Lorca Y Dada

Intermediality and its Role in Fracturing the Mirror of Tradition

Federico Garcia Lorca’s character is usually described as charismatic, seductive, even. For most, it is through that prerequisite knowledge that we come to discover his work. His oeuvre comprises plays, poetry, and even drawings, so a study of each tends to borrow ideas from the others. However, each of these forms of expression represents a different perspective— at least, a different process—giving rise to the theory of the Lorcan multiplicity: that there are “many” Lorcas. The Lorca who is concerned with sexuality and gender; the one who studies the environment and its character; Lorca who has pleasure; private Lorca. Taken individually, one can read in his work various interpretations of the same theme—for example in his Yerma, where, depending on the reader’s knowledge of him, it can lend a commentary toward either an anti- or pro-natalist discourse—but taken as a whole, a certain tendency toward experimentation in genre and voice becomes the clear methodology of the author.

In this essay I shall lay out this intermedial tendency that Lorca embodies, both during his life and through his work, after his death. Relating it to the structure of the early 20th century art movement Dada, I hope to reveal their shared lineage in subversive and experimental forms of expression that ultimately succeed in reinvigorating and catalyzing their respective areas of operation. Dada, coming to age as a movement in a post-war Europe beleaguered by a fluctuating understanding of selfness, reinvented modernity in various forms of art. Paramount to this was an interdisciplinary approach to creativity, encompassing simultaneous revolutions in painting, sculpture, collage, typography, theater, opera and music. Beyond this, it allowed for, and encouraged, a distraction from the horrors of lived experience at this time. Retrospectively, Dada is the singularity of what we today consider modern art, and through the framework it established a better understanding of other artists—unaffiliated with the movement through time and place, like Lorca, and Luis Buñuel—can be placed in the context of early 20th century avant- garde ideologies.

It should be mentioned however that Lorca, Buñuel, and, most notably, Salvador Dalí, all bore a relationship with Surrealism, which inherited the torch of Dada and indeed advanced these automatic and experimental methods in the form of writing. But seeing as Lorca himself maintained that his work lived outside the realm of any “movement,” including Surrealism, I have chosen to frame his work through Dada as it is fundamentally anti-art, and thus its philosophies can be, and are indeed encouraged to be, applied extemporaneously.

I will look at the work of Lorca—and, in the beginning, Buñuel—through four tenets established by Dada as their foundations: Shock, Fragments and Chaos, The Readymade, and Play. Each will examine a section of Lorca’s work, and how it demonstrates the posterity of the Dada philosophy, insofar as it looks at the past as a conditional state, something to upend or forge into a self-destructive instrument. My goal is to demonstrate how the body of work created by Federico Garcia Lorca, taken as a whole, fractures the mirror of the past in the same way that Dada sought to. Through his artistic, poetic, theatrical and visual work—some compiled after his death—I will examine the overarching theme of tradition and how it relates to modernity in Lorca’s time, and his creative impulses.

I: Shock

The first element in constructing a futureproof form is to subvert, if not release, its audience’s tethers to the past. In Dada, this was non-negotiable, since their opposition to “commodified” art forms were based in the well-established nature of the contemplative, “bourgeois” art viewer. They needed to foster destruction to achieve their goals, and in order to guarantee their work’s success in doing so, they had to find a way to shift the behavior of their audience from a casual perusal of art to a visceral and immediate reaction to it.

Art through the lens which they propose becomes “an instrument of ballistics, [hitting] the spectator like a bullet.” (Benjamin, quoted in Seeburger). It happens to them. Through methods such as a cut-up and repurposed picture, an absurd juxtaposition, or just a perceived uselessness, the Dada art viewer changes from a recipient—who pauses and contemplates the form—to a participant who actively engages with it.

In his essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin writes that “one of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later” (Benjamin, quoted in Seeburger). Framing Dada in such a light, he considers it a precursor to film, comparing its distractive qualities to that of the first moving pictures. Beyond that, he writes that its tactile quality “promoted a demand for the film, the distracting element of which is also primarily tactile, being based on changes of place and focus which periodically assail the spectator.” (Benjamin, quoted in Seeburger)

Dada lays the framework and, as the medium of film works its way into modern consciousness, its techniques become part of the burgeoning art form. Cross-cutting and overlaying are two examples we can still see today, but as Benjamin clarifies it is in the immediacy of film that the effects of Dada are most strongly felt. One cannot picture other images while they watch a film, their mind’s eye being preoccupied with that which is being projected.

