What is surrealism? What are we searching for exactly? Google defines surrealism as “a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature which sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example, by the irrational juxtaposition of images.”
Merriam-Webster’s definition of surrealism is “the principles, ideals, or practice of producing fantastic or incongruous imagery or effects in art, literature, film, or theater by means of unnatural or irrational juxtapositions and combinations.”
The online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica says that surrealism is a “movement in visual art and literature, flourishing in Europe between World Wars I and II [that] grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason...”(1). And according to James Voorhies of the Department of European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “surrealism originated in the late 1910s and early ‘20s as a literary movement that experimented with a new mode of writing called automatism which sought to release the unbridled imagination of the subconscious” (2).
Yet still we have the Tate Art Museum in England that says surrealism “aimed to revolutionise human experience, rejecting a rational vision of life in favour of one that asserted the value of the unconscious and dreams. The movement’s poets and artists found magic and strange beauty in the unexpected and the uncanny, the disregarded and the unconventional” (3). So, what is surrealism? 220 words of definition and what have we defined, exactly?
French surrealist and founder of the modern Surrealist Movement, André Breton, discovered the singular phrase that became foundational to the surrealist doctrine of objective chance, written by Comte de Lautréamont: “as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table”(4). This metaphor captures one of the most important principles of surrealist aesthetic: the enforced juxtaposition of two completely alien realities that challenge an observer’s preconditioned perception of reality.
German surrealist Max Ernst would also refer to Lautréamont's sewing machine and umbrella to define the structure of the surrealist painting as "a linking of two realities that by all appearances have nothing to link them, in a setting that by all appearances does not fit them” (5). As we can plainly see, nailing down one concrete definition of surrealism is nearly impossible. Robin D.G. Kelley, distinguished professor at UCLA and Gary B. Nash endowed chair in U.S. History, says the “definition [of surrealism] is as rich and evasive as the night itself” (6).
In his book, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Kelley highlights two interpretations of surrealism. The first is from the Chicago Surrealist Group and the second by Franklin Rosemont, one of the founders of the group. Starting with the Chicago Surrealist Group in 1976:
Surrealism is the exaltation of freedom, revolt, imagination and
love….[It] is above all a revolutionary movement. Its basic aim is
to lessen and eventually to completely resolve the contradiction
between everyday life and our wildest dreams. By definition
subversive, surrealist thought and action are intended not only to
emancipate desire and supply it with new poetic weapons….
Beginning with the abolition of imaginative slavery, it advances to
the creation of a free society in which everyone will be a poet -- a
society in which everyone will be able to develop
his or her potentialities fully and freely (7).
Twenty years ago (twenty five years after the above quoted definition was originally penned), Ron Sakolsky (8) wrote an article for the Socialist Review entitled “Surrealist Subversion in Chicago: The Forecast Is Still Hot.” Apparently, surrealism is sticking around in some circles. The article includes a brief history of the Chicago Surrealist Group: Organized in 1966 by Franklin and Penelope Rosemont, Chicagoans in their early twenties, poets and artists who also considered themselves revolutionary; the group was the first indigenous collective expression of surrealism in the United States and enjoyed the solidarity and cooperation of the international surrealist movement, including the direct, enthusiastic support of André Breton, surrealism’s founder and major theorist (9).
