Gerard Durozoi. History of the Surrealist Movement. Trans. Alison Anderson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 816 pp., 232 color ills., 777 b/w. $55 paper.
Jennifer Mundy, ed. Surrealism: Desire Unbound. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 352 pp., 300 color ills. $39.95 paper.
Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski, eds. and trans. Surrealism Against the Current: Tracts and Declarations. London: Pluto, 2001. 232 pp. $24.95 paper.
I'll begin with a question: why, after some eighty years, does Surrealism still fascinate contemporary audiences? Although other modern movements like Fauvism or Cubism continue to hold historical interest--and a major exhibition can still generate a degree of excitement--they fail to elicit the same passionate response as Surrealism, even among its harshest critics. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a contemporary artist being profoundly influenced by Cubism, whereas Surrealism nonetheless remains relevant. This is more than an idle question; it goes to the heart of how we respond to Surrealism today. Why does Surrealism's legacy not only demand to be addressed, but also distinguish it from other movements of the modern period? The answer, I suspect, is related to the paterfamilios of contemporary art, Marcel Duchamp, who always maintained close ties with the French Surrealists. Although Duchamp's legacy is often considered to be one of intellectual license--the artwork as a product of the intellect, rather than the senses--the Surrealist Duchamp is far more corporeal: underlying his intellectual conceits is a crude humor, a domain of vulgar jokes, bodily emissions, wanton yet frustrated desire. And it is this proximity, I would venture, that gives urgency to Surrealism today, at a time when the dominant themes of contemporary art border on the perfunctory enactment of cliches.
Surrealism seems to offer a way out of the impasse of contemporary art's antiaesthetic. If contemporary art is defined through its rejection of modernism's founding myths--originality, individuality, uniqueness, etc.--it frequently does so at the expense of aesthetic experience per se. All too often, a strange disconnect exists between the actual experience of contemporary art and its conceptualization. With Surrealism, however, aesthetic experience still played a central role, in that the vicissitudes of thought were related to material objects; indeed, the fashioning of objects often took priority over explicit intention. Although fabrication of objects can lead to mundane cliches--the explicit psychoanalytical imagery that sometimes swamps Surrealist insight, for instance--more often than not Surrealism engaged with the inarticulate materiality of the imagination that spurs the process of signification. And it is here that Surrealism's lessons remain.
Over the past three decades, Surrealism has been rehabilitated as an artistic movement and incorporated into the canon of twentieth-century art. (1) This represents a change in its status since the modernist era, when Surrealism remained a turbulent countercurrent in the triumphal history of modernism; although tributaries of Surrealism flowed through modernism, its source and delta remained foreign, its currents treacherous, and its depths dimly illuminated. From a modernist perspective, Surrealism was always too bombastic or too frivolous: it concerned itself with issues of social and political emancipation beyond the purview of modernist concern, or discounted issues of aesthetic quality as incidental to the actual significance of cultural endeavor. During modernism's reign, Surrealism could only be incorporated into the canon with a degree of caution--Joan Miro or Andre Masson could pass, but not Salvador Dali or Hans Bellmer--so it was only with modernism's passing that Surrealism could be incorporated fully into the canon.
During the 1980s, Surrealism was transformed into modernism's "unconscious," now a site for the reevaluation of modernism and a forebear of contemporary art--a process that culminates in the recent celebrations of Surrealism. Yet Surrealism remains profoundly misunderstood in the English-speaking world. Apart from the barrier of language--French was the international language of the movement--the principal obstacle is a reluctance to consider the movement as a distinctive culture with its own practices and values. These qualities do not readily translate into contemporary culture, which remains remarkably hostile to a radical experience of freedom irreducible to normative rules. (2) And it is this experience, which possesses both an aesthetic and an ethical dimension, that not only resists incorporation, but paradoxically, by virtue of this resistance, facilitates repeated encounters.
This review considers three publications that reveal the vigor and indolence of current scholarship on Surrealism. Each approaches Surrealism in a different manner: the chronological survey, the synoptic essay, and the anthology of primary documents. Each approach has its own merits, but the question I want to pose is how adequate each account is to the complex scope of the Surrealist enterprise.
