Anglo
Canada began to modernize socially when the CCF (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation),
a socialist democratic party born in the 1930’s out of the labor movement and other
progressive forces, was elected in the province of Saskatchewan in 1944. Coupled
with the end of the Second World War, the emergent political progressive movements
brought about changes that would, over time, result in support for culture and the
arts, including, in the 1960s and early 1970s, the establishment of bilingual culture
and education policies at a national level. Had surrealism been present in English-speaking
Canada through the formative years that gave way to these reforms, the shape of
artistic expression could, in my view, have been radically different. Instead, in
the literary field, especially in poetry, the dominant paradigms became either representational
and realist, generally denoted as “lyrical poetry,” or formalist, tending towards
abstraction and conceptualism, referred to as “experimental poetry.” In both tendencies
the influence of surrealism is often apparent. However, any mention of the word
“surrealist” or “surrealism” was, until the early 1990s used in a quasi-derogatory
way to denote a kind of affectation. What this attitude reveals is ignorance about
surrealism, its philosophy, a dismissal of surrealism as a way of being in the world,
and relegation of it to a mere style or manner of expression. To someone like me,
who has lived by surrealism’s philosophy and embraced its values entirely, this
has always felt hurtful and vaguely insulting.
The
trajectory of surrealism in Montreal differed completely from English Canada. There
the influence of surrealism was profound, transformative, and would bring about
radical change to Québec society. I say “influence” deliberately, for as Ray Ellenwood
writes in the introduction to his translation of Refus Global / Total Refusal, “Along with the upheaval of the war years
in Montreal came some very important cultural changes. There was new energy, challenging
the established, conservative institutions of the city, helping to introduce a climate
receptive to modern art and literature. In 1939, Paul-Emile Borduas was teaching
at the Ecole du meuble, which had been established as a college of design but soon
became a rival to the conservative Ecole des Beaux-Arts through the efforts of people
like Borduas and the art historian Maurice Gagnon…” (Refus Global / Total Refusal, 1985, 7).
Still,
until the late 1930s Québec society was isolated, its education and culture strictly
regulated by the Catholic Church. The early 1940s began to see change happen. As
Ellenwood states, “…The war sent not only artists and intellectuals into exile from
Europe, but whole collections of paintings as well, some of which were seen for
the first time in the North American continent. Fernand Leger passed through Montreal
in 1943, gave a lecture and showed his film Le
Ballet mécanique. A travelling exhibit of Dutch painting came in 1944 and many
of the works, including those of Mondrian, were a revelation to young Canadian painters.
The Quebec-born artist, Pellan, who had been living in Paris for years, returned
to Montreal in 1940 with his newest works, his books and his intimate knowledge
of Cubism and Surrealism… This kind of exposure and activity led to fervent questioning
of the status quo and eventually to revolt…” (Refus Global, 8).
As
Ray Ellenwood points out in his indispensable Egregore A History of the Montreal Automatiste Movement, Borduas, the
undisputed leader of the Automatiste movement, began to formulate and slowly define
a new vision of art during the second half of the 1930s. Around 1941 and in the
short years that followed, a small coterie of artists, poets, dancers, actors, a
photographer, a designer, and a medical student gravitated towards Borduas. They
were mostly young; some were his students at the Ecole du meuble, including the
artists Guy Viau, Fernand Leduc, Marcel Barbeau, Jean-Paul Riopelle and Maurice
Perron. Others were art students at the Ecole des beaux-arts: Pierre Gauvreau (joined
soon after by his brother the poet and playwright Claude Gauvreau), Françoise Sullivan
who was also a dancer, Fernand Leduc and Louise Renaud. Loosely quoting Steven Harris’
entry in the International Encyclopedia of
Surrealism, which has just been published in England by Bloomsbury, “There were
two significant exhibitions by the Automatistes in 1946 and 1947, which preceded
the appearance of Refus global in 1948,
a publication that included the famous tract of this name but also two other essays
by its author, Borduas, three theatre pieces by Claude Gauvreau, a text on art by
Bruno Cormier, another on dance by Françoise Sullivan, a brief closing text by Fernand
Leduc, photographs by Maurice Perron, and a cover design by Jean-Paul Riopelle.
