Agulha Revista de Cultura: ALLAN GRAUBARD | A History Not Hidden, Just Untold…

Surrealism in the United States has a fractured history, with several arcs of continuity. That a resurgence takes place in the mid-1960s with the formation of a group in Chicago, and other groups in San Francisco and Columbus, Ohio several years thereafter, is no accident. That alliances between them take root then break apart is no accident either.

As elsewhere, so in the United States: surrealism grows or diminishes in significance by its triumphs, crises, dissolutions and regroupings. Its history is scored by such moments, and its vitality is in direct proportion to how it recognizes and responds to them. Nor does surrealism possess immunity from the conflicts that otherwise ravage us. Its only vantage is its capacity to inhabit and revalorize the character of revolt and the currency of the poetic. Unless it is, on its skin as at its heart, the most human of movements in a world that strips us of our humanity – however brutally or gently that is done – it goes the way of other like movements; it tips into the mirror having lost its power to walk through it, adopts more or less fixed positions, its potencies compromised.

I have one purpose here: to recount for readers a history just barely touched on in public media, which evolves in five cities with several groups over four decades. And it involves, initially at least, the majority of those who constitute the Surrealist Movement in the United States – some coming earlier, some a bit later, some more prominent, some less prominent – at the point of its grandest intervention: the 1976 World Surrealist Exhibition, Gallery Black Swan, Chicago.

This is not the beginning of the story, but it is the pivotal juncture.

For that beginning, though, I return to San Francisco. It is the winter of 1969-1970 and Stephen Schwartz has published his first number of AntiNarcissus: Surrealist Conquest, which features the Greek poet Nanos Valoritis, Marie Wilson’s drawings, and the translation of a major text by Benjamin Péret. Soon thereafter a supplement to the journal, a newspaper street EXTRA, reintroduces Philip Lamantia within a constellation of poets rarely, if ever, read in English. Richard Waara, poet and collagist, enters the scene, along with poet Pete Winslow. [1] By 1971, an affiliation with the Chicago group solidifies, and AntiNarcissus is folded into Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion

The following year or somewhat later, artist Thom Burns, a member of the Chicago group, arrives in San Francisco to meet his colleagues. Among them are poet Laurence Weisberg and choreographer Alice Farley, recent transplants from Los Angeles. An exceptional couple then, their contributions are decisive, including Farley’s dance-theater performances – the body become a medium for transformation (through gesture, sculptural costuming, and spatial manipulation, both site specific and in theater).

Some months on, poet Allan Graubard emerges. It is just prior to the 1974 City Lights Anthology, with its exclusive, concluding section edited by surrealists.

Lamantia, Burns, Weisberg, Farley, Schwartz, Graubard, along with Waara, Nancy Joyce Peters, and other colleagues on brief or extended visits, form the San Francisco group. They engage a largely poetic-critical activity, the city and environs their magnetic. Repulsed by the remnants of Beat culture and critical of the naivety of the Left, they meet regularly in Lamantia’s North Beach apartment as elsewhere. Games new and old, detournments, the subversive erotic, objective chance, poetry, umor, and a spirit of contestation pervade.

Columbus, Ohio, sees the birth of a group in 1970 with artists Jean-Jacques Jack Dauben, Ron Papp and Wayne Kral, poet-artist Timothy Robert Johnson, and colleagues Janet Parker and Jocelyn Koslovksy. They intervene with wall posters and publications. Their manifesto, Black Widow, [2] notes the “irrepressible presence” of Native American cultures as a fundamental source, which will take on greater importance in years to come. In 1974, having signaled their desire to combine forces with Arsenal, they move to Chicago en masse.

And while Chicago is the nerve center, differences prevail, investing interactions with new possibilities and tensions. I include Schwartz’s expulsion for having published outside the purview of the group, a clear sign of the problems associated with sectarianism, and Waara’s mistrust of continuing affiliation.

Developments to 1976 yet mark an effulgent period in Chicago and in San Francisco. Tom Burghardt, revolutionary militant and meteoric poet, appears. Farley premieres two dance-theater works, Fortunate Light and Brides of the Prism. The latter features a program with statement by Lamantia, poems by Weisberg and image by Kral. Waara publishes his Sphinx Blank, Lamantia his revised Touch of the Marvelous then Blood of the Air, and so on.

