Hafftka began writing Conscious/Unconscious in 1973 and completed it in 2006. Conscious/Unconscious is a book of short stories narrated in the first person, weaving an inner life made real by paradoxes and conflicting drives. The 27 drawings created for this book add another dimension to the written words. Hafftka is a visual artist represented in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum, The NY MoMA, The Carnegie Museum of Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Brooklyn Museum, and other museums. He has had one-man shows at numerous galleries in the U.S and abroad.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Midway through Michael Hafftka's weirdly alluring matrix of episodic narratives (I hesitate to call them short stories as they defy virtually every assumption of the genre with hip audacity and confident savvy), our narrator finds himself wrestling with a particularly nasty porcupine, its savage pelt of prickly quills ever threatening, until, in the logic appropriate to a dream, he understands that now he must strangle the porcupine, does so, and then slips gratefully into a heavy sleep. Across fifty-six such vignettes, which exist tenuously between memory and dream and move with a kind of associational logic, Hafftka, an accomplished neo-expressionist artist for the past thirty years, catapults us, with this collection, his first venture with narrative, into a fairytale world of Jungian imagery charged with Freudian implication, a symbolic landscape of winding staircases, stone towers, lush fields, quaint cottages, and forbidding forests. With Alice-like temerity, the narrator moves about the dreamscape, his journey recorded in flatline prose delivered without exclamation even as the narrator meets one after another mysterious, inexplicably threatening eccentrics who are distorted by carnal itches and/or by unspecified emotional woundings. We share these confrontations with the narrator/artist who comes to reveal an evolving complex persona struggling with the unsettling implications of a series of irresolvable contemporary dilemmas: the relationship between sexuality and destruction; the appalling implications of the appeal of violence and the wellspring urges we share to do injury to others; the deception of appearances and the discomfortingly speedy process by which the familiar morphs into the strange; and above all the role--and challenge--of the artist whose inspiration and vision necessarily derive from shadowy and forbidding interior realms where we are ultimately most (in)human. Ably enhanced by twenty-seven original black and white drawings that are beautifully reproduced to reveal the Goyaesque dimensions of Hafftka's sensibility, these stories--part ironic parable, part fractured fairy tale, part skewed allegory--do not engage or entertain so much as haunt, lingering like the fragmentary recollection of a cryptic dream.--JOSEPH DEWEY --Review of Contemporary Fiction
I'm on the advent of a dream. I can feel it like acid in my blood, says the I-narrator of one of the 56 vignettes accompanied by 27 original drawings that make up Michael Hafftka s surreal collection CONSCIOUS/UNCONSCIOUS, published this year by the innovative Six Gallery Press. Indeed, one might say that the entire work reads like an extended, über-Freudian dream sequence. Each of the stories, which frequently feature situations and characters presumably from the author s real life, past and present, pulls us into a dreamlike parallel universe that is at once both personal and universal. While the pieces in this volume unabashedly employ elements of autobiographical confession/memoir, they read more like droll, nightmarish fairytales penned exclusively for adults, the sort of thing Edward Gorey (with a dab or two of Woody Allen) might have written whilst sipping absinthe and expunging his innermost doubts and fears upon the purulent-white page (had Gorey in fact been interested in women and sex, that is). The drawings, which look as though they were sketched by some deeply-disturbed albeit extremely gifted future artist/lunatic child, draw us deeper into the tenebrous world the author has created both for himself and for us, his readers. What is so intriguing about the collection is that it was written by someone who has chosen to narrate his stories through the medium of paint-on-canvas for many years, rather than by way of the pen (though he apparently wrote poetry for a time before abandoning it in favor of the [paint]brush, as alluded to in his bio and, briefly, in one of the vignettes in the collection). For this reason, perhaps, the prose is anything but pretentious. Sentences are short, simple, to-the-point. There are no haughty literary allusions here, no semi-obscure references to the work of important literary theorists or trends, no linguistic acrobatics that would serve to place the author among the avant prose-poets of either yesterday or today. Yet, neither is CONSCIOUS/UNCONSCIOUS a work likely to make the bestseller list (given that a book published by an independent press could ever end up as such in today s corporate