The tract was signed by sixteen people, but there were other members of this community
who felt unable to sign for various reasons, and others who became involved with
it as a result of the scandalous reaction the tract provoked. The first fractures
appeared in the group due to the stresses caused by the negative reaction to the
tract (or by the refusal of some to sign it), and it slowly unravelled thereafter,
though Gauvreau in particular put a great deal of effort into sustaining Automatisme
as a collective endeavour after 1948.”
Forming
as it did as an egregore (in the sense
that Mabille gave the term) during the 1940s, at a time when surrealism was experiencing
a certain degree of fragmentation due to the debacle wrought by the war, the Automatistes
came to see themselves as superceding surrealism’s psychic automatism. Further,
rather than “surrealist,” they defined their work as “surrational,” a term advanced
by Gaston Bachelard and used by Breton in his 1936 essay “Crise de l’objet.” “Intention
must be pushed into the background along with reason. Make way for the intelligence
of the senses,” wrote Borduas in a letter. The Automatistes did, nevertheless understand
and absorbed Breton’s notion of automatism as “more akin to a state of mind” (Ellenwood,
Egregore, 168). The same applies to the
Automatistes’ assimilation of surrealism as a means for liberation, prompting Claude
Gauvreau to state, “What Surrealism brings ¾ and Surrealism
alone¾ are the foundations for a new sensibility…” (Ellenwood, Egregore, 170). Not
all the Automatistes cast themselves as beyond, or outside surrealism, however,
and this fundamental disagreement may, in my view, have been one of the elements
that led to the dissolution of the group in the aftermath of the publication of
Refus Global.
There were other Montrealers during that period
who embraced surrealism, and did so in all its dimensions. Jean Benoît and Mimi
Parent joined the Paris group, and became essential figures in the activities of
the 1950s and beyond; Roland Giguère, Léon Bellefleur and Albert Dumouchel moved
easily between the Paris group and the Phases Movement. Alfred Pellan remained active
in the larger surrealist movement, opting for the associative poetic process rather
than automatism.
The first organized
manifestations of surrealism in English-speaking Canada took place in the late 1960s
in Vancouver. Sometimes these activities involved poets and artists like bill bisset,
who were experimenting in ways that overlapped with surrealist expression, if not
intent. A number of young artists and writers formed themselves adhering more specifically
to the values of surrealism, especially its openness to hermetic thought. Involved
in this significant movement in Canada was the artist and musician Gregg Simpson,
whose essay “The Triumph of the Surreal,” published in the journal Georgia Straight in 1971marks a significant
moment for the group. That same year sees the formation of the Divine Order of the
Lodge in North Vancouver, by Gregg Simpson and david uu (David W, Harris). The group
in its publication, Lodgisticks, included
contributions by Ingrid Harris, Gary Lee Nova, Gilles Foisy, Bob Coleman and others.
Their first exhibition was at the Avelles Gallery, operated by painter Leo Labelle
in Vancouver in December, 1971. For the exhibition the floor of the gallery was
punctuated by a grid of golden eggs. The
artist and poet Edwin Varney joined the group shortly thereafter. In 1973 Gregg
Simpson organized the show Canadian West Coast
Hermetics in Vancouver, which also toured Europe. The West Coast Surrealist
Group was founded in 1977 by Simpson, the painters Ted Kingan, Leo Labelle, Robert
Davidson and the poet Michael Bullock. They were were joined in 1979 by Varney,
the painter Ladislav Guderna, and his son Martin, also a painter. The group consisted
of about twenty members by the mid-1980s, including the painter and musician Lori-ann
Latremouille, the performance poet Sheri-D Wilson, and the writer Tim Iles. Several
remarkable publications came out of the surrealists in Canada’s West Coast, including
25 issues of Scarabeus, published between
1979 and 1998 by Ladislav and an Martin Guderna, and Melmoth Vancouver, which was published in seven issues between 1981
and 1986 (preceded by two issues of the Vancouver
Surrealist Newsletter published between 1980 and 1981). Bullock had travelled
to Britain several times between 1969 and 1981 to meet with Conroy Maddox, and in
1981 he brought the Melmoth name back with him from the short-lived Melmoth group
in London, as a sign of a nascent surrealist international. The period between 1977
and 1990, proved to be particularly fruitful for the West Coast Surrealist Group/Melmoth Vancouver: there were several exhibitions
and public performance, and the publication of the above-mentioned journals performances.
This
is how Gregg Simpson relates the story:
However, I was never a
doctrinaire surrealist, preferring poetic freedom above politics even though I have
a basically centre- left stance on things. Lately it seems contemporary art is only
involved in the ‘political,’ which is why I value my acceptance in the Surrealist
Movement.