André Breton was born February 16, 1896 in Tinchebray, France and died in Paris in September 1966. Breton excelled in school and developed literary interests early on in life. His thoughts on the avant-garde were influenced by French Decadents and German Romantic writers. Avant-garde, French for ‘advanced guard’ and originally meant to denote the vanguard of an army, was first applied to art in France in the early 1800s. The term refers to any artist, art, or movement that breaks with precedent and is regarded as innovative and boundaries-pushing. Because of its radical nature and the fact that it challenges existing ideas, processes, and forms, avant-garde art has often been met with resistance and controversy. By 1912, Breton possessed an advanced knowledge of contemporary art and anarchism. And he was an active member of the Dada movement (discussed in more detail below) with an international reputation. But he began to separate himself from his contemporaries and their belief in art for the sake of art, in favor of art that appealed to and persuaded the masses (10). In 1924, Breton published Manifeste du surréalisme which defined surrealism as “pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express… the real process of thought. It is the dictation of thought, free from control by the reason and of any aesthetic or moral preoccupation” (11). Breton’s re-issued manifestos and essays in subsequent years would look differently at morality. When Mark Polizzotti (12) edited a selection of André’s work together for print in 2003, he describes Breton as a “theorist, polemicist, art critic, political agitator, Surrealist impresario, [and] cultural terrorist: [his] public persona commands such dramatic attention that we might sometimes forget he was, first and foremost, a poet” (13). He reports Breton’s work as,
this mixture of transparency and obfuscation that … rarely speaks
directly of his concerns, whether philosophy, politics, emotional
turbulence and group dynamics, admired predecessors, or valued
contemporaries. Rather, he uses these concerns as conduits, meant
to channel the marvelous reality hidden just beneath the surface of
our humdrum world” (14).
André Breton was either influenced by or an original member (depending on the source) of a larger intellectual and artistic movement that began during World War I called Dadaism. What is Dadaism, Dada, or a Dadaist?
As a word, ‘dada’ translates to ‘yes-yes’ in Romanian, ‘rocking horse’ or ‘hobby horse’ in French and it means nothing or nonsense. The movement was born in Zurich, during World War I, out of opposition to what many intellectuals and artists considered a war of nonsense dominating the entire European continent, ruining homes, businesses, and artworks, forcing entire families into exile. That is particularly poignant because this is a period of renewed nationalism in art, so many artists were very tied to romanticized versions of their homelands despite the rising tide of violence. In 2006 American artist, Paul Trachtman, wrote an article for the Smithsonian entitled “A Brief History of Dada”: The Dada movement began in 1913 (Breton would have been 17-years-old) and one of the inciting events is described as an open mic night in a popular Zurich nightspot.
German author and war refugee, Hugo Ball, recited “a poem that began: ‘gadji beri bimba / glanridi lauli lonni cadori…’”(15). It was utter nonsense aimed at a public that seemed all too complacent about a senseless war. Politicians of all stripes had proclaimed the war a noble cause. Ball wanted to shock anyone who regarded “all this civilized carnage as a triumph to European intelligence.” 16 Ball’s absurdist outlook spread like COVID-19, reaching receptive audiences from Berlin to Paris to New York. It was a stark contrast to the rationalism brought on by the age of the scientific revolution that we will discuss in more detail as part of the established values of the era.
The second interpretation of surrealism in Robin D. G. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination is brought to us by Franklin Rosemont’s book about the founder of the movement (and his mentor) entitled André Breton -- What is Surrealism? Selected Writings (1978):
Surrealism, a unitary project of total revolution, is above all a
method of knowledge and a way of life; it is lived far more than it
is written about, or drawn. Surrealism is the most exhilarating
adventure of the mind, an unparalleled means of pursuing the
fervent quest for freedom and true life beyond the veil of
ideological appearances. Only the social revolution -- the leap, in
the celebrated expression of Marx and Engels, ‘from the realm of
necessity to the realm of freedom’ -- will enable the true life of
poetry and mad love to cast aside, definitively, the fetters of
degradation and dishonour and to flourish with unrestrained
splendour (17).
While Dadaism expressed itself largely as an art form or anti-art form, largely an aesthetic proposition, surrealism sought to position itself as a life view. Georges Bataille, one of surrealism’s most profound critics, says that “in the end surrealism cannot be considered purely as a style. It is a state of mind which reaches toward unification…” (18).