Collaborations inspire collective purpose fed by poetic delirium: to deepen the expressive liberty at hand and to draw from the overarching heritage of the movement precise conclusions on the character of desire, the place of the onieric, elective affinity, and the complexity of intervention. Resonance of place, indigenous myths and tales, the magical and alchemical traditions, and authentic revolutionary survivals from the century’s blood baths compel them, along with other anarchic tendencies that filter through the quotidian.

Having launched a critique against manifest and latent forms of cooption, especially those embraced by the “avant garde,” they take to heart two positions that will influence their history post-Arsenal: Breton’s call for the “profound, veritable occultation of surrealism” (the movement become feeding ground for marketing strategists and academics) and an ever-pressing need to enhance group interaction and public performance.

Two major events speak to these issues during this time: the intriguing supplement to Living Blues magazine, [3] with its striking contributions, and the 1976 Marvelous Freedom: World Surrealist Exhibition. Every surrealist in the United States who adheres to the terms established by Arsenal – principally that individuals accepted into the group limit their interventions to those sanctioned by the group – either is in Chicago or travels there to work on the exhibition. Friendships quickly formed then will deepen.

Marvelous Freedom features a lavish catalog and its success, as the largest international exhibition of its kind in the United States organized by a surrealist group, is tempered by its failure: to establish a means for cohesive cross-border action on issues of shared importance.

With the close of the exhibition a period of travel and reassessment begins. Burns visits Paris to engage with surrealists and to clarify options and positions; Graubard explores Berber Morocco with composer Richard Horowitz; Farley and Weisberg engage indigenous Mexico with composer Peter Garland; Dauben and Papp venture to San Francisco, meet up with photographer Raman Rao and turn to the American Southwest and the Hopi.

But it is clear that something will change. A foundational period has passed.

Surrealism in 1977 is a tricky affair. In Chicago, two “Surrealism in 1977” exhibitions, which feature a newly found visual orientation, become the last manifestations by this group. With the sudden expulsion of Jack Dauben, then an editor of Arsenal, and Thom Burns’ decision to walk with him, along with Timothy Johnson’s leave-taking, it is quite clear that further collaboration is impossible. The expanded group, which includes those in Chicago and San Francisco and which accomplished so much with so few resources, unravels. And for the majority, excluding Lamantia, Peters and several others, a new path grows clear.

In January 1978, a document of separation from the activities of those “bound to the publication Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion” is drawn up with eleven signatures, and agreement from others not available to sign. It is titled “1977-1978,” and signifies the closing of one door and the opening of another. [4]

1978-1983 | 1978-1983 is an expansive period with new revelations, interventions and personalities. Dance theater and theater works premiere, a press is founded, and other publications, exhibitions, sonic events, and street interventions multiply. There is little question that independence offers a freedom in whose diverse explorations poetic liberty and contestation prevail.

Having returned to San Francisco after a period in New York, Alice Farley captivates collective energies with an exceptional site-specific dance-theater work, Land’s End. Spread through the ruins of the old Sutro Baths and environs, there, where the continent edges the Pacific, nature and gesture, spectacle and ceremony command.

Still in Chicago, Brooke Rothwell publishes two books of poems and collages. Jack Dauben, Terri Engel, and Timothy Johnson – retracing their steps from Chicago to their native Columbus – refine collective image making and hold vibrant exhibitions distinct to their evolving arcs. Along with photographer Chas Krider and Wayne Kral, who splits his time between Columbus and the west coast, a former nucleus recalibrates. In Los Angeles, Byron Baker and Jhim Pattison compose paintings and collages. Along with Steve Locke and others, they deepen their exploration of the sonic world by turning found industrial objects into ensemble instrumentation, which forms Mal Occhio.