In the context of Canadian
surrealist art, the touring show organized by Queens University in 1979, had the
title, Other Realities, and more importantly
it was sub titled: The Legacy of Surrealism in Canadian Art. I feel that was an accurate description of how
a Canadian surrealist artist must define their relationship to Surrealism, coming
from a country where at the time the movement was born in 1924, Canada had barely
acknowledged post-Impressionism.
In 1973 this changed when
I took an exhibition I had conceived entitled Canadian West Coast Hermetics:
The Metaphysical Landscape to Paris, Brittany,
Belgium and the UK. This exhibition was
seen by José Pierre, which led him and others in the Paris Group to realize that
the influence of their movement had reached half way around the world to us here
on the west coast. The exhibition contained a good deal of collage, which was the
main medium uniting this disparate group of artists.
Even before this exhibition,
artists like Gary Lee Nova, Al Neil, and bill bissett were noted for their work
in this medium. When I showed up (playing drums with Al Neil), many of us started
to collaborate in experimental multi-media work at the Sound Gallery, Motion Studio,
Intermedia and we exhibited our collages and paintings at our own gallery which
was named by bill bissett, the Mandan Ghetto, in honour of the legendary tribe.
In 1968 there was a collage
exhibition at the Mandan Ghetto which was not called ‘surrealist’, but had a number
of works which fit that definition. Works were exhibited by Gregg Simpson, bill
bissett, Gary Lee Nova, Ian Wallace, Joy Long and Ardis Breeze. The first reviews
in the Sun and Province newspapers set the stage for further recognition in the
years to come. The fact that there was so much surrealist imagery was sort of taken
for granted.
The 'classic' period of collage
in Vancouver was in the mid to late 1960’s. Gary Lee Nova and I made collages from
etchings we found in old books, influenced by the example of Max Ernst, while Al
Neil made complex, totemic, junk assemblages which evoked Kurt Schwitters and Dada.
Poet bill bissett continued doing a combination of the mystical and satiric in his
photomontages and mixed media works.
Breton’s basic mission
was to usher in a transformation of humanity through the emancipation of the unconscious.
This is something which knows no national boundaries and manifests differently in
every culture. I once was told by Edouard Jaguer of the Paris-based PHASES, that
it was conceived as a movement, not a group. The politics of groups can get unwieldy.
But there are many international groups still active. Our group continues to contribute
to international surrealist exhibitions in France, the UK, Holland, Chile, Portugal,
Costa Rica and elsewhere. Although formal activities and opportunities to exhibit
as a group are rare, they come up from time to time and we invariably will contribute
to international exhibitions and publications.
2003
saw the formation of the Inner Island Surrealist Group, spearheaded by Ron Sakolsky,
who had recently settled in Denman Island with Sheila Nopper. With a strong commitment
to anarchism and surrealism, both have been joined by others in collaborative activities,
often involving sound performance. This is how Ron Sakolsky describes their surrealist
engagement:
I initially encountered surrealism
back in the Seventies in the pages of Arsenal, the journal of the Chicago Surrealist
Group. As time went on, I was increasingly
fascinated by the intersections I was discovering between anarchy and surrealism
over the next few decades. My interest in the intertwining of those elements of
anarchy and surrealism manifested in the idea of "demanding the impossible"
would culminate in my researching, editing and introducing the 2002 volume, Surrealist
Subversions, which is an historical anthology focused on the Chicago Surrealist
Group. As time went on, I gradually came to understand myself to be not just a surrealist
fellow traveler who wrote and taught about surrealism, but rather as being a surrealist
myself who would eventually become an occasional participant in Chicago Surrealist
Group activities.
