JASON ABDELHADI | The
canned response is that of course surrealism has no inherent aesthetic ideal,
that it can embrace a wide range or even a totality of different modes of
expression, negation, experimentation, and that to limit it to an aesthetic
function in any regard is to miss the point entirely. This certainly holds
true. The beautiful will be convulsive – this formulation is a negation of an
aesthetic ideal insofar as what we understand as convulsion itself will never
remain static. Nonetheless, it makes one wonder about the place of aesthetic
ideals in the history of expression. If not from the point of a committed
school, aren’t they always objectively speaking temporary anyway? Since
surrealism has long forsworn the notion of school, and operates outside that boundary,
would surrealism merely be an “open eyed” approach to the historical reality of
aesthetic variation, negation, and so on? In contrast to the exquisite corpse,
in the Ottawa Surrealist Group we have a game called “Blueballing”. A player
starts to draw while the next in turn is watching closely. The next player has
the right to “stop” the drawing at whatever point she sees fit, and is likely
to continue in a manner that frustrates the initial player. One could see the
surrealist aesthetic ideal, over and above simple collaboration and mutual aid,
in a desire to frustrate, pause, interrupt, and re-direct the very “aesthetic”
intentions of any work. This could mean treating aesthetic objects
functionally, for example, or vice versa, treating unaesthetic objects
aesthetically. Regarding aesthetics, as with many other domains of knowledge,
the surrealist interest (rather than “ideal”) remains experimental and
interventionist.
MATTIAS FORSHAGE | It seems worthwhile to resist the urge to
kneejerk-react to the question and take it seriously. However, the fact that
aesthetic implications of creative work are unavoidable does not necessarily
mean that they can be formulated as a coherent or even converging “aesthetic
ideal”…
We constantly wish to be overwhelmed and provoked in a
way that offers a glimpse into the unknown especially in its aspect of dynamism
subverting the well-known and pointing towards the marvellous, but admittedly
we do more easily recognize this in certain works that in some substantial way resemble
older surrealist works, which provokes an unconscious emotional reaction,
recognizing an atmosphere beneficial for the dynamism of the spirit, and makes
us, perhaps, sympathetically inclined. We should not need to be embarrassed
about this, but we should continue making efforts to stay vigilant to take
seriously potential revelations also in that we do not recognize at all.
MICHEL REMY
| No aesthetic ideal can be defined. A mode of action in the fireld of
aesthetics which will gladly welcome all that makes the limits of rationality
and the habitual relationships with the world recede into the territories of
the marvellous understood as the passage between man and the universe, thus
enabling the former to interpret and recreate the latter – the marvellous as
the matrix of myths.
2 | The classic expulsions that Surrealists carried out
from the original Paris formation were of a behavioral nature. Poor-quality
work was never judged. Even now, although expulsions no longer take place, when
Surrealists comment on their peers they do so in the light of sympathies and
alliances, which emphasizes the existence of a clique. To what point does this
distort the understanding that one might have of the most important cultural
revolution of the 20th century?
JASON ABDELHADI |
This is something of a loaded question. What is meant by the word clique? What
it boils down to is that surrealism does not concern itself with product
integrity like some quality assurance mechanism in a factory. The most
important part of the surrealist movement is the movement itself, the people
comprising it and the potential to change the world through intersubjective
collective adventure.
Disassociations,
including expulsions, but also breakaways, re-connections, and others can and
still do take place, for a variety of circumstances and in a variety of ways.
It is an entirely legitimate byproduct of collective life and experimentation.
In a world that is hostile to surrealist activity, where compromise and risk of
recuperation are very high, it is important that we always take into account
“sympathies and alliances”. Certainly there is a distortion, but it comes from
an outside misunderstanding, something not all that important to the movement
itself. It is part of a wider trend of good old revisionist liberal thought,
the kind which can only understand radical fidelity to a cause in terms of
totalitarianism. But I think in general there is agreement among many
surrealists that correcting misinterpretations about the past or present seems
like a secondary, if not increasingly futile waste of energy. Let the funhouse
mirrors have their fun.
