In a 1981 symposium
on "Surrealism Today and Tomorrow," David Roediger suggested that
"the maturation of major women surrealist theoreticians will vastly
expand the already wide horizons of the movement." Certainly, in
the world such as it is today, there is plenty for surrealism's
critical theorists to do! The recent writings of Haifa Zangana,
Eva Svankmajerová, Alena Nádvorníková, Silvia
Grenier, Hilary Booth, Nancy Joyce Peters, Rikki Ducornet, Alice
Farley, Elaine Parra, Ivanir de Oliveira, Nicole Reiss, and the
poems (which double as manifestoes) by Jayne Cortez, Carmen Bruna
and Petra Mandal, are examples of bold, adventurous inquiry, rejection
of dogmatism, critical interpretation as a poetic activity, absolute
divergence from ruling ideologies, and a fresh start of the most
desirable kind of utopian dreaming. . . In surrealism today, poetry,
critical theory and revolutionary activity are perceived as one
and indivisible. In their search for ways out of the social prison
of the global commodity economy, such writings help fulfill Leonora
Carrington's recent call for "surrealist survival kits" to enable
us to get through these terrible times.
Since 1968, as we have seen, surrealism has been increasingly recognized
throughout the world as a forerunner and catalyst of many of the
most daring and creative developments in contemporary culture and
politics. However, surrealism's current viabilityas a continuing
current of ideas and as a living and organized movementis
a question that most critics and historians have chosen to ignore.
Surrealism has been pronounced dead so many times (André
Breton told an audience of U.S. college students in 1942 that its
obituaries had appeared just about every month since the movement
began) that few writers have bothered to look at the plentiful evidence
of its present-day vitality.
This favoring of the past over the present is part of the modus
operandi of the disciplines which thus far have taken surrealism
as a field of study. It is no secret that art criticism, art history,
and museum curatorship have generally been bastions of social conservatism.
Those whose job it is to preserve and protect the traditions of
the status quo prefer to look on surrealism as a dead cultural artifact.
Living surrealism remains an embarrassing problem, an irritating
nuisance that they prefer to ignore.
At
the time, the 1960s surrealist resurgence did attract considerable
attention, even in the U. S. That was because the volatile cultural/political
climate of those years fostered the growth of worldwide countermedia
(radical and "underground" press, films, etc.) which in turn made
it harder for Establishment media to ignore the real (i.e.,
eye-opening, revolutionary) news of the day. In stark contrast,
the great majority of recent academic literature on the subject
in the U.S. pretends almost unanimously not to notice that anything
has happened in surrealism since World War II.
One reason why contemporary surrealism seems to provoke so much
consternation among critics and scholars as well as the general
public is because it "fails" to copy the "classic" models of surrealism
now on display in museums, and therefore is not "entertaining" enough.
Prisoners of frozen categories who complain, viewing a painting
by Eva Svankmajerová or an object-box by Michele Finger, "That
doesn't look like surrealism to me!" show only that they have missed
the whole point. The liberation of the imagination can never be
reduced to a mere style of art or a type of literary production,
much less a form of amusement. In poetry, painting, collage, sculpture,
photography, film, dance, games, critical theory and politics, surrealism
is always new because the subversive imagination is always right
now when you need it, ready or not.
What is perhaps most noticeable about surrealism today is the greatly
enlarged field of its researches and applications. Entire fields
that surrealists in the past either bypassed altogether or considered
marginalsuch as music, dance architecture, and animated filmare
now important areas of surrealist inquiry and activity. A heightened
interest in Black music, for example, especially jazz and blues,
has been highly visible throughout the international surrealist
movement since the 1960s. This passional attraction has led to several
important books and numerous articles, as well as to an informal
but fruitful collaboration and exchange of views between surrealists
in several countries and the Association for the Advancement of
Creative Musicians (AACM), a group dedicated to the propagation
of "Great Black Music."
The
exploration of subversive currents in popular culturecomics,
films, pulp fiction, radio, etc.has been a fascinating surrealist
sideline from the beginning, but in recent years has grown into
one of the most luxuriant fields of surrealist research. History,
a discipline in which only a few surrealists intervened effectively
in the pasthas also emerged as a significant focus. As reinterpreters
of history, surrealists such as Alena Nádvorníková,
Hilary Booth and Nancy Joyce Peters have been interested in the
study of heresies, revolutionary struggles, utopias, Native American
and African American culture and resistance, ecology and the relations
between humankind and animals, "cranks" and other neglected figures,
changes in language (especially slang), vandalism and workplace
sabotage, the popular artsand surrealism itself.