Naturally, when I emigrated
to Canada in 2002 with my Canadian lover, I was interested in learning about the
history of Canadian surrealism and sought out other surrealists in Toronto, Montréal,
and especially Vancouver since I was now living on the West Coast. Of all the places
in Canada where I might have chosen to live, I ended up residing on Denman Island
in British Columbia. Why Denman Island? You see, I had read an article about Czech
surrealism translated into English by the late Doug Imrie in Montréal for an anarchist
zine called Minus Tide which was published on Denman Island. So I called Sean Woods,
the editor of Minus Tides, to find out if there were any more of these Czech surrealist
articles available in translation. Though there were no such articles floating around
as far as Sean knew; after a convivial phone conversation with him, I decided to
visit him and Denman Island in person. Charmed by the place and the people in Sean’s
circle of anarchist friends; only a few months after visiting, I was living there
myself. In actuality, then, it was surrealism that had been directly responsible
for bringing me to Denman Island. Once there, I began publishing my anarcho-surrealist
zine, The Oystercatcher, about a year after arriving, and formed an island-based
surrealist group a few years later. Of course, Denman Island is a colonial name,
but the English translation of the original Pentlatch placename (Sla-Dai-Aich) is Inner Island. So, recognizing
the power of objective chance in relation to auspicious occasions like namings,
we called our loose-knit circle of surrealist collaborators the Inner Island Surrealist
Group so as to honour both the indigeneity of the place and the surrealist attraction
to the unconscious.
At
their arrival in Toronto, Zeller and Wald brought with them their strong and influential
trajectory in the surrealist movement. The context of Chile is significant, since
it was there that Mandrágora emerged in 1938 with sufficient strength to shape the
culture of that country in ways that are still being felt today. Notable among Wald-Zeller’s
activities in Chile before their departure was the legendary cultural experiment
that was Casa de la Luna (1968), and the publishing and curatorial work they carried
out through the Sixties, including a massive surrealist exhibition in July of 1970.
Ludwig and Susana often described how anticlimactic life in Toronto felt, after
leaving behind the rich cultural life that characterized Santiago. They quickly
realized that they had arrived in a place with no surrealist activity, that they
would have generate such activity themselves, and would do so often facing the indifference,
and even resistance of the milieu. With undaunted urgency they set about making
contacts with friendly galleries (like the Mitchell Gallery) to exhibit their work,
and the work of their surrealist colleagues. This began in earnest around 1973 when,
following a recommendation and contact information given to them by Aldo Pellegrini,
they reached out and established and vibrant friendship with Édouard and Simone
Jaguer (Anne Ethuin), as well as with surrealists outside the Phases movement, including
Radovan Ivsic and Annie Le Brun, the group around Vincent Bounoure, Laurens Vancrevel,
and others. Between 1971 and 1992 Wald and Zeller worked assiduously on their own
artistic production. Zeller produced many of his major literary and collage works during that period,
including When the Animal Rises from the Deep
the Head Explodes, In the Country of the Antipodes, 50 Collages, Alphacollage,
etc), while Wald developed and produced her own art, first in ceramic sculpture
and drawing, and then in painting. They also worked collaboratively, inventing mirages, which merged seamlessly Zeller’s
collages with Wald’s drawing and watercolor and painting. The fervor of those years
resulted in many exhibitions, both in Canada and internationally, as well as a unique
contribution to Canadian culture, namely Oasis Publications, a press devoted to
publishing the work of members of the surrealist movement, in various languages,
in limited and exquisitely designed editions. It was through Oasis Publications,
that I began publishing my first translations, including Enrique Gómez-Correa’s
To Mayo, Edouard Jaguer’s The Hollow Beam, and Aldo Pellegrini’s essay
“Poetry is all that closes the door to imbeciles,” which appeared in the inaugural
issue of multilingual zine, The Philosophical
Egg. (In 2001, as part of my studies in bibliography and book history, I wrote
the complete catalogue of Oasis Publications, with descriptions of each of the titles
published by Wald and Zeller while they lived in Canada, including the one-of-a-kind
books they created. It is available upon request from Indiana University’s Lilly
Library manuscript collections.) Aside from their own work, Zeller and Wald worked
tirelessly to bring surrealism to Canada, and not just through publishing. Between
1975 and 1994, Zeller and Wald organized many exhibitions in Toronto area galleries,
especially Galerie Manfred in the town of Dundas, Ontario, for artists of the Phases
movement, including Eugenio Granell, Guy Rousille, John Schlechter Duvall, Anne
Ethuin, Jean-Pierre Vielfaure, Suzanne Besson, Marie Carlier, and others. Our home,
needless to say, was an exciting locus where many extraordinary artists and writers
from different corners of the world converged and established, often lasting, contact
with our Canadian friends. In Toronto, Albert F. Moritz and Ray Ellenwood stand
out as the steadfast participants in this adventure, though many other Canadian
poets and artists collaborated and shared the excitement of that period, including
John Robert Colombo, Karen Loomer, and the late Robin Skelton. When my parents settled
in the village of Huayapam, in the outskirts of Oaxaca, I took up the torch, by
continuing to translate Latin American surrealists into English, including César
Moro, with whose work I feel great affinity, Jorge Cáceres, Enrique Gómez-Correa,
Enrique Molina, Aldo Pellegrini, Rosamel del Valle and many more. I came into my
own as an author, and saw the publication of my first poetry collection in 2003.