MATTIAS FORSHAGE | This observation is adequate but not quite as
problematic as it may seem. The quality of work remains of secondary importance
to surrealist activity. Emphasising the different standards for surrealist
works and surrealist activity tends to construct them as comparable and equally
valid distinct entities, which is an ideological construct within the framework
of art and literature history and thus a party pleading for surrealist works
over surrealist activity, and for a perhaps accomplished ”cultural revolution”
over an ongoing adventure of the spirit and a yet unaccomplished project of emancipation.
Surrealist works function as autonomous focal points
of the imagination in a wider and uncontrollable circulation, but they took
shape as expression of surrealist activity, sometimes a surrealist activity
explicitly within a historical continuity and a degree of formal organization,
and sometimes a surrealist activity isolated, individual and/or intuitive,
which would not be recognisable as a surrealist activity if it was not for the
historical manifestation of the surrealist spirit by the historical movement.
Great works are continuously reintegrated into the more manysided framework as
they continue to inspire (and in a sense simultaneously continuously tugged out
of this framework when reified as items in the canon of western art and
literature history).
From the surrealist viewpoint, great works are those
works that are major revelations and that keep inspiring. Any other criteria
for great works are likely to be suspect and represent their canonization into
official art and literature, and thus be separate from, and substantially
contrary or even hostile to, the aims of surrealism. Less great works are not a
problem and do not merit scorn, they are just the ongoing everyday
experimentation out of which certain discoveries will emerge as great.
The fact that an ongoing surrealist activity may have
seen necessary to part ways with a certain individual who keeps producing great
work - a real scenario in several cases - is a problem for that individual who
will be uncomfortable and more or less detached and have few frameworks to work
in apart from the obviously inaccurate official art and culture, but not a
problem for surrealism that will still be able to benefit from the revelations
even if the individual has proven unbearable or untrustworthy…
MICHEL REMY
| I do not think that the hackneyed conception of the surrealist group as a
clique by contemporary Pharisees distorts any understanding of surrealism. Let
them say what they want! This being said, surrealism is inseparable from a
strong moral standpoint, only guaranteed by the group or peers. Expulsions
still take place in different ways when mercantilism and compromises threaten
the poetical impulse and the inexhaustibility of meaning.
JASON ABDELHADI |
This could be two totally different questions. First, can a surrealist magazine
really exist in the way you suggest? It’s hard to see what a surrealist
communication would look like that does not, implicitly or explicitly, counter prevailing
“views of life”. This does not mean that there is not a wider scope for
surrealist exploration outside explicit identification with the term. Sometimes
it is indeed very fruitful to look outside the immediate movement to different
ideas and practices. Other times we find things of surrealist interest in
totally non-surrealist contexts (professional art, poetry etc.). Nonetheless,
surrealism is a form of rebellion and non-conformist research. It is certainly
useful to think of it collaborating with parallel types of revolt, whether
these be expected (anarchism etc.) or unexpected. But it cannot ever be totally
accommodating, especially to views of life that reductive, financially or
religiously driven, quietistic etc. With regards to specific magazines, the
risk is perhaps lower than an outright “allegiance”, since appearing in the
same magazine with someone does not necessarily entail a strong affinity or
commitment. In this sense, yes, surrealist publications in the past have
certainly found ways of integrating in more or less interesting ways. As for a
rejection of surrealism, that is to be expected, given its specific focus on
untimeliness and non-compromise. Do we want it any other way? We recently had
correspondence with someone who runs a very loose, pseudo-surrealist poetry
blog. He seemed to think that by denying commercial viability surrealism was
not opening itself up to the masses. It is important to distinguish
mass-poetry, popular culture, and the “must be made by all” of Ducasse with commercial
viability. Surrealism obviously cannot accommodate. And so I pre-empt the
second question, which might be with regards to separating the wheat from the
chaff among current surrealist magazines, journals, pseudo-journals etc. It’s
hard to say what percentage of XYZ magazine is of sufficient surrealist quality
to consider it wheat vs chaff. One is often surprised, often repulsed. One
thing I can point to is a proliferation of the term itself in the
Anglo-American context of e-journals and blogs of all kinds which, especially
these days, seem to use “surrealism” as a bizarre excuse to focus on either
“poetics” in the long tradition of American poetry journals, OR to justify the
usual boring phantasmagoria. The distinguishing feature of the former would be
the paraphrasing of surrealist rhetoric in editorials and mission statements,
but, weirdly, the ignoring of that in terms of the rest of the content, which
is typically just off-the-shelf poetry and nothing else.
