By Ron Sakolsky
Question: What do Jonathan Swift, D.A.F. de Sade, Charles Fourier, Thomas De Quincy, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Lewis Carroll, Friedrich Nietzsche, Isidore Ducasse (Comte de Lautréamont), Arthur Rimbaud, O’Henry, Alfred Jarry, Raymond Roussel, Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, Arthur Cravan, Franz Kafka, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Arp, Jacques Vaché, Benjamin Péret, Salvador Dalí, Gisèle Prassinos, and Leonora Carrington have in common?
Answer: They all appear as writers in André Breton’s Anthology of Black Humour.
As Breton would put it in his 1939 preface to that volume, “Black humour is the mortal enemy of sentimentality”. To be sure, his book originally ran afoul of the censors who never seem to understand that black humour is neither maudlin nor light-hearted. It MUST take risks. Whether it be ironic, macabre, or absurd, it is always a dark acidic humour that is the opposite of mere joviality. That is not to say that it isn’t joyful. It iconoclastically lampoons social conventions and celebrates the principle of total insubordination in subverting our expectations and upending our preconceived notions at every turn. At its most succulent, black humour can exude an attitude of anarchic revolt.
Walls, 2008 | acrylic on paper | 229cm x 366cm
There is a marvelous abundance of black humour to be found in the art of Maurice Spira. It is not only cuttingly blasphemous toward all religious charlatanism and patriotic flatulence, but anatomically visceral in projecting a surreal levity that is not for the squeamish or the faint of heart. Bones seem to clatter and body parts shatter as he excoriates the unctuous pretentions and hypocrisies of the grotesque age in which we live while sticking it to the man with a Luciferian pitchfork of mirth. The blood and guts of wars for god and country flagrantly spurt out onto his canvases with a vengeance. The cadavers that are the unwelcome souvenirs of such human folly leer at us from their coffins or accost us in fragmented flight. As oceans of handwringing despair rise all around us, Spira wages war with his “oils” against the oil wars that are decimating the planet.
Not one to dogmatically follow the sanctimonious pathways of political correctness, Spira has always fearlessly charted his own intrepid course. His art is vivid testimony to the proposition that the trodden path is littered with the corpses of those who have dutifully submitted to the edicts of the reality police only to be cut loose and sneeringly abandoned when the next round of prohibitions causes them to fall out of favor or fashion. Refusing to harness his art to submissive proclamations of social conformity, his insistent heterodoxy calls for a more adventurous path.
Never reluctant or afraid to declare that the emperor is naked, he defiantly ridicules the electoral farce of consenting oligarchy that others hold sacred. As a dedicated opponent of the planetary work machine, he has long railed against both the capitalist state and its state capitalist simulacrum. Such anti-authoritarian sentiments as these can readily be found in his art, but they are not expressed in a didactic agit-prop manner. Rather, his provocative social commentary is of an imaginatively outrageous nature that I for one often find quite hilarious. While I’ve heard that there are some poor fish out there that find his work depressing or frightening, I guess they just don’t get the joke. Perhaps it is simply not cheery enough for their tastes in comparison to the romcom that they watched on Netflix the previous night.
Dress Code, 2016, acrylic on paper, 91cm x140cm
Always the merriest of Luddites, Spira takes great pleasure in launching screen-smashing assaults on the digital nightmare which engulfs us all in its omnipresent waters of surveillance. He clearly exhibits great glee in sardonically stripping the smiley-face mask off of the algorithmic “utopia of certainty” that everywhere colonizes our imaginations in order to virtually seduce us into its squalid Promethean bed of consumerism and citizenship. An avid reader of antiquarian books by eccentric and idiosyncratic authors, Spira searches for knowledge beyond the sprawling information overload of the networked world. He knows that every time we search Google, it is searching us in order to predict our future behavior. It seeks to sell us back even our most intimate desires in the form of commodities and ultimately to commodify desire itself. In humorously mocking the impoverishment of such a computerized version of reality, he urges us away from collusive acquiescence with such technocratic forms of mediocrity and domination and toward boldly breaking loose from the self-imposed chains of voluntary servitude in order to create a life worth living.
Where then does Spira reside? No need to reach for your GPS tracking device pardner. When viewed from a more human-scale perspective, he lives simply in a little cabin of big dreams the rafters of which are chock full of his paintings and drawings and the book shelves of which buckle with his ever-expanding library collection. The cabin is a decidedly primitive abode which is unpretentiously tucked away “somewhere” in the vicinity of Roberts Creek far from the cultivated cant of the land of his birth on the other side of the pond. As an avid gardener, he seeks another kind of cultivation these days. He is a connoisseur of cross-pollination and a master of self-pollination in his garden of earthly delights, but it is when immersed in the ludic activity of mushroom foraging in the rainforests of British Columbia, searching for the elusive chanterelles, morels, pines, cauliflowers, oysters, shaggy manes, lobsters and the like, that his wild side laughingly emerges as a compliment to the spontaneous flush of the fungi themselves when they magically appear before discerning eyes at the precise moment when they are ready to burst on the scene.
All Mine!, 2013 | acrylic on paper | 57cm x 76cm
So, dear friends, let us tip our liberty caps and raise our glasses high in salute to The Magnificent Maurice!
Ron Sakolsky
Chief Cook and Bottle Washer
Inner Island Surrealist Group