After World War I, many Dada artists started migrating to surrealism. Interestingly, one of the characterizing features of surrealism is it’s connection to science, Sigmund Freud specifically. Surrealist works are bound up with the psychoanalytic unconscious and employ unconventional techniques like automatism and frottage in an attempt to tap into the dream world of the subliminal mind, visualizing its secrets and mysteries.19 Robin D.G. Kelley defines the practice of surrealist automatism (or ‘pure psychic automatism’ or ‘automatic writing’) as a state of mind, a plunge below the surface of consciousness that relates more to shamanism and trance than to stream of consciousness. It is his understanding that automatism was a struggle against the the slavery of rationalism, another means to allow the imagination to run free.20 The overall goal of surrealist thought and creation is to undermine established values. As D. G.
Kelley notes, “surrealism may have originated in the west, but it is rooted in a conspiracy against Western civilization” (21).
It is important to understand the ‘established values’ of the time period that set the backdrop for Breton, Rosemont, Ball and other artists and intellectuals like them. The editors at History.com describe the Age of Reason (1685-1815) as a period in European politics, philosophy, science and communications that thinkers questioned traditional authority and embraced the notion that humanity could be improved through rational change (22). The Age of Reason is also referred to as the Enlightenment. There is no single, unified Enlightenment movement and many thinkers had unique and different views. But all differences and disagreement emerged of common themes surrounding rational questioning and belief in progress through dialogue. The Age of Enlightenment produced scientifically-sound despots like Frederick the Great who “rationalized and modernized Prussia in between brutal multi-year wars with Austria” and ‘enlightened’ would-be revolutionaries like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson (23).
In 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (24). Twelve years later, the same man wrote in Notes of the State of Virginia,
I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether
originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and
circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both
of body and mind… This unfortunate difference of color, and
perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of
these people (25).
Thomas Jefferson and most of the Enlightenment’s leading thinkers were influenced heavily by the Black men and women they enslaved on their private properties, in public affairs, and in their bedrooms. John Locke, one of the Enlightenment’s spiritual forefathers, asserted the right of people to resist the absolute submission to authority and to change a government that did not protect natural rights of life, liberty, and property. However, Locke was a participant in the slave trade as a shareholder in the Royal Africa Company. He is also credited with the authorship of the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which avowed that “every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever” (26). These startling inconsistencies drove Enlightenment at its core and many depravities were committed and have continued to be committed in the name of reason, rationality, and ‘illumination.’ Perhaps defining surrealism is easier if we consider it as a response to the depravity driven by human rationalism and enlightenment in the age of modern human enslavement.
According to Michael Richardson, “one of the issues raised most forcibly by surrealism was the nature of freedom itself in a collective context” (27). Richardson translated the works of French philosopher Georges Bataille in a collection called the Absence of Myth. Bataille is significant because he is part of a collection of intellectuals that were dissatisfied with surrealism after Breton published the first manifesto in 1924. Georges and other founding members of the College of Sociology believed that surrealism’s focus on the unconscious privileged the individual over society, and obscured the social dimension of human experience. As a man, Georges almost became a priest, going so far as to attend Catholic seminary. But in 1922, he renounced his faith and since was often heard to say that the brothels of Paris were his true places of worship. Georges founded several journals and groups of writers, authoring a diverse range of work himself, including writings, poems, and essays on innumerable subjects including the mysticism of economy, passing of poetry, philosophy, the arts, and eroticism (28). Bataille’s bend toward mysticism meant that many of his publications were banned or undermined by his contemporaries and he was largely ignored during his lifetime.
Bataille’s relationship with surrealism was controversial, his relation with its founder André Breton often strained, and at times he’s placed among its most influential enemies. This goes against Bataille’s affirmation of his fundamental solidarity with surrealists, and his general agreement with the thinking of André Breton. Apparently, Bataille referred to himself as ‘an enemy from within [the Surrealist Movement]’ and defined his position as lying ‘at the side of surrealism’ (29). In 1929, Bataille denounced surrealism as idealism and accused its members of being too concerned with place in the world and the founder (Breton) of attempting to be a priest (30).