MATTIAS FORSHAGE | It is never a choice between orthodoxy or renewal.
There is a choice between rigor and eclecticism, but that is a question of
integrity and method and not a question of wider or stricter delimitation.
Typically a journal with a sense of urgency and direction will establish more
or less of a particular spirit based on the constitution of its desires and
imagination along with its specific delimitations and its contingent historical
circumstances. Everything a surrealist journal is curious about will contribute
to the surrealist experience.
Some will not trust their own intuition and will keep
out stuff that seem peripheral in subject, alien in style, or just very
different from hitherto manifestations, which may or may not create a stiff,
limited, and more or less retrospectivist spirit. Others will not trust their
own intuition and will include obviously peripheral items for being for example
skillful, or good according to external standards, or because they relate to
contemporary topics and trends, which will typically (but not necessarily)
create a less inspiring eclecticist porridge.
MICHEL REMY
| Those magazines you mention (but none is quoted) represent the margins of
surrealism, just as magic realist paintings represent the margins and border
territories of surrealism.
4 | Two terms within the Surrealist environment have
always caught my eye, not because they appear inappropriate to me, but rather
due to the compliment-rejection partition that they carry within: ‘Surrealist
movement’ and ‘Surrealist civilization’. How different are the two, and what to
they represent to the point of appearing antipodal?
JASON ABDELHADI |
Perhaps the real antagonism is between “surrealist revolution” and “surrealist
civilization”? In any case, they are certainly contradictions which have not
been resolved. The “movement/revolution” paradigm fits in with a militant view
point, a kernel of radical change from within the old framework that sees the
need for total revolt. The “civilization” angle seems to be a highly utopian
form of world-building, in centuries after the revolution, but also right now:
surrealism as an alternative construct. In that sense the “civilization” would
be less concerned with attacking current structures and more concerned with
utopian dreaming. But the “surrealist civilization” itself is a contradictory
term, implying walls, states, and in fact structures of taxation (if recent
studies of the history of the “Deep History” origins of civilization can be
applied). Whereas one could see “revolution” or “movement” and “surrealism” as
almost synonyms, the term “civilization” seems much harder to digest in a
surrealist framework, standing as it does for all that surrealism wants to
destroy. One might have expected terms like “organization”, “commune” or even
“federation” etc. But perhaps the contradiction and flimsiness is exactly what
makes it an interesting term worth exploring. In any case, it is a very “open”
idea and one that looks to the future to confirm its potential or not. With
regards to the book La Civilization
surréaliste, which some are still insisting is the secret magic tome of the
future if only it will be translated into English… While some of the
propositions and experiments are very interesting (group automatism, and
especially Švankmajer’s off-topic masturbation machines) it perhaps only hints
at the contradiction outlined in the question, and this by its very form rather
than the actual content (being critical philosophical essays about the defense
and weighing of surrealism, rather than militant tracts or games etc.). If we
take it at face value, surrealist civilization could be questions around
“infrastructure” of surrealist life – the planning around everyday necessities
and contingencies (dare we ever use the word “policies”?) for those days “after
the revolution”, and for the everyday people who are now firebreathing
monsters.
