Octopus Time: Bellmer Painting

Description

This catalog was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Hans Bellmer: Octopus Time at Ubu Gallery from January 24 – April 25, 2009.

Octopus Time is the first study about Bellmer’s painting. It claims that insofar as eroticism is the main theme for Duchamp and Surrealism that Bellmer completed this vision as he was much more than an artist but also a mythical direction that took sex to its final extremes. Although adulating Duchamp the study also questions Duchamp as a man and as an artist in particular due to his covering up the debt he owed to Bellmer whose 1946 mug shots for the yanked open vagina, 1934 peephole into the panorama inside the Doll’s belly and the Doll’s spread-eagled legs influenced Étant Donnés. The text argues that Duchamp also forgot Mallarmé who was the base for Duchamp’s erotic thinking and language. As such, Duchamp was the magical bridge between Mallarmé’s hermetic eroticism and Bellmer’s raw sexuality. Octopus Time creates a new literary genre—art history that saunters into a world view.

Herbert Lust is a renowned art historian, art collector, investment banker and avant-garde novelist. His published books include, Giacometti’s Drawings (1946–1965): The “Gaze” and its Romantic Classicism, 2003; Alberto Giacometti, Love & Friendship, 2003; Hans Bellmer, For Woman are Endless Forms, 1990; Violence and Defiance, 1983; Enrico Baj, Dada Impressionist: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1950–1973; Alberto Giacometti: The Complete Graphics and Fifteen Drawings, 1970; and Art and Morals in the Philosophy of Nietzsche, 1948.