Surrealism
could be considered the last of the great non-academic intellectual
movements, for like Marxism, anarchism and psychoanalysis, it has
thrived largely outside the universities. In the past couple of
decades, however, notably in the Czech Republic, France, Brazil
and the U.S., several individuals who make their living as teachersSilvia
Grenier, for example, and Alena Nádvorníkováhave
also been active in the surrealist movement. Surrealist investigations
in such fields as anthropology, folklore, and psychoanalysis have
greatly multiplied since the Sixties. A growing number of non-surrealist
specialists have written sympathetically of earlier surrealist accomplishments
in these areas, and to some extent, most notably in Prague, have
shown their willingness to collaborate on surrealist publications.
. .
Even
a quick summary of surrealism's manifestations in the plastic arts
since the 1976 World Surrealist Exhibition would take up many pages.
The subject is well worth a book in itself. However, it is rarely
chronicled in the slick, commercial art magazines. Not incidentally,
surrealists today tend to situate themselves not only outside the
corporate-dominated billion-dollar industry known as the "art world,"
but in irreconcilable opposition to it.
Surrealism
started in poetry, and poetry remains the core of its central nervous
system. In the face of widespread retrograde trends (return to mysticism,
rhyme, didacticism, the mundane, etc.), surrealists persist in celebrating
poetry as the "highest language," a breath of fresh air, exaltation,
the vanquishing of misery, marvelous freedom itself. All these poetsfrom
Mary Low, who is now in her eighties, to Katerina Pinosová,
who at twenty-three is the youngest writer represented in this volumeshare
a close community of interests rooted in subversive values and complete
indifference to the usual forms of "success." These are not merely
writers "influenced by" surrealismthose who borrow bits and
pieces from the work of past surrealists to add glitter to their
own otherwise dull verse. No, these are true poets who, through
the magic light of words, embody the future of surrealism's
revolution today. Carmen Bruna speaks for all of them when she points
out, in an interview excerpted in this section, that poetry is "truly
an incitement to insubordination and revolt," an expression of "total
defiance."
Politically,
too, surrealism has not stood still. It is important to keep in
mind that the movement's current resurgence parallels the end of
Stalinism's pseudo-communist bureaucracies, and the renewal of interest
in anarchism and the humanistic currents of Marxism. Surrealism
today is clearly polycentric, and its constituent groups are far
from agreeing on the fine points of world politics. Various currents
of anarchism and Marxism have individual supporters in organized
surrealism today, but no existing surrealist group identifies itself
with any one of these currents over all others.
In the absence of large-scale movements for complete social transformation
in most countries, surrealists in recent years have tended to be
active in more limited, often local struggles. They have taken to
the streets to protest the Gulf War, the destruction of rainforests
and redwoods, the extermination of wolves and whales. They have
battled neo-Nazis, defended women's reproductive rights, demonstrated
against apartheid, and supported sit-ins and other radical student
initiatives. They have opposed nuclear power, the U.S. invasion
of Grenada, the persecution of sexual minorities, the racist "war
on drugs." They have helped organize and taken part in coalitions
to defend striking coal-miners, welfare mothers, immigrants, and
Native Americans against state violence. In each of these struggles,
moreover, they have called attention to the fragmentation inherent
in "single-issue" politics, and stressed the need for a larger political
vision, and a larger radical movement to struggle for a new, non-repressive
society.
Support for popular revolutionary uprisings, of course, remains
a "given" of surrealist politics. Thus the Chicago group issued
a detailed commentary on the Los Angeles Rebellion of April-May
1992, and the Surrealist Group in Madrid published its views on
the 1997 General Strike in Korea. In their analyses of these mass
revolts of the dispossessed, surrealists have focused on working
class self-activity, the involvement of new sectors in struggle,
the appearance of new forms of revolutionary expression, and the
possibilities these revolts suggest for the development of a more
effective international opposition. . .
By reinventing the image of revolutionand thus revolutionizing
itselfsurrealism also maintains its continuity. Inevitably,
the dialectic of the historic process brings forth new priorities.
In politics as in other areas, what once seemed to be only minor
tendencies in surrealism have since blossomed into major
emphases. Its current ecological focus is a prime example. It is
no accident that surrealists in at least three widely separated
countriesAustralia, Sweden and the U.S.have taken part
in Earth First!, the most radical, direct-action wing of the environmental
movement. The notion of animal rights, long latent in surrealism,
is also evident in movement publications today. Alice Rahon used
to say that all her works were "against hunting." "If you have one
of my paintings in your house," she told film-maker and huntsman
John Huston, "you will miss all the time." In those days Rahon spoke
as a minority, but many are the surrealists who would echo her sentiments
today.