Now relocated to San Francisco, Thom Burns presents Incubus Ramipithicus as a visual and textual cartography of mythopoesis for a bal masque while revalorizing the Romantic sensibility in a second exhibition. Richard Waara’s expropriations of filmic eroticism foliate into collages, both elegant and implosive. For their part, Laurence Weisberg, Tom Burghardt and Allan Graubard track the poetic – this voice, stung by reality, that transpierces the tumult of conflictive affections and logics. In response to the appalling, religiously motivated mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana, Tom Burghardt pens the street poster, Atheism: Verb of Light. Late one night, October 1978, it appears on walls throughout the city. And while not a scandal of public note, it is signed, in homage to Sade, by the “Sodality of the Friends of Crime” – a vivant riposte to the way things stand.

Seeking again in New York a base from which to launch a dance theater company and expand her repertoire, Alice Farley premieres Atomic Thief in the Circus of Crime. Poignant, convulsive and probing, the work is multi-layered and multi-level, an intriguing manipulation of theater space informed by circus artistry, carnival, magic and onieric metaphor. As an expose of the power that characterizes our epoch, the work touches a nerve with sold out houses for the near entirety of the run. And however clear it is to its audience or not, surrealism and dance theater convey their mutual enrichment.

Also now in New York after several months on the northern California coast, Allan Graubard begins writing for the theater. A chance meeting with an acquaintance from Oakland, composer-conductor Butch Morris, inaugurates an intensive collaboration that culminates in their effort, even so early on, to forge a context for Grand Music Theater, burnished by Morris’ “Conduction.” [5] The work is called Modette, and involves vocalists, actors, manikins and large ensemble. It will play at various venues in different ways, off and on in New York and Europe, for years to come.

A press, of course, is an essential matrix. Thus, in San Francisco in 1982, Tom Burghardt, Thom Burns and David Coulter go to it with lucid designs and typography. From an initial printed object, Uxmal, with text by Allan Graubard and drawing by Thom Burns, a press is born: Marquis de Sade Editions. During its brief but eventful life, three books appear, each unique: Ontogenesis By Fire, poems by Tom Burghardt, Jackson, a novella by Brooke Rothwell, and Ascent of Sublime Love, poems by Allan Graubard. The first two books carry covers and interior art by Thom Burns, Jack Dauben, Timothy Johnson and Kathy Burghardt while the last, more modestly, features a cover by Thom Burns.

Internationally, correspondence is rich, especially with Mario Cesariny in Portugal and a deepening affinity with Annie Le Brun and Radovan Ivsic, Jean Benoit, Edouard Jageur, Vincent Bonoure and others in Paris. In New York, there is Eugenio F. Granell and an introduction, through Granell, to Yo Yoshitome, whom Granell calls “the most important painter in the city.” In New Orleans there is photographer Clarence John Laughlin; in San Francisco, soon to relocate to New York, artist Jose Sanchez; and in Iowa, artist Schelchter Duvall.

This period, enlivened by successive interventions by various ensembles in different media – only just touched on by the preceding paragraphs – establishes a medium for open exchange on issues of importance: how to ensure focus in an extensive collective that configures anew the desperate and marvelous horizons before them? Discussion here sustains as subtext throughout each intervention – apt prologue for the opening of their next phase, the Harvest of Evil Exhibition, Columbus, Ohio, 1983.

Harvest of Evil

It is necessary to begin again from zero and entirely remake all revolutionary theory.

E. F. Granell (from his introduction, “A Living Vision of the Revolution,” to the

Red Spanish Notebook, by Mary Low and Juan Brea, City Lights Books 1979)

Granell’s words … those few words from a true militant… were so hugely important to us… in a way the entire catalog if not the entire exhibit… orbited around them.

Jack Dauben (personal communication, 2009)

Harvest of Evil opens its doors at Gallery TiRoJo in Columbus Ohio, Halloween night, 1983. For its audience, the exhibition portrays a vital international current in cultural activity. For the majority of its participants, it is a means by which to formulate a kind of cohesiveness that has previously eluded them and to deepen their exploration of subjects of significance. Several stand out in retrospect: the inspiration of Native America and other indigenous, rural peoples; the complexities involved with animist “spirituality” and materialist atheism; and the then debasement of surrealist theory in the United States by an arch political language and pat fixations on the kind and quality of works.