I became and continue to be actively involved in international surrealist activities,
participating in events such as “O Reverso de olhar,” organized by Miguel de Carvalho
in Coimbra, Portugal, La Chasse à l’objet du désir in Montreal, and regularly contribute
to surrealist publications and exhibitions. My experience has been greatly enriched
since 2000, the year I met the extraordinary Toronto duo, Sherri L Higgins and William
Davison, two surrealists, who came into the movement independently in their youth
in Nova Scotia. Here is how first William Davison, followed by Sherri L. Higgins,
describe their entry into surrealism:
As a reaction to the cultural
isolation and conservatism I experienced growing up in, largely rural, Nova Scotia,
in the 60s and 70s, I sought out anything strange, nonconforming and subversive.
In addition to the influences of science fiction, the occult, underground comics,
psychedelia, and other odd nooks and crannies of popular culture (Monty Python,
The Prisoner, etc.), the discovery of Dada and Surrealism had a
tremendous impact on me.
I had been getting clues to its existence through translations of European sci-fi/fantasy
bande-dessinée, mostly from the French magazine Metal Hurlant brought to North America
via the New York-based Heavy Metal magazine. Heavy Metal also included some very
intriguing articles on avant-garde cinema, music, and literature with numerous references
to Surrealism. Around the same time (late 70s), I found a book called The World Of Marcel
Duchamp (Time-Life Library of Art, 1966) at
the public library in Truro, Nova Scotia. All of the tantalizing, if confusing,
hints and clues I had been encountering up to that point suddenly leapt into crystal
clarity! I had been formally introduced to Dada and Surrealism through that book
and my life changed forever. I
devoured everything I could
find on Dada and Surrealism from that point on and became increasingly focused on
Surrealism and the artistic and literary work of the Surrealists. Max Ernst became
my hero. Although I was mostly given the (spurious) impression from art history
texts that Surrealism was a thing of the past, I found powerful contemporary
examples of it in the post-punk
and industrial music scenes that I was becoming involved in by the early 80s. In
Truro, I found a few like-minded individuals interested in underground/alternative
culture and we formed a loose-knit collective to create music, art, and writing,
much of which was inspired and informed by Surrealism. In 1984, I
founded Recordism (which
I later described as "an ideospheric mutation of the meme known as Surrealism")
and have continued to work under that name. After many years of isolated Surrealist
activity on Canada's east coast, my partner Sherri and I relocated to Toronto in
1989 which led to greater access to information, artistic opportunities, and increased
networking via mail-art and cassette culture channels. In the mid-90s,
we started to gain access
to the internet and discovered, much to our surprise, various contemporary Surrealists
and Surrealist groups all over the world and we actively began forging connections
with these groups and individuals.
...
and Sherri L. Higgins says:
As a teen, I was living in
rural Nova Scotia, which is incredibly remote and hardly an artistic hot spot. I
did, however, grow up under the influence of weird, Maritime folk culture, and Monty
Python, on the tele. As soon as I could, I moved to a bigger town and found some
rebellious kids, a few of whom had already been to art school. They were
painters and musicians, all
influenced to a greater or lesser degree by Surrealism. With my curiosity piqued,
I soon started scouring used book stores in Halifax, searching for art books and
discovered Une Semaine de Bonté, Max
Ernst's collage novel. It was the first real art book that I got for myself and
set me on my course as a Surrealist and a collage
artist.
Of
late our tiny gathering of affinities has been strengthened with the presence of
Joël Gayraud of the Paris surrealist group, who lives part of the time in Toronto,
and his partner Silwja Chrostowska. Vittoria Lion was introduced to us by Jason
Abdelhadi, a catalyst of surrealist energies in Ottawa. When I asked Abdelhadi to
describe his and the Ottawa group’s discovery and involvement in surrealism, this
was his answer:
The Ottawa Surrealist Group
has been active in one form or another since 2015 and is located in the city of
Ottawa on unceded, unsurrendered Algonquin territory. Using the chimera as its sigil, the group underscores
and celebrates the monster’s role in the surrealist bestiary. Its virtues, the group
believes, are apparent: above all other creatures, comic overcomplication and blatant
instability over the false streamlining of life.
