Date: Wednesday December 11, 2013, 19:00 hrs
Location: Piet Zwart Institute – Master Fine Art
Address: Karel Doormanhof 45, Rotterdam 

The Master of Fine Art programme of the Piet Zwart Institute presents:

SCAVENGERS of PARADISE – a lecture by Colin Browne

Today, it's above all the visual art of the red man that lets us accede to a new system of knowledge.
André Breton to Jean Duché (1946)

The revolutions of the 20th century deceived almost all who believed in them. Perhaps only Surrealism, conceived and sustained by a small group of poets and artists dedicated to the re-enchantment of the world, has retained its early promise. Its weapons were words and images, dreams and games–and objects, among them the breathtaking ceremonial masks of the Northwest coasts of British Columbia and Alaska. In flight from a discredited civilization, the artists associated with Surrealism encountered, in the transcendent art of the Northwest coast, an antidote to spiritual resignation and the promise of renewal. 

Surrealism was the child of the devastated landscapes of World War One. It was an anti-aesthetic, anti-colonial movement that challenged state and religious institutions by celebrating libidinous desire, disorder, chance encounters, automatic creation and “convulsive beauty.” Its founder, André Breton, had an ambitious goal–to re-integrate the energies of dreams, visions and the unconscious into everyday life. “The act of love,” he wrote, “just as with a painting or a poem, is discredited if he who surrenders to it does not do so in a trance.” He seized on the ceremonial masks of the Northwest coast as incontrovertible evidence of “the marvellous.” In the words of poet Robert Desnos, the marvellous was “the supreme goal of the human mind.” 

In this illustrated talk, Colin Browne will explore the history and legacy of the Surrealist fascination with the Northwest Coast, the culture of collecting and the art of British Columbia and Alaska indigenous nations. 

Biography Colin Browne

Poet and documentary filmmaker Colin Browne's most recent book of poetry is The Properties (Talonbooks, 2012) and a new volume, Silt, will appear next year. Recent essays include “Scavengers of Paradise” in The Colour of My Dreams, published by the Vancouver Art Gallery to accompany its 2011 Surrealist exhibition, as well as pieces on Edward S. Curtis, Alan King and Esther Shalev-Gerz. Until recently, he taught at the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, B.C.