The exhibition title is provocative by design, drawn as much from the time of its opening as the histories of that time worldwide. Simply, investing the gathering of foods with the return of the dead and the conflictive epochs that claim them highlights the dilemmas posed by the linkage.

Here, celebration and injustice, festival and genocide, memory and philosophy, urban modernity and love of the land also speak to differences between the word and the act, and somewhat further on between the practice of poetry in its broadest sense and the praxis of myth as a cohesive community force and prism for knowing. And while surrealism had long taken this last disposition as essential, if problematic, especially in terms of abuses of power, it had still to deal with it internally and intimately.

Of course, such issues inform the catalog and its primary text. The exhibition’s look and feel, discussions by participants who gathered in Columbus (from San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles), and, in its way, the game that infused the opening, follow suite.

Jack Dauben, who organized the exhibition along with Timothy Robert Johnson, gallery founder, describes it this way: “As children and then later as surrealists we had always had an interest in the ‘automatism’ expressed by ephemeral figures such as scarecrows and harvest images, which used to be made more commonly but which had all but vanished and been replaced by mass manufactured plastic surrogates. So we decided to send out into the streets our surrealist friends – ourselves included – to gather materials for the erection of ‘scarecrows’ to serve as sentinels.” [6] The result – four found-object and cloth and foil sentinel scarecrows prominently displayed in the gallery space “to protect our field of operation.”

The conception of the exhibition also deserves some comment. Now reconstituted in its original locale, the Columbus Surrealist Group includes five members: Jack Dauben, Timothy Johnson and Wayne Kral (as before) and two new figures, artist Terri Engel and photographer Chas Krider. With the city become a gathering point for a “growing scene of artists, writers, musicians and others of a rebellious persuasion,” [7] Gallery TiRoJo, and its sister Ohio Gallery (co-run by Krider), attract those moved by the possibilities at hand. TiRoJo had already presented several exhibitions of tribal, folk and outsider art as well as the solo exhibition of Terri Engel, “Lady of the Lake,” prior to the current, expansive exhibition.

The determination to clarify collective directions nationally prevails. And while the intent is largely to limit participation to the immediate circle of allied surrealists, invitations go to several other surrealist friends, independent of any group participation – such as, E.F Granell, Clarence John Laughlin, Marie Wilson, Nanos Valoritis, and Schelechter Duvall – and other creators marginalized by official culture; all of whom agree to contribute works. Mario Cesariny, then in frequent correspondence with Jack Dauben, upon hearing of the exhibition offers to gather images from a small group of his friends, including himself, to join in the effort. As Dauben describes it: “It was quite clear that Cesariny saw this as an act of defiance as well as friendship, as he had been thoroughly disgusted by the continuing slander promulgated against the ‘dissident surrealists’ by Franklin Rosemont” – a response shared by practitioners for whom surrealism was much more, something less, or other than what Rosemont promoted.

The exhibition presents 28 plus participants with paintings, drawings, objects, photos, poems and dance performance. Also included are images and objects by Black American Autodidacts, Haitian Voodoo and Hopi sculpture, Mexican masks, and other ceremonial objects from Hopi, Zuni, Iroquois, Navaho, Huichol, Tarascan, Mixtec, Zapotec, Maprik, Washkuk, Murik, Jivaro, Australian aboriginals, and Tibet. The energy is infectious and unusual. In response, several reviews appear from Columbus newspapers and regional art journals surprised at the seriousness of the endeavor, the cumulative effect and power of individual works, and that creators still sought in 1983 the imperatives of surrealist collectivity.

From Harvest of Evil, the path ahead is clear. And while the “zero point” that E. F. Granell identified was still to be sought, its sensibility is taken to heart. The desire for those involved to gather in one place and time for sustained discussion becomes a necessity.