Gerard Durozoi's History of the Surrealist Movement, originally published in France in 1997, fills an important gap by providing a chronological survey of Surrealism from its inception in the immediate wake of the First World War until the dissolution of the historical movement in 1969, in the aftermath of the failed Paris and Prague uprisings in spring 1968. Although the interwar period has been amply covered in previous histories of Surrealism, the post-WWII period is only slowly gaining the attention it deserves. (3) Studies of women artists associated with the movement have gradually appeared since the initial work of Whitney Chadwick, and the work of Bellmer, Pierre Molinier, and Claude Cahun have been the subject of increasing scholarly interest--albeit motivated more by their treatment of gender than their involvement in Surrealism. (4)
Despite its size--some 650 pages of text with 232 color and 777 black-and-white illustrations, plus 50 pages of biographical notes--Durozoi's History still necessarily suffers from the survey format. No reader will find every aspect of Surrealism covered in sufficient detail, nor does the volume conform to current fashion about what Surrealism should be. Durozoi's focus is on "historical Surrealism," that is, the movement organized around Andre Breton between the 1920s and 1960s. Immediately, this colors Durozoi's account, since he provides more space to the activities of Breton and his associates than to former or "dissident" Surrealists who have been the focus of the recent recuperation of Surrealism. In this, Durozoi's account reflects a concern with documenting the activities of the movement itself, rather than the activities of fellow travelers. Thus, while the activities of Michel Leiris, Georges Bataille, or Roger Caillois are described when they impact on the movement, Durozoi is not concerned with their later activities beyond the orbit of Surrealism.
History of the Surrealist Movement is structured chronologically, covering the movement in seven chapters, further divided into key episodes. It also discusses the international dimension of Surrealism, with brief accounts of Surrealism in Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Japan, and elsewhere. Durozoi does not offer a revisionist account of the movement; rather his goal is to provide a reliable overview that encompasses diverse aspects of the movement's history. Thus he describes events that helped to define Surrealism--either internal disputes or polemics against external adversaries--as well as providing a brief survey of the achievements during each period. This approach is not without problems, since it inadvertently perpetuates the artificial divide between the cultural and political tendencies of the movement. This is evident in Durozoi's treatment of the relation of the development of Surrealist objects to the Aragon affair. Andre Thirion has acknowledged how the collective manufacture of Surrealist objects was initiated as a way to rebuild the movement after Louis Aragon's divisive split with Surrealism in 1932. (5) Yet Durozoi's account of objects precedes the Aragon affair, thus sacrificing the reflexive relation between the political setback of Aragon's defection to the Communist Party and Surrealist cultural endeavor. At its worst the book presents a chronicle of the political skirmishes that animated the movement during a particular period, followed by a catalogue of the artistic and literary production--the challenge with Surrealism, however, has always been to hold the two aspects in dialogue. (6)
Although Durozoi dedicates extended discussions to the artists associated with Surrealism, he discusses many key publications only in passing, devoting little more than one page to Breton's Nadja. (7) While this omission would have less effect on French readers, who would be more familiar with the writings of the principal Surrealists (now an established part of twentieth-century French literature), the effect on an English-speaking audience is to perpetuate the image of Surrealism as a movement in the visual arts.
Nonetheless, there is much to recommend in Durozoi's History. One of the virtues of the account is his nuanced understanding of Surrealism's profound aspirations. Thus, when addressing Breton's 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism--a key document for any understanding of Surrealism--he is able to draw out the connection between the dictionary definition of Surrealism as "psychic automatism in its pure state" and the social and political goals of the movement. The Manifesto made it clear that Surrealism did not seek to advance a new definition of literature, but sought to deploy automatism to undermine the very basis of reality itself. As Durozoi notes:
It should have been clear that the apprehension of "the real functioning of thought" could not be confined to a narrow literary goal or, more precisely, that the constraints imposed by the practice of literature were not compatible with the exploration of true thought, of thought as it takes shape, well short of reason and logic as they are ordinarily defined.... The control exerted by reason and aesthetic or moral concerns could only stifle authentic thought and confine it to too narrow a framework. Doubtless this framework might appear to have the advantage of corresponding to a material or social reality, as it was initially responsible for what that reality became; but if thought freed itself from its censorship yet still found itself in disagreement with that same reality, it should by rights endeavor to modify it. Thus, as soon as surrealism was historically defined, it was able to claim a political dimension (70).
