The adventure of eroticism by French artists 100 years ago
The power of ‘absurd imagination’ leading the development of science
It is the first domestic study to introduce the activities, works, and ideas of French ‘pataphysics’ artists who believed that the imagination of literature and art would become a science in the early 20th century. While exploring the sensory world is physics, metaphysics is the study of objects beyond physics. Pataphysics is the study that exists beyond metaphysics. If metaphysics is a free discipline from the scientific proof of physics, pataphysics is a science of imagination and irrationality beyond scientific evidence and metaphysical logic. What possibilities could be opended up in the 21st century by the ferocious ‘eroticism’ adventures of French pataphysics artists 100 years ago?
Collège de Pataphysics
Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Jean Dubuffet, Eugène Ionesco, Boris Vian, Umberto Eco, Jean Baudrillard… What do these artists, writers, and philosophers have in common? They are the people who joined and supported a kind of academic society called Collège de Pataphysics.
This “academic and useless research group” and its members seriously and freely explored the vaule of expectional and abnormal things, such as bizarre things, confronations like the coexistence of good and evil, and unexpected combinations.
In the early 20th century, the intellectual and art field in Europe were enthusiastic about this absurd pataphysics, and its influence lingers throughout the culture of the 20th century including literature, art, music, and architecture.
Eroticism not tied to childbirth and reproduction?
Amongst the various expressions of machines and humans falling in love with pataphysics, the book focuses on the theme of “the bachelor machine.” As Marcel Duchamp and Raymond Roussel show, literature and art in the early and mid-20th century have many examples of the relationship between men and women, functions of history, and the relationship between humans and those who judge them with simple mechanical mechanisms. The concept of ‘the bachelor machine’ originating from Duchamp’s “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” is then repeated in the work of numerous writers and artists. This bachelor machine, which varies in appearance, unfolds an exciting area of eroticism that is not tied to childbirth or reproduction. Looking at the aspects of these bachelor machines also has significant implications for our time, called posthumans, where the boundaries of men/women and humans/machines/animals disappear today.