The roots of the group began
with the longtime friendship between Lake and Jason Abdelhadi, who both grew up
in Ottawa’s west end and bonded over mutual nonconformist attitudes and a love of
chaos, mythology, black humor, Journey to the West, Lewis Carroll, Dali, The Marx
Bros. and 1930s-era cartoons.
It wa not until the chance
discovery of Franklin Rosemont’s translations of Breton, “What is Surrealism?” in
a used bookstore, that Jason landed upon a common framework for the kind of perpetual
revolt he and Lake had been pursuing since childhood. Lake and Jason began a new
cycle of surrealist exploration on a series of dreams and automatic texts/drawings
in 2015. In the fall of that year Lake, Jason and Jessica Rousseau began the explicitly
surrealist journal kaɪˈmɪərə (“Chimera” is
still the group’s nickname).
In 2016 the Ottawa Surrealist
Group was officially established and regular meetings began. Membership has fluctuated
over the years but core participants have included locals and transients, including
Jason Abdelhadi, Lake, Jessica Rousseau, Patrick Provonost, Dunja Apostolov, Mackenzie
Macleod, and Sa’ad Hassan (aka the Marquis de Sa’ad, who chanced upon us playing
in a café and joined in!)
The group publishes its games
and researches in Peculiar Mormyrid and has participated in surrealist journals, exhibitions and projects around
the world. It is not at all connected to the local arts or poetry scene, but has
had some overlaps with local radical political reading groups and actions. In that
vein the group has written or signed several statements in regards to local or international
political situations. Its core activities include games, discussions, wanderings
and pretty much anything deliriously attractive, useless and poetic, while usually
aiming to fall outside outside the spheres of productivity or careerism.
The Ottawa Surrealist Group
continues to place emphasis on radical nonconformism, collective activity, an unending
cycle of games, utopian world/monster building, pansexuality, space, madness, and
gender rebellion. More information and new content can be found on the group’s blog:
https://surrealistottawa.wordpress.com/
Montreal became
the locus of surrealist activity once again in the 1980s through the collective
Les Boules, whose important contribution lies in the blurring of authorship: they
collaborated anonymously in collective drawing and painting between 1987 and 2014.
A
dynamic figure in the context of surrealism is the Montreal writer Peter Dubé. His
collaborations in surrealist publications take the form of fiction, poetry and criticism,
with desire as its magnetic pole. Here is Dubé’s response to my query regarding
his origins in surrealism:
I discovered surrealism quite
young: during adolescence, in fact. Though I learned of it from a friend, one of
a pair of bookish friends I had at the time, I am sure growing up in Montreal had
something to do with it as well. Montreal was, after all, a large city with several
universities, a vibrant cultural scene and a strong tradition of left-leaning politics
and - importantly - Montreal is a French language city… So, when I came to literature
as a lad, some of my friends were francophone and the titles towards which they
pointed me were French titles, including surrealist works. Those were urged on me
with a particularly heady enthusiasm.
The first surrealist texts I read were poems by
Breton, followed quickly by the Manifesto and some other things by him, and Aragon,
and Eluard… and I read eagerly. Before long, the world appeared transformed to me.
EVERYTHING meant something different, because what I was learning from the surrealists
had to do with much more than literature; it had to do with the ways in which the
mind, the heart and the soul exist only in connection to the world, and that that
connection had something to do with desire…
that idea has haunted me ever since.
So my initial meeting with surrealism took place,
appropriately enough, through friendship and my passage into young manhood. Also
significant is the fact that my discovery of surrealism overlaps the period of my
coming out… a fact that seems strangely satisfying to me. I could comment more on
this, but I’ve written about it before so I’ll simply say that it is through surrealism
that I came to many of my fundamental ideas and concerns: the place and power of
the imagination, love and desire as models for a relationship to the world and otherness,
the political implications of subjectivity and the place of elective affinity in
making community, and a whole bunch more. Though one does see these ideas in other
places, they are there in Blake certainly, the breadth and depth of the movement’s
publications meant they were most salient, most elaborated, in surrealism and it
was through surrealism that I began to work through their implications.