At Tiki Bob’s, a national meeting, and more… | The meeting takes place in San Francisco over several July days, 1984, at Tiki Bob’s, a downtown bar with its spacious back room. From San Francisco, Los Angeles, Columbus and New York, they come – the largest meeting of surrealists in the US since the 1976 exhibition. [8]

Certainly, locale prefigures sensibility. In New York, the street is a cornucopia for chance meetings and focused performance, raising the problematic of theater in all its forms. Subverting the spectacle by poetic and physical scenarios – in or outside of a theater – fuels argument on its significance or insignificance, along with discussion on derives, parallel walks and other games now in process. In Columbus, with its muted street life, interest has turned to the hinterlands, both real and metaphorical, where outsiders, Native America and rural magic interweave. By taking the various interventions of the preceding years as prefatory, they probe perceived continuities and intensities. For the San Francisco and Los Angeles groups, a median, inclusive position, drawn from humor and mythopoesis, marks out a route between conflicting tides: the demands of discipline by consent (all too easily abused) and the gifts of collaboration by free association (all too easily ephemeral).

Participants circulate between the bar, the Burghardt’s home, and other places where they are housed. Pitched there on the edge of the continent, San Francisco retains its magic; this borderland to the Pacific thrummed by foghorns, crisscrossed by bridges and doused in mist.

A final agreement on essential directions enables disagreement on individual passions that have founded oeuvres and projects. But what this means in terms of longevity, and the revelations that everyone expects, is a defining question.

Two vehicles are established: a round-robin of bulletins from each group, of which six are produced, and a proposed journal, which fails to materialize.

Over a period of 14 months, the bulletins frame momentum interspersed with local events, intimately or loosely tied to the groups, from theater performance to exhibitions. [9]

But there is uneasiness here, which concerns surrealism, its expressive content, how the movement reveals it, and what step might come next if one is possible. Tied to this uneasiness is a touchstone: Jean Benoit’s “Execution of the Testament of the Marquis de Sade,” whose singularity is clear, but whose implications have yet to find maximal response.

For Thom Burns, the perspective Benoit offers and the inspiration from indigenous cultures are two sides to the same coin. But it is a coin that must be flipped. And he does so in this rephrasing of Breton’s maxim on language: “Surrealism has been given us so that we might make make ceremonial use of it.”

And while this is presented internally, it is done to re-consider the question of myth and its relative absence, and what a band of creators might best be able to do in this regard. At the same time, the exclusion of theater as a viable intervention within the “ceremonial” is set. It is a divide that persists in their next phase via the exhibition, Magnets of the Polar Horn.

We have arrived here under the sign of the lunar magnet not to defend the posture of

art nor as the jealous guardians of a movement in need of watchdogs. We are here to

demonstrate the living properties of magnetism found within the collective experience

proper to Surrealism.

Thom Burns

The exhibition takes place in San Francisco at a well-known venue, Project Artaud, the former American Can Company factory. Housed within a larger, desultory exhibition of fantastic, visionary and satirical art, they intervene with full control over what and how, in a partially enclosed second-story loft above the fray.

The critical and poetic resonance of the Magnets attracts and repels; the title and design implicating the larger historical circumstance by negation. It is 1985, and the Pax Americana is nearing another juncture of misperception: imperial hegemony.

Magnets of the Polar Horn derives from an excerpt in Charles Fourier’s Passions of the Human Soul, a book essential to his evocation of the evolutionary power of analogy based in a new social harmonic. And, in tune with that power, the presentation is grand; with a central area of the exhibition devoted to the magnets as a sculptural-ceremonial installation, which is then refracted throughout as a design motif, with Fourier’s excerpt at the entrance.

With the recent death of Clarence John Laughlin, friend and mentor, they dedicate a wall to him with portrait and hieratic devices that signal his passing and recall his oeuvre, which is open and available to all.

Paintings, drawings, collages, boxes, photos, objects and poems proliferate. Visitors sensitive to their perceptions, and what they mean, recognize that they have entered a place where mytho-poetic realities have taken, or have begun to take, specific contemporary form. And the uniqueness of this encounter is telling.

Isolated from the exhibition on the floor below, Magnets of the Polar Horn also appears as an intrusion in a given artistic sphere, which statements in the overarching catalogue refer to. This is defined more specifically by an afternoon of “dialogue,” which Magnets participants insist on and attend along with artists in the larger show, and others. Thom Burns, Thom Burghardt and Allan Graubard open the dialogue by reading texts that depict their aims, contemporary surrealism, the promise of automatism, and the continuing failure of art to breach the despair of the alienated subject.

