Absinthe , Naked City, Avant Records

Recorded at Electric Lady, NYC December 1992

The band:

Wayne Horvitz (keyboards) Bill Frisell (guitar) Fred Frith (bass) Joey Baron (drums) John Zorn (saxophone) Yamatsuka Eye (vocals)

Cover photo: Hans Bellmer "Les Jeux de la Poupée"

...an introduction

Hans Bellmer's THE DOLL is an artistic tour de force that not only documents a unique body of work which preoccupied the artist for over forty years, and which has now achieved iconic status, but that also demonstrates the multiplicity of Bellmer's talents: sculptor, photographer, graphic artist, poet and above all speculative writer, one of the foremost theorists of Surrealism.

Bellmer's work with the Doll was fundamentally experimental, a voyage of discovery into the very nature of the body's unconscious representations and its connection with the roots of language, and how these link with the notion of the "marvellous" championed by the Surrealists.

Language and the body were very closely related in Bellmer's mind, so it comes as no suprise that the superimpositions of body images, both within ourselves and between one person and another, which so dominate Bellmer's drawings and photographs, are also reflected in his prose.

The reader is unsettled from the very first page and usual modes of interpetation are dashed by wavering contexts as Bellmer compacts memories of his youth with the construction of his famous Doll. Here the smell of size and wet plaster evokes both the construction of the Doll and Bellmer's youthful passion for making his own conjuring tricks, while simultaneously alluding to an underlying philosophy that only becomes clear in the later texts.

The writing throughout draws on a rich array of powerful images that make it evident that the book is not to be regarded simply as a theoretical treatise but as a poetic one that weaves together elements usually perceived as disparate and unconnected, such as the body, psychology, anagrams, chance, eroticism, the laws of optics and mathematics, the fourth dimension, the marvellous, hermaphroditism, intuition, and much more.

As Bellmer wrote in 1963 : "The thing about my book...is that simultaneously refers in very concise fashion to a great many different areas of both science and the emotions, because from the outset it aims for 'anti-specialisation'. Each specialist will understand and find only those aspects which correspon to his particular field: 1.Philosophy - aesthetics, relating to art or poetry 2.Psychology - psychiatry - analysis 3.Mathematics - physics 4.Eroticism (between sentimental moments and scandalous shock) 5.Dark humour and irony 6.Ethics(?) - reason and anti-reason 7.Revolt against 'nature'etc"