MATTIAS FORSHAGE | The surrealist movement is a real entity and
remains central to the sense of surrealism, and its real problems are hardly
related to those raised by the more recent, more peripheral and more
speculative concept of surrealist civilization. Surely, in Bounoure’s and
Effenberger’s case, the latter was a bit of an exciting thought experiment
prompted by the traditional Czech surrealist concept of the ”third ark”, a
certain kind of utopia implied in the fragments surrealism would carry through
either the surrealist revolution proclaimed in the 20s or the inherent collapse
of western civilization. It clearly did not mean, for example, that present
civilisation has significant surrealist aspects. It hardly meant, even though
it was suggested as a pun in advertising material already at the time, that
surrealism had passed its revolutionary phase and transformed into a
restitutional project.
MICHEL REMY
| The surrealist civilization is not a historical fact or even a fact. By
proceeding to a critical analysis of the realities of the present day world,
one may develop the necessity for an oppositional civilization within that
world. That civilization cannot be defined –
is it even ever definable? – except through the
denunciations it puts forward. The surrealist civilization is founded on, and
emerges from, surrealist movements here and there, all linked by the refusal of
obedience – after defining what must
NOT be obeyed – and strategies to parasite
a society based on falsification and the debasement of language. The voice of
this surrealist civilization will not belong to this or that one but will
remain a transparent and critical conscience.
JASON ABDELHADI |
This question seems to situate surrealism solely within an artistic paradigm,
which may be part of the problem. It is important not to conflate surrealist
exploration with the standard (and sometimes fascistic) mottos of 20th
century artistic modernism or avant-gardism, for example Ezra Pound’s “make it
new” etc. Surrealism should be less concerned with whether something is an
artistically new mechanism or not, and is instead interested in new forms of
knowledge and knowing as such, by any means necessary. That being said, there
is a lot of cliché, and as you imply, this may be inevitable (especially by
newbies and disconnected individuals) with any kind of adherence to a
“tradition”. I think it is fair to critique boring reduplications of the same
experiments as “surrealisant” rather than properly surrealist, especially when
they are coming from the more opportunistic, financially viable ends of the
movement. This applies to cliché in surrealist theories and tracts as well
poetic and artistic outputs. On the other hand, I do not think we should get
caught up in a cycle of art-criticism. We need to look past the surface
aesthetics and ask if an experiment is genuinely interesting beyond how it
“looks” or “sounds” or whatever. In this regard a simple collage game could
have really interesting implications (even if it looks classic). We are not
modernists. I wonder if there isn’t something deeper at work in the repetition
of all these collages, automatist texts, exquisite corpses etc. etc. To an art
movement this would be indicative of a decadence or a flat period of imitation.
Surrealism, always proud of going the opposite way, might even seek one day to
re-appropriate these sentiments and stand-firm on the side of stupidity, repetition, and a refusal
to play the innovation game so beloved of silicon valley.
MATTIAS FORSHAGE | Again not so much a problem. The basic activity of
creativity and the basic upholding of surrealist activity will revisit and
reinvent older methods and they will inspire the discovery and construction of
new ones, probably in different proportions in different persons or groups, but
without a substantial contradiction, since they both work towards the same aim
of invokation of the poetic spirit and the revelation of the unknown.
Practically, it might sometimes be a problem that some surrealist publications
and the works therein may be very predictable in appearance, admitting only
that which is more or less recognizable as belonging to surrealism, which is a
regrettable limitation. And it can be difficult to recognize a similar or
corresponding dynamics of the spirit in expressions that are very different in
appearance, so that potentially very relevant phenomena can be, and are being,
missed. But these are problems of unnecessary limitation for the surrealist
activity. Whereas concerns for the reputation of surrealism or the overall
standard of works of surrealism probably corresponds to a nervous will to
legitimate surrealism in terms of official recognition rather than terms
relevant to surrealism itself.
MICHEL REMY
| I contend, if I may, the expression “unquestionable impossibility of
perennial renovation”… A collage is a collage but what is glued together is the
result of the magic encounter of a single individual mind with reality. Surrealism
is a repetition of ressources in the same way and sense that when one writes,
one repeats words – but which ones, in what
order and where from, is what makes all the difference, and this is why all
surrealist texts never repeat each other at any level and why automatic texts
now written still hold the whole wonder of the marvellous.