Montreal
acquired yet another vibrant voice and influence with the move to that city from
Mexico in 2005, of Enrique Lechuga an accomplished collage and music artist. His
passionate commitment to surrealism is made evident also in Éditions Sonámbula,
the surrealist publishing house he established in 2009 with the Cuban Fernando Palenzuela.
Éditions Sonámbula is the natural heir to Zeller-Wald’s Oasis Publications in that
its goal is to produce beautiful, often bilingual books by surrealist poets and
artists from Canada, France, Latin America and Europe. Here is how, in my translation
from Spanish, Enrique Lechuga defines his coming to surrealism:
There are images that stay
with you for an entire lifetime. The fleshy part of a mollusk, where a pearl finds
perennial shelter is a throbbing example of such a union. My case is no different
from that of thousands of others: dreams, with their watchfulness and delirium have,
since my childhood, accompanied me, ceaselessly filling my mind with astonishment.
In fact, one of my first memories, the remotest image my memory can dig up, is the
fruit of a dream. From an early age, while still far from being able to rationalize
either the content or the mechanics of dreams, innumerable were the instances where
my imagination fell under the spell of the nocturnal spectacle. Without knowing
the source, nor the reason for those images, and regardless of their briefness,
my memory would caress each of them upon waking the next day. I can say the same
thing about my conception of the erotic: in all its immediacy and the incomprehension
it prompted, the erotic managed to emerge from the malleable scaffolding of my interior
boy’s life, so that even if unsettled in silence yet promptly delighted by it, I
did not hesitate to give it cause under the toy magnifying glass, or the daring
secrecy of seriousness. The years passed, and this is how my relationship with the
world achieved the closest of empathies with dream manifestations, and the dialectic
interweaving these establish with objective reality. A little later, my discovery
of electroacoustic music, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the paintings of Leonora Carrington and of
love, confirmed during my adolescence the sensibilities that had stayed latent in
me all those years before. That is how one day, while by chance leafing through
an art catalogue, in the context of Carrington’s painting, I came upon the word
“surrealism.” The mystery and magnetism that this word evoked in me, was enough
to immediately prompt me to read everything my eyes could learn at the time. As
a result, I was able to confirm and discover the existence of a state of mind, which
came up to the most beautiful, the most revolutionary spirit ever practiced by human
beings. Through the texts and documents I could access, I learned how a handful
of poets, in another continent, had set themselves to change the course of life.
I must mention those who
have played a fundamental role in my life, and whose friendship I’ve sustained through
the years: the Ácrata de mis amores collective, Ludwig Zeller, Susana Wald, Fernando
Palenzuela, Alex Januario, Bernar Sancha, Guy Girard, Antoine-Vincent L’Amor, Guy
Cabanel and Jacques Lacomblez
Lechuga,
along with Bernar Sancha, La Tête ailleurs and others from Montreal, Quebec City,
Saguenay, Gatineau and Toronto established Liaison
surréaliste à Montréal in 2011. Its tract, “Surréalisme sans service,” issued
that year, was followed in 2014 by an important international surrealist exhibition,
La Chasse à l’objet du désir. The Liaison
dispersed after the event.
Living
in Gatineau, though not associated with any one group, is the poet Antoine-Vincent
L’Amor. His chosen affinities include Enrique Lechuga, with whom he collaborates,
Bernar Sancha, and surrealists outside Canada like Virginia Tentindo, Guy Girard,
and Jacques Lacomblez, among others. Because he chooses effacement, I quote only
the briefest of excerpts from his lucid statement:
For me, being a surrealist
means having a passion for one thing: the marvellous. I thus consider myself a surrealist
because I am committed with the entirety of my being to the revolt of the imagination
against empirical reality; I consider myself a surrealist because I am possessed
by a desire to affirm life and love against death and misery; I consider myself
a surrealist because I want nothing short of paradise and will use any means necessary
to change the given world into a world of wonder; and I consider myself a surrealist
because I regard the interior adventure as the sole path that can lead to real life.
La
Vertèbre et le rossignol (The Vertebra and the Nightingale; a “rossignol” is also
a master or skeleton key) is a group of poets, a filmmaker, and theatre and puppetry
artists based in Quebec City. The group includes the poet David Nadeau, its chief
animator, as well as Alexandre Fatta, Claude Gendreau, Zoé Laporte, and Marianne
Chevalier, among others figures. The group publishes an eponymous zine. Here is
how David Nadeau describes his involvement in surrealism:
My first attempts at exploring
the unconscious, reinventing morality and creating new mythologies coincided with my discovery, around
the age of 15, of the work of André Breton (Nadja, the Manifestoes) and Antonin Artaud (Le théâtre
et son double, L’omblic des limbes
and Le Pèse-nerfs). From the first,
I appreciated the experimental rigor and the incarnation of poetry in everyday life.
