Marcel Duchamp, both Man Ray and Joseph Cornell, also André Breton, did „this kind of thing”. The greats of 20th century art.
We will, however, turn to a female biography. Born in 1906, Elisa Latte Elena Bindhoff Enet lived more than one life. In the first, she was a pianist and the wife of a politician. In the latter, already in earthly paradise in the USA, she was the (third) wife of André Breton and one of the most charismatic artists of the Paris Surrealist group after the Second World War.
She became Elisa, someone who could fit the unspeakable into a small box. Given the size of today’s parcel network, this ability is invaluable.
Elisa Breton died in 2000, before the sense of the world’s pixelated modularity had gone global and the market for delivering anything to the nearest parcel machine had taken off.
Every now and then, someone gets caught up in the pointless but tormenting question: what distinguishes art from non-art?
La boîte surréaliste, the Surrealist Box, will help you understand this question.
Imagine that a pressing state legislative need made it compulsory for every candidate in every election to compile and publish such a personality box of „not knowing what”.
By the time a group of professional assistants from la boîte surréaliste had been trained, we would have seen things no one had ever dreamed of.
Imagine heaps of such boxes „spontaneously” offered as vota or ex-vota in various sacred places in this country.
Even French surrealists with a pedigree would have eyes like saucers.
___
Elisa Breton, Untitled, 1970, Israel Museum, Jerusalem.