The “dialogue” also includes a recorded statement of separation from the Magnets exhibition by Columbus associates Jack Dauben, Terri Engel, and Timothy Johnson who find even this, quite carefully distanced co-habitation between the two exhibitions as confusing; a kind of compromise they are not prepared to make. Thom Burns resigns then from further surrealist group activity, along with his wife, Mi-Sook Kim. The Columbus group soon disbands, and a split widens with two horizons.

Not willing to abandon what they have gained, the majority agrees to continue their interaction within another guise. At an informal meeting the night of the dialogue event, Brooke Rothwell counts the eight friends there and suddenly refers to the Hydra. The name sticks, and Group Hydra is born; inspired by the spirit and sensibility of surrealism but absent all superficial reference to it.

Dauben, Johnson, Engel, Burns and Kim turn to the Southwest to expand upon previous meetings with Hopi friends. They seek, as they can, more intensive interaction with the oldest surviving ceremonial culture on the continent.

Group Hydra, Arizona, and beyond | Group Hydra moves quickly. There is discussion toward a platform and a number of games played locally and internationally. Parallel walks (New York to Paris, and San Francisco to New York) give rise to The City of the Sun, a text and photo elaboration on urban sites, quotidian and ruined; a deconstruction of cinema with found scene shots from genre films broaches new possibilities for montage and narrative; a phenomenology of the object and its poetic-erotic values derives from the object game. And there are more.

Yo and Sako Yoshitome, from their mid-Manhattan apartment, and Jose Ramon Sanchez, in Brooklyn, collaborate on major events, happy to have found congenial friends. Sanchez, an artist of insight who works with a variety of materials, from oil and charcoal to toys and yarn, will soon invent “Lautreamont’s sewing machine” for delirious imaging on stretched industrial burlap. Only he knows how many sewing machine needles he breaks as he works. For the catalogue of his retrospective at the Nassau County Museum of Fine Art, Weisberg and Graubard write texts, with Graubard writing the major text for his homecoming retrospective in Caracas several years later.

Peter Whitney, previously introduced by Granell, also collaborates with Group Hydra. An incisive collagist, he will soon reach baroque complexities with large collage boxes. Prior involvement with collages for, and production of, Graubard’s novella Apis mellifera, extends into set design and construction for several New York stagings of Modette.

It is on East 7th street, Manhattan, in 1986, though, that Group Hydra holds its first exhibition, Secret Face of Scandal. With use of a gallery sympathetic to their aims, they focus on a theme that Nora Mittrani posed in the Almanach surrealiste du demi-siecle. Through it, and for their own purposes, they explore the oft-abused area between self and objective scandal while critiquing “scandal” as a marketing device; as much to sell product as to camouflage the unnerving fact that scandal persists, in its individual and social forms, quite beyond attempts to sanitize it. And it is this they seek to capture in their works that orbit a “dice table” with its umorous “hydra pillow” by Sako Yoshitome, her husband, Yo’s painting, “Metamorphosis,” hanging by chance from the ceiling above it, with all this implies about eroticism, conjugal and not. To view the painting well you must lie flat on the table, the pillow at your head, and gaze up. [10]

At the opening, it is Farley’s slow, unexpected emergence from below street level as a hybrid stilt creature in billowing fog, however, that generates atypical interest. When she dances into the middle of the street pedestrian and car traffic stop and people lean from their apartment windows to catch the event.

Over the next two years, the gallery will feature Hydra artists, supporting some continuity here. The publication of four broadsides adds to this effort, the first three with images by Graham, the last by Yoshitome: Rothwell’s addition to Jackson, Weisberg’s No Echo, Graubard’s For Vivian Leigh, and Graham’s Satyriconey Island. Disturbed by neo-feminist expropriations of surrealism, they elect to disrupt an exhibition on “women surrealists” curated by an “expert” in academia. They couple their pamphlet, Thought Has No Sex, which they pass out at the opening, with Peter Whitney and friend in lingerie drag – who writhe seductively on the floor and whip each other as they desire. When Farley throws a glass of wine on the curator’s white silk blouse, an art critic from the New York Times becomes interested, agreeing with the pamphlet, which celebrates the poetic marvelous contra all attempts to reduce it by gender politics.