Francis Seeburger describes this in Freudian terms, distinguishing between the contemplative Nachträglichkeit (afterward-ness) of “traumatic time,” which “permits shock to be felt and registered in its ‘after-shocks’,” and Nacheinander (after-one-another), which “uproots shock from the temporality that has always heretofore defined it, the very temporality that gives shock itself time to ‘register’” (Seeburger). In painting or poetry, time is paused for a moment of contemplation, allowing shock to settle, whereas in film the consecutive presentation of images never allows for that contemplative state, multiplying shock like a “lengthy, brutal beating the end of which comes only with death or coma” (Seeburger).

In the opening scenes of Luis Buñuel’s Chien Andalue, such an idea can be seen in practice, with the distractive tactic of shock serving as the movie’s foundation. Cutting between an image of a woman’s eye held open by two fingers, and the slashing of the eye of an animal, Buñuel begins his debut by shooting a bullet at his audience. They are given no time to react or cushion it, as they are not opening to a page, or meandering around a gallery. Rather they are seated in a dark smokey theater, removed from the kind of temporality that usually gives shock time to register. By the time it does, the image has changed, having manipulated them into conforming to its desire, without regard for their own.

Buñuel’s gruesome sequence establishes a ground rule for the rest of the movie, wherein the audience must stay prepared for the unexpected, feeding into the Dada trope of needing to forcibly make the canvas blank before something new is made. Buñuel, a filmmaker, recognizes that his medium—in its infancy at this time—naturally possesses this attribute, and by presenting his film in this fashion attempts to establish this visceral discomfort as normalcy.

This is, however, much more carefully wrought than a simple jump scare. In the scene prior, we see Buñuel himself looking into the distance, out of the movie and towards the audience, reflecting their gaze. This is a mirror, since the smoke from his cigarette could be mistaken for the smoke in our theater, which establishes a togetherness with the audience— a form of conditional trust which is immediately exploited through the aforementioned ojo sequence. In this process, it is us who loses the ability to see, and we who must form a new way of doing so, assuming Buñuel as our eyes.

His ojo leans into this relationship between the visual metaphor and the dismantling of historical narrative, as it lays out the concept of tradition explicitly (sight, the eye), punctuating it with destruction (the laceration). It also breaks the trust of his audience brutishly, which can perhaps be attributed in equal parts to Buñuel’s artistic temperament and his medium, which takes up space not in the imagination but in perceived, representative reality through its immediacy.

Comparing Buñuel’s ojo to scenes from Federic Amat’s production of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Viaje a la Luna provides a more comprehensive understanding of how this tactic functions as part of a larger form. Thematically, the movie treats shock as whole differently, dealing not in gore but disquietude, cushioning the shock visually for his audience. Of course, the medium is a counterbalance to this since through cross-cutting techniques and the overlaying of provocative imagery one still feels that characteristic Nacheinander of film. But the outrage one feels from the image of Buñuel’s ojo is altogether absent, replaced instead by a vague discomfort that dares the audience to try and follow along. Lorca, thus, deals with shock through the emotional, while Buñuel is concerned more with the physical response.

When Lorca portrays the eye, he does not mutilate it, but instead shows it behind swimming fish, suggestive of a filter between what we perceive and what is truly there. We look at the screen as it looks at us, but he chooses to draw attention to our degrees of separation rather than—as with Buñuel—our oneness with the imagery. Where we would see unfettered the slashing of an eye, Lorca, choosing to forego this kind of immersion, suggests instead that we look at our own perception, and its discrepancies.

Perhaps where this is most apparent is in his approach to mutilation—which as we have seen is the crux of Buñuel’s attack on the spectator—as well as bodily fluids. The former appears in Viaje a la Luna through the scene of a raven being crushed in an anonymous, leather-clad hand. We witness—or we imagine that we witness—those eyes of the raven growing slowly more lifeless, its body losing energy through futile resistance. But we cannot really know the conclusion, as we see neither an indicator of death nor an emotional response. Only through the reaction of our fellow audience members can we find a sense of truth in these scenes, and even that tends to feel like a collective trickery.