There is some foreshadowing of this critique because by the end of World War II, Bataille would become a pseudo-religious leader in a sect outside of surrealism that revisited human sacrifice as an important element of modern myth-building. Bataille and other men like him wanted society to recognize the value of sacrifice as a mediating ritual, an act of purification by which society could seek renewal and absolution; but, because they lacked popular support Bataille shifted his thinking even more toward the absence of myth in modern society. Richardson elaborates on Bataille’s brilliant concept: “the myth of contemporary society [as an] ‘absence of myth’, since society had deluded itself into believing it was without myth by making a myth of its very denial” (31).
This understanding that modernity downplays myth to its detriment re-sutured Bataille to the surrealists. He realized that the Surrealist Movement had long sought to confront what the ‘absence of myth’ brought about and had long realized that the revival of ancient myths (like human sacrifice) could lead to nothing (32).
For Bataille, even surrealism’s acknowledgement of the absence of myth in modern society was one aspect of a more generalized ‘absence’. It also referred to an ‘absence of the sacred’. Bataille defined the ‘sacred’ as communication and “by extension its loss also meant an absence of communication... [or] a failure of communication which touched all levels of society” (33). A society ceases to function when it can not communicate, it becomes an ‘absence of society’ or more specifically an ‘absence of community’. Bataille’s greatest criticism of surrealism is that the movement could not capture the contagious quality of ritual since no one outside of its immediate circle could believe in it.
Therefore, surrealists, without a political theory like communism being convergent, were not confronting the ‘absence of myth’ that prevented sacred communication within societies meaning that surrealism had a bend toward mysticism, a by-product of the growth of individualism, in which God becomes substituted for social cohesion (34).
In positing an ‘absence of myth’, “Bataille was looking not for a new form of mysticism, but to reintegrate the notion of ecstasy into the body social… The focus is integration with others, and involves tangible realization of collective being, which both transforms and enhances one’s own individuality” (35). Surrealism as a movement influenced people around the world. The body social (the tangible realization of collective being) was alive in Third World countries and oppressed peoples everywhere. D.G. Kelley insists “surrealists frequently looked outside Europe for ideas and inspiration, turning most notably to the ‘primitives’ under the heel of European colonialism” further “what later became known as the Third World turned out to be the source of the surrealists’ politizing during the mid-1920s” (36).
Perhaps, the more interesting part of this exchange happens on the other end as oppressed and marginalized peoples embraced surrealism as a revolutionary method of expression and European surrealists were able to understand new ways of communicating and being.
European surrealists discovered themselves and their theories in African American music like jazz and the blues; while simultaneously Black writers, poets, intellectuals, and creatives discovered themselves searching for and continuing to re-define surrealism. And as D.G. Kelley reminds us -- some of the principles of surrealism that “invite dreaming”, “urge improvisation and invention”, and “weaponize the imagination” were arguably present in Afrodiasporic culture before surrealism was ever named by André Breton or discovered via Comte de Lautréamont (37). Whether this is true or not, the center of the Surrealist Movement (Breton’s Paris Group) issued an aggressive, forward thinking, anti-colonial statement in 1932 entitled “Murderous Humanitarianism” (38) and from that point forward Black surrealists and revolutionaries became an official part of the movement to find the Marvelous.
D. G. Kelley notes that “by plunging into the depths of the unconscious and lessening the contradiction between everyday life and our wildest dreams, we can enter the domain of the Marvelous.” There are too many examples of surrealism and Blackness to name them justly in this space. But Black art, thought, revolution, and surrealism became almost inseparable at points; from the dancing ivory keys of pianist Thelonious Monk (39), to Gertrude ‘Ma’
Rainey’s (40) ‘black’ humor and the blues, and from the fire of Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism to the bold clarity of Suzanne Césaire who once wrote the strand that brings them all together: “Our surrealism will enable us to finally transcend the sordid antinomies of the present: whites/Blacks, Europeans/Africans, civilized/savages” (41).