Shortly thereafter, Radovan Ivsic and Annie Le Brun arrive in New York to get to know us and to explore the city. They stay at Farley’s loft on lower Broadway, with repeat visits. Their appeal to desertion from given formulas (including those associated with surrealism) accords well with our own proclivities. As playwright, Ivsic also recognizes the magnetism of Farley’s oeuvre, which now commands major venues in the US and abroad.

Group Hydra works for several years on other projects then slowly disbands. Collaborations on individual events, though, continue.

Of note is the New York premiere of Ivsic’s play, King Gordogan, in 1997. Having found an adventurous young theater company through his wife, actress and director, Carolyn McGee, Graubard prepares and designs the American version of the play. It is published by Croatian PEN Center, Zagreb, for distribution worldwide, and contains essays by Le Brun, Graubard, Mrkonjic and Graham. One of Toyen’s character masks for the original publication of the play in France, “Royal Eye Gouger,” graces the cover. The premier, which introduces Ivsic to the American stage, with McGee as the forest waif “Teeleka,” is an off-off Broadway hit, drawing critical praise and large audiences. [11]

Graubard’s oeuvre in theater foliates with five works thereafter, the most important, For Alejandra, Woman Bomb/Sade and Erotic Eulogy. Premieres in New York, Washington, DC and Louisiana, and tours in Europe, with publication and radio broadcasts, follow.

Farley and her dance-theater company achieve success in multiple productions, in and outside of theaters. From her Anggrek, the human life of plants, in 1988, the celebrated Black Water: Dancing Below the Light, in 1991, her realization of Harry Partch’s Daphne of the Dunes, in 1994, to Erotech: The Human Life of Machines, in 1996, and other possessions of massive, public city spaces, Farley demonstrates an acute grasp of gesture, extended sculptural costuming, and spatial magic. Hers is the most accomplished dance theater oeuvre in the United States that consistently exploits its roots in surrealism, circus artistry, and indigenous ceremonials with dazzling effect.

Other interventions and publications appear, of course, as they should. Participants then are active now. During the 1990s, Oneiros Gallery in San Diego hosts important exhibitions by Schelechter Duvall, Jon Graham, Peter Whitney, and Terri Engel.

Jack Dauben, Terri Engle, Timothy Johnson, Thom Burns, and Mi-Sook Kim who settled in Flagstaff, Arizona, and live there still, pursue relations with Hopi artists. With ready welcome from a group of Hopi artists, known as “Artists Hopid,” who also seek kindred spirits in their revisioning of traditional sources, enrichment is reciprocal. [12] Together and alone, they attend Katsina and other ceremonies through the ritual year, and encounter tribes and traditions elsewhere in the southwest.

Their artistic activity is varied. Thom Burns continues to paint and experiment with glass sculpture and objects, sometimes with Delbridge Honanie, a member of Artists Hopid. Terri Engel directs a local foundation for mentally handicapped adults, where she creates a school for artistic expression, and continues to paint. Timothy Johnson, who curates the gallery in the school, works directly with the artists he presents; an “outsider” resource that nourishes his independent surrealist existence.

In 1996, Jack Dauben begins working with Mike Kabotie, also a member of Artists Hopid, on a series of collective paintings. A first of this sort between an American and Native American artist, they exhibit in 2000 as Ancestral Reunions: The Hopi/Celtic Collaborations. [13] As Dauben puts it: “We see the paintings as our dances. In a way when we are painting together we are a new tribe and those paintings are the plaza and that’s where Mike and I dance.”