6 | Aldo Pellegrini is one of the few scholars of
Surrealism that specifically addressed its poetic sphere. Any list of
Surrealist references will emphasize show the relevance of visual arts. This
always seemed to be like a failure of the critics because the rejuvenating
essence, even in the early 20th century, concerns the image itself and its many
angles. Is this one of any number of adulterations to the Surrealist principles,
or even they barely recognized the presence of a difference – except in purely
technical terms – between imagery and poetics?
JASON ABDELHADI | In
terms of the question of surrealist representation by outsiders, I don’t think
your framing is entirely true, especially less so now that there are many
scholars working in “surrealist poetics” (for good or probably for ill). In
fact, a lot of English neo-surrealist and surrealisant journals seem to be
based on scholarly theses from Joron etc. which focus almost entirely on
written surrealist poems. But I don’t care enough about scholarship, what it
thinks or how it perverts as such to want to list off a corrective
bibliography. Who cares. Let them wallow. The more interesting part of the
question of the image itself, and the
moves by various surrealist groups (notably Madrid, followed by others like
SLAG and Athens) to critique the naïve use of the image in surrealist attempts.
It cannot be a question of just “making pictures” vs “making poems”, but should
concern the very idea of imagery across all spectrums. In this sense, I don’t
think there’s a poetic difference between “imagery” in an image and in a poem.
But that it is certainly possible, and has been attempted, to have poems and
images that operate outside the framework of “the image”, in the sense of
easily recuperated or pre-mediated media. Do the experiments of game playing,
of poetic materialism and “poetry by other means”, or those of surrealist
walking, atopos theory etc. succeed in side-stepping the mediated dangers of
the image? I think to a large extent they have opened new possibilities for
poetic experience that is much less compromised than those espoused by markets.
Sometimes the results are genuinely amazing and really different. But there is
room to go much further in this direction. To avoid poetic effusions and find
ourselves in a real objective poetry, the kind of poetic non-action that has
quantitative negative effects on the market itself, as an index, and collective
constructions outside it, to its undoing. Untying the noose and simultaneously
doing up the shoelace.
MATTIAS FORSHAGE | I find this question very difficult to understand.
The image is surely an important principle in visual
art and in poetic writing alike, as most people know. Poetry in the light of
surrealism is an activity of the spirit and not a particular form, and is
therefore a core in visual creation just as much as in poetic writing.
If visual surrealism has made more impact in society
than written poetry of surrealism, this is hardly surprising just given the
much wider circulation, much more utilized mass psychology, and much higher
market value, of visual images than written poetry. It does not necessarily say
anything particular about the relative merits of each form of expression, and
it is certainly neither a success nor a failure.
Aldo Pellegrini was a surrealist to a much larger
extent than he was a scholar, and he was hardly alone in addressing surrealism
in poetic writing from a theoretical viewpoint, or surrealist poetics. Wasn’t
its methodology, phenomenology and poetology a crucial topic for Breton,
Aragon, Nougé, Tzara? What about Ristic, Cahun, Eluard, Caillois, Teige,
Arenas, Gomez-Correa, Césaire? Laaban, Bounoure, Effenberger, Paz? Etc… While still
staying with the old guys, that is.
And isn’t it just the formalistic division between
poetry-imagery in visual works and written works that makes some people miss
the poetics in the thought of Magritte, but also Dalí and many many others? And
the fact that thinking about poetry as such necessarily concerns surrealist
poetry since the poetic phenomenon is crucial in surrealism, and perhaps the
same goes for the imagination, and this is obvious in sympathetic scholars like
Bachelard, Blanchot, Alleau (and perhaps slightly less obvious to those
educated in conventional cultural canon and its distinctions but nevertheless
substantial like Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes and even Deleuze)?
MICHEL REMY
| Painting is part of the poetical impulse and the ultimate urge of creation.
The image, whether written or painted, is always already NOT the outside
reality but at the most elementary level a dovetailing of imagery and poetics.