In this passage, Durozoi teases out the implication of the argument advanced in the 1924 Manifesto. Although this political dimension remained immanent in the Manifesto, it would not be long before it asserted itself, and henceforth the history of the movement would need to be considered in relation to its political position.
Given the scope of Durozoi's History, it is not difficult to identify minor shortcomings--needless to say, each reader will have a catalogue of heroines and villains. Apart from the limitations imposed by the ambitious scope of the book, what are its principal weaknesses? First, there is little analysis of factors beyond the immediate compass of the Surrealist movement. Surrealism did not emerge nor develop in isolation, but in an often-acrimonious dialogue with other political, social, and cultural tendencies. Durozoi provides little background information to locate Surrealism within the context of French cultural history; he either assumes that the reader is already familiar with this history or that it is irrelevant to the account he presents. In part this is a practical decision, since to discuss these factors would have increased the length of an already sizable volume, but it does isolate Surrealism from important antecedents and contemporary developments. Second, although Durozoi is careful not to define Surrealism as an artistic or literary movement in the text, the copious illustrations inadvertently privilege the artistic side of the movement. Although the illustrations provide an important supplement to the text, including many unfamiliar images, plus a valuable photographic documentation of the movement, they are not closely integrated into the text but function independently. The divorce between image and text is a lost opportunity and suggests a photo editor's contribution more than an extension of the argument.
A minor problem is the translation, which is not as elegant as it could be. The text reads smoothly most of the time, yet occasionally an awkward construction captures the reader's attention. Nor has the translator consulted the many fine English translations of Surrealist writings, which produces some unnecessary jolts for the reader already familiar with these translations.
Nonetheless, Durozoi's History represents an important contribution to the study of Surrealism. Many of the above criticisms follow from the parameters of a chronological survey and should not overshadow the volume's value as an overview of the movement. Although it is not the definitive account of Surrealism--I doubt that such an account is possible, let alone desirable--it does provide a comprehensive overview of a complex cultural phenomenon.
Surrealism: Desire Unbound, edited by Jennifer Mundy, was originally published in association with the exhibition of the same name held at the Tate Modern in 2001. It departs from the typical format of an exhibition catalogue in that it consists of essays by eleven scholars of Surrealism, with entries on specific works in the exhibition kept to the minimum. Although the essays are illustrated with works from the exhibition, the book is intended to stand alone rather than function as a record of the exhibition.
This approach is not without weakness. To a certain degree the text stands apart from the illustrations: unlike a conventional essay, where the writer is free to select illustrations to support the argument, here the illustrations can seem incidental to the argument or at least in need of further elaboration to develop connections; this disjuncture also suggests a reluctance to engage with the imagery itself, as if it were beyond interpretation--a problem also shared with Durozoi's History. For an exhibition catalogue, there is little by way of supplementary material, such as a chronology, biographical information on the artists exhibited, bibliography, or list of exhibitions (although it does include an index, a feature often neglected in catalogues). The lack of this information is disappointing, since one valuable function of catalogues is to publish the findings of the detailed research that goes into the development of an exhibition.
A greater problem is caused by the absence of chronological structure. Surrealism subtly evolved over time: it was dynamically engaged in its own historical moment, and its imagery often addressed issues of contemporary relevance. For instance, the importance of psychoanalysis to the movement is often poorly understood. Although Breton acknowledges the importance of Freud's influence in the 1924 Manifesto, references to Freud were infrequent in the early years. This seems a tactical decision on the Surrealists' part, a way to distance Surrealism from the then-fashionable interest in Freudian "pansexuality" in literary circles (Le Disque vert devoted an issue to Freud in 1925, while Andre Gide wrote his 1925 Les Faux-monnayeurs as a "psychoanalytic" novel). (8) Freud's work became more important to the Surrealists in response to an impasse in the movement's political position after 1927: not only do they begin to publish extracts from Freud's work in their periodicals, but Breton began to systematically explore the relation between Freud and Marx that culminated in Les Vases communicants (1932). The goal was not a theoretical synthesis, as would later occur in the work of Herbert Marcuse and others, but to deploy Freud and Marx in a way that would illuminate the foundation of reality. The Surrealists' later interest in arcane figures like the social theorist Charles Fourier or the alchemist Paracelsus would continue this dialogue. This dimension of Surrealism is sadly absent in Surrealism: Desire Unbound.