As
Philip Lamantia once put it, "surrealism moves!" And its movers
today, more than ever, are women. At no time in the movement's seven-plus
decades have so many women in so many countries been so involved
in each and every aspect of the permanent revolution that is surrealism.
I find it curious and revealing that the least acknowledged period
in its historyfrom 1947 to the presentis exactly the
period in which the participation of women and Third World peoples
has been largest. Even more amazing is the fact that today, when
women's involvement in the movement is greater than ever (the Surrealist
Group in Sao Paulo, Brazil, for example, includes four times as
many women as men), some misled critics persist in attacking surrealism
as if it were some sort of male chauvinist plot.
These
antisurrealist feminists are like the feminists who call for police
suppression of pornography, restrictions on free speech, and other
repressive measures, thus allying themselves with neoconservatives,
Christian fundamentalists, and even fascists. Perhaps unwittingly,
they are examples of the sorry process by which a liberatory theoryin
this case, of women's equalitycan be manipulated and turned
into its opposite. This is not the place for an analysis of this
phenomenon, but I would like to suggest that this refusal to see
things as they are conceals a genuine fear not only of surrealism,
but also of women's liberation, on the part of those who have given
up hope for worldwide radical social transformation and trimmed
their feminism down to meet the needs of a small, privileged elite
of white, upper-middle-class professionals. It would seem that the
last thing such people want is for women to become interested in
a movement which demands and embodies freedom nowintellectual,
erotic, social, political, economicand defends the most revolutionary
means of realizing it.
Surrealists
today, female and male, are part of the international radical minority
which, in the aftermath of the "death of Communism," has refused
to say yes to the triumph of exploitation, militarism, white supremacy,
gender bigotry and other misery. They are fully aware that the further
fruition of surrealism depends on the rise of new mass emancipatory
movements seeking radical social change. In view of the prevailing
unfreedom and hopelessness of these times, the fact that surrealism
still exists at all is remarkable. But surrealism is never content
merely to exist.
In this depressingly prolonged historical moment of global reaction,
unrestrained imperialist expansion, rampant racism, homelessness,
ecological disaster, fundamentalist revivalism, neo-Nazism, the
"men's movement," hi-tech unionbusting, a burgeoning prison industry,
"compassion fatigue," and rising illiteracy, surrealismthe
living negation of all these horrorsnot only has refused to
evaporate, but is actually enjoying a promising renaissance.
A
look at two recent collective declarations provides an excellent
illustration of the situation of surrealism todayof its revolutionary
perspectives, the role of women in the movement, and its relation
to other present-day dissident currents. The 1992 international
surrealist manifesto against the Columbus Quincentennial certainly
marked something new in surrealism. For the first time ever, surrealist
groups around the world prepared and published a joint statement;
co-signed by 130 participants in surrealist groups in eight countries,
plus individual signers from four other countries, it was widely
reprinted and translated into many languages. It is significant
that this historic document was initially proposed and then drafted
by Silvia Grenier, a co-founder of the Buenos Aires group, and a
major figure in world surrealism today.
A
year later the Chicago group published Three Days That Shook
the New World Order, on the 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion. Focused
on the critique of "whiteness," the police state, the hypocrisy
of the media, and the ecological implications of the revolt, this
well-circulated and much-translated text also discussed the crucial
role of women in instigating and adding momentum to this sensational
upheaval; indeed, it was almost alone in the literature to recognize
this dimension in the L.A. events. In a letter prefacing the French
translation, Pierre Navillea co-founder of surrealism and
co-editor of La Révolution surréaliste in 1924wrote:
"I have been amazed by [this] beautiful text...I would go so far
as to say that [it] represents a new and exceptionally important
way of showing that the world is going to experience a surrealist
explosion far greater than that which burst out in Paris in 1924...It
is my vigorous hope that [the] surrealist movement will succeed
in renewing what we have attempted so long ago."
It
remains to be seen whether Naville's prediction will be realized.
In any event, revolutionary poetic thought always seems to find
ways to draw on resources that most people find "unimaginable."
As Walter Benjamin pointed out in 1929, surrealism discovered a
"radical conception of freedom," which, he added, Europe had lacked
since Bakunin. Surrealism's sense of freedomits undeviating,
irreducible, physical insistence on freedomcontinues
to distinguish it from all the other political and intellectual
currents of our time, and gives surrealist activity its special
(and growing) importance in the contemporary world. Surrealism's
sense of freedom is not at all abstractit goes hand in hand
with the concrete and revolutionary activity of the imagination.
Or
as Jayne Cortez says: "Find your own voice and use it / use your
own voice and find it!"
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