I was impressed by the extreme precision of Artaud’s description of the movements
of the inner life and the vertiginous strength of the associations of hallucinatory
images. My first attempts at automatic writing are lost (I burned everything!) and
my first book, La mémoire intraveineuse par-dela processus et
saveurs (1998-2001), contains
texts written between the ages of 16 and 19. My first recordings of experimental
sound art, made around the age of 16-18, were collected in 2017 on the EP Le labyrinthe de la mort symétrique (suRRism-Phonoethics). As a teenager, influenced
by my surrealist readings, I encouraged my friends to practice collective, poetic
and graphic automatism, and sometimes sound.
In 2001, I made contact with
Marie-Dominique Massoni, from the Paris, and we exchanged emails. She sent me copies
of issues of S.U.R.R..., the magazine
she directed. In 2004, I meet Alex Fatta and Gaétan Blais, with whom we formed the
first version of La vertèbre and Rossignol, an informal collective of surrealist experiments: "cataclysmic Surrealism" (Gaétan Blais).
The years 2006-2007 were a period of intense collective activities in Quebec in
connection with the surrealist movement, thanks to collective creation workshops
formed at the instigation of Zoé Laporte in the studio of the puppet theater company
Pupulus Mordicus.
Montrealers Enrique Lechuga
and Dominic Tétreault joined Alex and I in
e-mail exchanges and meetings lead to the writing of an investigation file on hypnagogic
phenomena, an investigation conducted following the invitation made in the text
"Council of night", by Michel Zimbacca.
My short poetry collection
Chantiers de l'ombre
was illustrated by some participants of La vertèbre et le rossignol: Zoé Laporte,
Claudia Gendreau, Gaétan Blais and Alex Fatta. Some exchanges with Merl Fluin lead
to my participation in the first issue of Hydrolith and the investment of the members of the Quebec
collective in the consecutive editions of the Festival of games organized by the Surrealist London Action Group.
In 2008, Enrique, Alex and
I contacted Les Boules, a group of surrealist collective creation active since the
end of the 80s. This led to the publication of the book La grandeur de la lune brûlée, published by
Éditions Sonámbula in 2012.
The
story of surrealism in Canada is, as the testimonials above more than prove, a living
organism in constant transformation, where combinations of people and mixing of
languages and forms of expression proves that the search for the gold of time is
ongoing. The overview I’ve provided is by no means complete, but it is a start.
REFERENCES
Bourassa, André-G and Lapointe,
Gilles. Refus Global et ses environs 1948-1988. Montreal: Editions de l’HEXAGONE, 1988.
Ellenwood, Ray. Egregore A History of the Montréal Automatiste Movement. Toronto: Exile Editions, 1992.
Email and Facebook Messenger communications: David
Nadeau, Enrique Lechuga, Gregg Simpson, Jason Abdelhadi, Peter Dubé, Ron Sakolsky,
Sherri L. Higgins, William Davison, Antoine-Vincent L’Amor, March 4 – 20, 2019.
Harris, Steven. [Draft entry to International Encyclopedia
of Surrealism].
Ross, W.W.E. Laconics.
Ottawa: Overbrook Press, 1930.
Total Refusal
Refus Global The Complete 1948 Manifesto of the Montreal Automatists. Translated with
an introduction by Ray Ellenwood. Toronto: Exile Editions, 1985.
*****
EDIÇÃO COMEMORATIVA | CENTENÁRIO DO SURREALISMO 1919-2019
Artista convidado: Jan Dočekal (República Checa, 1943)
Agulha
Revista de Cultura
20 ANOS O MUNDO CONOSCO
Número
134 | Maio de 2019
editor
geral | FLORIANO MARTINS | floriano.agulha@gmail.com
editor
assistente | MÁRCIO SIMÕES | mxsimoes@hotmail.com
logo
& design | FLORIANO MARTINS
revisão
de textos & difusão | FLORIANO MARTINS | MÁRCIO SIMÕES
ARC Edições © 2019
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