Unica Zurn
Unica Zurn and Hans Bellmer
Image of Unica Zurn tied up by Hans Bellmer
However Saville is in control of the presentation of her images and Zurn was often unacknowledged when Bellmer's photographs were exhibited, her name gradually disappearing from view even as Bellmer's own was being etched into the canon of modernism.
However Zurn was also an artist in her own right and she had a convoluted relationship not just with Bellmer but with Henri Michaux with who she experimented with hallucinogenics as well as having an intense affair. She was it seemed someone who was vital to both Bellmer and Michaux's ability to function, her intensity and open nature, gradually though slipping into mental illness, especially after her drug taking period when she was first having a relationship with Michaux. In an essay he wrote in 1957 Bellmer had this to say about his relationship with Zurn. 'A man in love with a woman and himself... is in a peculiar hermaphroditic interconnection between the male and female principles in which the female structure predominates. What is always vital is that the image of a woman must have been 'lived' (experienced) by the man in his own body before it can be 'seen' by the man'. Bellmer was in effect lost in her image, an image Zurn was very aware of as being something she had been playing with and constructing for several years; her explorations into repressed desires, nightmares and the subconscious, emerging in both literary form, such as in her novel, 'The man of Jasmin and other texts: impressions from a mental illness' as well as in her visual depictions of other worldly creatures.
Untitled 1959
Unica Zurn
I have been looking at her work as an indicator of how to tap into an more intuitive way of visualising the body and in particular I have decided that her drawing 'Untitled 1959' is a possible way for me to visualise Markov blankets, more on which I shall dwell on in a future post.
See also:
No comments:
Post a Comment