market), for its content is much too honest, its implied imagery and ideas much too disturbing for the Da Vinci Code-devouring mainstream in America. Tropes such as scatology/urination; the desire to kill people or animals (as in There Was No Need to Shoot, The Ass and the Porcupine, and Part of Me, to cite just three examples); a constant fear of terrorists (Hafftka lived on a Kibbutz in the Jordan Valley long before 9/11); lust and apprehension seemingly in equal measure toward the female body/sexuality; penises and cannibalism (in one case the protagonist distastefully imbibes the former); phallic guns; etc., are revisited again and again in different combinations, at turns playful and terrifying, and always if I may: Hafftakaesque. From the opening vignette, Changes, the reader is confronted with the appearance of a mustachioed monster with fake wings and a laurel made of leaves, a creature whose nondescript appearance suggests that it could be a stand-in for someone/anyone other than itself: the narrator-author, his father, you or me, etc. There is also a fairy-tale-like cottage that recalls the Hansel and Gretel myth (more so because the narrator is accompanied by his sister, though we all know from Laurie Anderson that Hansel was really in love with the witch!), and a series of Borgesian corridors that lead the I-narrator to a deformed portrait of himself which has literally changed over time in Dorian Gray fashion. The theme of change and transformation is again revisited in So Different, in which the narrator meets his wife on the street but hardly recognizes her ( She looked so different. ); at --Mad Hatters Review
...his works have been branded neo-expressionist by the critics and installed in the collections of New York s leading museums, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Brooklyn Museum to the Museum of Modern Art. It is not altogether surprising, then, that in his fictional debut the artist taps anew into the same visceral reservoir (this time, in absurdist, staccato-bound prose). ...Neither a tell-all memoir nor the autobiographical, Everything Is Illuminated -esque quest for heritage, Hafftka s book is thus a savvier attempt to grasp this heritage obliquely, by tracing the confusions and insecurities of a recent past. ...In surveying, with certain humorous detachment, the tattered cloth of his present, the protagonist of his cryptic anecdotes often manages to highlight both the patchwork workings of memory and the larger patterns of history and cultural myth. ...Although they frequently intersect, Hafftka s fictional enterprise and his visual opus move along parallel tracks. They are both products of a sincere and gifted artist who is not afraid to tackle what Steve Starger calls (in his editorial blurb) "the universal pain of our species." Albert Fayngold, The Jewish Daily Forward, June 6, 2007 --The Forward
I'm on the advent of a dream. I can feel it like acid in my blood, says the I-narrator of one of the 56 vignettes accompanied by 27 original drawings that make up Michael Hafftka s surreal collection CONSCIOUS/UNCONSCIOUS, published this year by the innovative Six Gallery Press. Indeed, one might say that the entire work reads like an extended, über-Freudian dream sequence. Each of the stories, which frequently feature situations and characters presumably from the author s real life, past and present, pulls us into a dreamlike parallel universe that is at once both personal and universal. While the pieces in this volume unabashedly employ elements of autobiographical confession/memoir, they read more like droll, nightmarish fairytales penned exclusively for adults, the sort of thing Edward Gorey (with a dab or two of Woody Allen) might have written whilst sipping absinthe and expunging his innermost doubts and fears upon the purulent-white page (had Gorey in fact been interested in women and sex, that is). The drawings, which look as though they were sketched by some deeply-disturbed albeit extremely gifted future artist/lunatic child, draw us deeper into the tenebrous world the author has created both for himself and for us, his readers. What is so intriguing about the collection is that it was written by someone who has chosen to narrate his stories through the medium of paint-on-canvas for many years, rather than by way of the pen (though he apparently wrote poetry for a time before abandoning it in favor of the [paint]brush, as alluded to in his bio and, briefly, in one of the vignettes in the collection). For this reason, perhaps, the prose is anything but pretentious. Sentences are short, simple, to-the-point. There are no haughty literary allusions here, no semi-obscure references to the work of important literary theorists or trends, no linguistic acrobatics that would serve to place the author among the avant prose-poets of either yesterday or today. Yet, neither is CONSCIOUS/UNCONSCIOUS a work likely to make the bestseller list (given that a book published by an independent press could ever end up as such in today s corporate market), for its content is much too honest, its implied imagery and ideas