Perhaps the most poignant is American novelist Richard Wright’s assertion that Black people did not need to search for the surreal because their lives were already surreal enough. Wright hypothesized that forced exclusion produced for Black people a different way of looking at the world and of feeling it. So, what is surrealism? What are we searching for? There is no straight answer for that but that is by definition. And isn’t defining things a tad bit rational? Ultimately, searching for surrealism involves a rejection of Aristotelian theories of rationality and reason in exchange for the opportunity at transcendence through an embrace of the unconscious, the metaphysical, the unknowable, and the undefinable -- all for an opportunity at the Marvelous.
I want an opportunity at the Marvelous.
1 Encyclopedia Britannica Editors, 2020.
2 James Voorhies, "Surrealism”, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/surr/hd_surr.html.
3 Tate Museum of Art, “Surrealism”, last revised 2021, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/surrealism.
4 New World Encyclopedia Contributors, 2017.
5 “Surrealists Inspired by Lautréamont,” Rauner Library, Dartmouth University, last revised 2014, https://sites.dartmouth.edu/library/2014/08/01/surrealists-inspired-by-lautreamont-2/.
6 Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), 158. 7 Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 158.
7 The Chicago Surrealist Group
8 Ron Sakolsky is a published, American public policy academic, student of anarchy, surrealism, and radical history. 9 Ron Sakolsky,"Surrealist Subversion in Chicago: The Forecast is Still Hot!" Socialist Review 28, no. 1 (2001): 3- 53.
10 Encyclopaedia Britannica Editors, 2021
11 André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. R. Seaver and H. R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 24.
12 Mark Polizzotti is a professor at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, a biographer, critic, poet, and translator of over 50 books.
13 Mark Polizzoti, “Phrases Knocking at the Window,” in André Breton: Selections, ed. Mark Polizzoti (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 1.
14 Polizzotti, André Breton: Selections, 1.
15 Dawn Ades and Matthew Gale, “Dada,” Oxford Art Online, last modified July 25, 2013, https://doi.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T021094.
16 Paul Trachtman, “A Brief History of Dada,” Smithsonian Magazine, 2006,
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/dada-115169154/.
17 Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 158-159.
18 Georges Bataille, The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, trans. Michael Richardson (New York: Verso, 1994), 55.
19 Dawn Ades and Matthew Gale, “Surrealism,” Oxford Art Online, last modified 2003, https://doi.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T082410.
20 Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 160.
21 Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 159.
22 “Enlightenment,” History.com, last modified 2020, https://www.history.com/topics/british-history/enlightenment. 23 History.com, “Enlightenment”.
24 Thomas N. Tyson and David Oldroyd, “Accounting for slavery during Enlightenment: Contradictions and interpretations,” Accounting History 24, no. 2 (2019): 212-235, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1032373218759971.
25 Tyson and Oldroyd, “Accounting for slavery,” 213.
26 Tyson and Oldroyd, “Accounting for slavery,” 213.
27 Michael Richardson, “Introduction,” in The Absence of Myth, ed. Michael Richardson (New York: Verso, 1994), 1-27.
28 New World Encyclopedia Contributors, 2017.
29 Richardson, “Introduction,” 11.
33 Richardson, “Introduction,” 13.
34 Richardson, “Introduction,” 21.
35 Richardson, “Introduction,” 21.
30 Richardson, “Introduction,” 3.
31 Richardson, “Introduction,” 13.
32 Richardson, “Introduction,” 14.
36 Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 159.
37 Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 158-159.
38 Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 160.
39 Thelonious Monk, “Don’t Blame Me,” live in Denmark, April 17, 1966. Recording, 5:28.
40 Gertrude M. Rainey, “Prove It On Me Blues,” 1928. Audio, 2:41.
41 Suzanne Césaire, The Great Camouflage: Writings of Discontent (1941-1945), ed. Daniel Maximin (Middleton: Wesleyan University Press), 34-35
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