Audacity

Audacity (pronounced aw-das-a-tee)

(1) Boldness or daring, especially with confident or arrogant disregard for personal safety, conventional thought, or other restrictions.

(2) Effrontery or insolence; shameless boldness.

1400–1450: From the late Middle English audacite, from the Latin audacis, from audāc, stem of audāx (bold; daring, rash, foolhardy).  The –ity suffix is an import from Latin via French and is used to form a noun from an adjective, especially to form nouns referring to the state, property, or quality of conforming to the adjective's description.  The other Latin forms were audacitas (boldness) and audeō (I am bold, I dare).  In English, the meaning "presumptuous impudence", implying a contempt of moral restraint, is from 1530s.  Audacity & audaciousness are nouns, audacious is an adjective and audaciously is an adverb; the noun plural is audacities (the rarely seen audaciousnesses is a real word). 

HMS Audacity

HMS Audacity was an example of the improvisation required of the Admiralty during the early years of the Second World War when the Navy’s resources were stretched.  The first of her kind, she was originally the German merchant ship SS Hannover, which the Royal Navy captured in 1940, renaming her first Sinbad, then Empire Audacity.  Under the prize laws of war, her cargo, including twenty-nine barrels of pickled sheep pelts, was sold.

HMS Audacity at sea with her Wildcat fighter aircraft secured on the after end of the flight deck, 1940 (left) and the wreck of HMS Audacity (right).  Such was the urgency that there was no time to construct hangers so the aircraft were exposed to the elements at all times.

A minimalist conversion typical of wartime necessity, the early escort carries were true flattops, having no superstructure above the flight deck.  As HMS Empire Audacity, she was commissioned as an "Ocean Boarding Vessel" but in early 1941 was quickly converted to an “escort carrier”, a rudimentary aircraft carrier used to cover shipping vulnerable to submarine attack in the "mid-Atlantic Gap" where there was no air cover from land-based aircraft.  The navy was short of such craft and re-launched her as HMS Audacity.  Traditionally superstitious, sailors have long held that it’s bad luck to rename a ship and so it proved.  Audacity’s pilots had inflicted losses on both German submarines and aircraft and in December 1941, a U-Boat wolf-pack stalking the convoy Audacity was escorting attacked the carrier which sank in little more than an hour, the wreck lying some 500 miles (430 nautical miles; 800 km) west of Cabo Finisterre (Cape Finisterre), a rocky peninsula on Spain's Galician coast.  One notable thing Audacity's brief service did was provide to the Admiralty the needed proof of concept of the inprovised Auxiliary Aircraft Carrier (AAC).  Using very few pilots and aircraft, she proved highly successful in countering the menace of the Luftwaffe's long-range Focke-Wulf Fw 200 (Condor) aircraft and was effective also against the U-Boats.

Lindsay Lohan’s 2012 photo-shoot by Terry Richardson (b 1965) was labelled by admirers as “audacious” although many others were less approving.  A decade on it’s interesting to speculate whether the gun or the cigarette would now be more controversial.

Surreal

Surreal (pronounced suh-ree-uhl (U) or sur-reel (non-U))

(1) Of, relating to, or characteristic of surrealism, an artistic and literary style; surrealistic.

(2) Having the disorienting, hallucinatory quality of a dream; unreal; fantastic & and incongruous.

(3) As surrealism, an artistic movement and an aesthetic philosophy that, inter alia, explored the “liberation of the mind” by emphasizing the critical and imaginative powers of the subconscious.

(4) In mathematics as surreal numbers, a collection of numbers which includes both the real numbers and the infinite ordinal numbers, each real number surrounded by surreals, which are closer to it than any real number.

1936: A back formation from surrealism, the construct being ; sur- +‎ realism, from the French surréalisme, the construct being sur- (beyond) +‎ réalisme (realism).  Sur- ((over in the sense of “on top of” & over- in the sense of “excessive; excessively; too much”)) was from the Old French sur-, sour-, sor- & soure-, from a syncopation of the Latin super- (above, on top, over; upwards; moreover, in addition, besides) from the Proto-Italic super, from the primitive Indo-European upér (over, above (and cognate with the Ancient Greek ὑπέρ (hupér) (above) and the Proto-Germanic uber (which in English became “over”)).  The English sur- was from the Middle English sur-, from the Old French sur-, sour-, sor- & soure-, a syncopic form of the Latin super.  Sur is a doublet of super-, over- and hyper-.  Real was from the Middle English real, from the Old French reel, from the Late Latin reālis (actual), from the Latin rēs (matter, thing), from the primitive Indo-European rehís (wealth, goods).  Surreal is a noun & adjective, surreally is an adverb, surrealism & surreality are nouns and surrealistic is an adjective; the noun plural is surreals.

Lobster Telephone (1936) by Salvador Dali, one of a dozen-odd originals (in colors and shades of cream created by the artist).