Later on, Lorca’s Anatomical Man walks up to a bar, and we watch as he squeezes a frog until its insides come out through its mouth. This sets the stage for a vomitorium, where all members of the room begin spontaneously erupting. All, that is, except for the lovers, who go about their business in love. Leaving, they enter the elevator where the Anatomical Man in sheep’s clothing presses his lover's eyes as she flails against him. This is the sowing of a characteristically Lorcan organism: the seed of disquiet. We don't see death, but we know it is there, enrapturing us as we are gently coaxed to pull at its thread.

Benjamin’s thoughts on film and Dada seem thus to ring true. These movies by Buñuel and Lorca approach contemplation as something to be toyed with, disregarding in the process the opinions of their audience, in favor of their reactions. In the case of Lorca, we are pulled throughout the film, unsure if it will eventually boil over, or simply simmer in front of and indeed within us. Buñuel, more overt in his technique, sets the audience in opposition to the movie from the beginning. With both, however, we are arrested by the scenes in front of us. In the theater, we feel as the writer Georges Duhamel did when he commented about his distaste of the medium of film: “I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.” (Duhamel, quoted in Seeburger)

II: Fragments and Chaos

Film is a fragmentary form but, on the highest level, Lorca seems not to make an exception for this medium, but rather contextualize his use of it. Looking at the lived and posthumous interpretations of his life and work, we can begin to understand how he embodies this compositional framework. What we know comprises firsthand accounts of his personality, a collection of drawings given as gifts, as well as poetry, and an unfinished play serving as a kind of big bang of the Lorcan universe, but which could not be performed in his lifetime. All of these fragments are seemingly contextualized by his death, which has both added to the mystery of the human Lorca and coaxed the work of the author into a re-interpretive immortality.

This last observation naturally poses a series of problems, the most notable being the conflation of the authorial and corporeal Lorca as one definitive Lorca. In his essay Lorca and Foucault, Paul Julian Smith discusses this in detail, describing the Foucauldian, indeed remedial, way of approaching Lorca’s body of work:

“To read Lorca in a Foucauldian way would be to resist the compulsion to erase difference and to make visible the multiple subjectivity confined with the single ‘individual’. This would not be to invert the traditional criticism and claim that the writing subject is wholly absent from the text. Rather, it would be to suggest...that the proper name ‘Lorca’ arises in the gap or scission between mouthpiece and writer, in the variable space which always separates the two.” (Smith 108)

Such a reading is that which I have attempted to take in this essay, wherein I seek not to erase the difference between his works, but rather to place an umbrella above it, which shields the threads that connect his multiple subjectivities to other ideologies. In individual examples of his work, however, this trend of the fragment which, as Smith shows, contributes to perceived discrepancies between his works, serves as a way of revealing connections between disparate elements—paradoxically—with one another.

Poeta en Nueva York is one of these individual examples where such discrepancies live in the text. As it was compiled postmortem, this book of poems has a more fluid body than its printed volume would in and of itself portray. This is emblematic of the atemporal fate bestowed upon Lorca’s opus and especially its accompanying criticisms, which change dramatically in line with their times. These poems deal with commodification and a mechanically driven capitalist society through the lens of a flâneur—adopting also the self-conscious roles of “Prometheus, prophet, and priest” (Laubenthal)—who seems at once dissociated from, and intoxicated by, the scenes he tells.

But this poet is in sharp contrast to the Lorca we see when we look at his letters home during this time. In a letter to his family from the 28th of June, 1929, Lorca writes: “In a word, I feel well adjusted. New York is an extremely gay, friendly place. The people are naïve and charming. I feel good here, better than in Paris, which I find a bit old and more rotten” (Lorca 200). In reaction to this, it is perhaps necessary to briefly touch upon Lorca’s theory of the duende, which I shall address in greater detail later. El duende is in its simplest form a combative alternative to the muse, which provides the artist inspiration from an earthly vantage point, as opposed to the safe, “above” place occupied by the muse.

