Outsider and Found-Dadaist Logic: Naive Captions and Text Illustrations, 1935

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1858

This pamphlet (Are You Dressed Correctly?) comes from my extensive Naïve Surreal collection, which is composed of (a) pamphlets that were concerned with important ephemera in the past that today looks implausible  or impossible, and (b) pamphlets that addressed issues of, shall we say, a mostly-internal, very personal, High Imagination that may or may not have been part of the visual world or the imagined world of others.Kathleen Enright's Are You Dressed Correctly? (1935) fits into category (a), mainly because the captions of the illustrations are  semi-devoid of connectivity with their illustrations, and in their simplicity are a bit of a challenge to make any association. That, or it is easy to disassociate image from caption and vice versa , making it easy for the images to slide right out of the book and stand on their own as some sort of self-educated Dadaist statement of simplicity. In this way they can almost form their own Alphabet of the Obvious. 

The pamphlet also fits nicely into the Naive Surreal Titles with Big Question Marks subset (kin to the  Pamphlets With Giant Exclamation Points ! collection). 

How could one leave the house before consulting this work?  I of course carry mine with me, which means I needn't consult it, which means I don't need to carry it to begin with. The text here is of minor importance, though it does have a little interest regarding the judging of women's fashion selections--mainly involving the author yelling at thin women for wearing thus and stout women for wearing so.

 

 Its the front of the pamphlet that is the catch here along with the quizzical captions of the semi-detached illustrations.  Taken by themselves, the pictures are a little disturbing; scary even, in the way that some cartoons (like Krazy Kat) could be unsettling and frightening.

 Separating the  images and captions from the rest of the text gives them their own weird, fractured appeal.  "Look for flaws" is wonderful; "excellent", superb; but "sit down" well, that's just downright genius.  I could see these arranged better, with more artistic license, as the basis of some dadaist poem from the '20's.