In French, the noun surréalisme appeared first in the preface to Guillaume Apollinaire's (1880-1918) play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1916-1917 and first performed in 1917).  The word was taken up in the 1920s by French intellectuals who created a number of (competing) Manifeste de Surréalisme (Surrealist manifesto) which were documents exploring the nature of human psychology and the way the radical imagination could produce transformative art.  Such was the nature of their texts, inspiration was offered to groups as diverse as landscape painters and anarchists and anyone else attracted to the idea (if not the business) of revolution.  The English form of the word appeared first in 1931, the French spelling having been in use since 1927.  Surrealist as an adjective and noun (from the 1917 French surréaliste) has been in use since 1925 while the adjective surrealistic dates from 1930.

La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images) (1929), oil on canvas, by Rene Magritte (1898-1967), Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The French text Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe) is an act of deconstruction, a statement that a painting is a representation of something, not the object itself.  It’s a statement of the obvious but is both in the artistic tradition of opposition to oppressive rationalism and an influential strand in the history of Surrealism and Pop Art.

Mama, papa is wounded! (1927) by Yves Tanguy (1900-1955), oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

One of the motifs of surrealist painters was a deliberate disconnection between the title of a work and any immediately obvious meaning. Tanguy’s Mama, papa is wounded! was a painting in one of the recognized surrealist styles: a landscape of wide vista littered with abstract shapes, the title taken from a case-study in a psychiatry textbook.  Beyond mentioning he’d imagined the whole canvas before lifting a brush, Tangay gave no clue about the meaning, but coming so soon after Great War, many focused on a link with the many French causalities of the conflict, the depiction of their horrific injuries also part of an artistic movement in the post-war years.

Swans Reflecting Elephants (1937), oil on canvas by Salvador Dali (1904-1989)

Salvador Dali remains the best-known surrealist painter and Swans Reflecting Elephants is an example of his paranoiac-critical method, which attempted to use art to represent how subconscious thought might summon the irrational imagery when in a state of psychosis or paranoia.  The work is interesting too in that it’s the most perfect example of a double image, the trees and swans reflected in the mirror-like surface of the water as lake as elephants.  Dali himself would sometimes discuss the usefulness of the mirror as a device to explore the divergence between conscious reality and the world of the subconscious.

Jean-Martin Charcot, documentary photographs of hysteria patients at La Salpêtrière Asylum 1878, printed in Le Cinquantenaire de L’hystérie (La Révolution Surréaliste (1928)) by André Breton (1896–1966) & Louis Aragon (1897–1982).  Breton & Aragon lamented that hysteria (which they called "the greatest poetic discovery of the late nineteenth century") was being redefined by the new discipline of psychiatry as merely a symptom of mental illness which could be eliminated by suggestion alone.

The link between surrealist art and madness long intrigued the medical community and the interest later extended to the relationship with modernism in general.  Remarkably, it wasn’t until 1980 with the publication of the third edition (DSM-III) that the diagnosis “hysteria” was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.  Hysteria had for centuries been a kind of omnibus diagnosis, applied to those (almost always women) displaying an extraordinary array of mental and physical symptoms, the gendered hysteria derived from the Ancient Greek word for uterus.  To many Surrealists, hysteria was the state in which a poetic expression of the mind’s wilder impulses could be unleashed, meaning that instead of being silenced, this fundamental condition of being female could usefully be objectified.  History and art met in the decade of the surrealists because the 1930s was a time to be hysterical, less about what was happening than the fear of what was to come but the reaction to the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, an exhibition by surrealist artists held in Paris in January-February 1938 was not despair or shock but indifference, the novelty of the form having passed, the claim the exhibition needed to be understood as a single installation convincing few.  In the history of the movement, the peak had actually passed and although surrealist works would continue to be produced (and actually mass-produced as wildly popular prints) in the post-war world, the output was repetitive.  The avant-garde having plundered from surrealism what could be carried off, explored other directions.

Woman’s Dinner Dress (February 1937) by Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973), printed silk organza and synthetic horsehair, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The fragments however endure.  Elsa Schiaparelli was an Italian fashion designer who took the objects made famous by the Futurists, Dadaists, & Surrealists and integrated them into clothing, her most memorable piece a white evening gown adorned with a large Daliesque lobster.  A design which would now attract little attention, at the time it was a sensation, its audacity a contrast with the solid pastels and other subdued hues with which Coco Chanel (1883-1971) had defined Parisian sophistication.  The playful designs she adopted (a telephone-shaped handbag, buttons in the shape of lollipops, fingernail gloves and hats in shapes borrowed from industry and agriculture) were not always original but she lent them a respectability in the world of high-fashion. 

In the surreal style: Salvador Dali (2021) by Javier Peña and Lindsay Lohan by Mohamad Helmi on Displate.