"You were witnessing an accountancy-driven compression of human potential within a global interlock of power, money, mechanization, and mass media. This condition, which Breton termed 'rationalism,' seemed to underpin all extant forms of governance, whether capitalist, Stalinist, colonial, or fascist. (A sliding scale, argued the Martinican Surrealist Aimé Césaire, for the violence the Nazis inflicted on Europe simply built on the precedent of violence inflicted by Europeans on others.) Surrealism offered a certain route out of that historical claustrophobia. Flaunting your anomaly—your disobliging, disagreeable x—you not only affirmed your personal intransigence but also signed on to an energizing counterconspiracy."
From "An Impulse Felt Round the World/A recent show and catalog on Surrealism proposes that the thoughts expressed in André Breton’s 1924 manifesto were latent in disparate urban centers, only awaiting his coining of a movement identity" by Julian Bell (NYRB)(reviewing "Surrealism Beyond Borders").
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7 comments:
It doesn't seem to be insight-driven.
In short, the surrealists, as with the Dadaists before them, were predecessors of the "punk rockers" in their impulses to shrug off, with a laugh or a snarl, the imagination-deadening social mores and restrictions of middle-class bourgeois society. Greil Marcus wrote a book on this connection, LIPSTICK TRACES.
Surrealist symbolism resonates with most people. That may be due to a deep recognition that dissonant aspects of reality not only exist but are often contingent upon each other. Or it may be that furry tea cups were once a thing, back in caveman era dining rooms, and we retain some genetic memory of drinking from them. Either way, the melting watch says that our hour of therapy are nearing completion, and it is time to return to our internet surfing version of reality.
Surrealism is fine. But give me the absurdism of American literature over that, any time. If I could be Vercingetorix, Fire Chief of New York, even if only in my dreams, what splendor!
I suppose so. Machines and the mechanical predominated in early 20th century art, and what was the modern city in the eyes of artists, but a giant machine? War, another giant machine, also played a role. The city (and the war) dwarfed the individual and overpowered the human and the natural. They made the artist feel powerless in their grip, yet they also provided rare juxtapositions and combinations of disparate things and conflicting realities, and gave the artist a sense of great or terrible possibilities just out of reach. If you were trying to cope with what you saw as the chaos of urban life you might look for some ordering force from above, or for some disruptive or destructive force from below, or for some liberation coming from the unconscious or what was repressed by civilization.
Thinking Like a State says a lot more in clear, understandable language.
The surreal surmounting and deprecation of principles for social progress.
When you know that Julian Bell is a descendant of the Bloomsbury artists of that time (Virginia Woolf's great-nephew?) his article may resonate a bit more.
The question of whether people respond to artistic movements because of something in their environment that they are reacting against or whether they just want to be fashionable is a difficult one. If a painting or poem or play "makes" you "realize" that you are alienated, were you really alienated before or is it just he effect of the painting, poem, or play? Clearly, there has to be some predisposition to follow movements rather than shun them, but once that's there, is where the movement takes you really a result of your circumstances or of the movement itself? Or can that question even be given a definitive answer one way or the other?
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