In 2003, the sudden death of Laurence Weisberg sparks agreement from friends across the continent to publish a posthumous edition of his poems and drawings both to preserve the lyric and visionary qualities that Weisberg revealed, and his presence in their lives but now for the public. To launch the book, they create a performance with ceremonial themes, The Wind’s Skeleton, which plays in Los Angeles and New York: choreography by Alice Farley, masks and costume by Thom Burns and Steve Lock, music by Mal Occhio. From this book, Anon Editions is born to provide a medium for publication. [14] Other presses follow, including Richard Waara’s Reve a Deux Press, and several periodical offshoots, along with interventions in noted journals, readings, and theatre and dance theater performances. [15]

If the past is prologue, the future is an open source for the majority of those mentioned in this history, partial though it is. Then as now, poetry, the marvelous, magic, revolt, adventure, and respect for the land and the nonhierarchical traditions that flower from it inspire them. [16]

NOTAS

1. See A Daisy in the Memory of a Shark, poems by Pete Winslow (City Lights Books, Pocket Poets Series, 31, San Francisco, 1973).

2. Published in Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion, no. 3, Chicago, 1976.

3. Living Blues, “Surrealism and Blues,” no. 25, January/February, 1976.

4. Signators, and those in agreement but not available to sign, include: Thom Burns, Tom Burghardt, Jack Dauben, Alice Farley, Allan Graubard, Timothy Robert Johnson, Wayne Kral, Mado, Ron Papp, Brooke and Janine Rothwell, and Laurence Weisberg. The document is published in the addendum to Invisible Heads: Surrealists in North America – An Untold Story (Anon Editions, 2011/2014).

5. For an explication of Conduction as a new methodology of musical creation, see: The Art of Conduction: A Conduction Workbook, by Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris, with Daniela Veronesi, Allan Graubard, and J.A. Deane (Karma, New York, 2017).

6. Jack Dauben, personal communication.

7. Jack Dauben, personal communication.

8. Those attending, include, from San Francisco: Thom Burns (who chairs the meeting), Tom Burghardt, Kathy Burghardt, Richard Waara, Bob Sharrard and David Coulter; from Los Angeles: Byron Baker, Jhim Pattison, Steve Lock, Brooke Rothwell, and Janine Rothwell; from New York, Allan Graubard (representing that group); and from Columbus, Jack Dauben, T.R. Johnson, Terri Engel, and Wayne Kral along with other assorted friends. Absent are Raman Rao, Laurence Weisberg, Alice Farley, and Chas Krider.

9. Noteworthy is Graubard's collaboration with Yo Yoshitome for his first major exhibition in New York, and the chance meeting of Jon Graham at that exhibition; a significant, new collaborator who ferries between New York and Paris.

10. Participants include Tom Burghardt, David Coulter, Alice Farley, Jon Graham, Allan Graubard, Wayne Kral, Jhim Pattisson, Steve Locke, Ramon Rao, Brooke Rothwell, Richard Waara, Peter Whitney, Yo and Sako Yoshitome. Works include paintings, drawings, collages, boxes, photos and poems. A collectively written, pyramid catalogue is published.

11. See the February 26, 1997, NY Times review by D. J. Bruckner: “Powerless to Stop an Infernal Machine: ‘King Godogan’.”

12. In February 1985, Thom Burns and Jack Dauben formalize these relations with their text, “Message to the Artists Hopid,” which they deliver by hand at second mesa, Hopi Land.

13. The two artists are interviewed in a substantial article on their collaboration in American Indian Arts magazine, spring 2003. The exhibition is held at California State University, Fullerton.

14. A Crescent by Any Other Name, by Allan Graubard, with art by Byron Baker, Rik Lina and Gregg Simpson is published by Anon Editions in 2017.

15. Most recent is Alice Farley’s site-specific dance theater creation: “If there were a moon: An imaginary landscape – A dance to conjure moonlight by day,” Alice Farley Dance Theater, July 19, 2018, Madison Sq. Park, NYC.

16. The full accounting of the majority of content in this text, with art and documentary photos, is available in: Invisible Heads: Surrealists in North America – An Untold Story (Anon Editions, NY/Flagstaff, 2011/2014). For more information, contact Allan Graubard at: graubarda@gmail.com

The following article is a partial exposition of a major current in the development of surrealism in the United States from the late 1960s on. It derives from the contextual content that fronts each chapter to the publication Invisible Heads: Surrealists in North America – An Untold Story (Thom Burns & Allan Graubard, eds., 743 pp, Anon Editions, NY/Flagstaff, 2011/2014). For more information, contact Allan Graubard: graubarda@gmail.com