As byproducts of the duende, Lorca’s poetic works must be grounded in his existence, and his person-to-person interactions. Where the poet says “yo muchas veces me he perdido” [I have lost myself] (Lorca 70), the man writes about a deep, often pleasant immersion in a foreign place. The two coexist, and indeed rely on one another. Without this immersion, the poet cannot face the duende, and without that kind of combat the corporeal Lorca has no grounds of comparison. We find evidence of this, or perhaps a kind of sanctuary, in the following line of his letter, when he writes that “what happens to me is always unusual.”(Lorca 200)

Altogether, these fragments demonstrate a larger, more cohesive whole. One which is inherently chaotic, as it takes place in a New York struggling with the pains of capitalism gone awry, but also because it focuses on the microcosmic cogs of the city as inseparable elements of the metropolis. In Panorama ciego de Nueva York, the poet begins by observing pain and death in such a system:

Si no son los pájaros,

cubiertos de ceniza,

si no son los gemidos que golpean las ventanas de la boda,

serán las delicadas criaturas del aire

que manan la sangre nueva por la oscuridad inextinguible.”

[If it isn’t the birds/covered with ash,/if it isn’t the sobbing that strikes the windows of the wedding/it is the delicate creatures of the air/that spill fresh blood in the inextinguishable darkness.] (Lorca 68)

The birds covered in ash here speak to a larger narrative that appears throughout the volume: that of a people weighed down by their environment. But birds specifically, since they appear often in Poeta en Nueva York, are an apt representation for the lightness of being that the poet consistently references as an absence in this city.

We find chaos here not in a fragmentary form, but through the apocalyptic vision of a blood-soaked earth. Its citizens—murderers or the murdered—live as a part of this oscuridad inextinguible as its cultivators and captives. In place of lightness, which he suggests may be the key to life elsewhere, the poet in New York finds pain, for whose source he obsessively searches:

Yo muchas veces me he perdido

para buscar la quemadura que mantiene despiertas las cosas

y sólo he encontrado marineros echados cobre las barandillas

y pequeñas criaturas del cielo enterradas bajo la nieve”

[I’ve lost myself/in order to find the burn that keeps everything awake/and all I’ve found are sailors leaning over the railings/and tiny sky creatures buried under the snow.] (Lorca 70)

Looking beyond mere circumstance in favor of the unknown, the poet finds himself presiding over this scene. Referencing vomiting, in the case of the sailors, and death as the birds are buried, the poet is faced with these inextricable features of this landscape, conceding that there is no moral or social basis for the pain that keeps everything alive. But it is the other systems which suffer—tiny sky creatures, children, the moon—from this “quemadura que mantiene despiertas las cosas.”

In Poeta en Nueva York, the poet’s incredulous relationship to suffering bears central focus in his perspective on existence itself. Lorca, after he had written these poems, but before they were published, elucidated this theory in a lecture titled Theory and Play of the Duende, given first in Buenos Aires in 1933, where he names this kind of inspiration as el duende. Four basic tenets—earthliness, irrationality, heightened mortality salience and a kind of diabolical trickery—serve as its foundation. It is distinct from of other forms of inspiration, as the nature of the duende is the “mediator of death (the ultimate form of negation), as opposed to such meeker agents of inspiration like the angel and the muse who look down upon life and death from a safe, elevated distance.”(Nandorfy 256)

Surrounded by this pain for which he can find no reason, the poet seeks inspiration in it. The poem Paisaje da la Multitud que Vomita (Anocheser de Coney Island) [Landscape of a Vomiting Multitude (Dusk at Coney Island)] builds on this, describing a scene at Coney Island:

La mujer gorda venía delante

arrancando las raíces y mojando el pergamino de los tambores.

La mujer gorde

que vuelve del revés los pulpos agonizantes.

[The fat lady came first/tearing out roots and moistening drumskins/The fat lady/who turns dying octopuses inside out.] (Lorca 50)

A narrator continually interested in the underside of lived experience and the dissolution of private and public personas, this voice opens the scene in a tunnel. Poetry, which cannot at the same time portray the dusk and the fat woman on the beach—as film can—only brings us to associate them. We see her in a vacuum, tearing out the roots and moistening the drumskins before turning the octopi inside out. Her setting, given only by the twofold title, is an assumption. Indeed, before our scene is anocheser de Coney Island, it is the paisaje de la multitud que vomita.

“Yo, poeta sin brazos, perdido / entre la multitud que vomita, [I, poet without arms, lost/ in the vomiting multitude]” (Lorca 52) he writes later, encapsulating the struggle of selflessness characteristic of the duende. Serving as a messenger, our narrator is an everyman who wanders through an unspectacular land. It is a commoner’s tone he adopts when painting this image, positioning la multitud que vomita as just part of what happens. Simply: what will be will be, and the landscape of vomiting animals and drunks, pigeon skulls and mutilated sea creatures can elicit only a response of dismay: “¡Ay de mi! ¡Ay de mi! ¡Ay de mi! [Woe is me]” he says to the comfort of his reader.