Indeed, the principal failing of Surrealism: Desire Unbound is that it perpetuates an oddly circumscribed image of Surrealism. In part this results from the organizing theme of the exhibition. Although desire is certainly central to the Surrealist enterprise, its role was integral to an ethics of desire. Desire was never without consequence. However, in elevating desire as the central organizing principle of the exhibition and catalogue, Surrealism: Desire Unbound has curiously neutered Surrealism, limiting it to an artistic and literary movement. The examples of Surrealism discussed (and included in the exhibition) are limited to works of art or literature; what is excluded is the polemical side of Surrealism, its engagement with contemporary social and political issues that was an integral part of the movement--and moreover that constituted the vital force of the movement. Divorced from this context, what remains is a series of enigmatic relics; thus, desire functions as a convenient theme to reanimate these relics in accord with contemporary concerns--what amounts to little more than wish fulfillment.
According to Mundy, "The word desire runs like a silver thread through the poetry and writings of the surrealist group in all its phases" (11). Mundy isolates desire from the compass of Surrealist experience; although desire is undoubtedly a central theme of Surrealism, it is part of a broader engagement with modernity and functions corrosively to reveal the inadequacy of what is given as reality. Yet the emphasis on desire marginalizes the role of politics in Surrealism; although it is touched upon or alluded to abstractly as "freedom," the contours of this freedom are never defined. (9) Thus Mundy states: "The surrealists sought change in all aspects of life, personal as well as political. To realize this, they championed the cause of an unfettered imagination, and attacked the restraints--intellectual and social--that served to censor the human spirit" (53). At this point the argument promises to become interesting, but unfortunately this statement only serves as a segue to the conclusion.
Indeed, Surrealism: Desire Unbound exhibits a reluctance to articulate the relation between Surrealism's intellectual and political positions. The contributors only acknowledge Surrealism's politics in the margins of their arguments, as an aside or concluding remark, but the implications of a politics of desire--what indeed should be central to an undertaking such as this--are often left unstated. For instance, the catalogue includes several works by Cahun, yet these are described in terms of a critique of gender; Cahun's political convictions--she was a member of the French Communist Party during the 1920s and early 1930s, only breaking with communism in the wake of the Aragon affair--and their relation to her creative endeavors are not addressed.
David Lomas uses psychoanalysis to pry open the enigma of Surrealism, focusing on the role of hysteria in understanding Surrealism. "The Bretonian conception of poetry hinges crucially on a dynamic interrelationship between repression and the return of the repressed which the figure of hysteria vividly dramatizes" (55). The danger here is that one simply transposes Surrealism into psychoanalysis, and in so doing overlooks the social and political dimension of the Surrealist image--indeed, of the image as a critique of rational consciousness. Although the Surrealists were avid readers of Freud, it is precipitous to reduce Surrealism to psychoanalytical categories. The Surrealists never accepted psychoanalysis tout court, and in fact were remarkably resistant to undergoing analysis (Leiris's break with Surrealism in 1929, for instance, coincides with his analysis by Andre Borel, who had recently treated Bataille). Psychoanalysis was always subjected to the test of Surrealist experience--a test that rendered it unrecognizable to Freud. If anything, psychoanalysis's greatest contribution to Surrealism was as an antidote to romanticism, providing an analytical vocabulary to acknowledge the importance of marginal states of attention. However, the measure to which psychoanalysis was subjected was that of a quest for lyricism, and it was this elusive quality that distinguished the validity of any technique.
Dawn Ades, in her characteristically understated style, contributes a thoughtful meditation on the role of desire and gender in Surrealism. Ades uses works by Rene Magritte, Man Ray, and Cahun to demonstrate how these examples cannot be reduced to any simple opposition between masculine and feminine, but in fact question the stability of each position. "The very transparency surrealism attempted to establish in this area of sexual desire and identity produced contradictions in its own discourse about love and the idealization of women, and raised questions about masculinity and femininity, sexual preference, deviance and normality that simultaneously began to dismantle surrealism's own myths" (171). Her contribution suggests the need to open Surrealism to a more radical questioning of gender. For instance, little has been said of the role played by the homosocial dimension in the dynamics of the Surrealist group, nor the effect of this dynamic on the participation of women in the movement. Here it may be a question of a mode of intimacy that, if not divorced from sexuality, at least places sexuality in a subdued role.