JASON ABDELHADI |
This is an interesting thought: does the “Surrealism” contain Marx already, or
is the omission a kind of post-factum removal of Marx from surrealism? But this
seems to be a question about the present state of the world. In 2018, it’s
probably no stretch to say that all three terms have had a resounding
come-back, beyond the surrealist movement itself, and into popular discourse.
Marxist thinking has had a major resurgence since the 2008 crisis and the
current global instability is only furthering his re-appraisal, well beyond
traditional activist circles and into the popular imagination. Coming from
this, to give one example, we have the major popularity of not just Freudian
but Freudo-Marxist-Hegelian theorists like Slavoj Žižek who are big celebrities now. This is
correlated to a similar rise in neofascist mythology, which is derivative and
which draws its lifeblood from the failures of the emancipatory imagined
communities. As for surrealism, the term is flourishing: the word “surreal” was
chosen by Merriam-Webster as the word of the year for 2017. While the extent to
which these touch on real problems of surrealist inquiry or are just popular
window dressing can be debated, there is certainly no denying that all three
forces as cultural rallying points are back on the menu. In that sense, Paz was
gazing nostalgically back from a future, a Fukuyama-esque 21st century he
projected himself into, past the end of history, and not our timeline, where
history is getting her revenge. The market, absolutist though it may be, is
running out of space to grow; its apologists and defenders, its destroyers and
undertakers, everybody seems to be coming out to play, to see what happens
next. If we get something worse than the present, which is a huge possibility,
the triple threat sandwich (Marx, Surrealism, Freud) will become more relevant
in the degree to which antagonisms sharpen and resolutions are postponed onto
the future. Even in a total apocalypse they would have plenty of fodder to keep
up their critique. Surrealism itself may be underground, but is only in the
realization of a surrealist future, whatever the hell that is, that the above
three forces could have absolutely nothing further to say (aka the “greater
movement” into which surrealism is absorbed).
MATTIAS FORSHAGE | This is probably in essence a big and often
repeated question, smaller aspects of which have been discussed at length in
various connections.
Very often the intent has been to claim that society
has changed so fundamentally during the 20th century and thereby for some
reason legitimize a withdrawal from any revolutionary ambitions of surrealism -
or, even more stupidly, to claim that surrealism’s ambitions have actually been
realized in society through the incorporation of disembodied fragments from
surrealism and the historical admittance of surrealism into the cultural canon
(along with psychoanalysis, modern art, relativity and quantum theory, and
various expressions of the extreme in popular culture as well as ”fine”
culture).
So is it a quote of Paz or a paraphrase? It’s not
particularly interesting, and I don’t necessarily care which. If he actually
said so it might be considered trivially symptomatic of the sentimentality and
half-senility of a reconciliant ex-activist. If it was back in his identying
the major ruptures of the 20th century, then indeed Marx’s thought would be
excluded for having been launched in the 19th, and is not necessarily
symptomatic of anything at all. Neither such a statement nor any vague
invocation of nostalgia for the spirit of revolt and social uprising will
challenge the inherent sense of revolt in surrealism, which will continue to
seek new applications, new alliances and new forms.
MICHEL REMY
| The forces unleashed by Freud, Marx and Surrealism have been pushed aside,
stifled, prevented from voicing themeselves. But it does not seem that they
have been liquidated. They wotk deeply, subterraneanly, with resurgences here
and there. The incredible number of surrealist groups appearing in the world
and as far as one can see, committed to the permanent spirit of surrealism,
testifies to the unstoppable expression and the strength and powerful output of
poetry and plastic works (Portugal, Brazil, Chili, Wales…)
 |
| Jason Abdelhadi | Mattias Forshage | Michel Remy |
EDIÇÃO COMEMORATIVA | CENTENÁRIO
DO SURREALISMO 1919-2019
Artista
convidada: Marcelle Ferron (Canadá, 1924- 2001)
Agulha Revista de Cultura
20 ANOS O MUNDO CONOSCO
Número 139 | Agosto 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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