i.ll. 9
Ir6]
his work," he arguesin BeyondPainting. "The role of the painter is to... project that wlxich seesitself inhirn.".rAgain, perhapswith the primal scenein mind, Ernst positionsthe artist as both a participantinside and a voyeuroutsidethe sceneof his art, as both an activecreatorof his fantasy and a passivereceiverof its images.Indeed,the visual fascinationsand sexualconfusionsof the primal scene seem to govern not only his definition of collage ("the coupling of two realities but also of its purpose(to disturb "the principle of identity").This irreconcilablein appearance") ( aesrheticis alreadyexemplified in the early collage tirled The Master'sBedroom I920) [ill. l3], an overpainting of a page from a German school-bookof an array of different animals and objects to drar' or ta trace. Here both the anirrral occupant-sand tJre -slewed space of the room seem to gaze back at the artist-viewerin threat, as if a traumaticfantasysuch as a primal scene,long repressed, had suddenlyreturned to threatenits "master,"even to "unmaster"him. Although the title alone may allude to a primal scene,it is in the formal dis/connectionof the image-its anxiousperspective, contradictoryscale,and mad juxtaposition(table,bed, cabinet,tree, whale, sheep,bear,fish, snake)-that traumatic fantasy is evoked,paranoid affect produced. Such are the "procedures"that helped Ernst penetratethe "no man'sland" of psychoticrepresentation,and to Passfrom the world of Dada to that of Surrealism. Often in his firsr collages(again,made in Colognebeforethe publicationof the Bildnerei)Ernst not only assumeda quasi-autisticpersona,"Dadamax,"but also imagedthe body in a quasischizophrenicguiseas a dysfunctionalmachine.Basedon found printer-proofdiagramsof obscure mechanisms,these collagesare more estrangedthan the ironic mechanomorphicportraitsof other Dadaists like Duchamp and Picabia.With titles like T'l'reRoaringof FerociousSoldiers[ill. 7], these disjunct schemasseem to point to the narcissisticdamageproducedby World War I (in which Ernst was slightly wounded). For example,in Self-ConstructedSmaII Machine ( I 9 I 9) [ill. B] the body is evokedas a broken apparatus;more, it is subsumedby this bizarreprosthesis,as though it had taken on life of its own. On the left is a drum figure with numbered slots; on the right is a tripod personage,suggesrlveof both a camera and a gun, as if the subject of military-industrial modernity had developed(or is it regressed?)into two functions alone-recording machine and killing machine. Below this literally split (schizo)figure runs a confused account of its armored "anatomy," in German and in French, which conflates sex and scatology,preciselyas a schizophrenicmight.