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Hal Foster revisits the question of Surrealist photography, reading it through the prism of Freud and Jacques Lacan to identify an unresolved tension between "woman-as-castrative" and "woman-as-fetish" (exemplified by Bellmer), which deconstructs the Surrealist aesthetic of "woman-as-phallus" that disavowed castration (exemplified by Man Ray, Brassai, and Lee Miller). To the degree that Foster's argument elaborates the deconstructive logic of the uncanny, it obscures the way that Surrealism articulates failure and repetition within the texture of its works. The difficulty posed by this reading is that, for all its apparent theoretical sophistication, it occludes the crux of Surrealism: the matrix of signification in the corporeal imagination. Photography acts as a convenient screen here, for, as a photomechanical process, it apparently removes spontaneity from the creative process, the "murmur" of the automatic message; more precisely, it arrests the temporality of automatism in the instant of exposure.
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The last three essays are the best in the volume. Neil Cox presents a long-overdue discussion of the Surrealist fascination with the Marquis de Sade, which he argues was based on the theme of "desire frustrated by repressive authority" (247). Surrealism, for all its celebration of love, "enacts a critique of the notion of desire" by speaking of love and Sade in the same breath that leads to the "dislocation" of the very idea of love (261). He discovers in the Surrealist Sade (for the Surrealists read Sade in a specific way) "desire forced through the social press." "Desire is no longer pure" but alienated by the presence of a social world; in this distorted form the Sadean image of desire represents an "empty vessel waiting to be filled by a future collective liberty" (272-73).
Alyce Mahon discusses three Surrealist exhibitions that "offered the surrealists an opportunity to make manifest the power of art to change life and the power of collective aesthetic experience" (277). In contrast to the conventional view of Surrealism's postwar decline, Mahon explores the way these exhibitions functioned to stage the revolutionary potential of Surrealism, the hope that "desire and eroticism would entice the exhibition visitor to view reality anew, to call his or her own being into question and, ideally, to share their dream or revolution" (277). Although Surrealism was no longer regarded as the latest avant-garde movement, eclipsed by existentialism, Art Informel, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop art, the International Surrealist Exhibitions of 1938, 1947, and 1959 provided important opportunities to reaffirm what remained vital in Surrealism: the collective fission of collaboration. Surrealist exhibitions were never an opportunity for individual artists to show their latest works; rather they functioned as collective demonstrations of the transformative power of shared aesthetic experience. The Surrealist exhibition transformed the gallery into a "dynamic and shocking space, in which the viewer could be persuaded to go beyond the limits of everyday life and to abandon social and moral codes of behavior" (280). Indeed, Mahon argues the Surrealist exhibition space was a "site of radical aesthetic and social change": "through desire, the visitor would not only arrive at a new understanding of reality but would also be inspired to challenge the social and political bases of the world in which he or she lived" (291). Mahon's attention to specific exhibitions rather than individual works allows her to explore the connection between creative endeavor and political action in Surrealism.
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In her spirited essay, "Desire--A Surrealist Invention," Annie LeBrun contributes the most compelling essay in the collection. Not surprisingly, LeBrun is not an academic: a poet and writer, she participated in Surrealist activities during the 1960s, which has left a distinctive mark on her values--and it is the insight of experience that colors her essay. Desire is not only the "vital source of all our thinking" (309), it also leads to "nothing less than a revolution in representation": "once desire becomes master of the game, there can be no representation which is not borne away in a vast centrifugal movement that shifts our human horizon towards everything we perceive as alien to ourselves" (305). Indeed, LeBrun's essay infuses Cox's earlier discussion of Sade with a degree of poetry, recognizing in desire "a physical intuition of the infinite" (308). This last phrase succinctly encapsulates the inadequacy of academic accounts of Surrealism, which rarely venture beyond the accepted doxa to avoid the risk of real thought. This understanding of desire as a subversive frontier sets into relief the limited ambition of most of the contributions to Surrealism: Desire Unbound. It is not sufficient to treat desire as a convenient category around which to organize the relics of Surrealism--a project that merely transforms Surrealism into another artistic or literary movement, interchangeable with any other modern movement. Desire demands to be taken seriously (which does not rule out its humorous side): desire as the very source of thought, figured against representation.
