein added a very modern mermaid to the waterfront in Miami. Tom Hanks fell for blonde beauty Darryl Hannah in the blockbuster fantasy film Splash in 1984 and Disney Studios produced the nubile red-head Ariel in 1989. In 2023 Disney plan to re-visit the story with a black mermaid. Racists across America have been trolling Disney ever since.
Across the globe, mermaid-like sea creatures have a myriad of names and incarnations. Almost all involve an aquatic creature with a human-like head and upper body, but with the tail of a fish: Naiads or Nereids; Sea Nymphs; Lamia; Rusalkas; Aycayia; Iara; Ningyo; Nixes; Merrows; Selkies; Kuliti.
Vital symbol of female freedom and fertility or the chaos of the ocean and the vengeful cruelty of free women? Mermaids are all this and more. Some say mermaids are alien extra-terrestrials, some say they are the ghosts of drowned women, and some say they lure humans to water and feast on their flesh. Some say they are simply manatees or dugongs, seen through lonely, sleep-starved eyes. If they are of human origin, did mermaids escape to the freedom of the sea or were they banished there?
Beautiful and seductive, yet wild and violent, the mermaid is the perfect representation of our human relationship with the sea. It offers adventure and freedom, but it is unpredictable and unfathomable. Our early ancestors crawled up out of the sea, our own lives begin in a watery womb, and it seems our fascination with these wonderful water creatures will never be sated.
Ruth Candler 01:23
I have to share with our listeners that we are not playing a nature soundtrack, but are actually sitting outside in a socially distanced way. And it's a gorgeous fall day here in Lexington. So we are, we're really happy to have you with us today. Before we dive into Salvador Dal and the research you've done on his body of work, I'd like you to provide some context. We've all heard the term surrealism before. But I think if you polled everyone listening right now about what it means, they'd each have a different answer. So what is surrealism? And how is surrealist art different from other modern art?
Elliott King 02:02
So that's a great question to begin with. Most people think of surrealism, probably, as an art movement, which is actually a very small part of what surrealism was, or even is today. Surrealism began in around 1922, in Paris, and it was actually a literary movement. At the beginning, it was a group of poets. People like Andre Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis Aragon, who were formerly Paris dadaists, but were looking for new ways of creating poetry. And Breton tells the story in 1922 that a couple years earlier, he had begun having a dream and these poetic words came into his head, and it was as he was falling asleep that he realized that perhaps the subconscious, the dream state, was a way of mining his own creativity.
And so he began exploring poetry through that psychoanalytic narrative. And he called that surrealism. He wrote the surrealist manifesto in 1924, where he described surrealism, defined it for the first time as pure psychic automatism. So it's a strange way of saying it, but thinking automatically, just letting your thoughts go, plumbing the subconscious, letting ideas run outside of any moral aesthetic concerns that might otherwise hinder those. So surrealist art develops a little bit later, actually. The movement, as I say, begins in the early '20s. By 1927, the group is still arguing whether or not there's even such a thing as surrealist art, because art seems to them maybe too predetermined to be as automatic as they'd like their poetry to be. But some artists come in. Andre Masson, Max Ernst, eventually the more dreamlike surrealists, like Ren Magritte and Salvador Dal, who have their own approaches to contacting the subconscious. And that gives you sort of the aesthetic of surrealism that ends up becoming the really popular manifestation.
So most people, when they think of surrealism now, they think of those more dreamlike surrealists, but that's really just a small part of what surrealism really was.