III: The Readymade

When considering the term “readymade,” one must mention its first instance as such in the sculpture Fountain, by R. Mutt. This sculpture, made under moniker by Marcel Duchamp, is a urinal turned upside down. Its name might refer to the imagined action of reverse urination

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since, with the urinal being flipped, the action must also be. Crafted in the Dada period of the 1920s, it pushed the limits of sculpture—indeed, contributed to the larger redefinition of art—by demonstrating it as an everyday, found occurrence. Art was everywhere and, as Francis Seeburger describes it, Dada works “eschewed the contemplation to which art before them had called its recipients, and instead sought distraction.” (Seeburger).

But the readymade is ultimately a more general concept. Defined variously by other artists in the 20th century—like Asger Jorn, who reframes it as detournement in his Situationist theory—it represents more of a shift in perspective, than an explicit statement. Through this, the readymade is applicable to many forms of expression and perception. I shall begin by looking at the role of Juliet, in Lorca’s El Publico, to form an analysis of how, through elements of drama, the relationship between tradition and modernity can be explored through the readymade.

El Publico offers a privileged position for looking at the theatrical productions of Lorca since it both precedes his later, more well-known plays, and because it was written outside of his native Spain, thus showing the artist in tune with a more international conversation. But it should be said that this play was not staged until 1978, long after Lorca had died. The author himself considered it a play impossible to stage but, as Andre Breton, the famed surrealist writes: “The work of art is valuable only in so far as it is vibrated by the reflexes of the future.” (Breton, quoted in Seeburger)

Lorca acknowledged this, and his work deals in themes of homosexuality and gender constructs that were in the 1930’s—especially in Franco’s Spain—an arduous task to stage. But as the first of a few mirrors that this play positions to reflect tradition—including the avant-garde tendences around Europe at this time—El Publico in hindsight shows that “in the cultural domain” it is “a constant” that “the offer...creates the demand.”(Laplanche, quoted in Seeburger)

The play opens as follows:

SERVANT: Sir.
DIRECTOR: What?
SERVANT: There is the public.
DIRECTOR: Show them in. (Lorca, quoted in Cerda)

From the first lines, we are presented with a metatheatrical, self-referential drama. The Servant and Director are found discussing the play to follow, providing us, its audience, a privileged position to see, in a sense, behind the scenes. I agree with Juan Cerda when he writes that this can be traced through two traditions: first, through the early-modern drama of Shakespeare, and second, as a result of a “new mode of sustained metatheatricality” which “erupted at the beginning of the 20th century” (Cerda 2), through playwrights like Luigi Pirandello and Alfred Jarry. This opening from El Publico, as an example, is a mirror of the opening scene from Pirandello’s Sei Personaggi in Cerca D’Autore [Six Characters in Search of an Author] where, in the opening lines, the characters discuss their roles in the play to follow, as well as the layout of the stage.

As it continues, El Publico presents a way of making conversation between this avant- garde tendency and a more historically dramatic perspective, as he introduces the reworked plot of Romeo and Juliet through this self-referential technique. As Cerda postulates, acknowledging Lorca’s denial of adhering to a movement per se, El Publico “provides an opportunity to examine the continental avant-garde’s take on Shakespeare.” (Cerda 1)

Thus we have our second mirror, reflecting the Shakespearean readymade of Romeo and Juliet through an explicitly modern perspective. Considering its cultural associations in Spain at this time, and indeed internationally through to the present, Romeo and Juliet has often been stripped of its subversive potential in favor of a reductive, black and white commentary on heterosexual, romantic love. Yet it is "linked to El Publico” through these same “culturally inherited connotations—heteronormativity, female passivity, conventional theatricality.” (Cerda 2)

It is through this Pirandellan metatheatricality that Lorca’s framework can be deconstructed, as it sheds the “conversative attributes” of the play as it has evolved, while the “Shakespearean characters are opened to new signification.” (Cerda 2) Cerda here describes the readymade in practice: a recontextualization of a given symbol for a new purpose or era. One can see the characters with different shadows cast upon their faces, but ultimately it is their place in history which makes them valuable as subjects:

MAN 1: Romeo could be a stone and Juliet could be a bird. Romeo could be a grain of salt and Juliet could be a map.

