Hella Guth’s surrealist drawings: between sense memory and mediation
Paper given as part of ‘Subtle Transitions’, a workshop/mini conference, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, Prague, April 2024.
Hella Guth’s surrealist drawings help us trace the birth of her dreamlike imagery and transformation into a surreal visual language, her work often interpreted through her émigré experiences, memories of Czechoslovakia, convergences of conflicting spatial proportions, abstraction and figuration. Guth presented subconscious thoughts turned into imagery, expressions of the feelings and anxieties of dislocation, thus building a closed world from simple abstract and object elements, all forms becoming a puzzle to transform the senses into an artistic language. Art provided a sense of unity in a world disintegrating into fragments; these fragments, disconnections and the disintegration feeling almost visceral in works of heightened colour and movement. The artist was receptive to the discoveries and connections this new world allowed for, while her artworks hold the potential to offer reflection on the past, activated into the present, to move us away from simplifying clichés for a reading that allows for the “distancing space of potentiality.” (M. Hirsch)
Cixous would claim that the body is always in the text, that reading and writing are part of a single gesture, part of a continuous chain of literature. Relating this to the work of Guth, one is able to attempt to negotiate the complexities of trauma, persecution and loss, but also to locate ourselves – the archive (artworks) giving space to consider the past conjecturally (Alexandra Lazar), fractured, incomplete. Hirsch believes that a retrospective glance at trauma can be expanded and redirected to open alternate temporalities to be more porous, more present and future-orientated, but also seeing interpretation in a “perpetual state of translation” (Morris), thus not marked by the loss ordinarily ascribed to translation, which supports an engagement that moves beyond the identification with victimhood.
Guth’s artistic practice provides an earlier example by which to investigate the multiplicity of means of expression and affective infrastructure offered by art. Both the limited discussion and lack of in-depth analysis of the visual activity within her work provides even more reason to explore ways to draw attention to what is represented and that which might otherwise go unnoticed, unseen, despite the immense visuality within these works. Might we consider, for example, the effective way contemporary artists examine “universal and personal mythologies” associated with the past? How they challenge the distant memory traced from the unconscious, multi-sensory experiences and embodied memory, but also the evading of exact periodisation that acts as “mythic histories unbound by time.”(Baird)
As a continuation of the panel in Newcastle, I see this as opportunity to explore further the shifts and differences in our experiences to visual language and consider how we each read art and offer new methodologies to re-approach the complexities of transgenerational and trans geographical experiences, while negotiating the impact of environment and social events across our global and historical geographies. As in Newcastle, we can bring different creative approaches into the discussion, to show different visual semiotic codes to ask how we read images and relate them to individual and universal memory. Bringing past Czech artists together with contemporary practices offers ways to explore the “dynamics of memory and ‘subtle transitions’” found in Central East Europe, but also the legacy of this beyond this context.
Subtle Transitions, a workshop bringing together Czech and international scholars and artists concerned with the role of art in the preservation, transmission, and transformation of memory.
Besides pivotal events, which are often commemorated and automatically receive sufficient attention, there are also changes and processes unfolding in cultural,social, and natural environments that are much less apparent. However, their impact in the long term is no less significant. Art and creative practice provide a platform where these processes can be made visible. Due to the multiplicity of means of expression and affective infrastructure offered by art, it can effectively draw attention to issues that might otherwise be neglected or even go unnoticed. As the workshop is taking place in Prague, the focus of the mini-conference will be put mainly (but not exclusively) on the dynamics of memory and “subtle transitions” in the rich but often contested cultural, social and natural environment of Central East Europe.