The theme of desire also functions to position Duchamp, whose relation to Surrealism is best described as ambivalent. Duchamp's affinity with Surrealism was through the avenue of mutual respect and friendship, yet he always remained aloof from the political position of the Surrealists. Thus within the exhibition Duchamp functions as a gatekeeper, regulating the relation between historical Surrealism and contemporary art. Duchamp's ambivalent status is not explicitly addressed, nor what indeed constitutes Duchamp's Surrealism. Here the politics of the museum intervene: the book reproduces the 1965 replica of The Large Glass (now in the Tate), plus some of the original accompanying notes, but does not include The Green Box, the edition of notes published by Duchamp in 1933, and which formed the basis of Breton's important essay "La Phare de la mariee," which reinstated Duchamp as a Surrealist fellow traveler. (10) These works in effect mediate between the Duchamp legacy within contemporary art and the construction of Surrealism as an artistic movement. Duchamp, in effect, makes Surrealism palatable to a contemporary audience.
If Surrealism: Desire Unbound furthers the aestheticization of Surrealism, then Surrealism Against the Current: Tracts and Declarations acts as a much-needed corrective. The tack adopted by Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski differs substantially from the two titles discussed above. Surrealism Against the Current is an anthology of sixty-four tracts and declarations collectively written by Surrealists between 1922 and 1991, supplemented by Jean Schuster's "The Fourth Canto" on the dissolution of the Paris group in 1969 and a collection of remarkably diverse definitions of Surrealism. The selection includes numerous contributions from groups outside the better-known French movement, such as the Belgian, Rumanian, Czechoslovakian, and Swedish Surrealists. The anthology is divided into four sections--the historical orientation of the movement, its relation to revolutionary politics, the security of the spirit, and declarations on colonialism--and each section is organized chronologically, which enables the reader to gain an understanding of the ways ideas develop over time.
The value of this anthology is that it gives access to many primary documents detailing the Surrealists' positions on a range of issues. There is no substitute for reading these documents to gain an understanding of the Surrealists' ambitions. The book serves as an antidote to the academic recuperation of Surrealism prevalent today, since well-known and cited declarations are outnumbered by many less-familiar statements, including an important selection of declarations from Eastern Europe.
Surrealism Against the Current opens with an incisive introduction that focuses on a sadly neglected aspect of Surrealism: the central role of collective experience in the life of the group. Richardson and Fijalkowski have a keen appreciation of the finer nuances of Surrealism, which allows them to discuss the idea of Surrealism in a manner that is not clouded by intellectual fashion, but informed rather by a profound understanding of what is at stake in the Surrealist enterprise. The starting point for their assessment is to identify the essence of Surrealism in "the implications that emerge from any attempt at thinking together" (1). It is this attempt that distinguishes Surrealism from other cultural and political movements during the twentieth century. In terms of artistic practice, Surrealism discounted individualism in favor of the belief that creative endeavor engenders a type of collective experience that erodes individual autonomy. Since the editors are committed to the idea of Surrealism as collective experience, they are able to argue from the basis of that experience rather than from Surrealism's position in the history of artistic movements. This emphasis also leads them to reject the common characterization of Breton as the "pope" of Surrealism. They argue that he did not possess any traditional authority in the group; rather the source of his prestige lay in his "moral intransigence," the fact he was prepared to place the idea of Surrealism above all personal considerations (13). And this sense of moral intransigence--which could be considered Breton's principal gift to Surrealism--echoes through the declarations in this volume.
Although the introduction presents an unfamiliar image of Surrealism, the following declarations provide ample evidence to justify Richardson and Fijalkowski's argument. This is one of the most surprising aspects of Surrealism Against the Current, since the image of Surrealism that emerges in its pages differs substantially from the conventional reading advanced by art historians. Whereas the latter wish to reduce Surrealism to familiar categories--art, poetry, automatism, the unconscious, desire, etc.--these declarations present Surrealism as a dynamic force that relentlessly negates the given in favor of the possible. It is also refreshing to read statements infused with anarchic poetic spirit rather than the affectation of academic argument.
In contrast to the cliches that still abound in scholarly writing on Surrealism, the declarations in the first section are something of a revelation. The fluidity of ideas leads to a disorientation of familiar assumptions. Notable here is the Surrealist appropriation of Hegelian dialectic, which does not function as a means to arrive at a final and definitive synthesis of ideas, but as a process of articulation between disparate positions, an unending process of becoming.