DIRECTOR: But they would never stop being Romeo and Juliet.” (Lorca, quoted in Cerda)

Central to this play is its balance between violence, and a game of masks and buffoonery. As such, however, there is a nuance between the Dada understanding of a readymade and its use in Lorca. The former of course insisted on outraging the public through its tactics, advocating for a kind of destruction that sought to establish a vacuum, rather than fill it up. But Lorca, though he recognized the context in which his play would be received, was more interested in transgression than destruction. He fills up the space that he creates, bringing his characters under the scrutiny of modernity instead of leaving them gilded and rotten in the shadow of the past. It is what Antonin Artaud describes when he writes, in Theater of Cruelty: “Instead of continuing to rely upon texts which are definitive and sacred, it is essential to put an end to the subjugation of the theater and text, and to recover the notion of a language half-way between gesture and thought.” (Artaud 89)

The readymade, an object placed delicately between the bounds Artaud sets forth, lands in our minds as an object that we have seen before—a urinal, Juliet, the “classical” drama—but gestures to something new through its juxtaposed position in a newfound context. We find El Publico thus, beckoning its audience—that is, those who read or see Lorca’s play—to look backwards and bring the theatrical oeuvre under that same kind of scrutiny, wherein the play acts neither as an ogling object nor a boilerplate form of expression.

IV: Play and the Automaton

Shock, fragments and the readymade are three tenets of Dada that appeal to a more traditional art historical perspective on creation. Looking at the work of Lorca and Buñuel, the parallels of criticism between them and the avant-garde are relatively clear and straightforward, as both artists borrow from—or at least converse with—other adjacent artists, movements, and ideologies. Coming to the topic of play, the emphasis shifts slightly from a more formal perspective on art, to a study of creativity.

Play is less combative, in that the idea of the audience matters less than the process of the artist themself, as Tristan Tzara—the assumed figurehead of the Dada movement—demonstrates when he writes his instructions for how to create a Dada poem:

To Make a Dadaist Poem
take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.

Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem. Cut out the article.

Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.

Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are—an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd. (Museum of Modern Art)

Tzara’s instructions can be summarized briefly along the lines of “break something, be random, and be deliberate,” a phrase which encapsulates the overall desires of Dada from a purely physical standpoint. From them, one can at least deduce a cut-and-paste process, and an externally based, combinatorial sensibility which removes the artist from the equation in so much as they operate more as an automaton—a random, automatic vehicle—than a creator. This approach to creativity is why Dada is often considered the infant terrible in a survey of art history, but it is through this lens that we can form an understanding of how the automaton relates to play.

Looking at Lorca’s drawings, the temptation is to look for parallels between them and his other work. Oda a Walt Whitman, for example, is the title of a poem from Poeta en Nueva York, as well as of a drawing made a little later, in 1935. Comparing them one can find similarities in his more surface-level descriptions of the poet—his “luminous, chaste beard” (Lorca 155); the death which “spills from [his] eyes” (Lorca 161) —but these comparisons are largely subjective, and do not hold critical weight.

Rather, the symbol of Walt Whitman appears more iconographic than representational. That is, the drawing serves as a visual guide for appreciating the inner workings of poem, rather than as an apparatus to understand it. This tendency, demonstrated throughout Lorca’s drawings, alludes to a kind of play beyond childishness, representing the inner thoughts of the artist outside of the bounds of formal composition. As Helen Oppenheimer writes in Lorca, The Drawings: Their Relation to his Life and Work:

“Lorca’s concerns remained the same throughout his artistic career; he was trying to resolve the conflict between the confines and constraints of man’s natural condition and his attempts to transcend and improve his lot. The tensions created by this clash recur again and again. Lorca’s drawings, so close to the core of his personality, reflect his development as a person and as an artist. They are not political. They are a personal account of his drives and insecurities, a memento of his boundless energy and creativity, as well as a record of the sadness, which lay behind the marvelously sociable entertainer.” (Oppenheimer 125)

Oppenheimer here reveals a key to understanding the gravity of Lorca’s drawing in relation to his oeuvre: “They are not political. They are a personal account of his drives...” like a journal entry. Play, in this sense, is experimentation without repercussion. It is the ability to create something outside of a canon, concerning the artist’s personality exclusively with regard to his self.