much too disturbing for the Da Vinci Code-devouring mainstream in America. Tropes such as scatology/urination; the desire to kill people or animals (as in There Was No Need to Shoot, The Ass and the Porcupine, and Part of Me, to cite just three examples); a constant fear of terrorists (Hafftka lived on a Kibbutz in the Jordan Valley long before 9/11); lust and apprehension seemingly in equal measure toward the female body/sexuality; penises and cannibalism (in one case the protagonist distastefully imbibes the former); phallic guns; etc., are revisited again and again in different combinations, at turns playful and terrifying, and always if I may: Hafftakaesque. From the opening vignette, Changes, the reader is confronted with the appearance of a mustachioed monster with fake wings and a laurel made of leaves, a creature whose nondescript appearance suggests that it could be a stand-in for someone/anyone other than itself: the narrator-author, his father, you or me, etc. There is also a fairy-tale-like cottage that recalls the Hansel and Gretel myth (more so because the narrator is accompanied by his sister, though we all know from Laurie Anderson that Hansel was really in love with the witch!), and a series of Borgesian corridors that lead the I-narrator to a deformed portrait of himself which has literally changed over time in Dorian Gray fashion. The theme of change and transformation is again revisited in So Different, in which the narrator meets his wife on the street but hardly recognizes her ( She looked so different. ); at --Mad Hatters Review
...his works have been branded neo-expressionist by the critics and installed in the collections of New York s leading museums, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Brooklyn Museum to the Museum of Modern Art. It is not altogether surprising, then, that in his fictional debut the artist taps anew into the same visceral reservoir (this time, in absurdist, staccato-bound prose). ...Neither a tell-all memoir nor the autobiographical, Everything Is Illuminated -esque quest for heritage, Hafftka s book is thus a savvier attempt to grasp this heritage obliquely, by tracing the confusions and insecurities of a recent past. ...In surveying, with certain humorous detachment, the tattered cloth of his present, the protagonist of his cryptic anecdotes often manages to highlight both the patchwork workings of memory and the larger patterns of history and cultural myth. ...Although they frequently intersect, Hafftka s fictional enterprise and his visual opus move along parallel tracks. They are both products of a sincere and gifted artist who is not afraid to tackle what Steve Starger calls (in his editorial blurb) "the universal pain of our species." Albert Fayngold, The Jewish Daily Forward, June 6, 2007 --The Forward
About the Author
Michael Hafftka was born in NYC in 1953. His books Michael Hafftka - Selected Drawings, 1982, and Art of Experience - Experience Of Art, 1981, were published by Guignol Books, Tivoli, NY. Conscious/Unconscious, a collection of stories, is published by Six Gallery Press. Hafftka has had one-person shows in New York City since 1982 with Art Galaxy, Rosa Esman Gallery, DiLaurenti Gallery, Mary Ryan Gallery and Aberbach Fine Art. His work has been shown in the US and abroad in numerous museums. Hafftka s work is in the permanent collections of major museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA NY, The National Gallery, Brooklyn Museum, San Francisco MOMA, The Carnegie Museum of Art. Hafftka s work has been the subject of critical monographs by Sam Hunter, Professor Emeritus of Art History at Princeton University, John Caldwell, Curator at the Carnegie Institute Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the novelist Michael Brodsky. Hafftka s work can be seen online at hafftka.com.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Painfully honest, disturbingly satisfying...,
This review is from: Conscious/Unconscious (Paperback)
In his collection of dream stories and drawings, Michael Hafftka artfully brushes aside the curtain of conscious pretense to reveal an honest and fascinating glimpse into his soul--a transparent pane that so quickly changes to a mirror reflecting our own inner desires and fears. The plain and powerful prose of the emerging young artist is complemented and brought to form by the drawings of the mature creator in a work that is both intimately personal and intensely archetypal. It is clear that in the 33 intervening years, Hafftka has only strengthened his grip on the silken thread that connects the two, which in truth, is a coarse, rough and twisted strand.
The book itself, an unusual smallish size that allows for full page reproductions of the drawings without being clumsy, is equally well done, of excellent black and white print quality on nice paper and with unassuming, easy to read text. I wish more biographical info on Hafftka had been included, but a visit to his website supplies background about him as an artist, writer, and not so surprisingly, a talented musician.
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