A continuous thread throughout the history of Surrealism is its opposition to colonialism. While their statements during the interwar period are familiar--their opposition to French intervention in Morocco and to the 1931 Colonial Exhibition--the two statements included from the post-WWII period deserve to be better known. The first, "Freedom Is a Vietnamese Word," is a 1947 statement against French imperialism in Indochina; the second, "Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War" (better know as the "Declaration of the 121"), a statement against French tactics in the Algerian War. The latter statement, in particular, demands to be read in the context of recent events, since it deplores the clandestine reinstitution of torture against colonial insurgents in Algeria--an "unofficial" policy that bears uncanny similarity to the treatment of "unlawful combatants" and terrorist suspects by the Bush administration.
One feature that would improve the collection is a chronological list of the declarations. This would allow readers to locate declarations from a specific period that are included under different rubrics. Similarly, a little more editorial design would have made the collection more reader-friendly, since it is often difficult to find individual declarations without consulting the table of contents. Admittedly, these are minor points, but why detract from an otherwise superb collection?
Both History of the Surrealist Movement and Surrealism Against the Current provide useful correctives to Surrealism: Desire Unbound. Whereas the latter is content to define Surrealism as an artistic movement, the former help restore the ambition and scope of the Surrealist enterprise. Durozoi provides a useful chronological overview of the movement, while Surrealism Against the Current furnishes the anger, passion, and commitment that invigorated the movement. Read together, these three titles reveal that Surrealism is far from disclosing its enigma; indeed, the real work has only just begun.
Raymond Spiteri teaches art history at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His recent publications include "Envisioning Surrealism in Histoire de l'oeil and La Femme 100 tetes" (Art Journal, Winter 2004) and, as coeditor, Surrealism, Politics, and Culture (Ashgate, 2003).
I borrow the title from a Surrealist tract written in opposition to a retrospective exhibition of Surrealist painting organized by Patrick Walberg in 1964. See Surrealism Against the Current, 52-55.
1. In the English-speaking world this process began in the 1930s, with the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but intensified in the late 1960s with Surrealism and its Heritage (again at MoMA) and the publication of William Rubin's monumental Dada and Surrealist Art, which still approached Surrealism through the percept of modernist values. The next landmark in the historiography of Surrealist art occurred in the 1980s, when October drafted Surrealism into its antimodernist polemic. For a critique of the American reception of Surrealism, see Guy Ducornet, Le Punching-Ball et la vache a lait: La critique universitaire nord-americaine face au surrealisme (Angers: Deleatur, 1992).
2. For a discussion of this point, see Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
3. Maurice Nadeau's The History of Surrealism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), first published in 1944, has long served as a standard history of the movement during the interwar years. For a history of Surrealist art, see Marcel Jean, The History of Surrealist Painting (New York: Grove Press, 1960), and William Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art (New York: Abrams, 1968). Dawn Ades's exhibition catalogue Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978), provides a useful survey of periodicals associated with Surrealism. For a more recent account, see Jack Spector, Surrealist Art and Writing 1919-39 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). For an account of post-WWII Surrealism, see Alyce Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938-1968 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005).
4. Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), See also Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation, ed. Whitney Chadwick (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
5. On this point see M. Stone-Richards, "Failure and Community: Preliminary Questions on the Political in the Culture of Surrealism," in Surrealism, Politics and Culture, ed. Raymond Spiteri and Don LaCoss (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 312.
6. I would argue that the unresolved tension between cultural and political dimensions of the Surrealist enterprise is not only a central feature of Surrealism, but continuously at play in the history of the movement.
7. Nadeau's History of Surrealism includes extended discussions of key writings.
8. See Elizabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
9. Freedom is a much-abused term in the twenty-first century, wielded by myopic politicians to legitimize their self-serving foreign-policy goals. Rarely have the stakes of a term been so great: to do justice to Surrealism means to render justice to the Surrealists' understanding of freedom.
10. In 1929 Breton had criticized Duchamp for abandoning creative endeavor in favor of chess. See Andre Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 170. "La Phare de la mariee" is translated as "Marcel Duchamp: The Lighthouse of the Bride" in Andre Breton, Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: MFA Publications, 2002), 85-100.