In her essay on Lorca’s drawings, Jacqueline Cockburn makes a number of important observations regarding this topic. First, that critics often consider that “Lorca drew primarily for the purpose of extending his poetic repertoire, the drawings thus serving to illuminate the significance of his poems” (Cockburn 88). Second, she references Helen Oppenheimer when noting that Lorca’s foray into the act of drawing coincides with his friendship with the Catalan artist Salvador Dalí. Finally, referencing the work of Dawn Ades, Cockburn looks at the friendship between Lorca and Dalí, citing Ades’ observation about Dalí and how he uses iconography throughout his work:

“Simultaneously with these canvases and with the new manner he adopted to paint them, Dalí published his first text ‘Saint Sebastian’ dedicated to Lorca. Since 1926 Saint Sebastian had been an emblematic figure for both Dalí and Lorca, part of a shared language which offered a channel for self-dramatisation, though the connotations of the martyr were different for each [. . .] As sado-masochistic object, St Sebastian becomes the sign of a private language of sexuality.” (Ades 140)

Through this lens, play becomes a kind of camp, wherein understanding the “real” meaning of something requires knowledge of an inside joke of sorts. St. Sebastian connects Lorca and Dalí, but in a larger way the icon of the drawing seems to represent the way that Lorca interacted with people in his daily life. Lorca’s drawings were not preserved and archived in the same way that his writings were. For one, they were never organized, and lived as gifts that he would give to people for visiting him, or for other personal reasons. He could curry favor through the act of presenting them, much like a child, having made a drawing at school, would present it to their parents to hang on the fridge. Play lives in two forms in Lorca: personally, as experiment, and publicly—at least, with relation to other people—as more puerile.

We see this more childish form throughout his drawings, wherein he chooses to use crayons rather than paint, use hotel stationery rather than a clean paper or canvas. Immediacy is what he was most concerned with in his drawings. They had to be done quickly, either to give them out, or to get his idea onto paper. Most importantly, his visual work does what Marcel Duchamp describes when considering the Dada creative process: “You have to approach something with an indifference, as if you had no aesthetic emotion...based on visual indifference and, at the same time, on the total absence of good or bad taste.” (Duchamp, quoted in Prager 270)

Conclusion

It is this approach to a subject with regard to itself, more than to the author’s self, which most often appears as a clear characteristic of Lorcas opus. In El Publico, and Poeta en Nueva York, the author serves as a vehicle for demonstrating the connections between history and modernity, and between environment and individual. In Viaje a la Luna, the director is almost altogether absent, with the fragments on the screen bearing little explanation of his intentions. But in his drawings, Lorca’s hand is clean. He approaches them with aesthetic indifference, yes, but to say he didn’t care if they looked good or not—a comment one can apply to his work as a whole—is to forsake intentionality for indifference. In Lorca, the two are delicately balanced, crafting an object uniquely positioned to reflect the present against the mirror of tradition. Lorca’s approach to creativity is of course multifaceted, as his theory of el duende

requires a certain degree of distance from his authorial persona. That being said, his life, when looked at retrospectively, indicates a certain disregard for this norm of the traditional author, who is known for one thing and praised for his adherence to it. He is an artist—as the word demonstrates a more general plurality in his tilling of the fields of creativity—more than he is singularly a poet, a drawer, or a dramatist. To look at his work as a whole and approach it from the kind of relative indifference that Duchamp describes—going further: to leave one’s mind open to the possibility of a multiple persona, rather than a singular creator—is to give it a more appropriate reception in the modern era.

We approach Lorca as an icon: a pioneer of homosexual literature, of avant-garde creation, and of subversion, that tacit interloper who can borrow from all disciplines. For the most part, this is an apt representor, however it is in the differences between these genres, in the scission between the Lorca we see and the one who lives behind his work—studious, though maybe not always a reader—that our understanding of him reaches a more universal form. Federico Garcia Lorca is a curator of creativity, and thus an analyst of the possibilities that lie between the elements of his intermedial tendencies. For this reason, perhaps, he maintains posterity through to the present, and continues to appear as subversive as he was in his own time.

This was written for the class Lorca, Buñuel, Dali—CUNY Graduate Center, Autumn 2021

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